Portraits of Academic Social Responsiveness at UCT and NYU

In the past decade, academic institutions have begun to pay increasing attention to societal challenges and their role in contributing to their solutions. Social responsiveness (SR) - scholarly based activities with projected outcomes that contribute to the development objectives of society, is a challenging issue for universities located in complex environments with significant social needs and inequities. The Capstone team was tasked with dual organizational analysis of social responsiveness at two renowned academic and research institutions: the University of Cape Town in South Africa and New York University in the United States. The foci of the study are their Medical and Public Health Schools. Both universities have socially responsive programs, with interdepartmentally fragmented frameworks without written SR policies. The Capstone team performed a literature review on the emergence of SR as a domain in university missions and programming, conducted a comparative review of SR at thirty Northern and Southern universities, and reviewed current portraits of practice at both universities. The research study was complemented by key informant interviews at both UCT and NYU. The Capstone team is developing a strategic framework for (a) social responsiveness to be recognized as the fourth pillar to the historical tripartite mission of health schools – education, research, and clinical service, (b) recommend incentive structures to enable engagement of more academic actors to do SR activities, (c) and propose monitoring and evaluation mechanisms to embed SR within these faculties of health sciences.