It is a pleasure and an honor to be asked to speak at this conference, sponsored by Campus Compact, the Ford Foundation, and the Johnson Foundation, on realizing the potential of community-campus partnerships. Although I hope what I have to say will have more general relevance, my comments will reference the successful partnership between Clark University and its neighborhood in Worcester. I can brag about that because I have had very little to do with its success, having been at Clark less than three years. My predecessor, Richard Traina, is one of the heroes in that story. But the story can be instructive, especially in a context like this one that includes the stories the rest of you have to tell.
In order to provide some background for those of you who do not know Worcester, I will briefly review what has been an $80 million partnership to rebuild the Main South area of that New England city.
Worcester is a city 40 miles west of Boston that, like Lowell and Providence, was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. Its manufacturing emphasis was in metal products and armaments, and it thrived until after World War II, reaching a peak in population of over 220,000. In the 1950s and 1960s it began a decline that culminated in the larger companies closing, moving, or selling out to firms located elsewhere, even abroad. The Main South neighborhood, where Clark is located, was a stable and prosperous middle class and blue-collar part of town located two miles southwest of City Hall. During the fifties and sixties families, as in other cities, began to move to the suburbs, and, of course, with jobs leaving town urban flight accelerated.
By the 1980s University Park, the Main South neighborhood immediately around Clark, had decayed. Far too many housing units-including those "triple-deckers" unique to the region, where three parts of an extended family might live on three different floors-were owned by absentee landlords, who badly neglected their properties. The area became a center of the drug trade and prostitution. Clark, like so many of its peers nationally, built bigger fences to keep the problem outside. Only in the last two decades has the truth come home to any of us-Yale, Penn, Trinity, Clark, CWRU, Southern Cal-that decaying surroundings reduce market share by making a college less attractive to tuition-paying parents and students. Recent university initiatives nationwide have been accompanied by ethical justifications for an increased role for community engagement, service learning, and volunteerism in undergraduate education. That the initial thrust by Universities grew out of enlightened self-interest, not altruism, does not diminish at all what was a long-overdue appreciation of an institution's interdependence with its community. The Main South neighborhood currently is about 41% white, with some of that coming from Central or Eastern European countries such as Albania and Greece; about 35% is Hispanic or Latino, about 9% African American, and about 11% Asian including many from Vietnam and China. About 31% of families are below the federal poverty line, and many are single-parent households. Clark is a relatively small school, founded in 1887 as a graduate-research university and now teaching about 2000 undergraduates and 600 graduate students each year. Its endowment is about $150,000,000.
Change in Main South came in 1985 shortly after Richard Traina arrived as the seventh president of Clark. With encouragement and funding from SEEDCO, a non-profit organization with funding from the Ford Foundation, Clark brought vision and leadership to a partnership that established a Community Development Corporation, a CDC. The University has never adopted a top-down philanthropic model but holds only one seat on the board of the CDC with the remaining fourteen being held by local residents. Only gradually, however, did Clark build trust among the often suspicious neighbors. In the 1990s the CDC, the University, and other area institutions then created the University Park Partnership, which helped the initiative move to a higher and more ambitious level.
Clark early on provided leadership, as well as unsecured loans for renovations, and helped to leverage millions of federal, state, and private dollars. Under an outstanding Executive Director, Steve Teasdale, the CDC has renovated and either sold or rented 220 housing units, helped establish 20 new store fronts, and improved lighting, paving, and policing. The CDC provides advice for new home buyers, helps with budgeting for maintenance costs, and makes arrangements for elderly home owners to live out their life in their home if they wish.
None of this has been as easy as it may sound in retrospect. First, the neighborhood-as I have said-did not trust Clark. The University had fenced out local residents; it had bought up residential land for expansion; students could be noisy and careless; their cars were being parked in places neighbors had been using; and Clark had a reputation for far-left leaning that did not sell well in blue-collar areas. Trustees of the University, moreover, had talked about deserting Main South for more rural surroundings. Relationships gradually turned around because of mutual self-interest as residents realized how important Clark's political know-how and financial support could be to rebuilding the neighborhood, and trustees recognized that Clark's future depended on having healthy surroundings that would not discourage students from applying. Of course, after the project began the neighbors also needed to realize that Clark could not be simply a "cash cow" for them.
Rebuilding University Park, that part of Main South closest to Clark, has been a $40 million project. Much of the early momentum derived from a $2.4M HUD grant in 1996 from its office of University Partnerships. It is hard to imagine the success that followed without such splendid early support. The project has had four emphases: housing and physical rehabilitation, education, economic development, and recreational opportunities. Clark itself has invested approximately $8 million already. Clark provides a full scholarship to any child who grows up in the neighborhood and qualifies for admission. Currently eleven such students are enrolled and 22 have enrolled to date. Clark provides a summer camp, use of campus facilities, music lessons, and other advantages to neighborhood children. It subsidizes faculty and staff who purchase homes there. Twenty-two have done so. Dick Traina also made a substantive but also highly symbolic decision to move the president's home back to the campus in Main South and out of one of the most affluent west-side neighborhoods. The move was important to Clark but also built further trust among those neighbors who had been very suspicious of the University, neighbors such as activist Billy Breault, a custodian at Holy Cross who will gladly charge into a trustees' or city council meeting and let you know just how he and his neighbors feel about something.
This year the Main South initiative took off in a new direction while the earlier work continued. The new dimension is a neighborhood just north of University Park that is called "Kilby-Gardner" after two local streets. It is a troubled area, with dilapidated houses and widespread drug trade, as well as old industrial brownfields. The properties and the necessary funding have now been secured, so that in three years there should be at least sixty new housing units for first-time home buyers and renters. Clark will put a new $2.5 million athletic field there, and the Worcester Boys and Girls Club will build its new $7.5 million home adjacent to the field. The overall project will cost more than $35 million, again a combination of federal, state, local, and private dollars including the pieces from the Boys and Girls Club and Clark. So these two initiatives to rebuild Main South will cost around $80 million, with at least $10-12 million coming from Clark. While there are a few differences of opinion on the project within the faculty and among trustees, the overwhelming majority of both have been very supportive, and that is important. At a meeting (NAICU) of college presidents in January 2001, Senator Ted Kennedy said that Clark University had set a national standard for how a university should relate to its neighborhood. The two key components to success have been first that the project has been a real partnership with the neighbors, not top-down charity, and second that the University had the political and economic experience and connections to help leverage public and private funding.
I should add that central to Clark's larger commitment to its city has been the goal of improving the education of Worcester's students. Building on an already strong program, in 1991 Clark trustee Jacob Hiatt, a local philanthropist and businessman, made possible-through a large gift-a University dream, the Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education. For twelve years the Center has made a huge difference in education reform and professional development in Worcester. One component of Clark's involvement has been the remarkable five-year-old University Park Campus School, a partnership between Clark and the Worcester Public Schools. A small 7th through 12th grade school, it has a student body 70 per cent of whom do not live in homes where English is the language spoken and 78 percent of whom are eligible for the free lunch program. Most enter 7th grade reading at the 3rd grade level. These are at-risk kids. But no UPCS student has ever failed the English part of the rigorous state achievement test (MCAS). Last year all 10th graders finished in the top two categories in English, and none failed the math section. In 2001 the Carnegie Corporation made the Clark- Worcester Partnership one of only seven recipients of an $8M grant to rethink urban high school education, and we have begun to implement the program based on the grant.
So what has Clark learned about realizing the potential of Community-Campus partnerships? What is the campus perspective on such challenges?
First, let me reflect for a minute on what "community" denotes for the university, then move on to some of the important barriers to success, and then outline a half dozen key factors for planning, building, and sustaining partnerships. At the same time, we all recognize that each college or university is different and brings different assets to a partnership; and each neighborhood is different with variable cultural, economic, political, and physical characteristics.
