A Matter of Trust, continued
The date was February 23, 1969. Inside College Hall, the crowd of student, faculty and community protestors cheered—and some even wept—as College junior Ira Harkavy read aloud an agreement forged with the University administration. They had been fighting Penn’s involvement in military research as well as what they saw as its unfair treatment of the West Philadelphia community. After a six-day sit-in, the campus activists had won several concessions.
“We changed the decision-making processes and priorities of this institution,” Harkavy told his classmates. “Nothing was destroyed, but we built a hell of a lot.”
Harkavy was no stranger to social activism when he came to Penn. His parents were involved in the peace and civil-rights movements, and his father took part in the March on Washington, he proudly recalls. But it was a class at Penn that set him on a mission to connect academic work to the problems of society.
Sitting in his office at the center, which is housed in a maze of rooms inside the old Mellon Bank Building at 36th and Walnut streets, Harkavy describes his “lightbulb” moment. It came in the middle of a history seminar 35 years ago. His professor, Dr. Lee Benson, posed the question: “Why study history?”
“And everybody buzzed around that issue and talked,” Harkavy recalls. Finally, Benson gave his own answer: “To better understand the world so that each of you can help change the world for the better.” (The respect is mutual: Looking back on his academic career, Benson cites being “Ira Harkavy’s teacher” as his proudest accomplishment.)
In his graduate studies and teaching, Harkavy had the chance to cultivate Benson’s ideas. “I came to see that the way for me to do engaged scholarship was to work to change things for the better in Penn’s community of West Philadelphia,” Harkavy said last year when he accepted the Tom Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, given by Campus Compact (a coalition of university presidents committed to improving the civic engagement of higher-education institutions).
In 1985 Sheldon Hackney teamed up with Harkavy and Benson to co-teach a seminar examining the history and problems of Penn’s relationship with West Philadelphia. A student project in that class spawned a community-revitalization group known as the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps—whose work is a model for universities around the world. It also led to the creation of CCP.
“I was optimistic” about the center’s chances for success, says Hackney, “but it’s done much more than I even thought was possible. Ira really is remarkably talented in motivating people, getting people to work together, and drawing faculty into [his work]. He is an academic entrepreneur with a strong social conscience who puts things together for the benefit of the University and the community.”
Some might also say that Harkavy is a masterful pest.
Dr. Robert Giegengack, professor and chair of earth and environmental science, recalls his own recruitment into the ranks of faculty teaching academically based community-service courses. Harkavy, a former student of his, “started bugging me after we’d been friends all these years, and he said, ‘When are you going to come and do environmental studies [for middle-school students]?’ I said, ‘Ira, that’s crazy. I study global climate change … What the hell am I going to tell these kids?’ He just kept after me.”
Giegengack finally told him, “To get you off my back I’ll do it, but if we’re going to do it then we have to choose an environmental case that is of immediate relevance to the children of West Philadelphia.” Lead-paint exposure emerged as the most obvious concern, given the older housing stock of the neighborhood. So Giegengack developed a course that put Penn undergraduates in local middle schools to teach the dangers of lead poisoning while also gathering data about the distribution of lead in the neighborhoods.
“The burden to society from the reduced functionality of all those kids [exposed to lead] is really enormous,” Giegengack says. “And every time we send a bunch of kids into the school to pass on some information that helps some family protect another child against lead poisoning, it probably [makes] a net contribution to society.”
In Environmental Science 404, middle-schoolers are sent home to collect dirt samples, paint chips, and dust out of vacuum-cleaner bags, then bring them back to their Penn instructors for analysis. The results then are shared with the schools as well as city agencies. Working together, the Penn and middle-school students create an educational pamphlet to distribute to families and neighbors. “We turn middle-school kids into delegates,” says Giegengack, who went on to create additional courses on tobacco-use prevention and asthma prevention following this model.
