One Way an Anchor Institution Contributes

Posted by Carol Coletta on January 12, 2009

When universities use the essence of their work to change a community, that's the best example of an anchor institution at work.

The University of Houston-Victoria is doing that by becoming an unlikely hot spot for experimental fiction and the humanities. But, according to Inside Higher Education, "this 3,200-student institution has, in just a few years, become host to a constellation of small but prestigious scholarly endeavors that needed new homes – including an independent press for “artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction,” and the 8,000-circulation American Book Review."

As one visiting publisher told the paper, “'One night I was hosted at a small gathering with about 30 people from the community. They were all patrons of the arts and supporters of the university; we just had a wonderful time in a gorgeous home. The next day I gave a reading for a packed house. It must have been over 100 people, maybe 120. Very few were students. It was just amazing to me. He [the chairman of Arts and Sciences] just drew all these people from the community and they all had read my work and wanted to discuss it with me' – so much so that they didn’t even want him to read, just discuss, Berry recalls. He compares, too, a lengthy treatment of his writing in the Victoria newspaper favorably to 'some of the readings it’s gotten in the New York Times, for example.'"