For additional information on the seminar, the WWW Home Page is located at http://h-net.msu.edu/~urban/comm-org or contact Wendy Plotkin at U13972@uicvm.uic.edu
This paper was originally published in the Social Service Review 68:3 (September, 1994), 299-321.
Comments on the paper may be sent to COMM-ORG@uicvm.uic.edu for posting to COMM-ORG or directly to Ira Harkavy at harkavy@pobox.upenn.edu.
by Ira Harkavy and John L. Puckett,
University of Pennsylvania
Ira Harkavy is Director of the Center for Community Partnerships at the
University of Pennsylvania. He teaches both in the history and urban
studies departments, and is co-executive editor of _Universities and
Community Schools_. In recent years, he has written on how to involve
universities effectively in democratic partnerships with local public
schools and their communities.
John Puckett is associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania
Graduate School of Education, where he conducts research on the
university-community relationship.
Urban universities are now compelled to work with their neighbors for their own immediate and long-term self-interest. There are four reasons why universities should be involved in urban revitalization efforts. The first reason is institutional self-interest, including the safety, cleanliness, and attractiveness of the physical setting. Each of these contributes to the campus ambiance and to the recruitment and retention of faculty, students, and staff. Needless to say, high walls and imposing gates cannot shield students, faculty members, or administrators from the disturbing reality that surrounds the urban campus.
The second reason involves a more indirect effect on institutional self-interest. It includes both the costs (financial, public relations, and political) to the institution that result from a retreat from the community, as well as the benefits that accrue from active, effective engagement. As Lee Benson and Ira Harkavy have noted:
As conditions in society continue to deteriorate, universities will face increased public scrutiny (witness the Congressional hearings chaired by Representative John Dingell of Michigan last year). The scrutiny is bound to intensify as America focuses on resolving its deep and pervasive societal problems amid continuously expanding global competition. Institutions of higher education will increasingly be held to new and demanding standards that evaluate performance on the basis of direct and short-run societal benefit. In addition, public, private, and foundation support will be more than ever based on that standard, and it will become increasingly clear to colleges and universities that "altruism pays"--in fact, that altruism is practically an imperative for institutional development and improvement.[3]
The third reason involves the advancement of knowledge, teaching, and human welfare through academically based community service focused on improving the quality of life in the local community. The benefits that can emerge from this approach are the integration of research, teaching, and service; the interaction of faculty members and graduate and undergraduate students from across the campus; the connection of projects involving participatory action research with student and staff volunteer activities; and the promotion of civic consciousness, value-oriented thinking, and a moral approach to issues of public concern among undergraduates. Historically, universities have missed an extraordinary opportunity to work with their communities and to engage in better research, teaching, and service. The separation of universities from society, their aloofness from real-world problems, has deprived universities of contact with a necessary source of genuine creativity and academic vitality.
Promoting civic consciousness, we believe, is the core component of the fourth reason for significant university involvement with the community. Sheldon Hackney has described this as the "institution's obligation to be a good citizen, and its pedagogic duty to provide models of responsible citizenship for its students."[4] In other words, universities and colleges have, along with schools and religious institutions, a special responsibility to be moral institutions, exemplifying the highest civic and character-building values of society. At the heart of civic responsibility is the concept of neighborliness--caring about and assisting those living in close proximity to us. As an institution, a university's actions and inactions express morality; a university's indifference or civic engagement teaches lessons to its students and to society. This citizenship and character-building role, of course, was at the very center of the American college. However, the didactic approach to citizenship education and morality employed by its predecessors would today be both off-putting and at odds with the openness of the modern university.
Collectively these arguments indicate that it is now both necessary and mutually beneficial for urban universities to work to revitalize their local communities. The complex problems of urban society necessitate a radical reorientation and reinvention of the urban American university to become, once again, a mission-oriented institution devoted to the use of reason to improve the human condition. That mission was the driving force behind the organization of the modern research university in the late nineteenth century. University presidents of the Progressive Era worked to transform the American university into a major national institution capable of meeting the needs of a rapidly changing and increasingly complex society. Imbued with a boundless optimism and a belief that scientific and social-scientific knowledge could change the world for the better, they saw universities as leading the way toward an effective and humane reorganization of society. Progressive academics viewed the city as their arena for study and action. The city was the site of significant societal transformations; the center of political corruption, poverty, crime and cultural conflict; and a ready source of data and information. It was, according to Richmond Mayo-Smith of Columbia, "the national laboratory of social science, just as hospitals are of medical science." [5] As Jane Addams and her colleagues in Chicago illustrated, the city was also the place in which academics could combine social science and social reform.
Social work as a field of social scientific inquiry gained impetus from Hull House, the social settlement founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr on Chicago's West Side in 1889.[6] The philosophy and programs of Hull House were modeled after Toynbee Hall, the first settlement house, established in 1884 by the Anglican vicar Samuel A. Barnett in London's East End. Adopting a multifaceted institutional approach to the social problems of the immigrant groups in the Nineteenth Ward, the Hull House residents offered activities and services along four lines, designated by Addams as the social, educational, humanitarian, and civic. The residents' programs included college extension classes, clubs and literary programs, ethnic festivals, art exhibits, recreational activities and neighborhood showerbaths, a summer camp program, a cooperative boarding house for working women, and kindergarten, visiting-nurse, and legal services. Moreover, Hull House was a site for labor union activities; a forum for social, political, and economic reform; and a center for social science research. Regarding its research function, as Addams once noted, "the settlements antedated by three years the first sociology departments in universities and by ten years the establishment of the first foundations for social research." [7]
In Twenty Years at Hull-House, Addams emphasized the benefits that accrued to the activist social worker from engagement with the community and its problems. She wrote of "a fast-growing number of cultivated young people who have no recognized outlet for their active faculties. They hear constantly of the great social maladjustment, but no way is provided for them to change it, and their uselessness hangs upon them heavily. . . . 'There is nothing after disease, indigence and guilt so fatal to life itself as the want of a proper outlet for active faculties.'"[8] For women, the problem of lacking constructive social outlets for their reform impulses was acutely felt, constricted as they were by Victorian gender roles. Viewed as an expression of "social motherhood," settlement work provided a satisfactory professional outlet for women that was not incommensurate with established gender roles and practices, particularly the idea of the "woman's sphere." Addams acknowledged this when she remarked that "many women today are failing properly to discharge their duties to their own families and households simply because they fail to see that as society grows more complicated, it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her home, if only in order to preserve the home in its entirety."[9]
For activist-oriented young men and women of Addams's generation, settlement work constituted, in Addams's apt phrase, a "subjective necessity." In 1889, Starr told a friend that "Jane's idea, which she puts very much to the front and on no account will give up, is that [the settlement] is more for the people who do it than for the other class."[10] Addams herself later wrote, "I hope it will never be forgotten in Chicago, at least where Hull House feels somewhat responsible for the Toynbee Hall idea, that Toynbee Hall was first projected as an aid and outlet to educated young men. The benefit to East Londoners was then regarded as almost secondary, and the benefit has always been held as strictly mutual."[11]
In 1895, Addams and the residents of Hull House--notably Florence Kelley, Agnes Holbrook, and Julia Lathrop--published Hull-House Maps and Papers, a sociological investigation of the neighborhood immediately to the east of Hull House; in Addams's words, it was a record of "certain phases of neighborhood life with which the writers have been familiar."[12] Inspired by Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People in London, the Hull House residents compiled detailed maps of demographic and social characteristics and produced richly descriptive accounts of life and work in a poor immigrant neighborhood.[13] Theirs was not dispassionate scholarship, as evidenced by Kelley's poignant advocacy of sweatshop laborers, whose "reward of work at their trade is grinding poverty, ending only in death or escape to some more hopeful occupation. Within the trade there has been and can be no improvement in wages while tenement-house manufacture is tolerated. On the contrary, there seems to be no limit to the deterioration now in progress."[14]
Closely associated with Hull House in its early years were the male sociologists at the University of Chicago, who acknowledged that "it was Addams and Hull-House who were the leader and leading institution in Chicago in the 1890s, not the University of Chicago." [15] Indeed, Hull-House Maps and Papers oriented the Chicago School of Sociology to urban studies and strongly influenced the direction taken by that department for the next 40 years.[16] The changing relationship of Addams and her Hull House colleagues with the Chicago sociologists from the 1890s to the late 1910s mirrored the American university's transition from an outwardly directed, service-centered institution to an inwardly directed, discipline-centered institution. It was also a marker of the separation of knowledge production from knowledge use, indeed, of social science from social reform, by the end of the Progressive Era.
