Commentary

Public Scholarship: Integrating Research, Teaching and Service

Lakshman Yapa
Professor of Geography
The Pennsylvania State University

A university's duty towards society lies in a deeper logic that goes beyond research and training of students. When academics think about social problems such as poverty, racism, terrorism and global warming, they are seen as lying outside the walls of academia, while the university itself with its idyllic campus settings, learned professors and eager students is viewed as a repository of knowledge that contains answers to those problems facing our society.

But academics need to go beyond "the knowledge business as usual" and launch innovative programs of public scholarship that integrate research, teaching, and service, and give new answers to our old problems.

For example, poverty is widely recognized as an economic problem defined by lack of sufficient income. Naturally the solution is to increase investment, create jobs, and boost income, in a word, economic development. But development has failed to eradicate poverty both here in the U.S. and overseas in poor countries. In fact, it has added to the misery of poor people and has prevented us from looking for more creative and sustainable ways to improve the quality of life for poor people.

The official rate of poverty in the U.S. exceeds 12 percent, a puzzling persistent condition in the greatest wealth-producing engine ever conceived in human history, and there is no reason to believe that producing more wealth will solve the problem. A two-person household in the U.S. with a wage earner working full time on minimum wages is still officially poor. The chances that such people will climb out of poverty by earning higher wages are very slim as they compete in a global market place with people who are willing to do similar work for far lower wages.

Is it possible for the university to create an alternative dialogue on poverty? Instead of asking why the poor do not make more income, suppose we ask the substantive question of why poor people have trouble obtaining adequate nutrition, good health, affordable housing, transport, and so on. The answers we get to such questions are different from those that use the conventional approach of eradicating poverty by focusing on jobs and income.

In a public scholarship course at Penn State titled, "Rethinking Urban Poverty: Philadelphia Field Project," the class focuses on quality of life instead of income. We begin with a single person and move out in ever widening circles from the physical state of the body, to the family, to the home, to the neighborhood, to the community, and to the region.

The Philadelphia Field project is a year-long course in public scholarship organized in three parts: a semester of critical readings on urban poverty; a summer field camp of work and research while living in a low-income West Philadelphia neighborhood; and an ending semester of reflection and writing. Current academic ways in which we think about poverty are deeply implicated in creating conditions of material deprivation for the poor. Our students are first invited to understand that argument and then as an exercise in public scholarship they are challenged to produce alternative practical knowledge that can make a real difference to the quality of life of inner city residents in Philadelphia. While they study and research the area, students also fulfill volunteer assignments that bring them closer to the community.

Students have helped to establish a web-based market for a Philadelphia woman's handicrafts, created a Children's Garden for the Sarah Allen Home, a women's shelter run by the Friends Rehabilitation Program (a Quaker organization), researched issues of nutrition, pricing at inner-city grocery stores, street safety, and have donated time to after-school programs for neighborhood children.

Penn State 's Public Scholarship Associates, a group of faculty members from several colleges, have developed a new minor in civic and community engagement that integrates questions of scholarship with citizenship and democracy. Other projects include promoting green building design on native Indian reservations, and community directed research and education initiative in West Philadelphia and Grenada. Public scholarship places an emphasis on the public nature of the work, an idea meant to capture both the democratic obligation of schools and citizens, and the ideal of knowledge as a public good.