Urban-serving research universities (USRUs) address issues of access, community engagement, and development within urban areas, but internal and external forces complicate their place-based missions. By embracing contradictions within stakeholder viewpoints, strategic planning can foster fruitful, institutionalized engagement. This mixed-methods…

This article focuses on the implications and creative possibility catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic and reinvigorated racial justice movement on infrastructure that seeks to build transformational community-engaged teaching and research partnerships. Pulling from existing literature around critical service-learning and the wisdom of scholars from…

There is broad recognition that anchor institutions--universities, hospitals, and other locally embedded organizations--can leverage their economic and human resources to revitalize and empower distressed neighborhoods. In Milwaukee, five anchor institutions, including Marquette University, collaborated with residents, city officials, and other…

For a service-learning course focusing on poverty, students from a Hong Kong university took a 12-day trip to engage in various poverty alleviation services in Cambodia. This course was border-crossing on five dimensions: (1) urban versus rural, (2) developed versus developing world location, (3) classroom versus practical and experiential, (4)…

It is common for universities that seek community partnerships to employ full-time staff, formally sanctioned as boundary spanners, to develop and manage such partnerships. These staff are frequently administrative or allied staff rather than tenure-track faculty or academic unit administrators. Given the multiple interests of universities and…

In this reflective essay, we describe Widener University's 10-year transformation from a disengaged institution to an institution that has a metropolitan-focused mission vested in civic leadership, community engagement, and service-learning. We describe our journey to embed an expansive civic frame that includes concrete practices of pedagogy,…

As more colleges and universities commit to a public mission, it is critical that our work as anchor institutions have a sustainable and positive impact, and that we collaborate fully with the diverse voices and expertise beyond our campuses--the most valuable assets of our multicultural cities. Taking Syracuse, New York, as a microcosm, the…

This article presents an urban teacher education center as a process model of how a university can cultivate authentic community engagement. Tree essential steps of the process model are identified: (1) being physically located at the school or community site in order to build trust and become integrated into the life of the school or community,…

Urban universities are a key resource for municipal government, businesses, community organizations, and citizens to foster partnerships for successful renewal of distressed urban neighborhoods. From its experience over the past decade, the Ohio State University has created a successful model for engagement with its neighborhoods and the City of…

In this keynote address presentation, Ray Suarez, senior correspondent for public television's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," makes a compelling case for saving America's urban neighborhoods from decline. Suarez discusses the role that higher education must play in this effort. [Keynote Address presented at the Outreach Scholarship 2003…

Urban universities are often characterized as economic engines--directly and indirectly serving the needs of the communities within which they are situated. However, the relationship between urban universities and their neighbors is often strained. Reflecting on the University of Illinois at Chicago's Neighborhoods Initiative (UICNI) and its…

The East Baltimore Revitalization Project, a fifteen-year, $800 million redevelopment initiative, seeks to transform a struggling area of the city near Johns Hopkins Hospital. A unique partnership of the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and the Annie E. Casey Foundation is supporting the City of Baltimore in this…