In recent years universities have been expected to contribute more to society and to play a broader role in addressing social, political, economic, and environmental changes. Even though this tendency is challenging the role and culture of higher education and the extent and scope of the academiaâs responsibility, the process of building relationships with the community is situated in a complex web of power relations. The academyâs modes and patterns of social behavior are part of a broader social and political context as well as of various institutional tensions that traverse its stratified structure. The social-political forces that are shaping the campusesâfor-profit entrepreneurial models and activities, information technology, corporate agendas, commercialization of campus, and erosion of authority of the academic professionâare altering the form and role of higher education (Hermanowicz, 2011). These social forces are interconnected with various institutional tensions: particular versus universal research, local versus global audience, and non-engaged versus engaged learning experiences (Robert, Fabricant & Simmons, 2004). The communityâs knowledge, practices, and social positions represent a fundamental challenge to the âivory towerâsâ scientific and bureaucratic assumptions. Thus, setting the terms that determine the nature of collaboration between the academy and the community is a dynamic process of professional and symbolic boundary formation that is negotiated by multiple parties. The mechanisms of (dis-)collaboration between the academy, the civil society, and the community are shaped by the political atmosphere, which determines the extent and form of the engagement and the social strategies and practices that are legitimate and available for all parties. Collaboration, and the scope, length, and nature of collaboration, is thus produced through these interrelated dimensions, which compose the agency of all actors involved. The academic sphere tended to promote notions that seek to individualize the students and emphasize their personal achievements rather than their contribution to the civic âgoodâ (Ryan, 2011). Faculty members, as well, usually function in a system that discourages them from investing efforts, time, and resources in civic engagements. In most campuses, faculty members are required to submerge themselves in their research and professional promotion (Gonzalez & Padilla, 2008), while interventions take place only when it advantages the academy (White, 2010). However, academiaâs attitude toward the community has been changing in recent years in response to various activist, social, and political agendas. These institutional transitions have affected the academy: increasing studentsâ chances for future social engagement (Golan & Goldner, 2016); fostering multicultural changes and welcoming diverse institutional environment (Pope, Reynolds, Mueller & McTighe, 2014); contributing to reimagining and reinvigorating democratic mentality (Bergan, Harkavy & Land, 2013); and adding new, âOtherâ, voices, perspectives, and insights to the intellectual process (Young, 1995; Cortes, 2004). These efforts have had a multiple impact on the students as well, adding valuable knowledge and broadening studentsâ worldviews (Butin, 2010), improving studentsâ achievements and skills (Astin et al., 2006); and strengthening studentsâ obligation to social activity (Johnson, 2004) and to engagements with disadvantaged groups (Beaumont, Colby, Ehrlich & Torney-Purta, 2006). Thus, these transformations have caused a lot of changes, both in the studentsâ and faculty membersâ positioning in the academic sphere, and in their goals and interests, forms of interaction, modes of behavior, and the sociocultural repertoires that are available to them. Furthermore, by fostering, promoting, and supporting campus-community engagements, the type and forms of perspectives/knowledge and academic practices have also been changing and sometimes even causing an âepistemological anxietyâ that has blurred the traditional division of areas of expertise (Taylor & de LoĂ«, 2012).
These changes and the complex interplay between the scientific, entrepreneurial, and social activities have raised a lot of questions that remain unanswered. For example, How to match the university courses to the social needs? How can more faculty be persuaded to participate in partnerships? How can the academy ensure the continuation of an intervention after the project ends? Can the academy become a space to resist, subvert, and reimagine the hegemonic status quo? (Schlossberg, 2018).
The Campus-Community Partnership (âthe Partnershipâ) is trying to answer these urgent questions. The Partnership was established in Israel in 2006 and is hosted ever since in the Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Partnership aspires to engage institutions of higher education to act for human rights in all sectors of the Israeli society and to encourage students to be active citizens. This innovative center was developed in order to assist institutions of higher education to develop a policy of social engagement as well as special programs/projects/courses that will engage students with pressing social issues. In order to bring academic knowledge and experience into deeper engagement and exchange with the students/staff members/communities, the center organizes workshops, seminars, and conferences regarding community-engaged learning and campus-community partnerships. Since the Partnership began to operate it has supported the development of dozens of community-engaged courses at 15 universities and colleges throughout Israel that encompassed a wide range of disciplines and fields of knowledge (Golan, Rosenfeld & Orr, 2017). Furthermore, the Partnership has encouraged the Council for Higher Education (CHE) in Israel to adopt policies that enhance and facilitate the social engagement of students, faculty members, and institutions of higher education. These efforts have led to the allocation by the CHE of resources for promoting the social engagement of institutions of higher education. Together with the CHE, the Partnership has held study days and conferences for heads of institutions of higher education, deans of students, and faculty members (https://âen.âlaw.âhuji.âac.âil/âbook/âstudents-7).
