Partnership Initiative

It is imperative that community engagement in higher education be further developed and sustained through reciprocal community-campus partnerships. And yet, despite a major step forward in 2006, with the recognition of seventy-six colleges and universities as community-engaged institutions by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement for Teaching, significant challenges remain. Driscoll defines the problem as a persistent lack of evidence and understanding of deep partnership work.

Most institutions could only describe in vague generalities how they achieved genuine reciprocity with their communities. Community partnerships require new understandings, new skills, and even a different way of conceptualizing community. There are generally significant barriers left over from both internal and external perceptions of higher education as an "ivory tower" and those barriers must be addressed for authentic community partnerships to develop (Driscoll, 2008).

Campus Compact has directed the integration of community with academic study for over two decades. In recent years, other national organizations such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) have increased their support for this national engagement effort. A common denominator to this national effort aligns with the landmark W. K. Kellogg Commission report findings: consistent emphasis on the characteristics of community partnerships, new roles for faculty, and new forms of scholarship. It is telling that few graduate programs prepare future faculty to develop or participate in community collaborations, however, and seldom is an academic understanding of the community partnership experience described in search and hiring criteria. Moreover, such engagement in the community/academy nexus is difficult to document in the context of current expectations for faculty scholarship.