Michael Fabricant

Understanding Contemporary University-Community Connections

Abstract This article contextualizes the contemporary phenomenon of university-community partnership initiatives. Because changes in the university must always be understood in context, recent efforts to build and strengthen relationships between institutions of higher education and communities must be situated in the broader social sites that produce them. To that end the article surveys the university-community intersect through an historical lens which emphasizes the relationship between the larger political-economy and civic engagement efforts. Subsequently, types of contemporary initiatives are broadly and selectively discussed. Lastly, challenges to both universities and communi-ties embodied in the current initiatives are posed.

Agency Based Community Building in Low Income Neighborhoods

ABSTRACT The decline of community is a significant strain in recent social science literature. The concept of social capital has been used to describe the weakened state of communal structure. The most intense expressions of such decline have been experienced in poor communities. Relatively little attention however, has been paid to the difficult task of social capital formation or rebuilding community. This paper attempts to address that imbalance. It develops a very preliminary praxis framework for community building and locates such practice work within non-profit social service agencies. The framework was constructed from the practice literature and represents a first step in developing a wholistic approach to agency based community building. Critically, the paper also underscores a number of the dilemmas associated with implementing such a framework.

The Twenty‐First Century Gold Rush: The Plunder of Public Assets and a Radically Restructured Teaching Labor Force

Over the past thirty years the commons has experienced dramatic change in both its level of funding and redistribution of functions to the market. These trends have contributed to the restructuring of public higher educations labor force. The shift from a full-time to part-time labor force is increasingly being joined to market-based profit-making ventures associated with online learning. These recent developments represent a third stage of part-time faculty development within the academy. The architecture for maximizing online revenue in an era of intensifying austerity is underpinned by “cheap labor.” Importantly it is in the dynamic between cheap labor and online learning that many public university administrators have identified their alternative to a steady regimen of starvation budgets.