Despite substantial progress in establishing academic and public health partnerships over the past 20 years, two questions require further examination: (1) How are the most effective partnerships achieved? and (2) How well are these partnerships suited to the current and future problems of public health? The authors propose the "new public health" perspective, which offers challenges to develop a dialogue and power relationships among partners based on symmetry rather than conventional asymmetry. New forms of discourse and benchmarking of progress in improving the health of the public may be achieved by adopting this paradigm.