Education for the World, in the World: SU as an Anchor Institution

Who: Chancellor Cantor and panel

Where: Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in Newhouse III

When: Saturday, 11:30 a.m.

How much: Free

Chancellor Nancy Cantor plans to mold Syracuse University into the anchor institution of the city — a plan she will explain in an address to students and parents Saturday during Family Weekend.

The presentation, ‘Education for the World, in the World: SU as an Anchor Institution,’ will be held at 11:30 a.m. in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium in Newhouse III. Cantor will discuss how SU can become an anchor for Syracuse through students becoming more involved in and positively impacting the city. Several members of the SU community will also participate in a panel discussion on partnerships between the university and community.

The event will highlight the vision of SU and how it can be turned into action, said Peter Englot, associate vice president for public affairs. 

‘This panel will give students some very vivid examples of how Scholarship in Action is rolling out at Syracuse, and how they might get engaged in projects like these,’ Englot said.

Scholarship in Action is Cantor’s term for technological, scientific, social and philosophical programs that solve problems in the city of Syracuse and elsewhere through student involvement, Englot said.

As part of the university’s push for urban renewal in Syracuse, the Shared First-Year Experience was overhauled to get freshmen more involved in the city as volunteers or employees at nonprofits like Say Yes to Education. Plans to become an anchor institution have also led the first-year forums to integrate projects in the city into the curriculum. For instance, engineering freshmen are designing a bus that doubles as a traveling stage that will eventually be built for a local puppet theater.

‘It’s not merely being pursued by the administrators of the university,’ he said. ‘It’s really very, very broad in its scope, its actions and its impact.’

Englot said one of the most successful products of Cantor’s plan to involve the school in the city is the Near Westside Initiative, which links the university, the city and businesses in a nonprofit aimed at redeveloping one of Syracuse’s poorest neighborhoods. 

Though some other institutions’ efforts to revitalize poor neighborhoods have displaced original residents and furthered class disparities, Englot said the Near Westside Initiative is consciously designed to accommodate those concerns and create a successful model for urban renewal.

SU’s Near Westside Initiative has worked with the Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems and Home HeadQuarters, a nonprofit organization working to improve neighborhoods in Syracuse and Onondaga County. The two organizations are working with the university to rehabilitate single-family housing in the city, boosting both energy efficiency and affordability, according to the Center of Excellence website.

Syracuse residents who currently rent apartments may be able to become homeowners through a program from Home HeadQuarters, Englot said.

Most importantly, he said, residents have a voice in the process.

‘We are very much aware of the dangers of gentrification,’ Englot said. ‘The whole purpose of the Near Westside Initiative is to lift the community up — to revitalize the community that is already there.’

Panel members include Shiu-Kai Chin, meredith professor in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science; Steve Davis, associate professor and chair of the newspaper and online journalism department; Marcelle Haddix, assistant professor of reading and language arts; Edward Bogucz, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and executive director of the Center of Excellence; and Julia Czerniak, associate professor in the School of Architecture. 

geclarke@syr.edu

Published on September 22, 2010 at 12:00 pm