Campus-community partnerships can play a vital role in environmental education by providing universities opportunities to engage diverse communities, but challenges often emerge when research centers leverage their legitimacy as a purveyor of expertise while embracing inclusive engagement practices. While previous campus-community partnership studies have treated inclusion and legitimacy separately, we developed the Legitimacy-Inclusion Engagement Gradient (LIEG) framework, based on a year of participant observations of meetings and workshops of a university urban ecology center and 38 interviews with center members and partners, to investigate the opportunities and tensions that emerge when a center utilizes more inclusive engagement narratives. We observed universities are more adept at enacting legitimacy and that inclusive partnership practices vary substantially. We provide insights into how inclusion and legitimacy can be navigated to advance urban social-ecological resilience. Findings have implications for universities seeking to build campus-community partnership during a pandemic-induced economic downturn and anti-racist social movements.