Composed of various programs, schools, and departments and a wide variety of community and government organizations as well as community residencies, the Partnership is maneuvering between two dominant and contradicting tendencies: national conflict and civic formation. These broader social tendencies and forces, which are rooted in the Israeli socio-historical context in which the academic sphere is situated, affect the academia while being affected by the academia. The national conflict is shaping a state-dominated society, which maintains the political and cultural hegemony of the Israeli-Jewish population (Timm, 2001). Non-Jewish residents who differ in their ethnic origin, religion, and national affiliation are marginalized, ensuring the privileged position of the Jewish population (Ghanem, 2001). In other words, the substantial and symbolic boundaries that distinguish between the different social, economic, and geographic stratum of the Israeli society are connected to the height of the national conflict (Shafir & Peled, 2002). These ethno-religious-national divisions strive to deepen the separation between the different segments of the Israeli society and establish an ethnocentric, highly polarized society (Kimmerling, 1998). Furthermore, the continuing national conflict is constructing the divergence and separation as legitimate and even as a moral imperative that resists civil partnerships.
On the other hand, the scope and the extent of the activities of the civil organizations in Israel have rapidly increased in recent years (Gidron, Limor & Zychlinsky, 2015). Israelâs civil society sector is one of the largest in the world in terms of contribution to gross domestic product (GDP) and the number of persons employed, and this sector is active in almost every realm of Israeli life (Sanz Corella & Ben Noon, 2013). While this process of civic formation can strengthen the egalitarian and tolerance notions and construct a sphere that reinforces democracy, Israelâs civil society has been facing growing conflicts. These conflicts reflect the tensions between diverse ethnic, religious, and national groups (Arabs and Jews, left and right, and Mizrahim and Ashkenazim), thus turning the civil society into a battlefield between the human rights organizations and the conservative nationalist social forces and organizations (Jamal, 2018).
Institutes of higher education in Israel are caught within this macro-political tension and carve their ideological goals and missions from the interrelations between nationality, civic culture, and power. To a significant extent, the Partnership is one place where these contesting messages are negotiated, debated, and interwoven into the various projects in order to promote and strengthen the civic culture.
The book is a joint effort of ten academic coordinators that work in ten different academic institutions of the Partnership in Israel. The various courses/projects are designed to engage the academic institutions in human rights and social activism in a wide range of disciplines: education, management and social policy, art, architecture, translation, and law. All the courses/projects/programs that were researched combine theoretical learning with social activism in order to deepen the engagement with underserved communities, migrant workers, refugees, and Israeli-Palestinian community organizations. All the courses/projects/programs that were researched involve students from disparate backgrounds: Palestinian, Jewish, migrants, and refugees.
By using a critical reflection about the civic mission of higher education and focusing on âbottom-upâ perspectives, the book inquires how the Partnership influences the students and the academia that are positioned in a stratified and conflict-driven society. Thus, the studies call attention to the micro-processes through which the Partnerships work by delving into participantsâ own worlds of meaning in a longitudinally, cross-sectionally, and across sites studies.
Through these two lines of inquiryâthe influence of the engagements on the perceptions and future activism of the students; the influence of the engagements on the academia and academic sphereâthe findings shed light on two opposing phenomena. The influence and contribution of the Partnerships to the students exposed that the participantsâ subjectivity was shaped in two different ways. On the one hand, and even though students from different backgrounds experienced the encounters differently, the engagements in the Partnerships allowed them to cross symbolic boundaries and build new networks of relationships. In other words, despite the national, ethnic, and class divisions and conflicts, the students were able to connect different unequal opportunities and to deconstruct distorted social images and stereotypes. However, on the other hand, most students preferred to bypass political and national conflicts by articulating their perception of their âOtherâ counterparts ...