You can discover lots of interesting things on the break room table where I work. My most recent find was a page from the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle, with an ad on it for a campus conference, "Sustainable Community Development: Does the University Have a Role?" The event was sponsored by both Duke and UNC (the School of Public Health, oddly enough), and proclaimed itself as free and open to the public.

It was last Thursday.

I never saw a thing about this conference anywhere on any Durham listserves, never heard a peep about it from my rather extensive network of community volunteer contacts. If I had, I might have taken a day off work and gone. But to my knowledge, if you weren't a member of one of the organizations presenting and/or a student or faculty at one of the schools, you would have had very little opportunity to discover that this event ever existed.

How does one live in a community, attend (or work for) a university right in the middle of that community, then host a conference about the role of the university in sustainable community development, but do nearly nothing to actually invite that community to participate? Is it just me, or is there a fundamental disconnection here?

I looked up the conference agenda, and while there were a few local organizations represented, it looks as though the event was more about sustainable community development in faraway countries.

Fascinating, that - personally, I feel that the best place to start with sustainability is where you are. Sure, somebody needs the global perspective, and I don't discount that Duke's graduates are for the most part intelligent, capable, and destined for Big Things. However, by discounting the community in which Duke exists, they lose out on a wealth of potential real-world learning experience. Of course, I somehow doubt most Durhamites are surprised to hear that Duke didn't really reach out to the greater community for a smaller free event.