Center for Academic-Community Engagement

Bruce Levy, Director

Since its founding in 1991, The Center for Academic-Community Engagement (ACE) at Southern Methodist University has cultivated in SMU undergraduates an understanding of the complex social issues that challenge Dallas, the region, and the nation.  The Center specializes in a form of socially engaged scholarship known as “action teaching and research,” which argues that a central mission of the University is to:

ACE Center teaching, research, and social action focus on the idea of community as both lived and imagined.  The Center's attention to the theoretical and practical questions of community includes issues of migration, diaspora, housing, gentrification, economic development, metropolitan-rural relations, globalization, cosmopolitan citizenship, and the topics around which these issues frequently revolve: healthcare, education, childhood development, gender, race, cultural diversity, and economic opportunity.

To further its commitment to SMU faculty and students, the ACE Centers supports faculty and undergraduate research that build social capital within and between Dallas communities. Since 1991, over 2,500 SMU students have taken ACE Center courses taught through either academic departments or the University's Office of General Education, where the Center is housed.

ACE House

A unique aspect of the ACE Center is the ACE House, where four SMU students live and work year-round in a low-income neighborhood four miles from the SMU campus. The ACE House provides an opportunity for SMU students from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds to cultivate a sense of community among themselves, the SMU student body, and the neighborhood in which they live. Along with course participants and work-study students, ACE House residents run weekly tutoring sessions for neighborhood children and help daily to staff local social agencies. ACE House and ACE course alumni have gone on to graduate and professional schools at Harvard, Yale, the University of Texas, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, Michigan, Yale, UT Southwestern, The Mayo Clinic, The London School of Economics and other leading national and international universities. ACE Center students have pursued successful careers in teaching, finance, higher education, medicine, law, business, engineering, and in the non-profit sector.

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