When I spoke last fall in Providence at a similar conference, what most excited me was that the planners had brought together two very different organizations-Campus Compact and CEO's for Cities, whose complementary synergies with universities are, I believe, necessary for maximizing the potential good that communities and campuses can do for each other. The results at times were curious, because the cultures of the two groups-Liz Hollander's Campus Compact and Paul Grogan's CEO's for Cities-are so very different. The audience was a mixture of the two, and you could see as discussion veered over in one direction or another, towards perhaps service learning or towards technology transfer, that this group or that one started squirming in their seats and asking, "How did we get onto this topic?" But the results were tremendous and the dialogue fruitful.
CEO's for Cities, a very new organization, brings together private sector, public sector, and university leaders to achieve maximum economic benefit for communities of having universities and colleges nearby while seeking such benefits in ways that cater to the universities' enlightened self-interest. It focuses on six kinds of involvement by universities: buying local products, hiring local employees, engaging in positive-impact real estate projects, work force development (at many levels-K-12 enhancement, community college training, bachelors level graduates, professional education, and research doctorates), research partnerships, and professional expertise (business, law, dental, social work, and so forth). As someone who spent nine years at a major land-grant university, I have come to feel that CEO's for Cities is really trying to develop an urban equivalent of the land-grant model.
Campus Compact has focused for several years now on partnerships that it sees as more grass-roots oriented, although without presidential-level commitment they tend to be inefficient. Here the focus is on student volunteer activity, service learning initiatives, and CDC-college collaborations to rebuild neighborhoods. In its own words it is a coalition "committed to the civic purposes of higher education," that is to "community service that develops students' citizenship skills and values and promotes partnerships between campuses and communities."
Both organizations seek to change the culture of universities to think in new ways about their relationship to the community, to encourage faculty to rethink the academic potential of community involvement, and to break down town/gown barriers. Because together they mobilize different kinds of energies, their combined powers are complementary not redundant.
But universities also use different definitions of "community" for different purposes. At times, as when we consider the impact of buying up private homes or pieces of commercial property, it may refer to the two blocks immediately adjacent to campus. At times it refers to a larger neighborhood such as, "University Park," the center of our rebuilding project. At times it is a larger section of a city, such as Main South, where Clark remains involved in numerous ways including much of our volunteer activity. At times it refers to the city of Worcester as in our larger education initiatives, our small business development center, and our engagement in revitalizing downtown. At times it refers to a larger region as when Clark plays a role in supporting the Central Massachusetts biotech development.
It is also important to remember that no college helps its city by doing anything to endanger its excellence as a teaching and learning institution. That remains its first priority, and community involvement must define itself as part of that excellence not a drag on that excellence. Philadelphia would not be helped by Penn becoming a less attractive center of learning, and a similar point could be made about Southern Cal, Chicago, Case Western Reserve, and so forth.
Sometimes one of the complaints you hear from alumni or faculty, less enlightened alumni and faculty to be sure, is "Why are you putting so many of the college's resources into this new community stuff?" That leads me to my primary argument about the barriers to success and the ways to maximize success in partnerships. They are related, so let me first summarize the pitfalls and landmines, then flip the page to look at some of the same issues more positively.
The first potential landmine, from the campus perspective, can be a failure to gain the support of a majority of faculty and staff. Trustees, of course, must be a given for the president. Without their support, it would be hard for a president to take a major community initiative. But at a time of tough economic decisions and scarce resources, the president also does not want to be undermined by faculty leaders not believing in the community partnership. This does happen, and it saps the energy of the project. The second and corresponding difficulty, of course, is lack of trust from the neighbors. If for a generation you have walled the community out and battled the usual town/gown problems, it is not surprising that the neighbors will not believe you when you come calling to build a new strategy.
A related barrier to success is faulty or inadequate communication during the planning and building process. Both the college and the community must learn what the other seeks to achieve and what the other's bottom-line values are. A fourth barrier is a failure to make the relationship a real partnership, but rather to assume a condescending (even if unconscious) paternalism in a project you are doing "for" the neighborhood, not "with" the neighbors.
