I've decided that the end of my term as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement at the University of Minnesota should also signal the end of my Public Engagement blog. I hope to stay involved with some aspects of engagement, and to do significant writing in this area. But my writing should be focused on those aspects, not on daily "news highlights".
Thanks for reading.
Yesterday I received an email announcing the 2007 Fellows of Echoing Green. According to its web site,
Launched in 1987, Echoing Green's mission is to spark social change by identifying, investing, and supporting the world's most exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch. Through a two-year fellowship program, we help our network of visionaries develop new solutions to society’s most difficult problems. These social entrepreneurs and their organizations work to close deeply-rooted social, economic, and political inequities to ensure equal access and to help all individuals reach his/her potential. To date, Echoing Green has invested nearly $25 million in seed and start up grants to over 400 social entrepreneurs and their innovative organizations.
Twenty "Bold Ideas" projects were chosen, involving 25 Fellows. The projects span a broad range, of which some flavor can be gained from this listing of the first four:
On the web site, profiles of each of the projects and fellows are given. Most, but not all, of the fellows appear to be recent graduates, often with advanced degrees. It's heartening to see these talented people use their talent and training to address "society’s most difficult problems."
As I prepare to leave my position as Associate Vice President for Public Engagement and return to the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics, I've been thinking about why I got involved in Public Engagement. Some part of the answer was expressed in a couple of paragraphs from a chapter I wrote a few years ago:
Bloomfield, V.A. "Public Scholarship: An Administrator's View", Ch. 10 in Peters, S.J., Jordan, N.R., Adamek, M. and Alter, T.R. (Eds.) Engaging Campus and Community: The Practice of Public Scholarship in the American Land-Grant University System. Dayton, OH: The Kettering Foundation Press (2005)
I have spent my entire academic career in major public research universities: B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley; Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison; postdoctoral at the University of California, San Diego; and faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Therefore I have grown up imbued with the spirit that public research universities are among the most important and contributory institutions in our society. They provide high-quality but relatively inexpensive teaching to a broad range of talented students, they produce much of the research and scholarship on which our modern civilization depends, and they translate this teaching and research to direct service to their society. Given these essential contributions, it has been puzzling and painful to recognize the steady decline in support (as a fraction of state budgets, not in absolute terms until very recently) of public research universities over the past 20 years. I believe that this relative decline in public support can be largely attributed to increasing neglect-on the parts of both the university and society-of the real meanings of civic engagement and public scholarship.
At the University of Minnesota my administrative position is as Vice Provost for Research and Interim Dean of the Graduate School. I also have maintained active teaching and research as a Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology and Biophysics. This mix of responsibilities, while demanding, assures that I keep uppermost in mind the raison d'etre of a university-to discover, communicate, and apply knowledge-rather than focusing on administrative issues for their own sake. At the same time, my area of research and teaching-molecular biophysics, specifically the polymer physics of DNA-is hardly the sort of stuff that immediately leaps to mind when one thinks of civically engaged scholarship; so I have been forced to confront some questions of definition that I think are crucially important to the proper understanding of public scholarship. To state briefly a point that I will elaborate later, I believe that essentially all research and scholarship being carried out at modern research universities is deserving of recognition as public scholarship. Lack of understanding of this point, by both the public and the universities, is at the root of declining support for public research universities.
Those last two sentences, I still think, are key.
A recent University of Minnesota news story told about a successfully-completed design project by architecture students in our College of Design, to provide sanitation relief for New Orleans refugees and disaster victimes. To quote from the story:
The Clean Hub is a portable, self-sustained structure that provides basic sanitation services. It contains a composting toilet and a 4,400-gallon water storage tank that is replenished by a rooftop tarp that catches rainwater. Electricity from solar panels powers the lights, water filtration system, and composting toilet.
Under the direction of John Dwyer and Tom Westbrook, students in the Studio 4 architecture class started with an empty shipping container and, over the course of a semester, turned it into a structure capable of providing relief for people in great need.
"This will be the only functioning [sanitation] infrastructure in the whole neighborhood," said Dwyer.
According to Westbrook, the students were aided by the donation of many materials for the clean hub, including the shipping container itself, all of the steel, the toilet, solar panels, water tank, water filter, and sink. And the Clean Hub almost exclusively uses recycled or everyday materials, meaning the hub could be mass produced with relative ease and constructed on site using nearby materials.
For students, it was a chance to put their talents to work in producing something that may have a lasting legacy; in fact, FEMA is interested in the students' prototype.
Aaron Wilson, who worked on the "tank team," said that after three years of learning through books, it was wonderful to build something that will be used somewhere. "It was an amazing learning experience," he said.
"The students worked far more than they should have for this level of class," added Westbrook. What they were able to produce was "nothing short of a miracle."
An animation of the Clean Hub prototype taking shape can be seen at http://www1.umn.edu/umnnews/movie/perspective.html.
