Civic house lecturer pushes to acknowledge expertise outside of academia

Welcomed by a sea of applause, former Director of the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University Nadinne Cruz stepped up onto the podium and greeted her audience, saying, “I speak as a practitioner who has stumbled, fallen and experimented with a lot of things.”

“It’s a beautiful night,” she added in in a Filipino language called Tagalog.

Nadinne Cruz was the guest speaker for the Civic House’s third annual Alvin P. Gutman Public Scholar Lecture. Cruz is an expert in the field of civic engagement. But the first thing she did was to clarify that she was here “not as a researcher or academic, but [someone] who primarily wants to share with you the mental map that guided my practice.”

This message resonated throughout her speech, which focused on the importance of shifting the priority and attention from the academy and the university to the expert knowledge that resides within communities.

“We don’t need more data, or 10 more theories about poverty,” Cruz said, adding “There’s an assumption that the expertise resides in the academy.”

Cruz started off her talk by discussing the indigenous Ifugao people of the Philippines and the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, honoring the two communities as experts on sustainability and moral brilliance.

She claimed that the academy is only a small slice of the “circle of knowledge,” which includes many other epistemologies.

She urged institutions of higher education to “de-center.” That is, to acknowledge that the university is not the center or the “big dog” of the show and to admit that the academy is not the core of the knowledge that is needed to effectively address the issues that are causing heartbreak and suffering.

“When the circle of knowledge is broken, when one part of it is privileged, or it ignores the rest of the circle, we lose a lot. It leads to disrespect and exclusion of different ways of knowing,” Cruz said.

She wrapped up the night by sharing stories of her development as not only an advocate for community-engagement learning practices in universities, but also as a human. Her stories ranged from how she quit university to take ownership of her own learning, to her battle with chronic depression.

Her talk was met with a standing ovation.

“I thought it was great...her talk just made me think in a new perspective and re-energized me. It was awesome,” College senior Rinzin Lhamo said.

“Her speech was really inspiring. It allowed me to think critically about how we engage in the community as Penn students and what that kind of relationship that could look like,” College sophomore Lara Jung.

Cruz’s talk was not only inspiring to many students, but also hopeful.

“We can create the ideal community here and now anytime,” she said. “The fabric of humanity is intact whenever each one of us dares to declare, ‘I’m human, and the human in me wishes to connect with the human in you.’”