From ABCS to Civic Engagement: Re-imagining Penn’s Commitment to Service

By Connor Augustine

On November 17th 2017, the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships celebrated its 25th anniversary. Venture onto Penn’s campus even for a little and you are bound to interact with some part of Netter, its community service branding, or some of its supposed impacts. Despite its increasingly engrained presence on campus, made possible by an annual million-dollar grant by the Penn administration, radical transformations to its organizational structure and philosophical mission are absolutely needed to realize its true institutional potential. My question, quite simply: what are we waiting for?

Formed in 1992 by alumnus Dr. Ira Harkavy, Netter is the only silo of Penn on campus designated to channel resources and ‘expertise’ to neighborhoods and communities in West Philadelphia. It is important to note that Netter, its organizational structure, and means of establishing partners was established at a time when it received virtually no institutional support from Penn. Penn’s annual donation has only helped to codify these rather outdated practices even further. Speaking at Penn’s first teach-in since 1969 last month, Harkavy, along with other panelists questioned the university as a site of knowledge production to benefit society as a whole. “Knowledge is for the continuous benefit of the human condition,” he said. “Today,unquestionably, the most important institution in the world for realizing a good society is highereducation.” Other panelists included Provost Wendell Pritchett, who remarked that engagement must be undertaken “in a humble way,” noting that, “We don’t believe that we have anownership of knowledge, we’re here to learn, not to teach.”

If the positionality of the Penn administration is one that truly seeks to learn and gain insight from the communities surrounding it, then we must reconfigure the ways in which service is conceptualized as well as the modes by which we deliver such ‘expertise’. If ‘communityservice’ is simply a way for Penn to channel supposed undergraduate ‘expertise’ intocommunities of need to further uplift its brand of ‘doing good locally’ while simultaneously engaging in the same land acquisition practices that got us here in the first place some sixty years ago – that’s hardly learning. In my time as an undergraduate student and site coordinator supporting ABCS programing, I have witnesses the lack of centralized institutional support forany of Penn’s service orientated programs or actions. As it stands now, there exists nocentralized approach to orientating students as they begin to work in these communities. Students on the whole are asked to obtain federal child-abuse clearances on their own, and then dropped into their respective service sites where hopefully they begin to channel their“expertise.” What type of expertise are these undergraduate students contributing? The answer isnot exactly clear.

As a transfer student coming from Drexel to Penn, I was quick to notice the disconnectbetween Penn’s discourses on community engagement and what actually played out in the classroom during my first year. What I can tell you is this – many Penn undergraduates engage in service learning in a rather transactional way – seeking to find a way to humanize themselves on paper for prospective interviewers. While some have blatantly referred to filling up their ‘volunteer/service’ byline on their resume, others have treated service as a chore and become frustrated when their ‘impacts’ aren’t immediately realized or felt. While many undergraduates actually seek to do good, too often than not the placement becomes increasingly beneficial for the undergraduate and less so for the students and communities supposedly ‘served.’ Rather than laying the blame at the feet of the undergrad I propose that we radically reshape the means through which we think of and engage with our surrounding communities. Doing so, however, will require complete institutional buy-in grounded in our historical legacy of extractive acquisition and greed.

While I support the current rhetorical focus of Penn’s administration on seeking to build stronger partnerships between Penn and the city’s schools, I would also like to strengthen Penn’sefforts to promote teaching and research, rooted in commitments to civic engagement and service. Having a unified center situated under the provost’s office rather than an external silo such as Netter would serve to create institutional support and accountability for Penn’s service orientated programing. The focus would be primarily on developing university partnerships with high quality non-profits and civic institutions. This would include not only schools with strong leadership and their nonprofit partners, but other civic institutions with effective programming and advocacy efforts addressed to the important problems of our times. This office would serve at least two functions that would provide greater focus and efficacy to efforts to promote civic engagement, research, service, and learning across the university. First: identifying, developing, and staffing ongoing partnerships with the leadership of civic and nonprofit institutions, whose work Penn faculty, staff and students could learn from, as well as contribute to; and Second: identifying sources of expertise and experience across the university that could provide support to the projects that would result from such partnerships, as well as many of the current approaches to community based service, research, and learning.

The basic idea here is not to replace the “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach of the Netter Center’s ongoing efforts to encourage faculty to teach service-learning courses, CivicHouse’s support for student volunteerism, the Fox Leadership Program’s support for student internships, the professional schools’ student placements, or community based research acrossthe university; but rather to build on the example that the Penn Futures model offers of putting more cross-school and cross-disciplinary institutional weight behind identifying and developingpartnerships and “best practices” in university/community engagement in ways that would makeit easier for faculty, students, and community partners to engage in such work with a promise of greater efficacy. The only thing serving as a potential site of resistance is Penn’s ownwillingness to commit to such a bold action.

Such an approach, however, would require collective buy-in from the Penn administration, which would mean that service learning could not simply be viewed as window- dressing, but a radical shift in our way of doing business. Strides must be taken to reconfigure the ways in which undergraduates are situated in communities of need. Simultaneously, we must alter and interrogate why our community views undergraduates as being capable of delivering‘expertise’ without absolutely any knowledge in group facilitation or pedagogy. This is not only a disservice to the children of partnership schools, but it is also a disservice to those university students who are being situated in a space where they are viewed as the expert. Moving from a model of community service to a model of institutionally support civic engagement would help better align us to Pritchett’s vision of “we’re here to learn, not to teach.” My question, quitesimply: what are we waiting for?