STRATEGY AND BENEFITS
Simply put, CUGS will be the central institutional umbrella and centralizing catalyst for Trinity’s broad-based effort to strengthen the academic connection between the campus, the Hartford city-region, and the world. It will do so by drawing on existing strengths and pursuing an integrative strategy. First of all, CUGS will build on Trinity’s well-established Community Learning Initiative (CLI), the Hartford Studies Project (HSP), and the Cities Program, which involve a variety of departments, faculty, and students across the College’s entire disciplinary spectrum and many academic units, and connect strongly with both the surrounding neighborhoods and the broader community.
CUGS also benefits from and builds upon Trinity’s global programs, located in several world-class cities, and more importantly, its large corps of excellent faculty with teaching and research interests in both Hartford and different regions of the world.
CUGS will find ways to bring the faculty and students interested in Hartford-based teaching and research initiatives closer together to expand their cooperation with government agencies, the private sector, and community organizations in Greater Hartford. On the global front, CUGS aims to develop more connections, consistency, and coherence among its international programs with regard to curricular development and integration, research opportunities, and organizational efficiency. Most importantly, CUGS will make the best effort to build bridges of cooperation in teaching, research, and service that straddle the Trinity-Hartford nexus and the Hartford-global dyad.
Regarding teaching, CUGS aims to foster the systematic and integrated development of courses with a stronger, more consistent, and comparative urban focus and content. CUGS will work to conceptualize and operationalize substantive and procedural connections between the Cities Program, the CLI courses, other urban offerings, and the curricula at Trinity’s global programs. This is intended to build sequential steps in stimulating and channeling students’ interest in urban studies at each progressive stage of their study at Trinity. If students are exposed to a more coherent set of Hartford-related urban courses with comparative content during their freshman and sophomore years, they are more likely to pursue an urban-focused interest in their study-abroad programs in world cities. This cumulative and comparative perspective will help sustain students’ interest to reconnect their urban experience back to Hartford upon return from abroad. By guiding more students into more integrated Hartford- and globally based experiential urban learning in all disciplines and majors, CUGS helps them become better prepared for future careers in both domestic and international urban settings.
On the research front, CUGS has recently launched a two-year (2008-2010) seminar on the transformation of the Hartford city-region by bringing together Trinity and non-Trinity faculty with different types and degrees of research and teaching interests in the city to engage in intensive discussions on the most salient and critical research and teaching questions and issues for understanding both changes and continuities in Hartford and its surrounding region. Taking a truly interdisciplinary approach via a multi-scaled investigation, this planned seminar aims to uncover the local, regional, and global dimensions and sources of the economic, social, cultural, and spatial transformations in Hartford. The seminar drives toward a comprehensive book that will achieve three benefits: 1) becoming an important contribution to urban scholarship; 2) serving as primary reading for future Trinity students, especially those taking urban courses; and 3) carrying useful policy and practical implications for the Greater Hartford communities.
In community relations and outreach, CUGS works to strengthen Trinity’s long-established relations with its surrounding neighborhoods, schools, cultural institutions, governmental agencies, business communities, and NGOs in Greater Hartford. It will facilitate an active, visible, and dedicated commitment to Trinity’s host city and work to develop mutually beneficial and attainable goals with input, direction, and support from community neighbors and partners. CUGS will keep its doors open to the communities around and beyond the campus, and plans to host community breakfasts. CUGS can only be effective in advancing Trinity’s integrated urban-global programs if it remains committed to engaging with the local community.
Finally, by adopting the integrative strategy outlined above, CUGS strives to create more synergistic linkages between the teaching-research-service triangle and the Trinity Triangle of the classroom, the city of Hartford, and the world. This will be accomplished through a complementary set of planned initiatives (see elsewhere on the CUGS website) that carry multiple short- and long-term benefits. As these initiatives are implemented over time and begin to pay off and as CUGS becomes fully endowed and institutionalized, CUGS will reassess its work and strategy and find new avenues for further advancing Trinity’s integrated urban-global mission—a mission that is key to turning future Trinity students and graduates into leaders on our campus, in the city of Hartford, and in communities across the world.
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