The nature of capitalism in its neoliberal form is decreasing higher education’s exclusive domain of knowledge production by exposing students to and exploiting local knowledge production. This has created a paradox. Experiential learning is being supported as ‘academic’ because students learn skills, values and perspectives by engaging in communities of practice. Through community service learning and social justice oriented internships, students learn about emancipatory social movements while simultaneously providing their intellectual capital. Urban Semester Program students participate in the movement for affordable housing, with its origins in post-war Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where many Puerto Ricans settled. Engaged in a struggle against displacement, for self-determination and developing community sustainability by advocating and winning low and moderate income housing, residents are determined to remain in their neighbourhood. Students are engaged in this struggle and connect this exposure to their internships, and the globalising world economy, the role of the state, and corporate power.
Sam Beck is Senior Lecturer at Cornell University where he directs the Urban Semester Program. He has dedicated himself in the last twenty years to an activist role as an anthropologist carrying out research in North Brooklyn. As such he is an active Executive Board member in local community-based organisations that insist on being recognised with dignity and respect, and struggle for community sustainability. He is a member of the Vernon Avenue Project and its spinoff Reconnect Industries, Churches United for Fair Housing, The Grand Street Boys, and Brooklyn Legal Services A. He has received multiple awards for his community service work and as a teacher. E-mail: sbeck@med.cornell.edu