In its early years, the University of Chicago demonstrated that by doing good, a research university could do very well. When Chicago's first president, William Rainey Harper, described the mission of his newly minted university as "service for mankind wherever mankind is, whether within scholastic walls or without those walls and in the world at large,"[17] he expressed a pervasive attitude of Progressive Era academics that "scholarship, teaching, and public service were fully compatible."[18] As Steven Diner has written, Harper and his Progressive colleagues also realized that the university's funding was contingent on the public's good will:
When the University of Chicago opened in 1892, universities were still quite new and were just beginning to to explore the possibilities of service to their society. This was not a time for introspection or self-criticism, but an era of growth and experimentation. Nothing in the experience of American universities thus far indicated that public service might harm the university; but the experience of the antebellum college suggested the shortcomings of a remote seminary of learning for its own sake. Its detachment from public service had resulted in neither solid scholarship, sound teaching, nor popular support. Indeed, most university presidents of the early twentieth century concluded that service was the only way to win support for the advancement and dissemination of knowledge on the highest level. [19]
The Chicago School of Sociology was created in this nexus of "serving society by advancing intellectual inquiry."[20] In the early years of the Chicago School no invidious distinctions were made between the applied sociology pursued by Addams and the Hull House residents and the academic research of the first generation of University of Chicago sociologists. Indeed, the two groups had a close working relationship, grounded in personal friendships, mutual respect, and shared social philosophy. Four men of the early Chicago School--Albion Small, Charles Henderson, Charles Zeublin, and George Vincent--were ministers or ministers manque, intellectual Social Gospelers with strong civic commitments. (The exceptions, with limited theological proclivities, were George Herbert Mead and William I. Thomas.) Like the women of Hull House, the Chicago sociologists were "social activists and social scientists."[21] Action social research, Chicago style, encompassed scholarly documentation of a social problem and lobbying of politicians and local community groups to obtain action. [22]
Recent feminist scholarship takes issue with the charge that the social science of Hull House and the early Chicago School was unscientific. Mary Jo Deegan, for example, argues that Hull-House Maps and Papers "established the Chicago tradition of studying the city and its inhabitants," and provided "the major substantive interests of Chicago sociologists": a focus on immigrants, poverty, and occupational structure. She asserts that Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess, leaders of the Chicago School's second generation, adopted the research concerns and methods of Addams and her colleagues even as they staked their own prior claim as the founders of urban sociology. [23]
After 1915 Chicago Sociology increasingly distanced itself from social reform, notwithstanding the continued focus on the form, structure, and problems of city living. Increasingly that focus was circumscribed by a natural science model and an underlying commitment to "the detached and objective study of society," which "allowed no room for an ameliorative approach."[24] Park and Burgess emphasized "urban studies . . . within a scientific framework."[25]
The career of Sophonisba Breckinridge is indicative of the attenuation of action-oriented, reformist social science in Chicago in the decades before America's entry into World War I. When Breckinridge enrolled in the University of Chicago's Department of Political Science in 1894, she entered a Progressive world where scientific rigor was deemed compatible with social problem solving. [26] According to Ellen Fitzpatrick: "All accepted the notion that scholars had a duty to address contemporary problems in their work. All agreed on the importance of empirical research. And all shared the belief that careful scientific investigation was a sine qua non for intelligent reform." [27] Unequal gender relations, however, stymied the entry of women with doctoral degrees (in Breckinridge's case, a doctor of philosophy awarded in 1902, a doctor of jurisprudence awarded in 1904) into the social science professoriate at the University of Chicago. The new feminist historiography has documented an emerging nexus of gender, social reform, and social science at the beginning of the twentieth century: after 1904, women would be relegated to the margins of the university, the confines of the newly opened Department of Household Administration, "a special intellectual province for women," where Breckinridge would find a home as an assistant professor. Yet her training had prepared her for a headier challenge: "While the political scientist pursued research that resulted in an essay entitled 'Industrial Conditions of Women Workers in Chicago Illustrated by the Packing Houses' in 1905-06, her colleagues in the household administration department wrote papers such as 'The Relative Digestibility of Animal and Vegetable Albumen,' 'Loss of Nutrients in Beans Due to Soaking,' 'Comparative Richness of Gelatin-Yielding Material in Old and Young Animals,' and 'Pectin Bodies in Fruit Juices and the Effect of Temperatures and Density in the Setting of Fruit Jelly.' Such concerns were far afield from the principles of law, political science, and political economy."[28]
In 1909, Breckinridge was appointed dean of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, an independent social work and research training center funded by the Russell Sage Foundation. Over the next decade she and her colleague Edith Abbott, both of whom took up residence in Hull House, directed extensive surveys in such areas as housing, stockyards, juvenile court, and public-school truancy and nonattendance. The merger of the School of Civics and Philanthropy with the University of Chicago in 1920 led to both women's appointment as associate professors of social economy in the newly created School of Social Service Administration. There, Breckinridge and Abbott "sought to create a new setting within the university that would permit them to address public issues and advance social research. In so doing, they helped professionalize social work, a field they first adopted and then worked to make their own."[29] Yet theirs was a Pyrrhic victory. The feminization of professional social work marked it as the last enclave of social reform. As noted by Ellen Lagemann, the implications of the rift between social reform and social science at the University of Chicago were considerable:
As a result, the new departmental lines drawn there created divisions, not just at Chicago, but also elsewhere, between theoretical, "objective," academic social research, on the one hand, and more reformist, political, and applied social work, on the other. The structural and intellectual divisions thus created were soon compounded by gender divisions that rapidly took on hierarchical status distinctions as well. Sociology, which came increasingly to be dominated by men, was more and more seen as a source for insights to be tested and applied by "social workers," most of whom were women; and settings for "social work," including social settlements like Hull House, were more and more seen as places to which (male) university sociologists might send students to collect data, which the sociologists and not the social workers would then analyze in a university laboratory and elaborate into theory.[30]
