Engaging Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions for Health Equity

Posted by American Public Health Association on December 5, 2016

Engaging Urban Universities as Anchor Institutions for Health Equity
Ira Harkavy, PhD [PHENND Founder and Board Chair]

The extreme poverty, persistent deprivation, and pernicious racism afflicting communities in the shadows of powerful, relatively wealthy urban universities raise troubling moral issues, as well as questions about higher education’s contribution to the public good. It is essential that universities as key anchor institutions significantly and effectively contribute to radically reducing the pervasive, ongoing, seemingly intractable problems of our inner cities, including the complex, multicausal problem of health inequity.1

A recent New York Times article highlighted conditions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio, the sites of the 2016 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, respectively, as examples of a more general phenomenon of urban inequality:

In 2014, Philadelphia had the highest poverty rate (26 percent) among cities with more than a million people, while Cleveland has the third-highest poverty rate (39.2 percent) among cities with more than 100,000 residents.2

The article goes on to note that “[t]oday, both cities rely on ‘eds and meds’—educational and medical institutions—as engines for jobs and growth.”2 Philadelphia, in fact, has one of the highest concentrations of anchor institutions, with “eds and meds” representing 12 of the 15 largest private employers, and the Philadelphia metropolitan area contains more than 100 colleges and universities.3

Read More: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303475