If Harkavy’s persistence occasionally leads to a flat no, he also knows how to bide his time until the moment is right, says Lee Benson. Several years ago CCP was developing a major school-based health-education program in conjunction with Penn’s School of Medicine. According to Benson, then-Dean William N. Kelley took over and nixed the idea that the medical school would be involved with the School of Arts and Sciences in a community-health program.
“That ended it,” Benson says. “But that setback never distracted Ira—or me, for that matter—from the idea of eventually restarting the health program.” After Kelley left in early 2000 in the wake of multimillion dollar losses for Penn’s Health System, Dr. Arthur Rubenstein—who had shown a strong interest in community health—took over as executive vice president of the Health System and medical-school dean. So Harkavy reached out again. The result was the Sayre Middle School health program, a partnership involving not just the medical school but many of Penn’s undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. “That is an even greater development than we had originally envisioned,” says Benson. “It exemplifies Ira’s persuasive capacity and his long-range vision.”
For all of Harkavy’s persistence, the work he oversees still takes place under the auspices of a center, and not a degree-granting program. “A center is sort of a stepchild of the University,” contends Mitch Berger. Having largely broken down the invisible barrier that separates Penn from West Philadelphia, CCP has another challenge back on campus: convincing people that it’s “more than an outreach program” and deserves to be part of the core curriculum, Berger says. “There’s room in a large university, set in a challenging urban setting, to get a bachelor of arts degree in a major that concentrates in service-based learning—in my humble opinion.”
Even without the support of a degree-granting program, one could argue, CCP’s presence on campus has influenced students’ outlooks and life plans. And through their fresh ideas—as well as the work of an energetic staff—what Harkavy and a handful of others started has gathered a momentum of its own.
“I guess it completely changed my life around,” says Mei Elansary C’04. She ditched a semester abroad and her French major to pursue environmental studies and biological basis of behavior, taking a leading role in CCP’s development of the school-based community health center at Sayre Middle School. For her leadership she received the 2003 Howard R. Swearer Student Humanitarian Award from Campus Compact. She’s applying her award money toward the development of a peer-education program at Sayre. Starting this summer, it will group 50 students who are failing science with 50 students who are doing well in that subject. The students will spend one day a week at a hospital being trained as “mini docs” and another day at a local health clinic. After she graduates, Elansary plans to join Teach for America and then pursue a career in public health and adolescent medicine.
“One thing Dr. Harkavy does well is that he inspires students to find their niche, their passion, and really go after it,” says Phillip Geheb. After taking a class with Harkavy, he was inspired to create a program that tries to give high-school students “the communication skills they need to go out in their communities and organize around problems.”
One semester Geheb’s students turned their frustration about the high cost of transportation into action. A SEPTA official came to their classroom and listened to their proposal for a reduced bus fare for students traveling to and from school. “Obviously, we’ll see what happens,” Geheb says.
He discussed with his students how “the wheels of change are slow and you don’t often see the benefits of what you’re doing until possibly months or possibly years down the line. But you need to carry this mentality into all the things that you do: Be persuasive and be forthright with people, because sooner or later things will change.”
Not every moment in the classroom is a success. Toward the end of Giegengack’s course on tobacco-use prevention, several of his undergraduates talked about some of the challenges of engaging pre-adolescents.
“We did exercises about what middle-school students are like, but it’s never what you think it’s going to be” says Vaishali Patel, a pre-med student. “My group ended up making adjustments to the lesson plan just because the kids may not have been responsive to something.”
“I think a lot of the problems were there before we got there and stayed there after we left,” adds another student. “If the [regular] teacher has no control of the classroom and can’t teach and can’t keep kids interested, then they have no respect for us because we’re just showing up” for part of a semester.
But Patel feels she connected with the students. “It definitely works better if we don’t become the same figure as their teachers,” she says. “Especially the first couple of days we went in there, what they really wanted to know about was us and what college is like. The more you establish that relationship with them, [the more] they start to listen to stuff we say about tobacco.”
July/August
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© 2003 The Pennsylvania Gazette Last modified 04/28/03
“This is not missionary work,” Harkavy says. “This helps us to be a better university.”