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Peer Review, Spring 2003
Lessons from a College Promoting
Civic Engagement
By James Trostle, director of urban initiatives
and associate professor of anthropology, and Richard
H. Hersh, president, Trinity College
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Engaging students in learning has become the rallying cry
of higher education during the past several decades, yet passive
learning is still customary on many campuses. Trinity College,
a small private liberal arts institution with high tuition,
a low student-teacher ratio, and a primary commitment to teaching,
has long promised to engage students in their learning. The
efficacy of that engaged learning, however, suffered for many
years because of an ivory tower separation of campus and community.
Our urban location has created for us in the past decade a
civic engagement imperative of "enlightened necessity" that
has begun to transform both our neighborhood and our campus.
Trinity is located in Hartford, Connecticut, the state capital,
celebrated as the insurance center of the United States and
home to fine museums and theatres. But Hartford is also a
stark example of an unequal America: It is almost the poorest
city of its size in the country and is ringed by towns that
together rank as among the ten richest in the country. Trinity
itself is now surrounded by Spanish-speaking neighborhoods,
where low education (almost half of adults without a high
school degree) is accompanied by high unemployment (40 percent
of residents unemployed in 2001), high residential mobility
(more than half move in three years) and low owner occupancy
(10 percent of housing units). What should be the role of
a liberal arts college in such circumstances?
A Civic Engagement Imperative
Although Trinity had community liaison offices extending
back to the mid-1960s, its community engagement accelerated
in the 1990s when gang violence and drug trafficking created
neighborhood crises. This was when the College fully understood
that its future depended on its surroundings. We were forced
to ask whether the College should/could mount a massive redevelopment
project, use its surroundings as a research laboratory, help
its students engage in service to ameliorate poverty, or do
something else. Trinity chose a path that is at once all and
none of these: It started a combination of large and small
development projects, created administrative offices to help
faculty develop collaborative projects with community groups,
and helped students encounter the city through existing courses
and programs in addition to their own organizations.
When Trinity first requested external foundation support
in 1996 for its plans to build "an extended community of learning"
linking campus and community, it asked whether a liberal arts
college could transform its neighborhood. Since then, the
College has played an instrumental role in building an adjoining
complex called the Learning Corridor. No other public school
campus in the nation has the Learning Corridor's mix of educational
institutions: a Montessori Magnet School, a Magnet Middle
School, and Greater Hartford Academies of Art and of Math
and Science, and support programs for youths, including a
Boys & Girls Club, the Aetna Center for Families, and
the Connecticut Valley Girl Scouts Council. Seven years later,
we know that some parts of a neighborhood can be transformed,
but we are even more certain that a college can transform
itself in this process.
Not One Community
Like other academic institutions, our college has both corporate
and academic sides to its operations. Our neighbors see one
college but there are many. It is an employer and developer,
a site of performances, and a producer of knowledge, populated
by students, faculty, and staff with their own politics and
programs. But the College has also tended to see one community
where there are many. Neighbors, businesses, political groups,
non-profits, and formal institutional alliances all call upon
the college to partner with and dedicate its resources to
them.
To deal with this multiplicity of interests, civic engagement
now takes place at Trinity along three identifiable pathways:
corporate, curricular, and co-curricular. The corporate pathway
is at the level of Trinity as an employer and historical constant
in the city for 180 years. The college has scholarship and
tuition remission programs for Hartford residents, gives hiring
preference to local residents, helped develop a neighborhood
job center, works with local neighborhood planning groups,
and, together with other neighboring institutions in the Southside
Institutions Neighborhood Alliance (SINA), helped build the
Learning Corridor.
Not One Curriculum
A second pathway for civic engagement in Trinity is at the
level of the curriculum, where courses offer both urban content
(e.g., a course on urban architecture) and urban context (e.g.,
a sensory biology class that partners with a local school
for the deaf). Our Community Learning Initiative (CLI), created
by the faculty, is the primary vehicle for academic departments
to promote civic engagement. CLI courses use community-based
experiences, usually designed together with community partners,
to further student learning within existing course objectives.
Compared to universities doing what is more commonly called
service-learning, Trinity's thirty CLI courses and 400-500
students a year are small numbers. But taking its size into
account, this institution has 30 percent of its faculty teaching
this way with more than 60 percent of students completing
one or more CLI courses by the time they graduate. In addition,
an academic internship program offers course credit to students
who design semester-long projects combining academic work
with community placements. Both faculty and community sponsors
supervise this work, and both evaluate it. About half of Trinity
students do at least one academic internship in the city and
metropolitan region before they graduate, and more than half
of the faculty have supervised them.