Applied social science largely vanished from the academy after 1918. World War I was the catalyst for a full-scale retreat from action-oriented, reformist social science. The brutality and horror of that conflict ended the buoyant optimism and faith in human progress and societal improvement that had marked the Progressive Era. American academics were not immune to the general disillusion with progress. One economist wrote that "it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the European war . . . has rendered every text in social science thus far published out of date, but it would not be a very great exaggeration."[31] Indeed, despair led many social scientists to retreat into a narrow scientistic approach: "They began to talk of the need for a harder science, a science of facts and numbers that could moderate or dispel the pervasive irrational conflicts of political life."[32] Scholarly inquiry directed toward creating a better society was increasingly deemed inappropriate. While faith in the expert and in expert knowledge was carried on from the Progressive Era, it was now divorced from its reformist roots. The dominant conception of science was clear and simple: it was what physical scientists and engineers did.[33] "Sociology as a science is not interested in making the world a better place in which to live, in encouraging beliefs, in spreading information, in dispensing news, in setting forth impressions of life, in leading the multitudes or in guiding the ship of state," Chicago sociologist William F. Ogburn declared. "Science is interested directly in one thing only, to wit, discovering new knowledge." [34] The retreat from applied social science in the 1920s crystallized a tendency that Addams had discerned at the turn of the century:
We recall that the first colleges of the Anglo-Saxon race were established to educate religious teachers. For a long time it was considered the religious mission of the educated to prepare the mass of the people for life beyond the grave. Knowledge dealt largely in theology, but it was ultimately to be applied, and the test of the successful graduate, after all, was not his learning, but his power to save souls. As the college changed from teaching theology to teaching secular knowledge the test of its success should have shifted from the power to save men's souls to the power to adjust them in healthful relations to nature and their fellow men. But the college failed to do this, and made the test of its success the mere collecting and disseminating of knowledge, elevating the means into an end and falling in love with its own achievement.[35]
Throughout the American university, a strong tradition developed that separated scholarly research from the goal of helping to create a better society. The political and cultural dynamics of post-World War I scientistic social science were reflected in the burgeoning field of psychiatric social work. In the 1920s, psychiatric social workers staked their claim to scientific legitimacy and professional status by defining their knowledge base as psychoanalytic theory and adopting a therapeutic, ostensibly scientific, approach that emphasized clients' social-psychological adjustment rather than social amelioration. Casework, if not Freudian psychology, also dominated other subspecialities of social work--for example, family casework and child guidance--and during the twenties, that approach became the raison d'etre of the profession as a whole. University schools of social work, which numbered 28 by 1929, and social work education were unified "around the idea of generic casework."[36] Professional social work training did not include preparation for a career in settlement work. The local Community Chest, which gained control of settlement house budgets, dampened reform; only in non-Chest cities such as Chicago and New York were settlement workers able to sustain some reform activity. Not surprisingly, that activity was associated with the charismatic leadership of Addams of Hull House, Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, and Lillian Wald of Henry Street Settlement, and it was not broadly institutionalized.[37]
Between the wars the reform impulse was further weakened by the fact that every major university formed similar and increasingly specialized departments, and a faculty member's primary source of identification and allegiance became his or her discipline, not the university. Since World War II, a steady infusion of federal funds allocated to individual researchers working under departmental auspices has accelerated the growth of a disciplinary-based reward system. [38] Departmental and disciplinary divisions have served to increase further the isolation of universities from society. A 1982 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report entitled The University and the Community noted, "Communities have problems, universities have departments."[39] Beyond being a criticism of universities, that statement neatly indicates why universities have not contributed as they should. Quite simply, their unintegrated structures work against understanding and helping to solve highly complex human and societal problems. This tendency has resulted in less effective research, teaching, and service. Indeed, all three missions have been impoverished by what might be termed a false trichotomization. For example, that trichotomy has contributed to an enormous imbalance in the production of knowledge.
Dazzling advances have occurred in university-based research in science and technology. New ideas, concepts, technologies, approaches, and techniques are developed with ever-increasing rapidity. Although designed to improve human welfare, the application of scientific advances too frequently results in new and more forbidding problems. The wondrous possibilities of new medical technologies, for example, have become distorted, helping to create a health care "system" unresponsive to the "low-tech" preventive needs of the vast majority of citizens.[40] How to make rational use of science and technology should be a primary focus of university research. It should be a primary focus because it is a primary problem facing human beings in the late twentieth century. If universities had an integrated mission--the creative, dynamic, and systemic integration of research, teaching, and service--intellectual resources would be significantly devoted to developing humane applications of scientific knowledge to help those living in conditions of profound poverty and neglect.
Integrating research, teaching, and service will be particularly difficult because of a fundamental contradiction in the structure of the American research university itself, a contradiction that occurred with its very creation. That is, the American research university was a product of a combination of the German research university and the American college. Daniel Coit Gilman, the founder of Johns Hopkins and central architect of the late nineteenth-century research university, in fact, claimed that one of his proudest accomplishments was "a school of science grafted on one of the oldest and most conservative classical colleges." Although referring specifically to the merger of the Sheffield Scientific School with Yale College, Gilman felt that this achievement exemplified his contribution to American higher education.[41]
Gilman did not make reference to the institutional contradiction that necessarily derived from a merger of two markedly different entities. The research university, on the one hand, was dedicated to specialized scholarship, and it was through the production of specialized inquiry and studies that the university provided service. For the American college, on the other hand, general education, character building, and civic education were the central purposes. The goal was to serve society by cultivating in young people, to use Benjamin Franklin's phrase, "an Inclination join'd with an Ability to serve." [42] The research university has, of course, dominated this merger, creating an ethos and culture that rewards specialized study rather than more general scholarship and the education of the next generation for moral, civic, and intellectual leadership.
