Public Engagement

A pertinent follow-on to yesterday's post comes from the University of Chicago, which has recently established a Civic Knowledge Project (CPK) as the new community connections branch of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. According to its web site, CKP

• provides educational and humanities programming, linking the University to other knowledge communities surrounding it;
  
• develops institutional policy that aims to establish channels for the exchange of knowledge among different knowledge communities on the south side of Chicago;
  
• serves as an organ for the dissemination of knowledge from the University to the community and from the community to the University; and
  
• undertakes small research projects that foster understanding of
  
  • how knowledge circulates in the demographic context of the U.S. and
    
  • the relationship between the circulation of knowledge and socio-economic status.
    Most research in this area begins from the assumption that socio-economic status determines knowledge acquisition. We start from the premise that knowledge acquisition and the circulation of knowledge significantly affect socio-economic status. We consider knowledge and its circulation to have structural social effects (i.e. influence class formation) on a fundamental level just as do brute economic realities. Helping to increase knowledge circulation in the area surrounding the University therefore empowers the people of the area’s communities and establishes the University as a valuable community resource. Increasing knowledge circulation between the University and the surrounding community also establishes the community as a valuable resource to the University.
  
  

The Grounding Ideas of the CPK are expressed by Danielle Allen, Dean of the Division of the Humanities and Executive Director of the Civic Knowledge Project:

"Successful democracies gather their strength and vitality from their ability to generate remarkably rapid knowledge transmission and an impressively fluid circulation of knowledge across geographical and social barriers. In a successful democracy, social diversity translates into an expanded knowledge base compiled from the banks of the entire citizenry. 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."

Given the eminent status of the University of Chicago among research universities, the Civic Knowledge Project could become an influential model. It will be interesting to see how reciprocal the anticipated mutual influences between community and university turn out to be.