Ira Harkavy has spent his fifty-plus-year career at the University of Pennsylvania advocating for the democratization of teaching, research, and learning. Since 1992, he has been the Founding Director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, whose mission is to develop democratic, mutually beneficial partnerships between Penn and its local community of West Philadelphia.

For the Long Haul is a conversational memoir, moderated by Harkavy’s colleague John Puckett, that features social history and pragmatic arguments stressing the importance of education. The authors discuss Harkavy’s distinguished career and put his life’s work in local and historical context, including his engagement of diverse faculty, students, and staff to take his projects to the nation and the wider world.

Puckett traces Harkavy’s activist origins from his childhood in the Bronx through his undergraduate and graduate studies at Penn. As he developed university-assisted community schools, Harkavy encountered challenges such as the impact of racism and local communities’ distrust of universities. Those experiences show how his learning shaped his thinking about “participation, partnership, and producing change in the world.”

In this era where universities are under attack, For the Long Haul emphasizes Harkavy’s considerable achievements and the importance of higher education for democracy. 

Ira Harkavy is the Founder and Barbara and Edward Netter Director of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. He is coauthor of Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform and Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century (both Temple University Press). He is the coeditor of the Temple University Press series Higher Education, Place, and Social Responsibility, Chair of the International Consortium for Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy, founding Chair of the Anchor Institutions Task Force, and Chair Emeritus of the Coalition for Community Schools.

John Puckett is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the coauthor of Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform and Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey, and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century, and the coauthor of Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as if Citizenship Mattered (all Temple University Press). He is coeditor of the Temple University Press series Higher Education, Place, and Social Responsibility.