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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 IV
The Connective Corridor* represents not only a transportation system, but also a means of making the rich arts and cultural infrastructure of Syracuse much more conspicuous. At each point along the route, there will be opportunities to engage the businesses and neighborhoods along it. It is also our own way of linking our hilltop campus with our city campus, as the route ends at The Warehouse!
*Click thumbnail to view a map of the Connective Corridor. Visit the Connective Corridor website for additional information.
National Grid, the lead corporate partner in the project, is sponsoring a Connective Corridor Design Competition with a grant through the Economic Development Plan approved by the New York State Public Service Commission. We hope this competition will attract designers from all over the nation (and world), including New York's Capital Region. Also, we are currently sponsoring local focus groups--with business owners, school children, arts organizations, city agencies and officials, neighborhood groups, and campus colleagues--to provide ideas and specifications to bring a local context to their work from the start.
This past fall semester, the Industrial Design Studio class in the College of Visual and Performing Arts developed concepts to assist the University's transition to The Warehouse. This semester, the class-taught by Don Carr and Denise Heckman, both professors of industrial and interactive design-is developing design concepts for the Corridor and building models of the ideas proposed by the students.
Our design students are working collaboratively with classes in other schools-including the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Information Studies, and the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science.
For example, students in a course called Building With a Conscience, taught by a professor of law and public policy and a professor of fine arts, are concentrating on one important landmark along the Corridor, working with Syracuse's Grace Episcopal Church to create a plan for the site's historic preservation. In the Spring and Fall 2006 semesters, students from our Newhouse School will develop a public relations strategy for the Corridor, and a capstone class in information studies is researching methods to integrate technology into the Corridor with broadband access and interactive kiosks.
These courses and projects give our students a first-hand look at how many people and sectors are required to come together to realize ideas in the revitalization of our cities. The ground is prepared for sustainable partnerships that create capital for the future.
Creating Capital for the FutureThe notion of sustainable connections brings me back to the central premise that Scholarship in Action serves us all well--campus and community alike--as it sparks an entrepreneurial attitude that invites diverse participants to pool ideas creatively. Such "communities of experts"--some scholars, some practitioners, some citizens, some students--seem especially well suited to address the most pressing concerns of our shifting economies and environments.
As innovation takes place today, it often requires horizontal rather than hierarchical collaborations. It demands pooled expertise, shared intellectual "property," and fluid work-groups with virtual and real connectivity, as Nick Donofrio (another wonderful connection between our institutions as an alum of both RPI and Syracuse) noted in IBM's Global Innovation Outlook report.29 In this context, it is critical to communicate, not just to connect,30 and this is what our faculty and students are doing in the arts, in neighborhood revitalization projects, in their partnerships with K-12 schools.
Encouragingly, these communities of experts also often attract a very diverse group of participants, including faculty and students committed to meeting the challenges of urban communities in transition. George Sanchez, a professor of history and American culture at the University of Southern California, writes eloquently of the "tangled web of diversity and democracy" that occurs when campuses cross the streets into their communities.31
And when we venture into these collaborations, not only do we see America's long-standing pluralism, but we also see the changing demography of immigration, blurring the boundaries of global and local. The world's peoples and cultures are in our backyard, and so are the pressing issues of the day--environmental sustainability, hunger and nutrition, inter-group conflict-along with keys to their solution-economic development, technology transfer and grassroots community entrepreneurship.
Scholarship in Action becomes a pathway toward innovation and a pipeline to engage a diverse talent pool for our future. And the rewards flow in both directions. Universities can spur collaborations and jump start projects that might never happen otherwise. In Syracuse, for example, our Warehouse project, which opened to great community excitement after a very speedy nine-month renovation, has been a shot of energy that, in turn, has spurred other groups to consider projects in the vicinity. For our part, the space and location provide our students with a birds-eye view of urban architecture and design, and every day seems to bring them new opportunities for collaboration.
Sometimes the impetus for collaboration comes from outside the university--as when Governor Pataki urged the siting of the Center of Excellence headquarters on the brownfield in downtown Syracuse, rather than up on our hill--and it is vital that we be positioned to respond in kind.
Very exciting projects can come directly from the needs and desires of the community, as we see, for example, in the South Side of Syracuse where residents are contacting us to mobilize expertise to aid in neighborhood revitalization and economic development. Once the word gets out, it spreads fast, and new business plans are being proposed every day as part of the South Side Connect project.
Similarly, local agencies and not-for-profit organizations often join to originate projects that draw on the relevant expertise of our students and faculty in very exciting ways. This is what happened when the Samaritan Center in Syracuse enlisted the geographers from our Maxwell School, along with faculty and students from Le Moyne College, to map patterns of food distribution and access in the most challenged neighborhoods of Syracuse, as part of a multi-group Hunger Project.
This collaboration, in turn, was so successful that the Rosamond Gifford Foundation in Syracuse teamed up with SU to support a "community geographer" to map the assets and challenges of our city along dimensions ranging from health-care delivery to environmental blight.
As such projects and collaborations take off, they build on their successes and contribute not only to the vitality of our cities but also to the opportunities for Scholarship in Action for our faculty and students. We garner opportunities for innovation in new arenas, and others begin to invest in our growth as well--as we are certainly seeing in the industry collaborations in the Center of Excellence.
At issue here, then, is a cycle of capital creation (of people, ideas, collaborations) in which both higher education and the public--businesses, residents, and practitioners--benefit, and in which we position ourselves together to produce solutions for our future. While John Marshall probably had a more monastic view in mind when he spoke of private colleges and universities filling that much needed space free of government, our 21st century collaborations in the marketplace can play to our many strengths and our core purposes, preparing the next generation of discoveries and discoverers.
Expanding the Upstate Connected CommunitiesFinally, let me end where I began--with the Erie Canal and its band of workers and inventors who showed what Peter Bernstein called an "unwearied zeal" for overcoming obstacles and spurring innovation. We can do that, too, today.
We can move beyond our silos of expertise and local interests, move up and down a new Upstate Pathway of Connected Communities, co-creating in the arts from Buffalo to Syracuse to Troy, pursuing stem cell research at medical schools from New York City to Rochester to Albany, forging a Central New York Humanities Corridor, as the Mellon Foundation is helping Syracuse, Cornell, and Rochester to do.
We can push forward separately and together, to pioneer in biotechnology, as is happening at RPI, or to explore other emerging and critically important fields, as the state's Centers of Excellence are doing. Just as in the days of the Erie Canal, each of our nested communities, and indeed each of our institutions--private or public--will benefit from an infusion of collaborative energy, especially if we work strategically to focus within our local arenas on areas of strength and if we all focus on sharing knowledge generously across the Upstate Pathway of Connected Communities. Then we will surely create some wonderful capital for our future.
Acknowledgements
This speech was written in collaboration with Jo Thomas with substantial collaborative input from Ed Bogucz, and editorial and technical assistance from Kevin Morrow, Sonita Surratt, Nicci Brown and Kalpana Srinivas.
29IBM, Global Innovation Outlook Report, see http://t1d.www-306.cacheibm.com/e-business/ondemand/us/pdf/IBM_GIO_2004.pdf
30Vartan Gregorian.
31George Sanchez, "Crossing Figueroa: The Tangled Web of Diversity and Democracy," Foreseeable Futures #4 (Ann Arbor: Imagining America, 2005).