Abstract
This article discusses a partnership initiative that involved a major Australian research university (University of Melbourne), a local government and a network of local community service organisations. The partnership projects aimed to promote public access to university infrastructure for poor and marginalised residents, enhance the local value of research and teaching activities, and create employment opportunities. The article draws on an evaluation of the partnership, which focused on four keynote projects. It found that the partnership appeared to achieve positive outcomes for residents but was limited by tensions associated with the university’s ambivalent commitment to the value of such partnerships. These tensions remained difficult to resolve because they signalled present contestation over the foundational values of contemporary public universities.Keywords: university-community partnerships, neoliberalism, neighbourhoods, community development
Highlights
In this article, we discuss a university-community partnership that had broad goals to promote social, economic, educational and cultural links between the university and people living, working or studying in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, with particular emphasis on engaging with disadvantaged and marginalised communities who had limited contact with the university
Insights from partnership activities are important to consider because they suggest the ways in which the value of universities as civic institutions that generate public benefits is being eroded through the influence of neoliberal policies
Potential benefits include enriching student experiences, creating knowledge flows that stimulate creativity and innovation, directing scholarly expertise to address real world issues, and building public trust and respect for higher education institutions (NCCPE n.d.). These public benefits are in tension with other institutional objectives formulated within recent processes of restructuring that in turn have been strongly influenced by various interpretations of neoliberal ideology
Summary
We discuss a university-community partnership that had broad goals to promote social, economic, educational and cultural links between the university and people living, working or studying in Carlton, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, with particular emphasis on engaging with disadvantaged and marginalised communities who had limited contact with the university This population could potentially benefit from having access to the educational, research, employment and infrastructure opportunities available at the university. The increasing orientation to global markets and rankings leads to the significance of partnerships with neighbourhood communities being readily overlooked, even though they are critical sites for demonstrating commitment to civic obligations and conducting scholarly work that seeks to understand how processes of globalisation manifest in everyday ways (Bivens 2014; Jones & Shefner 2014) These tensions are evident in the University of Melbourne’s vision statement that prefaces its current strategic plan. Universities have long been institutions that both reinforce and challenge inequalities (Reay 2011), and these effects may be polarising in times of widening socioeconomic inequality
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