Marc Schlossberg recalls that it all started during a good old faculty gripe session. He and his colleagues—Nico Larco, Robert F. Young, and a couple of other professors—were sitting around at the University of Oregon, airing a familiar set of complaints: How do we get students to pay attention and really care about their work? Why can’t that work be more relevant to the world off campus?
At the end of each term, they were grading papers embedded with intriguing, sometimes brilliant ideas. And where did those papers, those ideas, and all the money and energy used in producing them usually end up? Tossed in the wastebasket, soon to be forgotten.
“We started thinking, How many of these papers are happening on this campus, and then how many are happening across the country?” Mr. Schlossberg recalls. “It just seemed like a waste—a societal waste.” Even worse, he says after a pause: “It seemed immoral.”
Mr. Schlossberg and Mr. Young are urban-planning professors, and Mr. Larco is an associate professor of architecture. They all knew well the pressures that cities face, with budget cuts, outdated infrastructure, ailing urban centers, and a dearth of fresh ideas and resources. “If people working in cities had access to these ideas,” says Mr. Schlossberg, an associate professor of planning, public policy, and management, “they would be crazy happy.”
That griping and pondering led to the Sustainable Cities Initiative, now embarking on its fifth year as one of higher education’s most successful and comprehensive service-learning programs. It has paired the needs of Oregon cities—Gresham, Salem, Springfield, and, this fall, Medford—with classes and research relevant to sustainability. In the process, it has provided a meaningful and marketable outlet for the energy and talents of hundreds of students in tens of thousands of hours of work per year. And it shows signs of going national.
It also rakes in money: The cities pay the university $200,000 to $300,000 to be part of the program, and city officials say the work has paid back enormously. In Salem—where students tackled 16 projects, in work worth at least $12-million if done by consultants—the ideas for just one project at a solid-waste plant will save the city about $1-million every year. A project examining the economics of Salem’s streetlights will save $60,000 per year.
“It might not seem exciting to help a city save $60,000,” says Mark Becktel, Salem’s manager of parks and transportation services, “but when you are in a financial death spiral, $60,000 a year is meaningful.”
Many municipalities are desperate for such savings, but one could argue that higher education also needs the challenges the cities offer. These days, legislators are not shy about asking what colleges deliver for the state funds they get. And students clamor for education that offers meaningful, real-world skills and job connections—the very things that Oregon students say they have been getting through SCI.
Service learning is a growing trend, but most of the activity still consists of one-off projects and activities that don’t connect back to the classroom, says Maureen F. Curley, president of Campus Compact, an organization that promotes service learning. Given the demand, why aren’t colleges everywhere putting more students on the ground in cities and acting as think tanks for those communities?
To put it bluntly, academe doesn’t always reward people for work in the real world.
“A lot of how we have judged what we do in higher education,” Ms. Curley says, “is measured by time in the seat and credit hours, not necessarily by the impact you have.”
In the early days of the Sustainable Cities Initiative, Mr. Larco, Mr. Schlossberg, and Mr. Young went around the Oregon campus and talked with faculty members about getting students to do applied work. Sustainability has an inherently interdisciplinary emphasis, and faculty members from planning, architecture, law, journalism, public policy, economics, and business showed interest.
Being professors themselves, the trio kept in mind that their colleagues would not participate if working with a city meant adding extra hassles or having to bend their pedagogy to imposed lesson plans. The city work would have to blend as smoothly as possible with what professors were already doing or wanted to do.
So SCI was set up to act as a broker between cities and the university, to help make a match between municipal needs and the professors’ plans.
Mr. Larco, Mr. Schlossberg, and Mr. Young also mined connections in nearby cities—first in 2009 in Gresham, a Portland suburb of about 105,000, where they reached out to alumni among city employees. More than 350 students, in 21 courses, worked on 16 projects, like designing a new city hall, studying how walkability and crime affect housing prices, and analyzing commercial-development potential.
The purpose of the year in Gresham was to find out if the model would work—and it did. One student project—examining new uses for a shuttered big-box store—took on a challenge that had flummoxed consultants for years; in the process, the project helped repair the relationship between the city and nearby Latino and Slavic communities.
“When we got things rolling, it was like we were in the Beatles. We went from zero to 60 in no time,” says Mr. Young. Soon other cities started clamoring to get picked as the next partner in the Sustainable City Year program.
“All we did is take all this capacity that every university has and just cross that wire with the need for capacity that most cities have ... and boom, things took off.”
With that demand, SCI could set the terms of the relationship. The founders wanted to avoid the pitfalls of the usual, random connections between classrooms and community leaders—when, say, a professor calls in a favor with a city official to show up at a class. That’s considered charity and is not taken seriously. In those situations, the students’ work, disconnected from other agencies or groups in the city, usually languishes and disappears, just like papers at the end of the term.
“We wanted our students to learn, but we also wanted the work to be put into practice,” Mr. Schlossberg says.