Given the structural contradictions built into the American university, and nearly a century of increasing specialization, fragmentation of knowledge, and separation of scholarship from direct service to society, it will not be easy for higher educational institutions to effectively integrate research, teaching, and service and substantively increase their contributions to knowledge and human welfare. Certainly the significant problems facing American society and the pressures to change that are coming from a variety of constituents will mean that some new directions will have to be forged. But will they be the right directions, directions that enhance the university's ability to carry out its mission? And will these new directions be significant and basic enough to reduce the impediments to progress that hinder the creative, dynamic, systemic integration of research, teaching, and service?
In three key respects, Hull House provides a model and inspiration for work being undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania. First, the Hull House residents emphasized amelioration and reform. Although they acted too frequently for rather than with their neighbors, they believed in and espoused the ideal of empowering community residents to address social problems.[43] Second, as indicated by Hull-House Maps and Papers, their ameliorative, reformist approach to social science integrated the production of new knowledge and the uses made of that knowledge.[44] Third, Addams and her Chicago colleagues recognized that the social problems of the city are complex, deeply rooted, interdependent phenomena that require holistic ameliorative strategies and support mechanisms if they are to be solved. The settlement house provided, albeit on a small neighborhood scale, a comprehensive institutional response to social problems.
Our approach has been to advance academically based community service--service rooted in and intrinsically tied to teaching and research. Among other things, it is an approach that seeks to integrate the research, teaching, and service missions of the university, while also spurring intellectual integration across disciplines. We have found that the very nature of concrete, real-world problems, particularly the problems of the university's immediate geographic community, encourage genuine interschool and interdisciplinary cooperation. No single component of the university can significantly help understand and reduce the complex, myriad, interrelated problems of the urban poor. In combination, however, advances can be made. And that combination must go beyond the various components of the university. It necessarily must also include other institutions, such as public schools, businesses, unions, community organizations, government, and voluntary associations.
Our goal is to develop an innovative model of how higher educational institutions can fruitfully and simultaneously work together to advance knowledge and human welfare. The work builds on John Dewey's proposition that knowledge and learning can be most effectively advanced through working to solve immediate, strategic societal problems. For Dewey, "Thinking begins in . . . a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous, which presents a dilemma, which proposes alternatives."[45] In effect, our forked-road situation is the intellectual problem of what can be done to overcome the pervasive problems affecting the people of West Philadelphia.
To a significant extent, our work can be viewed as testing the validity of Dewey's proposition about how we learn and think. Even more fundamentally, it tests the validity of Francis Bacon's central proposition that knowledge advances most effectively when the "relief of man's estate" is made the true end of knowledge. In 1620 Bacon put the argument as follows: "Lastly, I would address a general admonition to all, that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or for any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity. For it was from lust of power that they angels fell, from lust of knowledge that men fell; but of charity there can be no excess, neither did angel or man ever come in danger by it."[46]
How are we to know whether a Deweyan-Baconian approach is indeed superior to the traditional, scholastic model that dominates the American university? For Bacon the test was simple: By their fruits shall we judge modes of inquiry and thought. In other words, to what extent does research change the world for the better? In Reconstruction and Philosophy, Dewey praised Bacon for his brilliant analysis of the sociology of knowledge and his call for cooperative research: "To Bacon, error had been produced and perpetuated by social influences, and trust must be discovered by social agencies organized for that purpose. . . . The great need [Bacon proclaimed] is the organization of co-operative research, whereby men attack nature collectively and the work of inquiry is carried on continuously from generation to generation."[47]
Since 1985, the University of Pennsylvania has been involved in a broadly based community project to help improve the quality of life in West Philadelphia. The project has two main organizational components. With staff offices in the West Philadelphia community, the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC) represents a coalition of university faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and West Philadelphia teachers, students, and school administrators. The WEPIC provides a year-round program that currently involves over 2,000 children, their parents, and community members in education and cultural workshops, recreation, job training, and community improvement and service activities. The program is coordinated by the West Philadelphia Partnership, a mediating, nonprofit, community-based organization composed of major institutions (including the University of Pennsylvania) and local community groups, in conjunction with the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition and the Philadelphia School District. The recently established Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania coordinates and provides opportunities for participatory action research projects conducted under the aegis of the WEPIC.
This approach is quite different from strategies undertaken in the 1960s, when escalating poverty, crime, violence, racial strife, and student protest demanded a response from urban universities. Federal and foundation-supported programs, notably urban extension programs, urban studies centers and urban observatories, were created to link university research and technical assistance to urban concerns. The goal, according to Paul Ylvisaker of the Ford Foundation, whose 1958 speech signaled the beginning of an era of reengagement, was to create urban equivalents to the Agricultural Extension Service. Typically, these efforts were not partnerships, that is, mutually beneficial relationships between the city and the university. For all the public and private funds expended, relatively little of substance was accomplished, and a genuine and acute disappointment about the level of university performance set in.[48] The development of a mediating organization that encourages partnerships and the pooling of institutional and community resources has helped the University of Pennsylvania to sustain and expand its contribution to the WEPIC coalition.[49]
The WEPIC has reinvented and updated an old notion--that the neighborhood school can effectively serve as the core neighborhood institution, an institution that both provides comprehensive services and galvanizes other community institutions and groups. That idea motivated the early settlement workers, who recognized the centrality of the neighborhood school in community life and its potential as a catalytic site for community stabilization and improvement. At the turn of the century, settlement pioneers mediated the transfer of social, health, vocational, and recreational services to the public schools of major American cities.[50] Dewey's notion of "the school as social center" reflected the vision of Addams and other settlement workers that urban public schools would incorporate settlement ideas and functions.[51] The school and the curriculum would become, in effect, focal points of neighborhood development , improvement, and stabilization. Although Dewey did not make it explicit, this idea is consistent with his general theory that the community-centered school would help catalyze the development of a "cosmopolitan local community."[52] For the neighborhood school to be truly comprehensive, to function as a genuine community center, to help transform its catchment area into a cosmopolitan local community, however, it needs additional human resources and support.
