The Role of Race in Urban Community-University Relationships

In this open-access article published in the Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, Dr. James Earl Davis and I explore how race and racism often inform community-university relationships. We also wrote a brief blog post about the origins of this paper and our findings for a general audience.

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an increased involvement of institutions of higher education in their communities. Previous scholarship on community engaged scholarship and anchor institutions often fails to consider race, racism, and racial power dynamics. We analyze interviews with the program director of a critical community engaged scholarship initiative as part of a multi-year community-led collaboration between an urban, historically White institution and its adjacent community using the critical race theory tenet of interest convergence and critical literacy. We find that the university’s relationship with the local community is troubling to residents, especially frequent student projects and university-initiated neighborhood safety initiatives. We also find that the university became interested in partnership when there were clear financial incentives and maintained significant logistical hurdles that hindered an equitable partnership. These tensions between the community and university highlight the university’s desires to conduct research and build prestige as self-interested acts, negatively impacting the community-university relationship and partnership. We conclude by emphasizing the importance of race in research on anchor institutions and community engaged scholarship. We offer critical literacy as a framework for universities to establish more equitable interactions, both in community-university relationships and in scholarly partnerships.

Citations

Winfield, J. D. & Davis, J. E. (2020). The role of race in urban community-university relationships: Moving from interest convergence to critical literacy. Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Education and Student Affairs, 5(3), 16-32. https://ecommons.luc.edu/jcshesa/vol5/iss3/5

Winfield, J. D. & Davis, J. E. (2021, April 21). Disrupting the commonplace: Reflections on the meaning of community-univeristy “partnership”. PRAXIS - The Blog of the Journal of Critical Scholarship on Higher Eductaion and Student Affairs. https://jcshesa.wordpress.com/2021/04/21/disrupting-the-commonplace-reflections-on-the-meaning-of-community-university-partnership/

This paper is also archived in Temple University’s institutional repository here.

The cover image for this paper was generated with the aRtsy package by Jake Winfield.