Now, when cities submit applications to be the next City Year partner, they have to demonstrate commitment. First, the mayor, the city council, and the city manager all have to support the partnership. Lower-level bureaucrats will take the work seriously if the city’s leaders back it, and it’s likelier that the work will be coordinated across departments. The city also has to name an official who will act as a liaison with the university.
Second, the cities have to come up with a set of projects, all related to sustainability, each of which can be tackled in 10 weeks, the length of a quarter-term. “We want the city to be able to think in discrete pieces,” so that students can wind up with a finished project and also offer up something useful to the city at the end of the term, Mr. Schlossberg says. Sometimes SCI staff have to help the cities determine the right size of a project.
Lastly, the cities need to offer up money—a serious indication of commitment. “We tell them that this doesn’t have to be a big chunk of money from the general fund, but it can add up to a big number,” Mr. Schlossberg says. When Salem gave the program $328,000 during its year, the money came from various city departments.
Springfield—a working-class neighbor of Eugene, a 10-minute bus ride from the university—came up with more than $250,000 by matching its money with funds from private landowners, the independent utility agency, the school district, and the United Way, among other sources. Jeff Towery, Springfield’s assistant city manager, says city officials jumped at the chance to be a City Year partner because they saw it as a chance to develop a deeper relationship with an economic engine like the University of Oregon.
A portion of the city’s payment covers the work of SCI staff members who manage communication between the cities and the faculty members, line up transportation for the students, and order catering for project presentations. A chunk of the money goes to the faculty members and students as grants to cover materials for research, field trips, and guest speakers. At the end of the term, SCI pays students to put together reports summarizing the best work from each class.
With the payments, some businesses raised objections, saying that the students were taking work away from professionals. But city officials argue that there are key differences between SCI and professional contracts. First, the students are working only on stalled projects, and the city will need professionals to finish the work.
But more important, cities are not paying for results in quite the way they would with professionals. Contractors and consultants, city officials say, will often deliver safe solutions and conclusions—whatever gets them another contract and avoids controversy.
“Innovation is often a tough thing in government,” says Pete Haga, community/government-relations officer for Grand Forks, N.D., and chair of a town-gown-relations council for the National League of Cities. “We are using taxpayer dollars, and we don’t like to fail.”
But students are idealistic and adventurous, and they provide political cover for city officials who want to test the public’s boundaries. If students come up with a few wacky ideas, city officials can easily distance themselves from the work and note that they spent relatively little on it. But the students might come up with wacky ideas that people unexpectedly love. They can provoke the public in ways that city officials might not dare.
“The thing about students is that they are not an intimidating population,” says Courtney Griesel, a management analyst with Springfield, Ore., who managed the SCI program for the city. Students went out into quiet neighborhoods and gathered all sorts of information that had long eluded city officials: what people considered attractions in the city, where people liked to eat, where they shopped, how they got around.
Residents “were opening their doors, making the students tea, serving them cookies. They just opened up,” Ms. Griesel says.
Students in Beth Hjelm’s business-strategy course at Oregon did a marketing plan for Springfield’s underutilized Dorris Ranch Living History Farm, which raises hazelnuts. (One of the students’ recommendations: Stop calling the hazelnuts “filberts,” because people don’t know what those are.) Ms. Hjelm, who teaches capstone management courses in the college of business, says that before SCI she would mentor dozens of students, each pursuing a separate topic. In concentrating the entire class on one project, “I can do a much deeper analysis,” she says. “I can spend much more time on the substance of the work rather than arranging the work.”
Springfield let the students treat a painful industrial scar on the city’s landscape: an lumber mill that had been Springfield’s main economic driver until it went out of business in the late 1960s. The city took over the site in the 1985. One city official called the site “our Detroit.”
“It’s a touchy subject, because we don’t know how to start the conversation or who to start it with about how to change what this is and retain the good side of its past,” says Ms. Griesel. “The safest population to hand this off to is students.”
Turned loose on the site, the students came up with designs and plans that paid homage to the mill’s industrial past but envisioned new uses, like a business incubator paired with an educational institution. One rendering showed people boating and swimming in a pond on the site.
“It gave us the images to have the conversations with community groups and citizen groups, so it’s a little less intimidating,” Ms. Griesel explains. “We can say, ‘The building is still there, and the water is still there, but now it’s a place where you want to go.’”
Sometimes student idealism causes bumps in the process. In one course, students were asked to design a school, with an access road, on a Springfield site. They questioned the location—open space on a wetland—and protested the inclusion of the road, which they believed would be dangerous to children, says Esther Hagenlocher, an associate professor of architecture, who taught the course. Each side dug in.
“It was a fight,” she says. “It lasted weeks and weeks.”
Mr. Larco talked with the class about the compromises inherent in real-world designs, and the city and the students eventually worked out their differences.
“In design schools, there is a tendency to fetishize design,” he says. “To get work done, you have to understand policy, regulation, economics, and politics. Design schools tend not to touch that stuff.”
