By Ari S. Merretazon, M.S.CED
Since being hired in May 2006 as the ninth president of Temple University, Ann Weaver Hart, the first female president in the University’s 123 year history has initiated the devolution of its flagship community education program, the Pan-African Studies Community Education Program (PASCEP), a world class model of community education over the last 33 years, under a national eminent domain education movement, some call Community-based Learning.
Community-based Learning is a community engagement model presented as a national education movement in which universities expand their campuses into low and moderate income communities. This movement is presented as a collaborative approach to upgrading community infrastructure, businesses, housing conditions and community collaboration.
Within this model Temple is able to leverage massive amounts of development dollars based on research and socio-economic and housing data collected by professionals, most of whom are white and don’t live in North Philadelphia. This is how Temple has entered the Community-based Learning movement, much like other urban-based universities.
Granted, the concept of this movement is marketable in terms of expanding entrepreneurship, new capital improvements, and strengthening ties to its surrounding neighborhoods. Its process of implementation, however, is likened to an apartheid state or plantation administration.
Here is how it operates within well used principles of apartheid and plantation rule. A new president/administration comes in with a deceptive public relationship strategy of community engagement, collaboration, and promises of community inclusion. The vision of development is done with a standard community impact assessment; department heads are treated as 3/5ths of a human with no rights the administration is bound to respect; successful community education programs are dismantled or downsized beyond recognition under memoranda and news releases from the office of the president indicating a grand university/community vision such as “Broad Street and Beyond.”
The clearest case of this approach is the relocation/downsizing of the Temple University Pan-African Studies Community Education Program (PASCEP). This started only months after Temple’s first women president took office. She, without involving any of the current PASCEP staff in any collaborative discussion and decision-making, decided to relocate PASCEP off the main campus into a much smaller and unaccommodating facility with the distracting name of Community “Entertainment” Center. This suggests that Temple has no intention to continue PASCEP as a quality community education program.
With this apartheid and plantation handling of the director and program, the faculty, alumni association, and supporters are seeking to meet with Pres. Weaver Hart to discuss the negative impact of the relocation and downsizing with goal of keeping PASCEP on campus in Anderson Hall.
Pres. Weaver Hart has yet to give basic recognition, respect to the highly successful program or to its director. She has not responded directly to his letters and information packet about PASCEP which provided her with milestones achieved by PASCEP at its current capacity. To date supporters have received the same boiler-plate form letter response to each of their distinctly different letters of support for the program.
If the relocation proceeds in this apartheid/plantation process, the following successful programs will be terminated: The East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention. This is Philadelphia’s premiere comic book and literacy initiative; The PASCEP Black Male Development Symposium Rites of Passage Program; The PASCEP Prison Outreach; The PASCEP Community Consortiums; and the PASCEP Vendors Association. All of these vital community engagement programs with great exponential positive impact will leave Temple because of the apartheid and plantation incursion of Pres. Weaver Hart.
A vetting of Pres. Weaver Hart reveals, among other things, that she previously served as president of the University of New Hampshire and provost and vice president for Academic Affairs at Claremont Graduate University, neither similar to the Pan-African community in which Temple sets. Her prior education at every higher education level has been from the University of Utah, not nearly the multicultural environment of Temple.
Well, which way forward from here? Do the North Philadelphia community leaders know that PASCEP will never be the same if relocated? Will Pres. Weaver Hart open talks with the PASCEP director and the PASCEP faculty? When will the appropriate City Council and State Representatives intervene in this local disruption of a successful education program with a grand legacy of community-based learning and engagement for more than 33 years?
PASCEP is at a critical junction. The date set for this unjustified relocation has been set, un-officially, for fall 2008. Why must one successful community-based learning program be displaced by any new ones without a collaborative community process?
To collaborate in theory and practice is when at least two entities with similar interests come together to do something neither could do alone. As a faculty member of PASCEP, I know firsthand that Pres. Weaver Hart has not met with the director of PASCEP as a collaborative partner. If PASCEP’s director had been included in the decision-making process, perhaps there would have been a relatively seamless transition and supporters of PASCEP would not have to write such commentary and continue to oppose such apartheid/plantation approach to community-based learning.
ASM - April 29, 2008
