The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads

Posted by on December 13, 2010

Report Describes Potential of Urban Universities to Fully Realize an Anchor Institution Mission

For Additional Information: Contact: Steve Dubb: 301-237-2135, sgdubb@yahoo.com or Rita Axelroth, 205-422-4488, rita.axelroth@gmail.com

December 2010: College Park, MD — In the past two decades, a number of universities have taken significant steps toward adopting conscious, placed-based anchor institution strategies. “The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads” — a 221-page report published by The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, located in College Park, Md. — profiles ten leading colleges and universities and assesses how such strategies can be more sharply focused for greatest impact, particularly to benefit low-income neighborhoods and families locked in generational poverty.

Universities’ Role as Place-Based Economic Anchors is Large — and Growing
Taken as a whole, universities collectively spend over $350 billion a year — more than two percent of GDP.  They employ over 2 million full-time employees and over 1 million part-time employees. They enroll over 18 million students. Their endowments, even in the wake of the Great Recession, exceed $300 billion.  As a result, universities can bring many resources to bear: not just intellectual, but also economic — purchasing, investment, hiring, and real estate development among them — to contribute to solutions to economic challenges facing U.S. metropolitan regions.

The Developing Movement of Universities as Anchors
The report makes the case for universities to act in more strategic ways and increasingly recognize their role as local anchors in their communities. In particular, the report outlines a new vision of what might be possible if urban universities were to fully achieve their anchor institution mission — that is, consciously apply their long-term place-based economic power, in combination with human and intellectual resources, to better the long-term welfare of the communities in which they reside.

The authors examine in depth the renewed movement over the past few decades by a number of universities from a range of different backgrounds (community colleges, historically black colleges and universities, state comprehensive universities, land-grant colleges, and private research universities) to adopt innovative anchor institution strategies.

Three Anchor Roles in Community Revitalization
The various and multi-faceted community development strategies at ten colleges and universities are featured throughout the report. The authors identify three principal patterns among the institutions’ policies and practices and their roles in anchor-based community development. Specifically, they describe IUPUI, Miami Dade College, and Portland State University as facilitators in broad efforts for local and regional development; Penn, Cincinnati, and Yale as leaders in community development efforts, focused on revitalization of a particular community or neighborhood adjacent to campus; and Syracuse, Minnesota, LeMoyne-Owen, and Emory as conveners, working to forge stakeholder coalitions for collaborative community development. Brief case studies are presented on the individual institutions.

While “The Road Half Traveled” highlights innovative strategies and successes of these profiled institutions, the authors also detail key challenges faced by most, if not all, university-community partners. These challenges include creating an engaged community, establishing partnership programs and goals, institutionalizing an anchor vision, securing funding and leveraging resources, building a culture of economic inclusion, sustaining participatory planning and robust community relationships, and meeting the needs of low-income residents and neighborhoods who are partners in these efforts. The authors provide in-depth analysis on how these institutions work to navigate through such issues.

Building from Best Practices
The report explores the promising practices at each of these institutions that have the greatest potential to contribute to improving the quality of life, as well as building individual and community wealth, in distressed and underserved neighborhoods. The authors identify lessons learned through each university’s experience to help provide guidelines for implementation at other sites. Some of these practices include:
•    Deploying institution-wide resources (academic, human, and corporate) to achieve comprehensive neighborhood revitalization in a specific geographic area, such as Penn’s work in West Philadelphia.
•    Driving cross-sector collaboration that builds on existing partner strengths for sustainable engagement, such as Syracuse University is leading throughout its city.
•    Employing a university’s endowment to finance community investment, such as the University of Cincinnati’s $148.6-million investment in Uptown.
•    Pursuing diversity hiring as well as connecting low-income residents to workforce training and small business development, such as Miami Dade College’s efforts in Miami-Dade County.
•    Sustaining inclusive planning and dialogue that leads to shared ownership between the university and community, such as the approach adopted by the University of Minnesota in North Minneapolis.

Realizing an Anchor Institution Mission
The authors argue that, even among the leaders, the road to fully achieving an anchor institution mission remains only half traveled. The potential of urban universities fully achieving this mission requires first and foremost, recognition that universities, as institutions that unlike corporations cannot move, have an actual stake in the welfare of their communities.  Provided this mission is accepted, it is incumbent on universities to act in coordinated fashion — directing business and academic resources in mutually supportive efforts.

Policy Recommendations
The report concludes with recommendations aimed at practitioners, administrators, policymakers, and foundations to more effectively leverage universities’ assets. Among the policy recommendations are:
•    A more conscious linking of the corporate and academic sides of the university, to work with its community in democratic, mutually beneficial and respectful partnerships.
•    Adopting a strategic, place-based approach to community development to help ensure that existing institutional resources have much greater impact.
•    Using the convening power of foundations to bring practitioners together to develop a common voice, as well as promote comprehensive initiatives.
•    Identifying specific opportunities to direct federal funds towards anchor institution strategies. For example, establishing a federal “Urban Grant” program — modeled after the USDA’s “land-grant” and cooperative extension programs — with an express focus on meeting the needs of urban areas, and which incorporates partnership principles, as proposed in the Urban Universities Renaissance Act (HR 5567), introduced by Representative David Wu (D-OR) in June 2010.

For a free copy of the report, contact Steve Dubb, Democracy Collaborative (sgdubb@yahoo.com)  or go to http://www.community-wealth.org and click on: “The Road Half Traveled” (listed under “Featured Publications” on the left-hand side of the home page).