A fifth problem can be having the wrong personnel in place. I always believe that success comes back to personnel more than anything else. But a sixth problem can be organizational-not having, on the one hand, access to the university at the presidential level (usually through a direct report) but, on the other, not having the means for opening up multiple points of entry to the university so that faculty and staff can take the initiative to develop and institutionalize educational and service programs that broaden community involvement.
So, what are the ways to maximize the potential of partnerships? First, do build up internal support among faculty and staff, who need to believe that community partnerships can open doors to new opportunities-for research and curriculum-and can in the long run maintain and even enhance resources. Faculty and staff can be on pertinent committees and receive support when they initiate new ventures, internships, and collaborative programs-whether with family centers, schools, theaters and museums, or something else. If curriculum-based community research and service learning courses have any potential, they will depend on the culture of the college valuing the community partnership. In universities with professional schools-law, dentistry, nursing, business-the mutual advantages of collaborative programs are obvious. But the President needs to articulate the partnership as a priority of his, and leadership needs to make sure the faculty believe in it.
Second, trust must be built up between the neighbors and the university. This depends on mutual respect. It depends on all partners walking the walk not just pontificating and posing. It especially depends on making the collaboration a real partnership in which the value of university influence is clear but the specter of university control is not a threat.
Third, success depends on the self-interest of both parties being gratified. The neighbors need to see, for example, streets getting safer, housing getting better, schools improving. The college needs to see, for example, admissions growth, positive publicity, new academic opportunities. Each side, moreover, needs to understand clearly not only its own self-interest but the other's self-interest. The best rule in both partnerships and negotiations is to have a clear understanding of the other's bottom line, values, point of view, and self-interest. Put yourself in your neighbor's shoes. What are his priorities? What are her negotiables? The university must realize its neighbors may not care much about exciting new ideas in peptide research or the age of the universe or the novels of Saul Bellow. The community must realize that the university is not a cash cow and that it has legitimate academic priorities, most of which do not have a connection to the neighborhood.
Fourth, it is important to have the right personnel and continuity in personnel. Clark's Main South project would not be a front-page story, I am sure, without Steve Teasdale running the program for 15 years and without an outstanding university liaison, Jack Foley, in the University President's office for the same period. Paradoxically, however, in order to institutionalize the partnership a structure must be created that can overcome the loss of key personnel, for no one is forever. On a related organizational note, you need the central point of entry in the President's office, but then you need to open up doors for multiple initiatives elsewhere in the university, multiple points of entry once the program is healthy. Faculty and staff need to be able to take neighborhood initiatives, but communicating about those initiatives with the University is also important. In the long run a richly symbiotic set of relationships involving academic programs and service work will bode well for the permanence of a healthy university presence in the town or city.
Fifth, you need to plan marketing as well as substance. Media not educated about the partnership may distort or misinterpret what is under way and do unexpected damage to the relationship. In Worcester there were at one time headlines that read "Clark's plan for the community," thereby alienating neighbors with whom we had long worked to develop an equal partnership. You also need some early successes, even if small ones. They build confidence and provide acceleration for the initiative.
Those are my five major criteria for developing, building, and institutionalizing a creative partnership. One could add others. A broader involvement in the town or city and its schools is helpful. Knowing the larger economic issues, the demography, and the politics will make the college a better leader in its own neighborhood. Interacting with other colleges in the same city-community involvement need not be competitive between colleges-will help leverage resources and manpower for all parties. Knowing best practices from around the country-with the help of, for example, Campus Compact, will also make you much more efficient in your initiatives. Finally, remember that some of the barriers to success will be beyond your control-the loss of jobs in your region or a terrible economic downturn like today's. You want to cushion the partnership against the inevitability of some bad news; and with a shared vision, mutual respect, and a will to succeed communities and universities can build long-term, viable relationships in which the lives of everyone involved are improved.