Choices in community-higher education colloborations

In just two short decades, colleges and universities across the United States (US) have begun to transform themselves from remote ivory towers to neighbourly community citizens as their faculties and students collaborate more and more with groups outside the academy. There are many important questions to ask to help these institutions become the kind of community members that their neighbours want.|This paper reviews some past and current practices in US universities. It explores the challenges of universitiesÆ interactions with the community and asks what role the universities will take. There is discussion on forms of community-university collaboration, such as community service, service learning and community-based research. It goes on to describe the community-university collaboration structures currently in place, for example, single campus centres and metropolitan networks. The paper then considers the future choices that community-university partnerships will make on questions of what to do and æhow big to make it, and the implications of this on partnerships.