In Book VII of the Republic, Plato develops the famous cave allegory that illustrates how knowledge functions in his philosophical idealism. Deep within the cave, the multitudes are shackled; they see only shadows projected on the back wall, mistaking those phantom forms for reality. Education, for Plato, is the casting off of the chains that imprison us in the shadow world of ordinary reality. True knowledge, he asserts, is attained when the prisoners leave the cave and ascend into the intelligible light of absolute and eternal truth–the world of the Ideas or Forms.

Ira Harkavy, C'70, Gr'79, doesn't like Plato–or at least he doesn't like Platonic epistemology, which sets theory and abstract ideas above practical studies. "The whole later development of Western philosophy can be regarded as a series of extended footnotes on Plato," wrote the English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Harkavy feels the same about the ancient Greek philosopher's impact on how colleges and universities have come to see themselves: as enterprises aloof from the everyday concerns of society, set apart like Plato's Academy among the olive groves.

Harkavy is director of Penn's Center for Community Partnerships. He is also an historian and writes about community-building partnerships and innovative approaches to education that use community service as an important part of the knowledge quest. In his scholarly writings, he is fond of using phrases like "in other words" and "to put it another way" to recapitulate his points. Harkavy has spent his life putting things in another way.

He came from a family of political activists, and as a Penn undergraduate, he was a prominent campus leader who promoted community service. "My Penn undergraduate experience had a profound impact on me," he says. "I became increasingly interested in a career that would combine academics and action."

Harkavy has never left the University; his role as adjunct associate professor and academic administrator is part of a continuing arc of activism in which he has tried to understand the world and make it better. "The crisis of the American city," he writes, "is testimony enough that the self-contained, isolated university will no longer suffice." The social cataclysm that has overtaken portions of the city casts its shadow across Penn's campus almost daily. The underlying rationale for the Center for Community Partnerships (www.upenn.edu/ccp/) is that the futures of Penn and Philadelphia are inextricably bound. The Center's outreach is driven by the belief that a research university's mission of advancing and transmitting knowledge can be enhanced through community involvement and that such involvement will contribute to improving the quality of life in the community where Penn is situated.

The Center has three foci: traditional volunteer work, community and economic development, and what educational innovators have come to call "academically based community service." University-wide coordination and support of Penn's service projects and of community programs such as job training and the Buy West Philadelphia program are only part of the Center's outreach. More than simply an organization to provide needed services to Penn's underprivileged neighbors, the Center supports the University's academic mission with an array of research and teaching initiatives. Academically based service learning is a hands-on, real-world, problem-solving experience à la Ben Franklin's linkage of theory and practice. "It focuses intellectual energy and service on making a major difference in this locality," says Harkavy.

An important part of the Center's service-learning activity is carried out by WEPIC, the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps. WEPIC is a partnership of groups and institutions that include Penn, local public schools, neighborhood organizations, community leaders, churches, and state and federal agencies. WEPIC involves about 7,000 children, parents, and other community members in educational programs, recreation, school-to-work training, community improvement, and service initiatives. These activities take place largely through 13 "university-assisted community schools," the hubs through which Penn delivers its service-learning programs on topics such as health and nutrition, toxins in the local environment, and conflict resolution and peer mediation.

Penn's curriculum now has over 70 graduate and undergraduate courses in which students can study issues facing West Philadelphia, participate in related community service projects, and conduct research aimed at solving local problems. A preponderance of service learning classes are offered through the School of Arts and Sciences. "The center of the Center, in many ways, is the connection to Arts and Sciences," states Harkavy.

Building service learning into the curriculum is part of a multi-pronged strategy that Penn is using to work with the community for long term change. "What we learned through practice," explains Harkavy, "is that engagement with the community has to exist in the curriculum. By linking it to the curriculum, we have our greatest impact because it's sustainable: the courses create an ongoing vehicle for future students and faculty to keep doing the work."

There is no cookie cutter model of what a service learning course should look like: they range widely in style, methodology, content, and discipline. What they have in common is the linkage of traditional classroom work with the presence of Penn students at local schools.

Geology Professor Robert Giegengack teaches "Urban Environment: West Philadelphia." The Penn undergraduates work with students and faculty from Shaw, Turner, and Strath Haven middle schools to study lead toxicity and ways to reduce exposure. The Penn students learn how to perform tests for lead traces in the environment and then teach the middle-school pupils these techniques. Local students carry out systematic tests in the surrounding neighborhood, becoming co-researchers and gathering data for a longitudinal study of lead toxicity in the community. They also learn how to dispose of household chemicals. Environmental science, chemistry, graph and chart making, math, and report writing and oral presentation are only a few of the subjects and skills that Penn and middle-school students develop in the course of carrying out these projects.