Medical and dental students at the University of Minnesota are not just learning their professions, they're learning how their professions need to fit into the life of the state. An article by Deane Morrison in today's UM eNews tells about Minnesota's Future Doctors program:
As an immigrant to the United States from Liberia in 2001, Georgette McCauley has seen more than her share of turmoil. But there's one thing in particular she would like to change in her home country: young women's lack of health information.
"I'd like to go back to Liberia someday and educate young women on how to prevent sexual disease and how to take better care of their bodies," says McCauley, who has just completed her freshman year at St. Mary's University of Minnesota.
She is one of 23 Minnesota college students in a new joint program of the University's Medical School and Mayo Medical School to help increase the numbers of minority, immigrant and rural doctors in the state.
Called Minnesota's Future Doctors, the program is the brainchild of two U medical students, Gareth Forde and Matt Fitzpatrick. It brings in high-ability students during the summer and the academic year to learn about topics like the science behind medicine and how to take the Medical College Admission Test. This summer's inaugural group has already toured the Mayo Clinic and UMD's Medical School, worked on a volunteer project, and shadowed doctors to see how medicine is practiced on a daily basis.
"[Forde and Fitzpatrick] wanted to create future classmates who were more reflective of Minnesota," says program director Jo Peterson. "This project aims at narrowing the disparity and increasing the percentage of persons of color.
"The reason that's important is that persons who work with doctors within their same cultural values [and] community of color feel they have better health care, and they continue to work with that doctor."
According to an AAMC report 2006 and Minnesota Department of Health 2007, percentages of physicians in Minnesota aren't representative of minority communities.
Today's posting is a contribution from Ben Winchester, of the Center for Small Towns at the University of Minnesota-Morris, a small liberal arts campus in the western part of the state.
The Center for Small Towns (CST), based at the University of Minnesota – Morris, has been quite successful over the years by regularly involving talented students in our small towns across western Minnesota. The involvement of faculty, however, has been episodic. To address this challenge, we received a grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation to establish a “Small Town Faculty and Student Fellows” program that connects regional development problems and/or issues with the research interests of UMM faculty. Three regional development projects are now underway this summer!
Project 1: Collaborative School Bus Routing
UMM faculty: Dr. Peh Ng, Professor of Mathematics.
The goal of this project is to develop models of school bus routes both within a school district and between five school districts in west-central Minnesota.
The project entails determining optimum models for vehicle routing across our area in a cost- and time-effective way. By determining the location and number of students in the dispersed areas, together with time, models can be built to determine routes, and flows, of student pickups. Mathematically, these are referred to as combinatorial problems. The solutions would allow our school districts to save transportation funds (at the approximate rate of $1.60 per mile) while at the same time providing an efficient solution to overlapping geographic areas brought about by open enrollment. The schools involved in this project are Chokio-Alberta, Clinton-Graceville-Beardsley, Cyrus, Hancock, and Morris.
Project 2: Skills, Careers, Employees and Employers
UMM faculty: Dr. Engin Sungur, Professor of Statistics.
The goal of this project is to identify gaps between employers in the region who have entry-level positions that will lead to higher-wage positions and those individuals seeking employment. Employers report they are unable to find workers who have the necessary skills to enter employment. Prospective employees report they are not able to find entry-level positions in the region. In order to build skills that qualify family members to hold better jobs within the region, it is imperative that we understand what skills are required for positions that allow individuals to move into high-demand, higher-wage positions, directly or through career ladders. This will be completed through interviews and/or a survey of employers, employees, and employee training programs.
The Jobs, Careers and Employability workgroup requested this project. This workgroup is a subcommittee of the Family Economic Success program provided by the West Central Initiative with funding from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The workgroup will identify a series of questions for employers, adult job seekers and K-12 organizations that provides data to better understand the current gap between the skills that current perspective employees present to the labor market with the skills currently required by employers. In this way, programs or other strategies can be developed to address the gap rather than making assumptions about the needed skills.
Project 3: The Value of Culture and Education
UMM faculty: Carol Marxen, Associate Professor of Education.
The goal of this project is to work with the Long Prairie-Grey Eagle High School to demonstrate the value of culture and education to the Hispanic community. It has been found that Hispanic students that finish high school generally do not pursue post-secondary educational opportunities. The research components of this project will develop curricular, co-curricular, and community-based integrative strategies. The objectives are to provide professional development opportunities for teachers, connect the community to the school to provide role models and mentors, as well as develop and implement a team teaching environment.
This application of knowledge is a perfect example of our land-grant responsibility in action. As our small towns and rural places have changed, we too must change the way we serve our neighbors – and do this in a way that contribute to the sustainable future of our region. For more information about these projects, or if you have any questions, please contact Ben Winchester at (320) 589-6451 or visit http://www.centerforsmalltowns.org.