In 1929, near the end of her extraordinary career, Addams wrote that the social settlement served the same function as the university, but the settlement's impact encompassed a broader and needier population: It was the function of the settlements to bring into the circle of knowledge and full life, men and women who might otherwise be left outside. Some of these men and women were outside simply because of their ignorance, some of them because they led lives of hard work that narrowed their interests, and others because they were unaware of the possibilities of life and needed a friendly touch to awaken them. The colleges and universities had made a little inner circle of illuminated space beyond which there stretched a region of darkness, and it was the duty of the settlements to draw into the light those who were out of it. It seemed to us that our mission was just as important as that of either the university or the college.[53]
The key challenge today, however, is not to have social settlements function as universities but rather to have universities function as perennial, deeply rooted settlements, providing illuminated space for their communities as they conduct their mission of producing and transmitting knowledge to advance human welfare and to develop theories that have broad utility and application. As comprehensive institutions, we would argue, universities are uniquely qualified to provide broadly based, sustained, comprehensive support. The community school project itself becomes the organizing catalyst enabling the university to function as a social settlement as one innovative, humanistic strategy to better perform its traditional mission, as well as to better perform its role as a cosmopolitan civic university.
As we noted previously, a broadly based coalition of agencies, organizations, and institutions today is a sine qua non for school and community revitalization in collapsing urban centers. If it is to be an effective partner in this coalition, the university must institutionalize a strategy that engages academic resources in ways that integrate and strengthen its missions of teaching, research, and service. The strategy we have chosen is to develop a permanent, humanistic natural laboratory in West Philadelphia. We do not treat West Philadelphia as a laboratory for experimentation on poor people, that is, as a site for study rather than assistance. Our approach emphasizes a mutually beneficial, democratic relationship between academics and non-academics. In that relationship, academic researchers learn from and with the community, do research collaboratively with and not on people, and contribute to the solution of significant community problems. Put another way, we believe that West Philadelphia, and the community school in particular, should serve as a natural social and cultural laboratory in which communal participatory action research functions as a humanistic strategy for the advancement of knowledge and human welfare.[54]
Participatory action research is "a form of action research in which professional social researchers operate as full collaborators with members of organizations in studying and transforming those organizations. It is an on-going organizational learning process, a research approach that emphasizes co-learning, participation, and organizational transformation."[55] Both participatory action research and communal participatory action research are directed toward problems in the real world and are concerned with application. They differ in the degree to which they are continuous, comprehensive, and beneficial and necessary to the organization or community studied and the university. The participatory action research process is exemplified in the work of William Foote Whyte and his associates at Cornell University to advance industrial democracy in the worker cooperatives of Mondragon, Spain.[56] Its considerable utility and theoretical significance notwithstanding, the research at Mondragon is not an institutional necessity for Cornell. By contrast, the University of Pennsylvania's enlightened self-interest is directly tied to the success of its research efforts in the West Philadelphia community, hence its emphasis on communal participatory action research. In short, proximity and a focus on problems that are institutionally significant to the university encourage sustained, continuous research involvement. A crucial issue, of course, is the degree to which these locally based research projects result in general knowledge. We would argue that local does not mean parochial and that the solution to local problems necessarily requires an understanding of national and global issues as well as an effective use and development of theory. Two research projects in West Philadelphia, one conducted by a physical anthropologist, another by a graduate student in communication studies, illustrate these propositions.
Francis Johnston, chairperson of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Anthropology, carries out research in the Turner Nutritional Awareness Project, a joint community/university-sponsored participatory action research project at the John P. Turner Middle School that is designed to improve the nutritional status of the community. "The Project is comprehensive in scope, with components dealing with nutritional assessment, with instruction in concepts of nutrition, and with the collection of a broad range of related information, including such areas as knowledge, preferences, and attitudes concerning food, food streams within the neighborhood, and other sources of information (merchants, media, etc.)." [57] Turner School teachers participate in the design and presentation of the intervention. Sixth-grade Turner students participate in the nutrition education program and, as seventh graders, they teach elementary school students about basic nutrition and healthy habits. [58]
In a recent study, Johnston and his students in an undergraduate anthropology course on "Biomedical Science and Human Adaptability" collected measurements of physical growth status and dietary intakes from 11- to 15-year-old African-American youth. Data on growth were collected on 136 individuals; for both sets of indicators, data were collected on 113. A nutrition software package was used to calculate the nutrient values of students' dietary intakes, and individual records were merged into a single data set for computer statistical analysis. Tabulations of the data supported the following conclusion: "Overall, the data indicate a population with a very high prevalence of obesity, and diets high in saturated fat and low in polyunsaturated fat. Also of potential concern is the indication of low intakes of zinc and high intakes of sodium. Given the increased health risks of urban African-Americans, these findings on young adolescents suggest the development of programs designed to improve diets and enhance health in general in this age group." [59]
Johnston's work with undergraduates further distinguishes the University of Pennsylvania's approach from other varieties of action research. Communal participatory action research extends to creating or restructuring academic courses to include an explicit community focus and action component. The assumption is that embedding community service into courses, research, and general intellectual discourse will lead to positive changes in the institutional climate, providing a linkage between service and education.
A dissertation study in the Annenberg School for Communication provides a second illustration of communal participatory action research. For 2 years, Eleanor Novek, a former professional journalist and editor, was involved at West Philadelphia High School, a WEPIC site, as a co-teacher and researcher in the development of "an educational demonstration project, an urban high school English/journalism class which uses production of a community-focused newspaper as a strategy for the self-determination of young African Americans."[60] Novek's research on self-determination and student empowerment built on Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action, elements of reference group theory (e.g., Robert Merton), and superordinate goal theory (Muzafer Sherif and Caroline Sherif), not only to interpret and to theorize from ethnographic data, but also simultaneously to shape the intervention strategies, effecting an ebb and flow of theory and action. The specific vehicle for this work was QWest, a school-based community newspaper project, each component of which was adjudicated and carried out by students. In a recent report of her study, Novek has constructed several criteria of self-determination on the basis of her theoretical perspective, and she provides a summary of evidence from participant observations and student writing to indicate the progress made in each category. Her description of risk taking and the crossing of social boundaries is a case in point:
A shy young woman who never spoke up in class, not only obtained an interview with Ramona Africa, the lone survivor of the world-infamous MOVE bombing in May 1985, but also brought her to the school to address the whole class. A taciturn young man interested in rap music visited one of the largest African American radio stations in the city and interviewed a popular disc jockey on the air. Another student took it upon himself to develop and distribute an attitude survey about the QWest project to class members. Two students applied for and won admission to a minority workshop for high school journalists--the first time any students from their school had participated. Another began freelancing sports reports for a community newspaper.[61]
As our examples are designed to suggest, genuine thinking has occurred in the forked-road situation of West Philadelphia, engendering new approaches to school and community development. We believe that we have made a good start. The interaction of faculty, staff, and students working at the same site, attempting to solve immediate real-world problems, has fostered an unprecedented degree of academic integration at the University of Pennsylvania and spurred the development of new organizational structures and mechanisms to encourage and coordinate academically based public service. We want to emphasize, however, just how extraordinarily difficult it is to change the university and its community. Even after more than 8 years, our work is still in a developing phase.
