1. 08/03/12 Toward Entrepreneurial Universities for the 21st Century | Stanford Social Innovation Review
EDUCATION
Toward Entrepreneurial Universities for the 21st Century
What are public research institutions doing or what should they do to fulfill their compact with the citizens of their states?
By Rick Cherwitz | 1 | Mar. 5, 2012
W ith skyrocketing tuition, shrinking budgets, increasing demands for performance-based measurements of academic success, and
mounting assaults on the research mission of universities, it is time to ask: what are public research institutions doing—or what sho
they do—to fulfill their compact with the citizens of their states?
One among many viable approaches is the University of Texas at Austin's (UT-Austin) Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) initiative, a
community-university collaboration that seeks to foster "citizen-scholars"—students who can offer more than narrow disciplinary knowled
society. IE has been endorsed by presidents and chancellors from such prestigious institutions as the Ohio State University, Stanford, the
University of California, Syracuse, and the University of North Carolina. Working in cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional teams, IE
participants have found solutions to overcrowded emergency rooms and have used the scholarly methodology of oral history to implement
programs for increasing diversity and promoting culturally-sensitive communication in local schools.
IE students take to heart the ethical obligation to discover and put to work knowledge that makes a difference. They understand that the
mission of higher education should include more than being a repository of knowledge bestowed upon a fortunate few—that it simultaneo
should include being a partner of the larger society with an intellectually adventurous and fierce civic orientation. The program also reveals
students how local, national, and global problems are complex and cannot be solved by any one academic discipline or sector of society.
Yet serious challenges remain. To fully realize the ethical imperative to make a difference requires academe to confront stark realities: inflex
administrative structures, historically embedded practices, status-quo thinking, and inertia.
Consider just a few of the challenges confronting citizen-scholars:
How do scholars, who live primarily in a world of ideas, develop the rhetorical skills needed to incubate and sustain projects requiring fis
and intellectual investment by stakeholders inside and outside the university-skills typically disassociated from the scholarly enterprise?
How can faculty integrate, synthesize, and unify knowledge to permit solutions to complex social, civic, and ethical problems? How do w
ensure the continued proliferation of specialized knowledge, while concurrently encouraging renaissance thinking?
How can faculty who engage in public scholarship flourish, given traditional performance assessment? Incentive systems fail to encourage
public scholarship and may actually devalue research that simultaneously contributes to society. What changes to institutional reward struc
are requisite for academic engagement?
How should academic institutions recalibrate methods for creating and delivering knowledge? Because historically original thought, lone
discovery, and disciplinary contribution are considered more important than team work, what changes are needed to address problems
requiring multi-institutional, cross-disciplinary, and collaborative forms of investigation?
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2. 08/03/12 Toward Entrepreneurial Universities for the 21st Century | Stanford Social Innovation Review
Although diagnosis of the problem is a first step, faculty, administrators, and campus leaders have yet to discern fully how to make the chan
resistant academy more responsive to the needs of society. It is time to reflect on how to harness the vast intellectual assets of universities as
lever for social good.
Fashioning genuine university-community synergies must move beyond platitude, becoming part of the day-to-day routines of universitie
raise these issues not because they immediately or easily can be answered, but because their articulation itself may be controversial, requirin
careful debate and discussion. If we can agree that these or other questions accurately capture the challenges confronting citizen-scholars, th
we are one step closer to realizing genuine academic engagement. Nevertheless, let me at least offer a few examples of what might be done t
address several of these challenges.
First, public research universities should begin to deliver more cross-disciplinary, graduate-level courses on topics such as innovation,
entrepreneurship, leadership, ethics, and communication. When institutions like UT-Austin and the University of Washington experime
with this type of curriculum in their graduate schools, it was discovered that these courses equip graduate students with the necessary
knowledge and skills not only to successfully develop and sustain their research but also to put their projects to work for the benefit of societ
Second, we must seriously revisit the issue of faculty assessment and tenure and promotion, much as the Ohio State University president E
Gordon Gee and Syracuse University chancellor Nancy Cantor are doing on their campuses. This should include a discussion of whether t
traditional three-pronged approach to faculty contribution (research, teaching, service) makes sense. These may no longer be discrete
categories, and perhaps the time has come to recognize the vital role of service (engagement) in scholarship.
Third, in an effort to integrate knowledge, engage the community, and recalibrate methods for discovering and transmitting knowledge,
universities should offer "action seminars"—team-based collaborations among faculty and students from multiple disciplines, and stakehol
from the public and private sectors. Action seminars would not start with academic disciplines or particular bodies of knowledge, but wou
instead focus on specific problems facing society, such as the environment and health care, seeking to produce a whole that is more powerfu
than the sum of the parts. Outcomes could include public policy proposals, corporate strategies and partnerships, funded and published
research, new ways of discovering and communicating knowledge, and spin-off communities of practice.
Fourth, universities should deliver academic-community mentorships, working with both graduate students in academic disciplines of int
and with community liaisons inside their proposed majors to find important connections between academic fields and their career aspirati
These mentorships would allow undergraduate students to thoughtfully pick an academic major and devise a program of study, and would
make seamless connections between academic disciplines and social problems. This initiative might even reduce time to degree and increa
retention, thus saving money and enabling universities to educate more students.
Whether it's solutions like these or others, addressing the challenges of creating engaged universities must not be a platform for disgruntled
faculty or external groups motivated by a political agenda. On the academic side, this cause requires prominent scholars to join the
conversation. While understanding the distinctive mission of research institutions, many distinguished faculty also recognize the need to b
connections between universities and communities. Moreover, they refuse to apologize for being scholars. Through example, they can
concretely illustrate how "research" (thought and reflection) and "engagement" (action) are not inherently an either-or; each propels and
contributes to the other.
Academic engagement is laudable in its own right and therefore ought to be pursued by faculty and students, and vigorously facilitated and
supported by administrators. Yet there may be a more practical and urgent reason for academics to engage their communities: if, for examp
we expect the public—legislators, students, parents—to pay higher education's increasing sticker price, then building more relevant
connections between academe and society is a must. As former UT-Austin president Larry Faulkner bluntly put it: "The antidote to
irrelevance is engagement of the university with the real needs and aspirations of the supporting society."
is a professor of communication, and the founder and director of the Intellectual Entrepreneurship Consortium in the Division of Diversity and Commun
Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, a presidential portfolio created by president William Powers, Jr. to foster “dynamic community university partnership
designed to transform lives.”
COMMEN
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3. 08/03/12 Toward Entrepreneurial Universities for the 21st Century | Stanford Social Innovation Review
BY Removals Fulham ON
March 8, 2012 12:20 AM
The given opinion of professor Rick Cherwitz in the p
above is really adequate and applicable to our current situation, where the tuitions are really skyrocketing on the background o
the shrinking budgets and more students see going to college as an luxury. So I think that if every public institution should fo
the lead of the University of Texas at Austin’s and its Intellectual Entrepreneurship initiative, where not only acquiring of deg
and respectively making more money are in the main focus of the students, but also that they become aware and taking positi
in local, national, and global problems, as part of their obligations, will bring a major changes in the society. Such changes are
going to result in everyone’s lives and I am absolutely agree with the stated opinion in the post.I just hope that more people w
be able to read it! I want to ask if that initiative is going to be accessible for online courses?
C o pyr i g h t © 2
D esi g ned and devel o ped b y Ho p S tud
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