A number of anthropology courses related to health and nutrition are taught by Professor Francis Johnston. Johnston is a medical anthropologist who specializes in human growth, development, and nutritional status in Guatemala and other third world nations. In the early 1990s, he was persuaded to shift his focus of research to West Philadelphia, where, Joann Weeks observes, "the conditions are often equal to or worse than conditions he was seeing in the third world." Weeks is director of the WEPIC Replication Project.

As part of their coursework in urban and medical anthropology, Penn students teach a nutrition curriculum and work with Turner students to publish a nutrition textbook appropriate to this African American community. The middle-school pupils learn about healthy nutrition habits and the basic science related to nutrition, and collaborate on school and community health improvement projects. "Some of these kids have never heard of bananas," notes Weeks. An ongoing study of the nutrition status of Turner's students is underway.

Weeks recalls a principal at one of the WEPIC sites telling her that School District officials rarely visit schools in poverty-afflicted neighborhoods. "They just assume the kids are bouncing off the walls," he remarked. But Weeks points out that "some of them are very bright children, and with the range of opportunity we've been able to provide, they've really blossomed." Many WEPIC schools report improvements in students' behavior, citing decreased suspensions and increased attendance. Parent involvement is also on the rise, as is the rate of student promotions. Over the last three years, the number of seniors graduating from University City High School has doubled. When Harvard wanted to start up a similar community partnership program several years ago, it looked to Penn's model for inspiration. Many colleges and universities have expressed interest in WEPIC's projects, and additional grants have provided funding for the WEPIC Replication Project, which is working to start up Penn-like programs at sites across the country.

Dean of the College, Rick Beeman, remarks, "I have been impressed by the number of faculty Ira [Harkavy] has been able to recruit to teach those courses and the seriousness of intellectual purpose that they have devoted to it. I really cannot tell you how much I believe in the value of what is being done in those courses. They give our students a problem-oriented experience in learning, and all the research literature shows that the best learning takes place, not in studying theories and abstract forms, but in solving concrete problems. I am committed to getting first rate faculty involved in that effort as an important definition of their contribution to undergraduate education at Penn."

Beeman remains something of a Platonist in his commitment to "traditional disciplinary imperatives." It's more problematic, he believes, for faculty whose disciplines are not directly relevant to issues confronting the inner city. "It's a stretch for me as an historian of the American Revolution to teach a course that links up in that kind of direct engagement."

English Professor Peter Conn feels no compunction about that disjunction. "I don't try to justify it," he responds when asked about the tenuous link between the content of his course on American literature and history, and the requirement that enrolled students work with teachers at University City High School for four hours each week.

Conn points out that there are powerful academic benefits to doing service learning courses, even if the subject matter doesn't lend itself to the kind of research professors like Giegengack and Johnston do. "It doesn't matter what the content is. Because of the peculiar nature of the responsibilities they've got, the students become a real group. They start to support each other; they start to interact with each other; they start to be willing to go out on a limb for each other in ways I just haven't seen at Penn. I've never had this kind of experience: students creating a community of learners, teachers, sufferers, complainers. I'm getting better work in just straight normative terms: what kinds of papers the students write, what kind of research they do. But I'm also getting a higher level of energy and engagement and commitment to a task that, I think, has importance."

Professor Conn is faculty advisor of the new Civic House (www.upenn.edu/civichouse/), a "hub" for campus interest in community service projects. "Civic House promotes a different idea of education," says Conn. "For us, education also consists of what you do outside the classroom. We provide an opportunity for Penn students to enrich their total educational experience by engaging in activities that will better prepare them for the sorts of responsibilities, challenges, and opportunities they're actually going to confront."

Penn can no longer afford the bunker mentality that imprisons the campus community deep within its ivy-covered walls. "Academically based service learning," Harkavy writes, is one way "to release the vice-like grip that the dead hand of Plato has had, and continues to have, on American schooling and education." The grand theories and world-shaking ideas that flit like shadows across the minds of Penn faculty, if they are to continue, require that attention be paid to the grim realities threatening America's cities–and its urban universities. Community service is not just an add-on: it is an integral part of the University's mission–a way to make teaching and research better that also makes things better for Penn's neighbors, and hence, better for Penn. It is, as they say, a no brainer.