In this article, we have presented a rationale for reinventing the American university to become once again a mission-oriented institution. With particular attention to social work and the social sciences, we have traced the origins of that rationale to Jane Addams, the women of Hull House, and other Progressive Era social scientists qua social reformers. Historical analysis not only indicates that progressive change can occur, but it also is useful in revealing and clarifying impediments to change, for example, the entrenchment and long-standing dominance of narrowly scholastic social science. We have also described a general strategy of organizational structures, activities, and mechanisms developed at the University of Pennsylvania to help enable the "neo-Progressive" reconstruction of the university through academically based community service.
It is our contention that American social science should be about the "relief of man's estate." These endeavors should be about overcoming the urban crisis and preventing urban chaos. In his studies of creativity, psychologist Howard E. Gruber has emphasized the connection between individual creativity and a desire to solve real-world problems. Gruber's concept of "creative altruism," which we think has relevance for universities, highlights that connection with particular clarity: "We can envisage and identify cases of 'creative altruism,' in which a person displays extraordinary moral responsibility, devoting a significant portion of time and energy to some project transcending immediate need and experience. Creative altruism, when it goes the limit, strives to eliminate the cause of suffering, to change the world, to change the fate of the earth." [62]
Creative altruism imbued the social work and social science of Addams and the women of Hull House at the turn of the twentieth century. As we have indicated, their ideals and practice provided exemplars for the development of social work and sociology at the University of Chicago. We have argued that their humanistic, real-world, problem-solving approach to social science has strong potential to produce better teaching, better research, and better service than conventional social science. The "settlement idea," which has inspired our collective efforts at the University of Pennsylvania and other campuses and communities, is a legacy of the early history of American social work.[63] If the American university is to fulfill its promise and help create a decent and just society, it must give full-hearted, full-minded attention to solving our complex interrelated problems. The benefits of doing so would, we are convinced, be considerable for the university, social science, and the American city.
John Puckett's contribution to this article was supported by a Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. We are also grateful to Lee Benson and Ellen Lagemann for their superb advice and encouragement.
[1] Ernest L. Boyer and Fred M. Hechinger, Higher Learning in the Nation's Service (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1981), p. 3.
[2] Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 122.
[3] Lee Benson and Ira Harkavy, "Universities, Schools, and the Welfare State," Education Week,April 29, 1992, p. 27. Representative George E. Brown, Jr., chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and Representative Rick Boucher, chairman of the Subcommittee on Science for that committee, have sharply criticized the priorities of contemporary scientists and the academic research community, which they view as detached from broad societal concerns; in Colleen Cordes, "As Chairman of Key House Committee Restates His Vision, Scientists Worry," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 1993, pp. A26-28; Rick Boucher, "A Science Policy for the 21st Century," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 1, 1993, pp. B1-2. The Senate Committee on Appropriations voices a similar complaint about the National Science Foundation, admonishing that agency to address "specific national goals" or face curtailment of its funding; in 103d Congress, Senate Report 103-137, September 9, 1993, pp. 165-69.
[4] Sheldon Hackney, "Universities and Schools: Hanging Together or Hanging Separately?" Address at Bank Street College, New York, May 2, 1992; printed in University of Pennsylvania Almanac (May 12, 1992), p. 6.
[5] As quoted in Barry D. Karl, Charles E. Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 31.
[6] See Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women's Work in the 1890s," in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective 1880-1940, ed. Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 111-47.
[7] Jane Addams, "The Objective Value of a Social Settlement" (1893), in The Social Thought of Jane Addams, ed. Christopher Lasch (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1965), pp. 44-61; quotation from Jane Addams, The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House: September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 405, cited in Lela B. Costin, Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 45.
[8] Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 118, 120.
[9] As quoted in John H. Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 35. See also Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 10, no. 4 (1985): pp. 675-77; Stanley Wenocur and Michael Reisch, From Charity to Enterprise: The Development of American Social Work in a Market Economy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 26-29.
[10] As quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 241.
[11] As quoted in Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 65.
[12] Residents of Hull-House, Hull-House Maps and Papers (Boston: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1895; Arno Press reprint ed., 1970), p. viii.
[13] The key volume, which included Booth's "Descriptive Map of London Poverty," was Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Northgate, 1891). See Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women's Work in the 1890s," in Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, eds. (n. [6] above), p. 122.
[14] Residents of Hull House (n. [12] above), p. 41. This volume was published as part of a book series, Library on Economics and Politics, edited by Richard Ely of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
[15] Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1988), p. 5. Hull House provided a training ground for noted women reformers of the Progressive Era: Kelley, Lathrop, Alice Hamilton, Mary Kenny O'Sullivan, Sophonisba Breckinridge, Grace Abbott, and Edith Abbott. See Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1967; rev. ed., 1984), pp. 103-47.
[16] Deegan (n.[15] above), p. 24.
[17] As quoted in Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 33.
[18] Steven J. Diner, A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), p. 50.
[19] Ibid. This "public spiritedness" was evident in the "University Extension Division," which released professors into the city to provide instruction for the citizenry at large. Edward Shils notes that nearly a quarter of the University of Chicago faculty participated in municipal reform activities at the highwater mark of the city's Progressive movement. See Edward Shils, "The University, the City, and the World: Chicago and the University of Chicago," in The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 210-30.
[20] Fitzpatrick (n.[17] above), p. 39. As Fitzpatrick indicates, this commitment was also shared by the political science and political economy departments at Chicago: "They stressed the importance of using scholarship to advance both knowledge and civic-mindedness" (p. 41).
[21] The quotation appears in a different context in ibid., p. xv, but our research indicates that it aptly describes the first-generation Chicago sociologists. For discussion of Social Gospel influences in American social science in its formative period, see Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983), pp. 23-24. In the early 1890s, Small, Vincent, and Edward Bemis (whom Harper would fire in 1895 because of Bemis's support of the 1894 Pullman strike) worked with Addams, Kelley and community leaders tohelp secure legislation eliminating sweat shops and regulating child labor. In the winter of 1910 Henderson and Mead joined the women of Hull House in support of 40,000 striking garment industry workers; in 1915, Mead participated in another garment union strike.
[22] The most important research study of the early Chicago School was The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918), a 2,232-page study co-authored by Thomas and Florian Znaniecki. See Martin Bulmer, The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalization, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 45-63, p. 238, n. 1.
[23]. Deegan (n. [15] above), quotations from p. 55; see also chap. 6. Hull-House Maps and Papers helped inaugurate the Social Survey Movement, of which the Pittsburgh Survey, 1907-9, was the largest and most prominent example. Sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation, the Pittsburgh Survey was carried out by a combination of academics and nonacademics, including Kelley, formerly of Hull House. The survey was conceptually unified around the seminal role of the steel industry in shaping Pittsburgh's urban environment and growth. See Stephen R. Cohen, "The Pittsburgh Survey and the Social Survey Movement: A Sociological Road Not Taken," in Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, eds. (n. [6] above), pp. 245-67.
