ABSTRACT
Service-learning may function as a pedagogical equivalent of “exploitative” community-based research. Academics, of course, have often studied and written about poor, particularly minority, communities. Advocates and practitioners of service-learning have tended to agree that the goal of that pedagogy is to educate college students for citizenship. Urban research universities in particular will move to strategic academically based community service because it is consonant with their historic mission and the words and actions of their founders and early leaders. The tradition of problem-driven, problem-solving strategic academically based community service is readily identified in the histories of four leading urban universities at the turn of the 20th century. University presidents of the late 19th and early 20th centuries worked to develop the American research university into a major national institution capable of meeting the needs of a rapidly changing and increasingly complex society.
