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Universities and Their Connected Communities:
Creating Capital for the Future
Presidential Lecture Series
Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York
4 p.m. Monday, March 6, 2006

Part III

In a more recent development, the South Side Entrepreneurship Connect Project is establishing a business incubator in which faculty and students from Syracuse and SUNY-Morrisville with expertise in many disciplines will work side by side with local entrepreneurs to support start-up businesses that include fashion retail, organic produce, information systems and technology. To support and house these efforts, we are also setting up our own office in the South Side.

As we strive to create local economic capital to secure the future of our city, we also realize the need to pay careful attention to the social fabric of the community and to the cultural pluralism of our own campus. In the city of Syracuse, grassroots organizations, and individuals from the campus and the community have engaged in inter-faith and inter-group dialogues on racism, ethnic conflict, global genocide, and pluralism. The InterReligious Council of Central New York has sponsored Community Wide Dialogues on Racism,²⁶ with a new curriculum in the schools, and we are working to strengthen our inter-group relations curriculum on campus. An ever-growing local group called Women Transcending Boundaries²⁷ is exploring inter-faith dialogues, and SU is enhancing its Religion and Society interdisciplinary curriculum.²⁸

Again, I believe that our definition of "capital" must be stretched to include the cultural and social capital of trusting networks of peoples, ideas, and cultures that are bound to invigorate the new economy if only we open the doors.

Features of Sustainable Campus-Community Engagement

As we work to invigorate the economy and to engage the widest talent pool possible, we, as private research universities, must each follow a clear plan that serves both our institutional goals and our connected communities. This is the only way to ensure the sustainability of our efforts. Our investments at Syracuse follow a particular approach that I would like to spend some time here outlining.

First, we are working to establish both a physical and a programmatic presence in the city, doing it in a disciplined way that plays to our scholarly and educational strengths and interests. We are focusing on areas of exciting growth, often where there are interdisciplinary links. We are also focusing on areas of activity in which there is no dividing line between scholarship and education, integrating the diverse facets of faculty work and directly engaging students in "learning by doing."

In broad strokes, the target areas include collaborations in: the arts/journalism/architecture; the public humanities around issues of pluralism, religion and society; the built environment and sustainability of urban eco-systems; a Partnership for Better Education with the Syracuse City School District and our colleges of education, visual and performing arts, and engineering and computer science. Another target area is entrepreneurship, economic growth, and neighborhood development.

These are areas where Syracuse faculty are excited and students have ambitions and where they can collaborate with others in our community: with nonprofit organizations, with other colleges and universities, with schools, libraries, and museums, with community groups, cultural institutions, industry and individual firms, and with government at all levels.

For example, both our city and our campus have great strengths in the arts, and we are making strategic new investments to build on these. We are expanding some longstanding programs -such as Syracuse Stage, the Community Folk Art Center and Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company-while starting new ones, including a 140,000-square-foot Warehouse, located in Armory Square downtown, where we are focusing on the visual arts, design, and communication.

The Warehouse is the temporary home for our School of Architecture while Slocum Hall on the main campus is being renovated. Afterwards, Architecture will continue to house its design think tank-Upstate: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate-at The Warehouse to continue its focus on rejuvenating Upstate New York.

The Warehouse also houses our Goldring Arts Journalism program and provides space for two design departments of our College of Visual and Performing Arts.

In all, more than 600 students, faculty, and staff are now in and out of The Warehouse, spilling out to the streets of downtown Syracuse at all hours of the day and night.

The Warehouse also provides ample space for the Cultural Resources Council of Syracuse to incubate new arts organizations and support existing artists and arts projects. Syracuse and the Everson Museum will run a Teen Art Gallery there. And The Warehouse includes a major gallery space to show both campus and community work. Significantly, renovation of the public space in The Warehouse is supported by a grant from the State of New York.

The notion here is that we can sustain these projects over the long haul because they are central to the interests of the campus and the community. They also represent a major physical presence for the campus in the community.

Our strategy is to invest simultaneously on campus and in the city in ways that become intertwined, creating the "city as campus" and the "campus as city," as our Dean of Architecture, Mark Robbins, likes to say, with people and projects crossing the boundary between them.

In the Partnership for Better Education, for example, our Visual and Performing Arts faculty members are working side-by-side with the teachers at Nottingham High School in Syracuse to create a literacy-through-the-arts curriculum to be woven throughout the classrooms at Nottingham, and eventually to serve as a district-wide model.

A signature feature of this curriculum is that it too will be Scholarship in Action, in which the teaching and learning will take place in the school, on our campus in lectures, performance spaces, darkrooms and studios, and at The Warehouse downtown. This partnership, in other words, is a dynamic one, moving up and down the Hill in ways that symbolize our third space of engagement.

In Syracuse, the downtown and the campus Hill areas are rather dramatically divided, not only by topography, but also by Interstate 81*, a clear boundary that has both symbolized and exacerbated the division between campus and city in years past.

*Click thumbnail to view larger image of the Interstate 81 aerial view.

To overcome this obstacle, we have collaborated with corporate and federal partners to commission a "Connective Corridor"--a lighted and Internet-wired pedestrian and bus pathway with public art and kiosks to advertise the cultural life of the city and campus. The Corridor will run up and down the Hill, linking together the campuses on the Hill and all the city's cultural institutions.

view Part IV >>

²⁶http://www.irccny.org/programs/CWD/cwd_home.aspx
²⁷http://www.wtb.org
²⁸http://religion-and-society.syr.edu

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