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.