Ira Harkavy is Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships, University of Pennsylvania. As Director of the Netter Center since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop academically based community service courses and participatory action research projects that involve creating university-community partnerships and university-assisted community schools with Penn's local community of West Philadelphia. Harkavy teaches in history, urban studies, and Africana studies, as well as in the Graduate School of Education.

Harkavy has written and lectured widely on the history and current practice of urban university-community-school partnerships and the democratic and civic missions of higher education. He has authored and edited eleven books including: Higher Education’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Building a More Sustainable and Democratic Future (2021 co-edited with European colleagues) and Knowledge for Social Change: Bacon, Dewey and the Revolutionary Transformation of Research Universities in the Twenty-First Century (2017, authored with Penn colleagues); He is also Executive Editor of Universities and Community Schools journal.

Harkavy is the Chair of the International Consortium for Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy; Chair of the Anchor Institutions Task Force; founder and member of the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (PHENND) Steering Committee, and Chair Emeritus of the Coalition for Community Schools.
Among other honors, Harkavy is the recipient of Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, New American Colleges and Universities’ Ernest L. Boyer Award, a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant, and three honorary degrees. Harkavy received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania.