COMMUNITY INITIATIVE HISTORY
College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) Community Initiative Founder and former
CAS Dean David Stamps
During my tenure as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, I pulled together faculty to start the Community Initiative. The idea was to get faculty and their
students involved in equal partnerships with community groups to work toward
the resolution of urban problems. Once the College's Community Initiative was conceptualized and implemented, I pulled together deans from across the
University to start the University Community Initiative and to sponsor our
major international conference, "The University as Citizen." While I was Provost, I continued to support the University Community Initiative. In 2003, I
co-authored an article entitled "Engaged in the Metropolitan Research
University." I am very proud that as Provost I was able to make sure that "community engagement" was part of the USF mission.
Although the College of Arts and Sciences has been connected with the community in
numerous ways since it was established in 1990, a coordinated effort did not begin until
the fall of 1996. At that time, then Dean David Stamps met with a group of chairs, who
shared his interest in developing more concrete and integrated efforts to link the teaching,
research, and service of the college with the interests and needs of the local area. Dean Stamps assigned Associate Dean Mark Amen to oversee the process and, in January 1998, hired Robin R. Jones, who had coordinated the University of Pittsburgh’s Urban
Studies program since 1977.
In the early years, the Community Initiative (CI), as its name implies, explored a variety of engagement initiatives—curricular, research and service—and learned important lessons. The curricular initiatives, the Undergraduate Urban Studies Certificate and the Community Experiential Learning Program, were successfully integrated into the
college’s curriculum. Since those early days we have added a Graduate Certificate in Community Development and several public policy internship programs.
The CI also developed a series of individual courses that encouraged students to become engaged in community internships and research projects through the Community
Experiential Learning (CEL) Program. In some cases the students work independently,
while in others they work as a group on a focused activity (e.g. the study of a particular
community, understanding the functions of a legislative office, or involvement in a
political campaign).
All of these curricular activities combine academic learning with community
involvement. This pedagogy has come to be known as service-learning. CI has
supported the development of service-learning courses throughout the College byproviding faculty training in the pedagogy, community connections, and, when possible,
small grants.
As a metropolitan research university, it is important that we support engaged research in
addition to engaged teaching. CI’s attempt to create a center for engaged research proved
to be too costly at the individual college level. While CAS CI builds relationships among
faculty and between faculty and community representatives on an ad hoc basis, it does
not directly initiate community-based research. It has, however, been an active
participant in the efforts to create a university-wide infrastructure for engaged research
initiated by the Faculty Senate and now promoted by the Associate Provost for Strategic
Initiatives.
The most interesting lessons learned during CI’s early history relate to its attempts to
develop service activities that relied upon external funding. The primary example was
the highly successful Clemente Course in the Humanities which, over the three years of
its existence, resulted in substantial local, state and federal funding and was chronicled in
Earl Shorris’s book Riches for the Poor. An excerpt on the experience can be read at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ltZXCvg4ubAC&printsec=frontcover#PPA226,M1. In spite of these successes, the Clemente Course could not be sustained because its direct
service nature could not be integrated into the primary mission of the College of Arts and
Sciences.
What we have learned in the ten years existence is that by integrating service into its teaching and research missions, the College of Arts and Sciences, can attain the dual
goals of community service and scholarly achievement. This integration, known as “engaged scholarship,” is the mission of the CAS CI and we join with other engagements
centers across the campus (most notably The Collaborative for Children, Families and Children and the Center for Civic Engagement and
Voluntarism to promote USF’s strategic goal of
becoming fully engaged with its local, national, and global communities
(http://www.ods.usf.edu/Plans/Strategic/goals-strategies.htm). We are optimistic that the
current efforts of the Associate Provost for Strategic Initiatives will institutionalize bring
Dean Stamp’s dream of an engaged university (http://www.acad.usf.edu/Office/Strategic-Initiatives).
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