CHAPTER ONE: FRAMING THE STUDY The Need for this Study Universities, colleges, medical centers, research institutions, and other centers of higher learning create jobs, occupy physical and social space, and bring together people from the places where they are physically located and beyond. They simultaneously are a source of resources for and draw upon the resources of the communities they call home. A significant concern for public universities is balancing their responsibilities to their students, staff, and faculty and the academic communities within which they are embedded with their responsibilities to the public, which include state, national, and international constituents as well as the communities in which they are situated. Multiple publications including peer reviewed articles, reports, books, and entire journals have delved deeply into the topic of community-university relationships far beyond the scope of this project. Some of the breadth and depth of that work has been captured in an annotated bibliography prepared as a supplement to this document. This chapter provides a glimpse into that literature to allow readers to put the University of Arizona into the wider context and summarizes the University of Arizona’s efforts to develop, expand, and assess community-university interactions. Community, in the context of community-university relations, most often refers to actors outside the university who contribute to the public good (Janke et al. 2014). Most broadly defined in this context, community includes private and public sectors, businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Though universities regularly interact and form relationships with other academic institutions, business and industry, and government agencies within the communities within which they are located—increasingly motivated by disinvestment of state governments in higher education, especially public universities— University of Arizona | UCR Report
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