CHAPTER 1: Toward Understanding Reciprocity in Community-University Partnerships: An Analysis of Select Theories of Power

More than ever, universities and communities are establishing symbiotic relationships to work collaboratively in addressing societal issues. Boyer (1990) describes these relationships as community engagement. Such relationships between the university and the community are highly complex, with each partner having particular resources (Bender, 1988). How these resources are distributed and how the distribution is negotiated—specifically, reciprocity and mutuality—provide the context for this paper.

Reciprocity and mutuality are fundamental values and inherent goals of community-engaged partnerships. Yet one of the significant challenges that emerged from the 2006 Carnegie community-engaged classification applications was in the area of establishing reciprocal campus-community relationships. As Driscoll (2008) reports, “most institutions could only describe in vague generalities how they had achieved genuine reciprocity with their communities” (p. 41). Further analysis by Saltmarsh, Giles, Ward, and Buglione (2009) found that campuses that adopted Boyer’s scholarship categories tended to frame community engagement as “application to” a community, instead of engagement “with” communities, an indicator of reciprocity.