Collaboration, partnership are key to meeting UNC Tomorrow goals

When most people think of a silo, they picture a tall, cylindrical tower used for storing grain or animal feed.

When Mike Smith talks about silos, he is more likely to mean the invisible structures that exist within academia — silos used by various disciplines and departments to separate and store the body of knowledge created by their faculty members.

Smith, Carolina’s vice chancellor of public service and engagement and dean of the School of Government, readily concedes that academic silos are essential. They differentiate and preserve specific kinds of knowledge, as a traditional university structure requires.

But those silos, if left in stubborn isolation, prevent the kind of co-mingling of knowledge that can spawn creative solutions to real-world problems. And seeking those kinds of solutions lies at the heart of the UNC Tomorrow initiative launched by UNC President Erskine Bowles and the Board of Governors nearly a year ago.

Bowles’ UNC Tomorrow Commission developed a long list of recommendations for how UNC campuses could step up to help the people of the state meet the challenges they face in the areas of global readiness, access to higher education, improving public education, economic transformation and community development, health and the environment. On May 1, each UNC campus responded with its own list of proposals or existing programs to address the UNC Tomorrow recommendations.

The UNC Tomorrow initiative is not so much about tearing down silos, Smith told the University Board of Trustees last month, as it is removing the barriers that get in the way of the UNC system making a bigger difference in the lives of the people of North Carolina than it does already.

Not only must various departments and disciplines seek opportunities for collaboration, he said, the 17 members of the UNC system must also find new ways to partner with, and learn from, each other.

Piloting a partnership
In no area will that collaborative spirit be more vital than the Community-Campus Partnership. Carolina will serve as a catalyst for the partnership by piloting the program with an underserved community whose needs most closely match Carolina’s areas of expertise, Smith said.

The needs of a community do not come in neatly separated bundles, Smith said. They are inextricably linked and reinforce each other in ways that cannot be fully understood by focusing on one problem to the exclusion of the others. For example, a family that lacks good health care also lacks employment opportunities or access to good schools.

“We are going to focus on getting it right with one community but that is not where we want to end,” Smith said. “We want to work with other communities and we want to help other universities work with their communities.”

A benefit of this process will be the need for faculty experts to break out of their specialized silos in order to respond to these challenges through interdisciplinary teamwork, Smith said.

“The communities’ problems aren’t organized as we organize ourselves on campus,” Smith said. “They don’t care about disciplines. They don’t care about departments. It makes zero difference to them and they shouldn’t care about that.”

A key challenge — and something that will make Carolina even stronger over time — is the ability to work across silos, he said. “It will help the community, but it will help us down the road in terms of other initiatives and activities and partnerships that we want to take on as a campus.”

Smith said Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Bernadette Gray-Little reinforced Carolina’s commitment to the pilot program by allocating $350,000 of existing resources to seed it.

Tracking progress
Another challenge for Carolina and the other campuses is keeping track of the many things each school already does to serve the state.

Based on the work of a committee chaired by Carol Tresolini, associate provost for academic initiatives, with support from Lynn Williford, assistant provost for institutional research and assessment, a work group will be created to develop a database of Carolina’s public service in an accessible format that will be regularly updated.

In a related vein, Smith said, the University needs to develop stronger assessment tools to gauge the effectiveness of its public service — both things it is already engaged in and those it will undertake as a result of UNC Tomorrow.

He also praised the work of the various committees who first met on Feb. 14 and had the University’s response ready to forward to UNC General Administration by the May 1 deadline.

“In that 10-week period, these folks worked enormously hard,” Smith said. “I’m not sure we’ve ever done anything of this magnitude this quickly. It was really impressive the way people dropped everything, or nearly everything, to make this work.”

Student involvement
Smith said in formulating this first-phase response, the University encouraged the students to get involved and decide exactly how they should respond. That level of engagement among students, he said, was one thing that made Carolina’s response distinctive from that of other universities.

One student idea was to establish an online public service volunteer database that would allow community organizations to post service opportunities, and in turn, allow students to post feedback and share their volunteer experiences with other students who might want to get involved.

Another idea was to study the possibility of establishing a campus-based Latino center that would address the needs of Latino students at Carolina and other issues facing Latinos throughout the state.

Academic phase
The completion of the report marks the end of the first phase of the UNC Tomorrow project and the start of a second phase focused on academics.

That effort will be led by Gray-Little, who is overseeing the University’s overall response. The second-phase report must be submitted to the Board of Governors by December.

Smith said each phase of the UNC Tomorrow initiative was vital and each response should be viewed as a blueprint. “This is not a report. It is a response. It is really a plan for going forward, and it is one that we will, and should, be held accountable for.”

To view the five-page summary of Carolina’s first-phase response, refer to www.unc.edu/pse/files/SummaryUNCTFinalReport.pdf.