ERIC Number: EJ1442239
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024
Pages: 21
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1047-8485
EISSN: EISSN-2472-3451
Tactical to Transformational: Reclaiming the Strategic Purpose of a Metropolitan Campus
Michael G. Strawser; L. Trenton S. Marsh; Thomas Bryer; Shalewa Babatayo; Katelyn Lambert
Metropolitan Universities, v35 n3 p150-170 2024
In the fall of 2019, our large southeastern metropolitan university launched a campus strategically situated in downtown Orlando. As we all remember, in the spring of 2020, as our campus was starting to build momentum as a student and community-centered hub, the world shut down because of a global pandemic. Our challenges over the last several years have been multifaceted. Our university lost key administrators who championed the efforts of the new campus and we have been trying to reclaim the vision and purpose of this space. We have also had a dearth of faculty engagement at the new campus partly because of so many remote courses and meetings. These challenges impact all stakeholders involved with the downtown campus. To reclaim our purpose, we interviewed key stakeholders (N = 21) connected to the university and/or the community to then use their perspectives on the downtown campus as well as their thoughts on community-engaged scholarship (CES) to create a strategic plan to move forward. To code our 188 (N = 188) units of analysis we used the six categories of community engagement as identified by Gordon Da Cruz, (2018). These categories include community-identified issues, scholarly investigation of public issues, collaborative and mutually beneficial community-university partnerships, collaborative knowledge production, institutional resources for the public good, and integration with faculty scholarship. Our findings reveal the following breakdown: community-identified issues (n = 12), scholarly investigation of public issues (n = 15), collaborative and mutually beneficial community-university partnerships (n = 66), collaborative knowledge production (n = 26), institutional resources for the public good (n = 50), and integration with faculty scholarship (n = 19). We used these distinctions as well as stakeholder suggestions to build a strategic plan and our seven primary goals or objectives for moving forward into our next phase.
Descriptors: Higher Education, Educational Facilities Planning, Strategic Planning, School Community Relationship, Stakeholders, Community Involvement, Partnerships in Education, Metropolitan Areas, Position Papers, Educational Objectives, College Faculty, Distance Education, COVID-19, Pandemics
Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities. 8000 York Road, Towson, MD 21252. Tel: 410-704-3700; Fax: 410-704-2152; e-mail: cumu@towson.edu; Web site: http://www.cumuonline.org
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Location: Florida (Orlando)
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A