The center is an interdisciplinary effort dedicated to promoting scholarship and debate on critical issues facing urban America. In addition to serving as a research center, it will develop plans for an undergraduate and graduate program in urban research and policy.

The center draws faculty collaborators from various academic units in Arts & Sciences — including American Culture Studies, International and Area Studies, Social Thought and Analysis, and African and African American Studies — as well as from the George Warren Brown School of Social Work, the School of Law and its Interdisciplinary Institute for Children and Youth.

The Center on Urban Research and Policy will be a key element of the emerging Center on Joint Projects in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The urban research and policy center's founding director is Arts & Sciences' Carol Camp Yeakey, Ph.D., professor of education with appointments in American Culture Studies and International and Area Studies.

"We are very excited about the potential of this emerging center to serve as a way to bring together the wide-ranging interests of our faculty and students across the University," Macias said. "Nearly every department and school has some interest in urban research and policy."

Macias plans to appoint a representative executive committee soon to work with Camp Yeakey in developing the center. The first challenges include developing an inclusive academic agenda that avoids redundancy while building upon current activities, and developing an operations budget and fund-raising plan to sustain the center's activities.

"Going beyond the notion of a research center for engaged academics, our hope is that the center, over time, will offer both graduate and undergraduate academic programs to prepare our students to assume leadership roles in investigating many of the critical issues vividly displayed in the human tragedies we have seen recently in New Orleans, indeed in much of urban/metropolitan America," Camp Yeakey said.

"No one academic discipline holds all the theoretical models or research tools we need to address these issues. As a result, the center's activities, and those of its students, will be richly interdisciplinary and multi-methodological, to break down the disciplinary boundaries and to bring the best of our intellectual resources to bear upon crucial urban dilemmas.

"To further enrich our students' preparation, we will have an international focus on global cities to educate our students to study comparatively, urban/metropolitan dynamics in city centers across the globe."

The center and its programs will seek to draw serious examination to the profound issues confronting urban/metropolitan America and to prepare students for the challenge of solving these problems.