President's Blog: From the Heart

By Eric F. Spina

A few months ago I read a guest essay in The New York Times by Nick Burns, editor at Americas Quarterly, that criticized some American universities as “ivory towers walled off from reality.”

This line, in particular, jumped off the page: “Even as concerns about social justice continue to preoccupy students and administrations, these universities often seem to be out of touch with the society they claim to care so much about.”

Ouch. As an anchor institution, the University of Dayton has put a stake in the ground as a partner in Dayton’s destiny. Our bond with the community is so sacred that we literally built a front porch for community collaboration: the Fitz Center for Leadership in Community shares a home with the Dayton Foundation and the Dayton Development Coalition at 1401 S. Main St. It’s turning into a national model for civic engagement — and a place where students are learning to be community builders.

Nancy McHugh, the Fitz Center’s energetic, new executive director, brings an enormous amount of experience and passion to our civic engagement efforts, and our community collaborations — and associated experiential learning opportunities for students — are only growing deeper.

In her first 18 months at the helm, she quickly tapped into the wealth of expertise in the building and across campus and engaged in conversations with community partners, including West Dayton leaders, about ways students, faculty, and staff could collaborate on a broad swath of interdisciplinary issues from housing justice to health and educational equity. Working with others, she successfully sought out grants and private gifts that have allowed her to build a highly diverse and highly qualified staff and increase the number of graduate assistants in the center. They’re focusing squarely on an issue close to her heart and our mission: equity.

With funding from the Scarlet Feather Fund, the Fitz Center will soon launch a Health Equity Fellows Program to provide paid internships, mentoring, and professional development to underrepresented students from the Dayton region. With a significant gift from the Caresource Foundation, the center will work with community partners to address Black infant and mother mortality in Montgomery County. The more than $1 million in funding between these two new initiatives will help prepare a workforce that can find solutions for some of the region’s most pressing health inequities.

Under a new $600,000 grant shared with Wright State University, the Fitz Center is working with the School of Education and Health Sciences to provide tutors and mentors to help Dayton Public School students master reading and math skills. It’s an effort to improve educational equity in our urban schools.

I’m so pleased to see a growing number of faculty conducting community-engaged research as Fitz Center Faculty Fellows. Sociologist Chad Sloss is working with Dayton Public Schools on mediation strategies for bullying, and geologist Charles Wu is researching climate change’s impact on rising river levels in formerly redlined communities — to name just two projects.

In addition, the center is spearheading an ethics and leadership initiative and has taken a major role in helping to organize this week’s “Imagining Community: Housing Justice and Flourishing Neighborhoods” conference at the Dayton Arcade — all of this on top of involving students as River Stewards and Dayton Civic Scholars under the center’s signature programs.

Out of touch? I beg to differ. The Fitz Center is an exemplar in higher education — along with the associated staff, faculty, and students — for the ways it blurs the lines between campus and community in a true collaborative spirit.