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Innovations in higher education are slow to implement. Sometimes related events coalesce and provide the impetus for paradigmatic change. Two such events in the latter part of the 20th century were (1) societal dissatisfaction with attempts to resolve problems of individuals and communities across the life span, and (2) dissatisfaction with the perceived lack of leadership and involvement of American colleges and universities in efforts to resolve societal problems, such as high-risk infants, disabled children, troubled youth and adolescents, single parenthood, substance abuse, failing schools, poverty, family illiteracy, family and neighborhood violence, nutritional disorders, and environmental contaminants.

These two events helped to generate a venue for applied developmental science (ADS) to emerge as a theoretical, methodological, and applied approach to university-community partnerships with an emphasis on long-term relationships, asset approaches to problem solving, respect for diversity, and the reciprocal relationship between knowledge application and knowledge generation (Fitzgerald, Abrams, Church, Votruba, & Imig, 1996).

History of Applied Developmental Science

Applied developmental science was first articulated as an innovative approach in higher education by a Task Force on Applied Developmental Science that was convened at Fordham University in October 1991. The goal of the task force was to launch discussion about graduate education involving the various disciplines that were coalescing into a newly framed applied developmental science (Fisher et al., 1993). The launch was impressively successful! Within a decade ADS has become sufficiently well defined and recognized to merit handbook status. The Fordham task force was convened by Celia Fisher, a member of the Fordham faculty and a national leader in the applied developmental science movement. Richard M. Lerner, then director of the Institute for Children, Youth, and Families at Michigan State University, was also a member of the task force.

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On March 29, 1993, Richard Lerner and Jack Knott (Director of MSU's Institute for Public Policy and Social Research) issued a concept paper drawing attention to the relationships between ADS and the university's land grant tradition, the need to develop undergraduate service learning opportunities in ADS, the need to establish an interdisciplinary graduate program in ADS, and the desire to provide national leadership for the ADS movement. Provost Lou Anna Kimsey Simon and Vice Provost James Votruba, in collaboration with Deans Kenneth Corey (College of Social Science) and Julia Miller (College of Human Ecology), established the Steering Committee on Applied Developmental Science and charged it to meet with Celia Fisher to determine whether the university should pursue the recommendations advanced in the Lerner-Knott concept paper. Members of the committee represented 11 different disciplinary units, with Hiram Fitzgerald from the department of psychology serving as convenor.

On the basis of its meeting with Celia Fisher, the committee recommended that the university support a year-long study to address three key questions about ADS: (1) How are ADS activities different from those associated with the land grant philosophy and its historical connection with Cooperative Extension? (2) How can the university better inform the public about its existing applied research programs? (3) Should the university establish an interdisciplinary graduate program in applied developmental science?

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