[24] Bulmer (n. [22] above), p. 69.
[25] Ibid., p. 89. Bulmer's study focuses on the period 1915-1935. See also Fitzpatrick (n. [17] above), p. 200; Shils (n. [19] above); David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 151-79.
[26] The University of Chicago was hardly a hothouse for radical social change, as evidenced by the trustees' firing of Edward Bemis, who took the side of labor in the violent Pullman strike of 1894: "The scientific study of pressing social issues was one thing; openly advocating 'radical' causes without reference to scientific inquiry was another" (Fitzpatrick [n. [17] above], p. 40.) Yet according to Shils, "The trustees of the University of Chicago, despite assertions by critics such as Thorstein Veblen and Upton Sinclair, have an impressive history of self-restraint, for which there is ample evidence" (Shils n.[19] above], p. 218).
[27] Fitzpatrick (n. [17] above), p.
70.
[28] Ibid., p. 86.
[29] Ibid., pp. 20-25, 87-200
passim; quotation from p. 166. For more on
Breckinridge and Abbott's collaboration and
friendship, see Costin (n. [7] above), pp. 41-67.
[30] Ellen C. Lagemann,
"Introduction," in Jane Addams on Education, ed.
Ellen C. Lagemann (New York: Teachers College Press,
1985), p. 35.
[31] Dorothy Ross, The Origins of
American Social Science (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 321.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Ibid., pp. 326-30; Dorothy
Ross, "American Social Science and the Idea of
Progress," in The Authority of Experts, ed. Thomas L.
Haskell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984),
157-71; Sheldon Hackney, "The University and Its
Community: Past and Present," Annals of the American
Academy 488 (1986): 135-47; Martin Bulmer and Joan
Bulmer, "Philanthropy and Social Science in the 1920s:
Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial 1922-29," Minerva 19 (1981): 347-407.
[34] Ogburn's 1929 presidential
address to the American Sociological Society, quoted
in Bulmer (n. [22] above), p. 182. For the role of
private foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation,
Russell Sage Foundation, and Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial in sustaining this representation of social
science through funding programs, see Ellen C.
Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie
Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987),
chap. 3; Wenocur and Reisch (n. [9] above), pp. 55-58,
p. 272, n. 8; Deegan (n.[15] above), pp. 96-97.
[35] Jane Addams, "A Function of
the Social Settlement" (1899), in Lagemann, ed. (n. 30
above), p. 90.
[36] Wenocur and Reisch (n. [9]
above), p. 137.
[37] Ibid., pp. 77-106, 127-48;
Judith Ann Trolander, Professionalism and Social
Change: From the Settlement House to Neighborhood
Centers, 1886 to the Present (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), pp. 21-24. In the 1930s,
while social workers and many social scientists helped
create a body of research and social planning that
undergirded many New Deal reforms, their work was not
rooted in sustained efforts to transform local
environments; reflecting the norms of the American
Association of Social Workers, as professional social
workers gained a higher profile in the public sector,
they adapted casework technologies to treat the
unemployed. By 1936, as the Depression deepened, a
rank and file movement involving some 15,000
underpaid, radicalized social workers, most of whom
lacked professional credentials and held jobs in
heavily stressed public welfare agencies, had arisen
to challenge the professional enterprise, organizing
protective associations and trade unions and
advocating a planned economy and income
redistribution. Although social work unions remained
viable until about 1950, the radical critique was not
sustained after 1940. See Wenocur and Reisch (n. [9]
above), pp. 151-207; Leslie Leighninger, Social Work:
Search for Identity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987),
pp. 51-101.
[38] For discussion of the
strengthening of disciplinary communities, see David
Alpert, "Performance and Paralysis: The Organizational
Context of the American Research University," Journal
of Higher Education 56, no. 3 (1985): 241-81; and
Christopher C. Jencks and David Riesman, The Academic
Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 523-31.
[39] Center for Educational
Research and Innovation, The University and the
Community: The Problems of Changing Relationships
(Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, 1982), p. 127. For other critiques of
university-community relationships, see Derek Bok,
Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of
the Modern University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1982); Hackney (n. [33] above); Clark
Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1982); Peter L. Szanton, Not
Well Advised (New York: Russell Sage Foundation and
Ford Foundation, 1981).
[40] For discussion of the
environmental threats posed by science divorced from
social, moral, and ethical concerns, in this case,
quantum mechanics and molecular biology, see Herbert
J. Bernstein, "Idols of Modern Science and the
Reconstruction of Knowledge," in New Ways of Knowing:
The Sciences, Society, and Reconstructive Knowledge,
ed. Marcus G. Raskin and Herbert J. Bernstein
(Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1987), pp. 37-68.
[41] Daniel Coit Gilman, University
Problems in the United States (1898; reprint, New
York: Garret Press, 1969), Foreword, p. iii.
[42] Albert H. Smyth, ed., The
Writings of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Macmillan,
1907), 2:396.
[43] Wenocur and Reisch (n. [9]
above), pp. 138-46.
[44]Martin Bulmer speaks of
"research done with a reformist and ameliorative
purpose," in Martin Bulmer, "The Decline of the Social
Survey Movement and the Rise of American Empirical
Sociology," in Bulmer, Bales, and Sklar, eds. (n. [6]
above), p. 305.
[45] John Dewey, How We Think (New
York: D.C. Heath, 1910), p. 11.
[46] As quoted in Lee Benson and
Ira Harkavy, "Progressing beyond the Welfare State: A
Neo-Deweyan Strategy: University-assisted,
Staff-controlled and Managed, Community-centered
Community Schools as Comprehensive Community Centers
to Help Construct and Organize Hardworking, Cohesive,
Caring, Cosmopolitan Communities in a Democratic
Welfare Society," Universities and Community Schools
2, no. 1-2 (1991): 4-6. The National Academy of
Sciences has stated in quintessentially Baconian
terms, "The countries that best integrate the
generation of new knowledge with the use of that
knowledge will be positioned to be the leaders of the
21st century" (Committee on Appropriations, Senate
Report 103-137, September 9, 1993, p. 167).
Referencing Bacon's vision, Bernstein writes, "We have
. . . lost the original connection between scientific
truth and social good; we have refined moral concerns out of the
process" (Bernstein n. [40] above, p. 52). For a
useful discussion of Bacon's oeuvre, see Lee Benson,
"Changing Social Science to Change the World: A
Discussion Paper," Social Science History 2 (1978):
427-41.
