News

Urban Humanities: Exploring Connections Between Universities and Communities

Throughout its history, The University of Chicago has had a complicated relationship with its surrounding community, a relationship in which cooperation has had to compete with skepticism and suspicion. For years, the university used its surrounding community as a both a source of inspiration and an object of study. The Chicago School of Sociology, arguably the most important and innovative contribution to the field in the twentieth century, forged its theories and supported its methods through sustained engagement with the South Side of Chicago. With the South Side as its laboratory, such writers as St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, authors of the monumental and still resonant Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, worked with members of the surrounding community to ensure that the stories of the South Side, both its exhilarations and its hardships, would be told.

This high point in the university’s relationship with the South Side was soon followed by a precipitous decline in community-university cooperation. In the 50s and 60s the university instituted policies that corroded the once proud tradition of accomplishment and mutual self-regard. The university’s position with regard to the South Side began to change, with the school often treating the locals as problems to be contained rather than citizens to be engaged. To this day skepticism about the university’s motives remains. As recently as last year, the university’s acquisition and relocation of The Checkerboard Lounge, a historic South Side blues club, re-ignited tensions between the community and the school, even as the university tries to reach out to its surrounding community.

On March 7, 2005 the Cultural Policy Center, in association with the DuSable Museum of African American History, made an important step in addressing this turbulent era in the university-community history. Urban Humanities, a town-hall style discussion featuring leading figures in the development of innovative, arts and humanities-based university-community partnerships, provided a forum for dialogue between community residents and the university. This event was moderated by Larry Rothfield, the CPC’s Faculty Director, and featured Danielle Allen, Dean of the Division of Humanities, University of Chicago and Director, The Civic Knowledge Project; Julie Ellison, Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan and Director, “Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life”; and Chuck Thurow, Executive Director, Hyde Park Art Center.

The event, which filled the DuSable’s small theatre to capacity, is part of a national trend in which institutions of higher education are seeking to collaborate and serve their surrounding communities. Unlike many of these initiatives, Urban Humanities focused on using the arts and humanities as tools to build stronger relationships, and, subsequently, better communities. Attendees included representatives of several South Side community-based, non-profit educational and arts organizations, several university faculty and community-relations staff, and other interested individuals.

In her presentation, Allen, who is also a professor in the departments of classics and political science, addressed the history of tension between the university of Hyde Park when she asked, “How many of you have ever been to a University of Chicago event at the DuSable,” a museum located only blocks from the university campus. When her question received no affirmative response, she continued, “Exactly. That’s why we are here today. That’s the first piece of good news.”
Allen, who is still in her first year as Dean of Humanities, has been instrumental in efforts to change the community’s perception of the university as exploitative and disengaged.

Under the direction of Allen, The Civic Knowledge Project, the new community connections branch of the University of Chicago’s Humanities Division, has launched a series of programs that unite the “knowledge communities” of the university and the larger South Side community. The Civic Knowledge Project’s current initiatives include “The Odyssey Project,” a year-long, college-level humanities course for people living in poverty; a tutoring program at the William Carter School that incorporates lessons on civil rights and civic responsibility in its lessons; and a pilot program that gives area public school teachers access to the university’s Regenstein Library.

Allen stressed the connection between the dissemination of knowledge, civic responsibility, and the sustained development and security of communities. Universities, argued Allen, have a responsibility to open their doors and help sustain and cultivate community-based cultural expressions. As she said recently in an article for the University of Chicago Chronicle, “Arts, humanities and cultural organizations are key to securing neighborhoods and preserving and advancing a community’s culture over time,” Allen said. “They expand participants’ intellectual opportunities, increase their capacities for self-expression and self-confidence, and help them envision new possibilities for the future.” To this end, Allen is mobilizing the resources of the Humanities Division to lower barriers and create opportunities for south side organizations and individuals that do not have a formal affiliation with The University of Chicago.

Julie Ellison, whose organization functions at a national level, provided an overview of the specific obstacles that academics must overcome in or to serve as assets to their communities. Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life is a national consortium of colleges, universities, and cultural institutions dedicated to fostering the Public Scholarship and civic work of university artists, humanists, and designers, and forming relationships between the academy and non-academic communities. Ellison conceded that forming these relationships is often difficult, especially in the initial planning stages, but that most obstacles can be overcome with careful planning. Ellison provided the audience with a series of guidelines for such partnerships. She emphasized the need for scholars to speak the language of their community-collaborators—not retreat into the arcane language of the academy—as well as negotiating firm, fair boundaries between community organizations and their academic partners.
Thurow’s Hyde Park Art Center is a frequent collaborator with the University of Chicago. Most recently, the university provided support for the Art Center’s soon to be built new Hyde Park facility. In his presentation, Thurow discussed the “nuts and bolts” challenges he faced in building a productive relationship with the university, including locating the right contact person and working through the Byzantine university bureaucracy.

Thurow’s detailed discussion about the difficulties of collaborating with the university proved inspiring. During the discussion period, Paula Robinson, Managing Director of the Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, said that she was glad to hear that The University of Chicago was equitable when making life difficult for would-be partners.

In addition to providing academics with yet another platform from which to articulate their plans, Urban Humanities was structured so that the audience would have an opportunity to speak directly to the university representative and help shape the discussion. Audience comments moved created a series of spirited engagements and exchanges. During the audience Q & A session, Harold Lucas, president of the Black Metropolis Tourism Council, reminded the audience and panelists about the university’s complex history with the community, tracing some of the neighborhood’s current economic difficulties to the experiences of the 50s and 60s. In particular, Lucas asked the audience and panelists to consider the university’s hand in the economic and racial segregation around the perimeter of the university’s campus.
Despite these exchanges—or perhaps because of them—Urban Humanities was a successful attempt to reinvigorate community and university dialogue. Today, through such initiatives as The Civic Knowledge Project, its work with the Hyde Park Art Center, and such public forums as Urban Humanities, The University of Chicago is once again forging productive connections with the community. As Allen has written about her initiative, “A central goal of The Civic Knowledge Project is to lead the University in generating modes of knowledge transmission between itself and its surrounding knowledge communities that might help jumpstart, in places where it has broken down or has never existed, the process of cultural circulation and mutual influence that is crucial to socioeconomic mobility and fluidity, and successful democratic practice.”

Emblematic of this engagement, the Cultural Policy Center successfully generated interest in its academic program. Urban Humanities attendee Lyn Hughes, Founder and Director of the A. Phillip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, a community-based history museum in Chicago’s south side community of Pullman, has enrolled in “Excavating Cultural Policy,” a graduate level cultural policy course at the Harris School of Public Policy. The course will provide students with knowledge about the field of cultural policy and as well as solid training in qualitative research methods, skills Hughes will take back to her museum. Moreover, by bringing a skilled cultural practioner and representative of a community-based cultural organization into one of its classrooms, the Cultural Policy Center is helping to achieve Allen’s mission of helping knowledge to flow both ways.

Back to 2005 headlines >>