Revisiting the Civic Mission of the American Public Research University

Abstract

Recently, the East Bay Express published a profile on the University of California at Berkeley’s American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) program titled “Tumbling the Ivory Tower” (Burke 2015). The title suggests, and the ACES program in its implementation aims to “[break] down the ivory tower by bringing the university’s brain power to issues in the communities that surround it, and learning directly from those communities in the process” (para. 10). It is the story of a public research university implementing its civic mission. And, simultaneously, it is a story of a public research university struggling to implement its civic mission. The ACES program, once robustly supported by a gift from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, has run out of funding and is seeking to be considered an institutional priority of the university (with the institutionalized funds such prioritizing would warrant).