[47] John Dewey, Reconstruction in
Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1920; enlarged
ed., Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 36-37. Addams
attributed the following Bacon-like statement to
Dewey: "When a theory of knowledge forgets that its
value rests in solving the problem out of which it has
arisen, that of securing a method of action, knowledge
begins to cumber the ground. It is a luxury, and
becomes a social nuisance and disturber" (Addams,
"Function of the Social Settlement" [n. [35] above], p.
76).
[48] Hackney, "University and Its
Community" (n. [33] above); Organization for Social and
Technical Development, Urban Universities: Rhetoric,
Reality, and Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare, 1970); Peter M. Tobia,
The University in Urban Affairs: A Symposium (New
York: Editor, 1969); Szanton (n. [39] above); George
Nash, The University and the City: Eight Cases of
Involvement (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973).
[49] See Ira Harkavy and John L.
Puckett, "The Role of Mediating Structures in
University and Community Revitalization: The
University of Pennsylvania and West Philadelphia as a
Case Study," Journal of Research and Development in
Education 25, no. 1 (1991): 10-25.
[50] Vocational counseling and
school social work were sui generis innovations of the
settlement movement. See Marvin Lazerson, Origins of
the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts,
1870-1915 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1971), pp. 191-97; Murray Levine and Adeline Levine, A
Social History of Helping Services: Clinic, Court,
School, and Community (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), pp. 125-43. The
settlement movement also provided a "practical testing
ground" for social innovations that were not sui
generis, for example, kindergartens, playgrounds,
school nursing, vocational education, and vacation
schools; in the 1910s these programs were widely
adopted by the public schools. See Morris I. Berger,
The Settlement, the Immigrant and the Public School: A
Study of the Influence of the Settlement Movement and
the New Migration upon Public Education: 1890-1924
(1956; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1980); Davis (n.
[15] above), esp. pp. 40-59, quotation from p. 57;
Amalie Hofer, "The Social Settlement and the
Kindergarten," National Educational Association
Proceedings 34 (1895), pp. 514-25; Isabel M. Stewart,
"The Educational Value of the Nurse in the Public
School," in The Ninth Yearbook of the National Society
for the Study of Education, ed. Thomas Wood (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1910), 2:19-26.
[51] John Dewey, "The School as
Social Center," National Educational Association
Proceedings 41 (1902), pp. 373-83. As a case in
point, Addams served on the board of managers of the
National Society for the Promotion of Industrial
Education, established in 1906, to help persuade the
public schools to take over the settlements' manual
training programs. See Davis (n.[15] above), p. 52;
Paul U. Kellogg, "The National Society for the
Promotion of Industrial Education," Charities and the
Commons 17 (1906-7): 363-71, cited in Davis (n.[15]
above), p. 273, n. 24. The idea of public schools as
social centers, or community schools, has persisted in
a minor key throughout the twentieth century. For
example, see Clarence A. Perry, Wider Use of the
School Plant (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
1911); Edward J. Ward, ed., The Social Center (New
York: Appleton, 1913); Eleanor T. Glueck, The
Community Use of Schools (Baltimore: Williams &
Wilkens, 1927); Samuel Everett, ed., The Community
School (New York: Appleton-Century, 1938); Elsie R.
Clapp, Community Schools in Action (New York: Viking
Press, 1939); Nelson B. Henry, The Fifty-second
Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of
Education, Part II: The Community School (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953); Edward G. Olsen,
ed., The Modern Community School (New York:
Appleton-Century Crofts, 1953); Leonard Covello, The
Heart is the Teacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958); W.
Fred Totten and Frank J. Manley, The Community
School: Basic Concepts, Function, and Organization
(Galien, Mich.: Allied Education Council, 1969);
Maurice F. Seay and associates, Community Education: A
Developing Concept (Midland, Mich.: Pendell, 1974).
[52] Benson and Harkavy,
"Progressing beyond the Welfare State" (n. [46] above),
pp. 23-27.
[53] Addams, Second Twenty Years at
Hull-House (n. [7] above), pp. 404-5.
[54] Benson and Harkavy,
"Progressing beyond the Welfare State" (n. [46] above),
pp. 2-28; Ira Harkavy, "The University and the Social
Sciences in the Social Order: An Historical Overview
and 'Where Do We Go from Here?'" Virginia Social
Science Journal27 (1992): 1-25.
[55] Davydd J. Greenwood, William
Foote Whyte, and Ira Harkavy, "Participatory Action
Research as a Process and as a Goal,"in International
Dimensions of Action Research: Sources of New Thinking
about Inquiry That Makes a Difference, ed. Max Elden
and Rupe Chisholm, special issue of Human Relations,
in press. See also William Foote Whyte, Davydd J.
Greenwood, and Peter Lazes, "Participatory Action
Research: Through Practice to Science in Social
Research," in Action Research for the 21st Century:
Participation, Reflection and Practice, ed. William
Foote Whyte, special issue of American Behavioral
Scientist 32, no. 5 (1989): 513-51; and William Foote
Whyte, ed., Participatory Action Research (Newbury
Park, Calif.: Sage , 1991).
[56] William F. Whyte and Kathleen
K. Whyte, Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of
the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press,
1988); Davydd J. Greenwood and Jose Luis Gonzalez
Santos, Industrial Democracy as Process: Participatory
Action Research in the Fagor Cooperative Group of
Mondragon (Assen/Maastricht: Van Gorcum, 1992).
[57] Francis E. Johnston, Robert J.
Hallock, Pratik Desai, and Stephanie Bock, "Physical
Growth, Nutritional Status, and Dietary Intake of
African-American Middle School Students from
Philadelphia," manuscript submitted for publication.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Eleanor M. Novek, "Buried
Treasure: The Theory and Practice of Communicative
Action in an Urban High School Newspaper," paper
presented to the Association for Education in
Journalism and Mass Communication, Kansas City,
Missouri, August 1993, p. 1.
[61] Ibid., p. 15. Other criteria,
or markers, include "providing experiences of mastery,
strengthening group bonds and increasing their
influence in social systems" (p. 21).
[62] Howard E. Gruber, "Creativity
and Human Survival," in Creative People at Work, ed.
Doris B. Wallace and Howard E. Gruber (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 185. For Gruber's
most recent development of the idea of creative
altruism, see his essay, "Creativity in the Moral
Domain: Ought Implies Can Implies Create," in
Creativity in the Moral Domain, ed. Howard E. Gruber,
special issue of Creativity Research Journal 6, no.
1-2 (1993): 3-15.
[63] For example, the Committee on
Inner City Initiatives of the Western New York
Consortium of Higher Education (12 colleges and
universities) has focused on the collaborative
development of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, a
community school and community center in East Buffalo.
See Stephen C. Halpern, "University-Community
Projects: Reflections on the Lessons Learned,"
Universities and Community Schools 3, nos. 1-2 (1992):
44-48.