From tile 
Editor's Desk Ernest A. Lynton 

I am very grateful to Deborah Hirsch, my friend and colleague at theN ew 
England Resource Center for Higher Education at UMass/Boston, and to 
Jamie Price and John Martello, thus far only professional pen pals but, I 
hope, friends-to-be, for assembling the outstanding collection of articles on 
service learning in this issue of Metropolitan Universities. Many of our read-
ers already know, and many others will learn from these pages, that service 
learning, i.e., academically based outreach by students, is rapidly growing in 
colleges and universities throughout the country. It is, for obvious reasons, 
of particular importance to metropolitan universities. 

The articles on service learning presented here will be complemented in a 
forthcoming issue by three discussions of the use of action learning in profes-
sional education. As Deborah Hirsch points out in her Overview, one can 
draw the same conclusion whether coming from the vantage point of service 
learning or from that of professional education: there is a growing need for 
strong links between metropolitan universities and their external constituen-
cies, to the benefit of both. There is a second message, as well, that can be 
inferred from the perspectives of both service learning and professional edu-
cation: that faculty engagement in professional service and outreach benefits 
the university as much as it does the external partners. Indeed, as has been 
pointed out several times before in my own editorial remarks as well as in 
various other contributions to Metropolitan Universities, we need increas-
ingly to see faculty professional service not just as a laudable exercise of 
individual initiative, but as an essential element of the collective mission at 
the institutional level and at the level of every subordinate unit. 

With this issue, Metropolitan Universities enters its seventh year of quar-
terly publication. The concepts and the vision that led to the development of 
the metropolitan university model and to the founding of this journal are 
emerging with ever greater clarity and importance. I hope that the many in-
teresting, informative, and provocative articles that have filled our pages have 
contributed to this progress, and am grateful to everyone who has partici-

pated. 


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