Center sets new course for an old mission

The Carolina Center for Public Service was created about the same time that Hurricane Floyd ripped through the state.

The center opened its doors on Sept. 26, 1999, not much more than a week after Hurricane Floyd hit the North Carolina coast and long before floodwaters throughout eastern parts of the state had fully receded.

In many respects, the close timing of the events proved to be both a curse and a blessing, said Mike Smith, dean of the School of Government.

On the one hand, the devastation from the floods left in Floyd's wake left plenty for volunteers to do. The center responded to relief efforts, as it should have, Smith said, by mobilizing and organizing volunteer efforts.

On the other hand, the all-consuming nature of flood-related volunteerism diverted attention away from focusing on, and defining, the center's broader, long-range purpose.

Much of that work still remains to be done.

Smith detailed the history of the center on April 9 during the inaugural meeting of the center's new advisory board that was formed shortly after the arrival of the center's new director, Lynn Blanchard.

Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Robert Shelton told the group that its charge is to guide the University in shaping what the public service mission ought to be. It must reinforce the culture of Carolina that includes public service as an inherent part of its mission and sees it as a mandate rather than a choice.

On many campuses, Shelton said, there is an ebb-and-flow cycle to public service. What makes Carolina stand out, he said, is that it has never been caught in such a cycle -- not, at least, in the troughs.

Shelton urged committee members to become familiar with the charge of public service given to public research universities several years ago by the Kellogg Commission. It is not enough to work on issues that are interesting only to the examiner, Shelton said. Public service must address the serious real-world issues that society confronts -- from bioethics to the growing challenges related to immigration.

Another challenge for the advisory board is to set realistic limits on what it can be expected to accomplish. "It's very tempting when you have the breadth of a great university like Carolina to say, `We're going to do everything for everybody, and we're going to do it tomorrow,'" Shelton said.

But the recipe for trying to do everything leads to few lasting results.

Shelton described Blanchard as "one of the great recruits he had the privilege of being a part" of selecting.

"She not only knows the right words to say but puts them into practice," Shelton said.

"I am truly a Tar Heel," Blanchard said, as she detailed how she had spent the first 50 years of her life and returned home after what she described as a five-year adventure serving as vice chair of community initiatives in the Department of Community Health and Health Studies at Lehigh Valley Hospital and as associate professor in the Department of Health Evaluation Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine.

She began her career as an elementary school teacher in Wake County schools but later received her graduate training in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at Carolina's School of Public Health.

"I always knew I wanted to come back," Blanchard said. "What is exciting is I didn't know I would come back to something like this."

Service, Blanchard said, is not something you do to people or for people. At its best, service is "engaging people in a relationship" that allows volunteers and community members to work together.

Ron Strauss, chair of the School of Dentistry who convened the meeting, said the center should seek to become "the conscience of the University" by helping to right things that may not be right.

The challenge before the center and volunteers is to accomplish good rather than to do something for a couple of hours to have something to feel good about.

Too often, Strauss said, volunteers get back more than they give. Too often, efforts have been too sporadic and scattered to make a lasting difference.

The challenge will be for the University to establish enduring bonds with communities even as staff, faculty and students continue to come and go.

Other board members cited the challenge of getting staff members as engaged in service as faculty and students. Students and faculty are tied, in direct or indirect ways, to public service through the practice of teaching, learning and research. The jobs of most staff members, on the other hand, are not.

Virginia Carson, the director of the Campus Y, and Tommy Griffin, the chair of the Employee Forum, looked at this problem through a different lens.

Carson said she wanted to find ways to get more staff members involved with students in various Y projects.

Griffin, on the other hand, wanted to find more opportunities to get staff involved in campus projects. Many staff already volunteer within their own communities, as coaches, fire fighters and church leaders, he said.

"We have a lot of talented staff who would be more than willing to volunteer," Griffin said, if they had the information to show them where and how they could.

Linda Cronenwett, the dean of the School of Nursing, and others talked about how the reward system for professors tilts away from public service. Promotion and gaining tenure are driven not by how many public service projects you participate in, but how often you get published, she said.

Steve Allred, the associate provost for academic initiatives, said the fact that Carolina is a Research I institution makes that challenge all the more overwhelming. (Research I is the highest level of a nationally recognized system for classifying universities.)

The role of public service for faculty members is something that Allred and Shelton have discussed at length during the formulation of a new academic plan, Allred said.

Public service, Allred said, is something that needs to be engrained within the culture to such a degree that faculty members are not deterred when they hear the admonition, "Don't do that, it doesn't count toward tenure."

Smith said the history of the Center for Public Service really dates back five years to a group then called the Public Service Roundtable that included, among others, himself; Judith W. Wegner, who was then serving as dean of the School of Law; and Ned Brooks, who was associate provost for health affairs before he retired last summer.

Smith said the group tried to get a handle on what the University was doing. At the time, there was criticism from outside the University that it was not doing enough to serve the state -- a criticism that did not square with what Smith and others knew was going on.

A survey was done to see how other universities across the country organized public service, Smith said. They found out that many universities name a vice chancellor to deal with public service. But former Chancellor Michael Hooker, during a meeting held in the South Building to report on the findings, greeted that suggestion with an emphatic no.

Out of those discussions grew the idea for a center of public service that could give structure, support and direction to the menagerie of activities already under way and to serve as a catalyst for more.

Other universities have similar centers, such as the Haas Center for Public Service at Stanford University and the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University.

What makes Carolina's center different from the others is that it does not focus exclusively on student participation but seeks to find a place and a role for faculty and staff as well.

The center's role, Smith suggested, should be to "serve those who serve." In fulfilling it, the center should seek to support rather than to lead and to offer help without imposing it when none is needed.
University Gazette