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The University & Urban Revival:
Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets
By Judith Rodin
Coverage excerpts:
August 1, 2007
Community building 101
By Neal Peirce, syndicated columnist
Opinion/The Seattle Times
July 31 2007; summary
The University of Pennsylvania could claim great wealth, intellectual preeminence, Ivy League status. Covering nearly 300 acres on its campus, it had an enrollment of 23,000 — and, with 24,000 employees at the university and the medical center, it was Philadelphia's single largest private employer.
But set in an area of the city devastated by post-World War II urban renewal and flight to the suburbs, Penn's relationship to the surrounding community had steadily deteriorated...by 1996, the preservation of the institution was at risk. "Nothing short of a revolution" in how Penn dealt with its neighborhood would now suffice, writes Judith Rodin in The University & Urban Revival of the institution she headed.
The "revolution" was a daunting task. Some faculty were highly skeptical, fearing diversion of scarce dollars from their staff slots and research. Others asked if community building was a university's job at all. But Rodin (now president of the Rockefeller Foundation) insists a university worth its salt "has to show itself, its neighbors and its students it's willing to take on the thorniest issues of its time ... to put real skin in the game."
Why universities? Corporations, Rodin notes, have become so global "that the city where they sit is less vital to them." The biggest job-providers in many cities, universities and medical schools, may find civic leadership thrust on them — and fittingly, "because they generate what makes today's Knowledge Economy."
As for Penn itself, she argues, it tripled both its research funding and endowment and rose from 16th to fourth in the U.S. News & World Report yearly ranking of American colleges and universities during the 10 years she was president.
2007, The Washington Post Writers GroupCan’t We All Just Get Along?
By Matthew Schuerman
The New York Observer
August 1, 2007
...Dr. Rodin, now president of the New York–based Rockefeller Foundation, has published a book on her decade at Penn, where she initiated a number of town-gown projects that both improved the surrounding neighborhood and eased animosity toward the Ivy League school. Ever since, she has been widely lauded as the arbiter of modern, enlightened community-university relations...
Her book, The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets (University of Pennsylvania Press), came out July 24...
Dr. Rodin, who left Penn in 2004, is the first to admit that every campus is different, but she outlines in her book various themes that she thinks can apply everywhere.
"It is something that really needs to be led from the top," she said in an interview with The Observer. "This is not something that can be delegated to a vice president. Your own internal people need to see how important it is because there are a million decisions each week that can make it work or not, and they’ve got to know you care."
2007 The New York Observer
Public Discourse in America
Conversation and Community in the Twenty-First Century
Judith Rodin and Stephen P. Steinberg, Editors
A distinguished group of scholars and prominent figures here offers thoughtful new perspectives on the tenor and conduct of public life in contemporary America. Originating in a shared concern that our civic culture was becoming coarser and more polarized, Public Discourse in America provides a critical corrective to this widespread misperception about declining civility in public culture and the ways we as citizens negotiate our differences.
Together these essays explore the current condition and centrality of public discourse in our democracy, investigating how it has changed through our history and whether it fails to approach our widely held, but often unarticulated, ideal of "reasoned and reasonable" public deliberation. Contributors consider whether rationality is really the best standard for public discussion and argument, and isolate the features and principles that would characterize a truly exemplary, more productive public discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They investigate why public conversations work when they work well, and why they often fail when we need them the most, as in our nation's so often aborted "national conversation" on race.
Taking a comprehensive look at institutional and leadership practices in recent public debates over a variety of "hot button" public policy issues, Public Discourse in America outlines how such conversations can be used to reintegrate our fragmented communities and bridge barriers of difference and hostility among communities and individuals.