Early in the presidency of Barack Obama, he was criticised for his notion that the United States was not uniquely exceptional in the world. In a media interview, he stated: âI believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism ⌠Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that weâve got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that weâre not always going to be rightâ (Farley 2015).
Though Obama continued through his presidency to extol various characteristics of American society and the American economy, he never veered from this underlying point. The United States is exceptional in the things in which its people take pride, but is unexceptional in its belief of exceptionality. With the same logic, we suggest what should be an obvious truth: every society on earth has its own values, ideals of the good society, and strategies through rule of law, rule of dictator, or somewhere between to implement the good society. For any one society represented through the nation-state to claim exceptionality is to acknowledge difference; to judge those who are different based on oneâs own set of socialised norms, values, and practices, with the idea of not exceptionality but superiority, is ego-centric.
No society is perfect, meaning no society is without challenges in the implementation of its strategies to achieve the ideal good society. Societies that arc towards exceptionality in freedom struggle with individuals who and groups that abuse that freedom to inflict harm on others; societies that arc towards exceptionality through limitations on freedom struggle with individuals who and groups that strive to break through authoritarian restrictions on individualism. Both kinds of societies struggle with clear definitions of human rights, and both equivocate regarding appropriate sacrifices to ask of its people to further the ambitions of the society. Further, both struggle with those who seek to enrich themselves through unethical and corrupt practice. For societies across the ideological spectrum, âperfectionâ is always a distant goal that is never reached.
Universities are critical actors that help societies strive towards perfection, through teaching, research, and, the focus of this book, engagement with various segments of the community on the local, national, regional, and international levels. In these pages, we do not judge, rank, or rate the universities profiled throughout, nor the societies in which they are embedded. This is a goal of this text; it is comparative without judgement.
However, we do assess the profiled universities, but only through honest reflection, given the unique experiences that define the lenses of the authors. We do not claim to be unbiased in our vision of the âgood university,â and our unique biases may be revealed throughout the text. When we are aware of them, we will call them out in the interest of transparency. In cases where we are not aware of our biases, we ask readers to question our words and to use them for their own critical reflections. This is the primary goal of this text: to provoke and promote reflection, discussion, and deliberation among readers and their associates, such that universities around the world, across societies and societal contexts, are indeed doing what they can and think they should do in relationship with community for the promotion of civic health.
In the balance of this introduction, we introduce the major themes from the book and preview what we consider to be the biggest questions for the global higher education community in the years ahead, as they relate to university-community engagements and civic health.
Nine chapters follow this, plus the conclusion. Chapter 2 presents a general discussion of how the civic mission of the university has been advanced, theoretically and practically, in different parts of the world. This is a discussion that comes at a time when this part of the mission is simultaneously promoted through outside recognition (Carnegie Foundation 2015), application of innovative pedagogy (Bryer 2014; Shaffer, Longo, Manosevitch and Thomas 2017), and held up by concerned stakeholders as suffering (National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement 2012), while also being overshadowed by mostly economic interests that give rise to scenarios such as the shuttering of liberal arts programmes in rural campuses (Smith 2019), concern for high costs of higher education (The Economist 2018), and concern for political bias in civic action (National Association of Scholars 2017).
As such, the chapter presents a civic mission at a crossroads and presents a set of typologies: civic versus un-civic university (Goddard, Hazelkorn, Kempton and Vallance 2016); humaniversity versus impact university (Campbell and Hwa 2015); multiversity versus transversity (Scott and Awbrey 1993).
In Chap. 3, we offer a review of university-community partnership literature, linked mostly to the disciplines we uncovered in our case universities as, essentially, carrying the torch of such partnerships. The literature is drawn from a review of scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) journals across disciplines, though limited to English-language journals.
We introduce our case universities in Chap. 4. Our cases come from different parts of the world, though not exhaustive. We present core attributes of each university, including historical development, size, programmes of study, mission, and other elements important for the discussions that follow. The case universities are from North America (University of Baltimore, Arizona State University, and University of Central Florida), Europe (Edge Hill University, Kaunas University of Technology, Tallinn University of Technology), Eurasia (University of Tyumen), Africa (Stellenbosch University), and South America (University of Chile, Catholic University of Chile, and University of ConcepciĂłn). In addition to these primary cases, we introduce other select examples from other institutions throughout the text.
In Chaps. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, we discuss the critical themes that emerged in our interviews with professors, students, staff, and community partners at our case universities. We examine the variations of how âcommunityâ is defined by our case universities in Chap. 5. Ultimately, we distinguish between two kinds of universities: those we label as having a hard integration with community, which tend towards having a clear notion of communities being served, apart from academic communities, and where there is some level of being embedded; and, those we label as having a soft integration with community, which tend towards having a more loose or variable definition of community and more ad hoc relations with community stakeholders that are driven potentially more by the individual interests of academic staff than by institutional directive.
Those universities with a harder integration (as they exist on a continuum) include Stellenbosch University (South Africa), University of Central Florida (United States), Arizona State University (United States), and, to a more variable extent, the University of Baltimore (United States), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), University of Tyumen (Russia), and University of ConcepciĂłn (Chile). Universities with a softer integration include Tallinn University of Technology (Estonia), Edge Hill University (United Kingdom), and University of Chile (Chile).
In Chap. 5, we also consider different strategies for engaging with these variably defined communities. Specifically, we consider engagement strategies of the individual scholars working outside or within formal university processes, teaching enrolled students and/or community members outside tuition-paying students, and research on versus with community members. Reflecting upon the nature of civically or community-engaged work of universities, we encounter a potential paradox. For instance, within a university maintaining a harder integration with community, we find a professor who prefers to work outside the formal channels of the university to engage with certain stakeholders through his or her research and teaching.
We question some factors that might contribute to a universityâs and individualâs inclination to engage with civic and community issues in Chap. 6. Specifically, we examine the kind of autonomy an institution, and professor within the institution, has, and the relationship to institutional or individual willingness to take risks by engaging in c...