IUPUI Named One Of Top Five "Best Neighbor" Colleges And Universities In The Nation

Chancellor Charles R. Bantz View print-quality image

 This morning in Philadelphia, at the 15th annual conference of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities, Dr. Evan Dobelle reported IUPUI took 5th place in his survey of the “Best College and University Civic Partnerships.”

Dobelle described IUPUI this way:

This state university, in the heart of Indianapolis, claims that, “Civic engagement isn’t just what our students, faculty, and staff do; it’s at the heart of who we are . . . ” The institution lives up to this commitment through entities such as the IU Emerging Technologies Center, which has helped to create myriad high‐tech companies and jobs in the area, and the Signature Center Service Learning Research Collaborative which “has enabled the campus to emerge as a center for research and scholarship on civic engagement and service learning.” The university’s own service learning course offerings are outstanding and IUPUI makes available a wealth of information to other institutions in regards to constructing service learning curricula. Thus, its engagement effect is not only positive for its own students, faculty, and community, but for others as well.

We are pleased that Dobelle’s study placed us at the top of U.S. universities—with two leading private institutions (the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and University of Southern California in Los Angeles), which have invested millions in rebuilding their neighborhoods, and with two urban public universities (the University of Houston and University of Missouri at Kansas City).

During this, our 40th anniversary year, community members expressed their praise for IUPUI’s impact. By pursuing the vision of community leaders who in 1969 emphatically said, “A great city must have a great university,” we have built an IUPUI that makes a difference. As I said at the 40th Anniversary Staff and Faculty Recognition Breakfast last month, the credit for all this goes to all of you.