Of all the relationships you may see while you are in college, perhaps none is as important as the marriage between the university and the City of College Park. While you may not think of this partnership as a marriage, it is now celebrating its 150th anniversary, and it needs your help.
Though it has been strong at times, the marriage is now in need of rebuilding. You can think of this anniversary as a second engagement. Last week at a panel discussion titled “Land Grant Mission: Relevant or Relic?” university President Dan Mote and Provost Bill Destler made a commitment to reassert Maryland as a land-grant university, meaning it will once again serve the needs of the community.
Panelists at this event, particularly keynote speaker Graham Spanier from Penn State University, cited a need to make civic engagement a priority, encourage more interdisciplinary work, put students before research, money or prestige, develop incentives for faculty and students to be engaged in the community and secure funding streams for such initiatives. No one from the university stood up to disagree; rather, many of them echoed these sentiments and nodded their heads as these people spoke.
But that is how this marriage has always been. The community has always expressed these concerns to the university’s nodding heads. The university has been too busy watching its precious football games and worrying about its own private interests to listen to the community talk about its needs. Think about the relationship between your parents. This is the equivalent of one parent, representative of the community at large, telling the other to take care of the family needs such as mowing the lawn or taking the kids to soccer practice, while the other one simply pretends to be listening. The usual response the university leadership seems to have given us is, “We’ll get to it after the game, hon.”
The biggest argument in this marriage is whether the university is a public good or private benefit. Everyone at last week’s event defended the university as a public good more than anything else.
Therefore, rather than only catering to students who are going to go to college no matter what, the university, like other land-grant institutions, needs to revisit its claim to serve the community. The students who most need help are the ones who would come to get an education they would not otherwise have the opportunity to receive, just like the students who first attended the university in 1856. These are the same students who gave back to the community and cared deeply about the public good – not the students of today who trash the campus, spend their parents’ money on alcohol and look at higher education as a right.
It is not solely the responsibility of university leadership to make this marriage work. It is up to the entire university community. That means the students and the faculty. There needs to be pressure from the bottom that those on top will feel, for initiatives such as academic classes in civic engagement and tenure for professors in this subject area.
Students and faculty need to recommit themselves to making a public good out of their experience at the university, rather than an individualistic, private benefit. And while some students will say they are paying for their education and can do whatever they want, they should keep in mind that for every dollar an in-state student is putting in, the university and the state are investing two more.
Nonetheless, we have a chance to start making these changes. In fact, there is a big opportunity coming up that will help shape where this marriage is going: The city elections take place Nov. 8.
And while many of you are probably not registered to vote in the City of College Park, it is important for those of you who are to show up at the polls to re-elect the current council and mayor. These two form a hard-working, cohesive team that will work as a unified voice to make this marriage better through economic development, rent control and an effective balance of community needs and student interests.
It is imperative for everyone to take responsibility in making this marriage work or else it will fail. Like all failing marriages, those who suffer most are not the parents, but the children like you and me.
Pat Wu is a senior individual studies major studying university-community partnerships. He can be reached at patwu@umd.edu.
