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Universities and Their Connected Communities:
Creating Capital for the Future
Presidential Lecture Series
Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York
4 p.m. Monday, March 6, 2006

Part II

The new $35 million research facility, designed for a brownfield site* in downtown Syracuse (on the site of the original Smith-Corona typewriter factory and 40 yards from the bank of the original Erie Canal) will be a "real world" test-bed for new technologies.

*Click on thumbnail to see a larger image of the site.

The partners involved in this Center of Excellence seek to improve indoor environmental quality, the sustainability of urban ecosystems, and the quality and security of our water resources, including drinking water.²⁰ And, much along the model that I am suggesting, each institution (and its industry-community collaborators) is already engaged in work that plays to its particular strengths. RPI, for example, is leading a project on "Intelligent Facades," to develop new technologies for building facades, including the generation of solar power.

While each institution has at least one signature focus in the Center--be it the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in renewable energy, SU in indoor air quality, RPI in lighting technologies, or Clarkson in outdoor air quality--many, if not all, of the projects engage multiple partners.

By pooling and sharing knowledge, experience, and experimental facilities, innovation will be spurred and technology transferred. Economic growth will occur, and the urban ecosystems all along our Upstate Pathway of Connected Communities can be improved. The Syracuse University College of Law, for example, can contribute expertise from its New York State Science and Technology Law Center, while RPI can draw on the region's leading research park, the Rensselaer Technology Park. New York State Centers for Advanced Technology have valuable and relevant expertise to contribute, with two centers at RPI and one at SU.

We can also collaborate to build and sustain our social environments, and the Erie Canal offers us a model there, too. The immigrants in search of better lives who flowed through the physical network of the Canal brought with them new ideas that energized their communities. The same thing is happening today in each of our communities, as new waves of immigration bring the vibrancy of cultural pluralism to the Upstate Pathway of Connected Communities, and the network of colleges and universities from Albany to Buffalo continually attract fresh new learners. In a knowledge economy, diverse intellectual and social capital drives the innovation that creates new opportunities.

Connecting in the Public Good

Today, I will spend my time outlining some of the ventures--or should I say adventures--that Syracuse University is pursuing in our particular community-campus context, outlining a strategy of engagement that is intended both to play to our strengths and to invite partners from our Pathway (even from downstate!) to join with us, as many colleagues from RPI already do.

Let me start with a vision or context for our work at Syracuse. Our strategic vision--which I'm calling "Scholarship in Action"--builds on the engagement of students and faculty members with practitioners and communities of experts in partnerships that recognize no geographical or disciplinary boundaries. Scholarship in Action is precisely that--an approach to discovery that embeds our research and our disciplines in the "work" of the world, testing ideas and generating knowledge with an eye towards solutions for our future, including those that derive from what we sometimes narrowly frame as "basic research."²¹

The key to Scholarship in Action is the depth and breadth of connections that we can forge between the "work" of the campus and the "work" of our communities, at home and abroad. Of course, with technology we often think that we have made connections, yet, as Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, warned recently, even in an era of technology, "connectivity does not guarantee communication."²² Instead, whether we collaborate virtually or in physical space, we must connect in ways that let us speak and listen to each other.

This communication spans locales. It occurs in our public schools, in the cultural and civic and business institutions of our cities, and in the partnerships and connections that bind our faculty and students to the citizens of the city. If we can cross groups, cultures and tradition to address locally problems that occur across the globe, we can build coalitions that will engage the pluralism around us as a major asset to the American dream, even if that is a dream not yet realized.

This is particularly true as we tackle some of the most pressing issues in our communities--environmental sustainability, urban education, cultural and religious pluralism, health and nutrition, and so forth. It is also true in the arts and humanities, as the creative process is enhanced by the challenge of different voices in the mix.

The quality of our faculty's scholarship and our students' education will be substantially enhanced in a context of collaboration that generates new perspectives on the world, on ideas, on people, and on our disciplines. In this way, community engagement is a genuinely "generative intellectual practice,"²³ as David Scobey of Bates College has described it, with substantial benefits to the core work of our campuses.

Building a Nested Community: Up and Down the Hill in Syracuse

As we pursue a blueprint for Scholarship in Action that creates capital for our future, it is important to look closely at our communities--to do better at understanding the terrain. Like many Upstate cities, Syracuse has seen the transition--perhaps disruption is a better term--from a manufacturing to a knowledge economy. As populations have sought new footholds for prosperity, we saw the flight of industries and population to the suburbs. We lost a host of manufacturing operations, even those of the corporation for whom our beloved Carrier Dome is named.

Buildings full of history were boarded up, and during the 1990s the City of Syracuse issued more than twice as many demolition permits as building permits.²⁴

We have felt the painful after-effects of industrialization: Onondaga Lake, near the heart of Syracuse, became so polluted that nothing could live in it.

Although it is still beautiful seen from afar, the lake is now a Superfund site, and a massive effort is underway to reclaim its vitality and health. It is also at the heart of the sacred territory of the Onondaga Nation, and we have much to learn from the Nation, not only about the science, but also about the spirit that surrounds this lake and its culture and history.

Our social landscape, too, has been littered with walls and depressions that have cut many people off from access to opportunity and mobility. Our poor and minority populations need access to the new economy, but our depleted urban school system is hard-pressed to meet those needs. Add to that the barriers of language, culture, and history that face the new immigrant populations working so hard to establish a secure place in the economy, and it might be hard to imagine that we can make a difference. But it is absolutely critical that we do.

Become Opportunities

Challenges In particular, as we strategically build campus-community partnerships to harness the intellectual capital of local institutions--Syracuse, SUNY-ESF, SUNY-Upstate, Le Moyne College, Onondaga Community College--we start by recognizing these particular areas of need and focus on relevant institutional and community strengths for creating capital.

In our case, much of the technology transfer and economic development emphasis in Syracuse centers on biotechnology and environmental sustainability--water resources, indoor built environment, alternative energy. The Center of Excellence, the Syracuse Technology Garden, and CNY Medtech, an association of medical technology firms, are only a few of the groups trying to share knowledge generously and to address pressing community issues while also spurring economic growth.

Creating economic capital also means finding opportunities to support local residents as entrepreneurs in ways that enrich the neighborhoods of the inner city with sustainable resources for the future. The Gifford Foundation of Syracuse, for example, has an ambitious multi-year commitment to the South Side neighborhood, and we have also joined with resident groups on the South Side in areas that include the arts, health, housing, technology, and entrepreneurship.

These programs build upon and substantially expand the activities of our faculty and departments in arenas where Scholarship in Action can flourish. Here is just one example (click to play video below), in which Andrew Covell, director of information technology for the Whitman School of Management, describes some of the activities initiated several years ago by the school's entrepreneurship program.²⁵

view Part III >>

²⁰Syracuse Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems, Progress Report: Oct. 2005.
²¹See a discussion of the contributions of basic research to the public good in solutionsforourfuture.org.
²²Vartan Gregorian, "The Pursuit of Knowledge: Grounding Technology in Both Science and Significance," The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9 Dec. 2005: B5. ²³David Scobey, Overview of the History, Mission, and Key Activities of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, Bates College, December, 2005. ²⁴William Coplin, director, Public Affairs Program, Syracuse University Community Outreach Partnership Center Abstract, Fall 2004: 24. ²⁵http://whitman.syr.edu/eee/southside/members.html#groove

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