Recently Ms. Griesel and her colleagues gathered in an art-studio building on the University of Oregon campus for the final presentations in a digital-arts class. The students had been assigned to come up with signage designs for Springfield, working with recommendations from a class in a previous term.
One of the students, Jonathan Xiaoran Wu, stepped up with his proposal: designing all the signs around a Simpsons theme, with silhouettes of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie atop poles pointing people to City Hall, the riverfront, and other attractions. (Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, has said that Springfield, Ore., was one of the inspirations for the cartoon Springfield.)
“A lot of people told me, ‘Don’t do that, they won’t want it,’” Mr. Wu said during his presentation. “The thing is, we already have a lot of good designers in our class, so I wanted to provide a different option.”
His signs were beautiful, but city officials in attendance found his proposal virtually useless. Ms. Griesel was visibly annoyed, while her colleagues seemed mildly amused.
Tatiana Havill’s designs were just as colorful but more straightforward. They featured metal waves of color that bent around the poles and threatened to inundate the signs themselves. In an interview, she says she had never poured so much energy into a class project.
“I have been in digital arts for four years and have never done anything relevant to anything outside of the teachers’ requirements,” she says. Her work involved research on signage and conversations with engineers, who pointed out simple things, like paying attention to how the sign could be bolted to the post. Abstract learning suddenly became real.
“It was ridiculous, because most of us were like, ‘Oh, yeah, the bolt!’” she says. “Because a lot of the jobs that I am going to get as a digital artist are going to be paying attention to outcomes, it was really great life experience.”
Ms. Curley, of Campus Compact, believes that higher education needs to head in that direction. “The millennial generation are doers—they want to get out there and they want to get involved,” she says. And employers are looking for the kinds of skills that real-world work can provide.
A lot of colleges demonstrate their support for civic engagement by having students collect canned goods for a shelter or paint a building in a tough neighborhood. That’s fine, Ms. Curley says, “but the challenge is, How do we make it more than just a few hours in the community? How do we make it deeper?”
The Sustainable Cities Initiative has begun to spread. For the past two years, Mr. Larco and Mr. Schlossberg have held a conference each spring at the University of Oregon, where they lay out their methods, plans, successes, and failures. Colleges in California, Indiana, Iowa, and Minnesota are starting programs based on the SCI model, although some have been timid about charging the cities money for the work. The Oregon-based founders themselves are even looking to establish City Year programs in China through a Chinese faculty member with connections overseas.
But many of these programs face a challenge endemic in academe: Community-based learning and engaged scholarship are not always embraced when it comes to promotion and tenure. “It has always been a bit of a struggle to get faculty involved if there aren’t incentives and when they already have a full plate with their writing and other things they have to do,” Ms. Curley says.
Mr. Young, one of SCI’s three founders, knows that well. Organizing the program took up probably 10 to 12 hours a week and cost him a journal article per quarter, he says. When his third-year review came up, his colleagues told him to publish more—his work with the initiative, however meaningful, wouldn’t count.
“I think the average journal article is read by seven people, not including your mother,” he adds sardonically.
He ended up leaving Oregon for the University of Texas at Austin—not in bitterness, he says, but because both he and his wife were offered plum positions there. But his experience at Oregon drove home his belief that academe generally should rethink its policies for promotion and tenure—not to loosen the requirements, but to be more competitive.
“Really, really good talent wants to have that additional dimension in what they are doing, and they want to have it supported and acknowledged,” Mr. Young says.
Recently he was part of a team at Austin that interviewed a job candidate from the Ivy League, who wanted to know whether work that engaged the community and other institutions would count toward tenure. Probably not, Mr. Young had to admit.
He plans to start something like SCI at Austin—but only after he has tenure. And he wants that version of the program to have a rural component. “Eighty-five percent of the population may be in the cities in Texas, but a huge amount of the political clout is in the countryside,” he says. “That is the place where there is the highest level of need.”
Indeed, SCI’s founders look around and see lots of need—and wasted effort. One recent morning, while walking through Oregon’s architecture building, Mr. Schlossberg and I happened on the final presentations of students in various courses in the department. In one, students had been assigned to hand-draw a building planned at the University of California at Berkeley decades ago, but never designed or built. In another, students stood anxiously next to colorful computer renderings and intricate scale models of buildings in cardboard and balsa wood, while professors and professional architects critiqued their work.
Mr. Schlossberg marveled at the students’ skills and the labor they had put into their projects. But everything we saw was merely hypothetical—buildings and landscapes that had no real clients and no chance of ever being built.
“I think about people outside this world"—the cloistered studio—"and how great it would be for them to be as impressed as I am,” Mr. Schlossberg says. “What if the architects were designing a police station, and the police chief were here—with the added layer of urgency and importance?”
Just think, he says, of studios like this being held at colleges across the country every 12 weeks or so. “It just seems like a big untapped resource.”