Residence halls, student clubs, and service projects are
a third track for civic engagement at Trinity. These co-curricular
initiatives are almost entirely student-controlled, so they
give students experience in running their own organizations
as well as experiences in the city. More than twenty-five
student organizations now offer services to local groups,
ranging from a chapter of Habitat for Humanity to various
clubs that offer mentoring and tutoring to local public school
students.
The Advantage of Size
Size matters in the scale of community work at Trinity, and
it might even be called an example of the economist E.F. Schumacher's
"appropriate technology." Faculty at Trinity, as at many liberal
arts colleges, are committed to working on their courses more
than on national policies--the outcomes of their teaching
are designed for their students and community collaborators
rather than for some national research or policy audience.
This means course-based projects are smaller, simpler, easier
to understand, possible to complete in one semester, and scaled
for students to do themselves. It often means that class-based
research projects are undertaken to satisfy the operational
needs of community collaborators more than to satisfy the
research interests of faculty. But it also ensures that many
community-learning projects are locally relevant. We are beginning
to explore how faculty can use these types of pedagogical
innovations to benefit their own scholarly disciplines, how
to help extend projects over time and across disciplines,
and how better to disseminate what works and what doesn't.
Evaluation as Pedagogy
Evaluation has been a key component of Trinity's recent urban
programs. CLI courses are evaluated by students, faculty,
and community partners. An in-house evaluator has used both
ethnographic methods and sample surveys to understand the
variability and frequency of expectations and perceptions
on- and off-campus. A baseline community survey of 650 residences
helped establish residents' perceptions of their neighborhood
and of the college, and helped disseminate information to
the neighborhood about computer classes and opportunities
to enroll in high school equivalency programs. Supplemented
by an evaluation committee, the evaluator helped us to make
mid-course corrections of process as well as to recognize
where things were working and where they were not. We are
now working toward assessing the outcomes and long-term impact
of student participation in community learning courses, academic
internships, and co-curricular initiatives that promote urban
engagement. We are also beginning to collect institutional
data on faculty engagement in the city by, for example, better
assessing faculty participation on boards of directors of
community agencies and other political and volunteer work.
The Need to Institutionalize
Trinity has constantly trimmed and adjusted its community
projects, seeking the right scale and mix of endowment-funded
and grant-funded initiatives. For example, Trinity's information
technology project originally offered free Internet connections
to nearby residents and community groups. As Internet connections
became more available and inexpensive, the college has finally
decided to get out of the Internet provider business, which
cost approximately $90,000 per year. Most, but not all, community
organizations have chosen to continue their connections at
their own expense. The college-sponsored neighborhood technology
center, now heavily staffed by students, continues to offer
free typing and computer classes, and has worked with community
groups to create additional community computer labs.
The college has begun to change its institutional incentives
and administrative programs to support civic engagement. CLI
work used to be counted as service work during promotion and
tenure reviews; now it is counted as part of teaching, and
the category of service continues to be refined. The dean
of faculty now collects information about faculty connections
to the city as part of their annual performance reviews. And
a number of programs have been reorganized and coordinated
under a new director of urban initiatives position, which
reports both to the president and the dean of the faculty.
These types of changes, along with concurrent faculty discussions
of curricular reform, are allowing new and more coherent attention
to be paid to the many forms of civic engagement at Trinity.
Recent changes include enhanced attention to our urban location
as a part of admissions outreach, more attention to urban
opportunities in our First Year Program, and better orientation
for new students as well as student mentors and residence
hall advisors. Proposals have been submitted to national and
local foundations at the same time that fundraising is taking
place among trustees and alumni. Over time, our challenge
is to raise the endowment funds required to sustain these
programs from internal funds for the foreseeable future.
In summary, here are some of the lessons we have learned
in this process of transforming some parts of our college
and our city:
- Community and college appear monolithic and constant
to each other, though each is multivocal and evolving. A
college needs multiple points of entry and exit to allow
appropriately complex articulations to develop among its
many clients and partners.
- Deferred maintenance of neighborhoods can be as dangerous
and costly as deferred maintenance of campus buildings.
- A curriculum is not the sole agent of change within a
college. Civic engagement is supported by, but does not
depend on, curricular change.
- Smaller can be better.
- Evaluation matters.
- More engagement creates greater expectations and more
pressure to sustain projects over time.
The imperative of civic engagement has become part of Trinity's
urban liberal arts mission. Because both the community and
campus are constantly changing, this commitment continues
to evolve. We are working to create the institutional processes
to help us recognize what to do next, and the institutional
and community-based resources to allow us to sustain what
we all choose.
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