ABSTRACT
Globalization has revolutionized the university’s role and its ways of working, training, and research. The increasing focus on excellence at the top has missed social engagement as an important role for the university, its faculty members, and students. Social engagement will be crucial in ensuring the correct problems are identified and the right mechanisms developed to ensure equitable and sustainable growth for many Asian communities. It requires academia to develop a variety of mechanisms and arrangements to work with the state, market, and civil society, and to engage with core problem areas such as rural and urban amenities, regional planning, pollution and sustainability, agriculture and irrigation, problems of small enterprises, and the informality of livelihoods. Chapter 5 provides a nomenclature for, and an analysis of, various modes of community engagement followed by AUA member universities. It also provides a possible organizational approach, and checklist, that can assist universities to undertake social engagement. We support our reasoning with the help of case studies.
