Being Community Serviced: Campus-Community Partnerships in the Neoliberal Era

• In Event: 67.069 - Sheraton Roundtable 14 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 67.069-7 - Engaging With Communities: Partnerships and Impact

Abstract

There are multiple constructs of the public good leading to tensions regarding the cost, quality, and mission of higher education. This analysis looked critically at university-community partnerships as one place where these tensions are enacted, using critical realism to examine the causal mechanisms informing participant’s constructs of the public good. The case of a public and private university were used as a basis for illuminating how constructs of the public good can lead to university-community partnerships that simultaneously support individual freedom and social justice. The study outlines two contrasting views of the public good placing an emphasis on how neoliberalism has transformed concepts of the public good, and ultimately institutional structures.

Author

• Patricia Waters, St. Joseph's College of Maine