By Leslie Boney, Vice Provost for Outreach and Engagement
I saw the future and the past of land-grant universities all rolled into one package last week – watching the assembly line at the Scott Farms sweet potato processing center in Wilson County, NC.
We were in day two of NC State’s “Connecting in North Carolina” tour, planned by Chip Futrell and Kyle Wallace with the McKimmon Center for Extension and Continuing Education, to get new NC State faculty and staff out into the state they now live in.
There we were, on a cool fall morning, an eclectic group of 20 faculty and staff, folks from multiple countries and disciplines, watching as thousands of varying-sized, brown-skinned sweet potatoes were washed, sorted and boxed inside a giant metal building in the town of Lucama. We listened to the plant manager describe the operation. We heard about the role NC State plant scientists had played in developing the longest-shelf-life, toughest, sweetest sweet potato on the market and how cooperative extension agents had advised on improving crop yields and business practices.
But it was during the Q&A and side conversations that I was really reminded of the full value a university can bring to the state and the communities and the people that it serves. I don’t want to know what our nuclear engineer was thinking, but an environmental engineer thought about waste disposal. A sociologist wondered about wages and employees, and a women’s studies expert noticed the interactions of subgroups of workers. A climatologist considered how flexible the temperature band was that would support optimal crop production. A graphics designer and a communications professor paid special attention to the boxes the product was packaged in. Logistics folks looked at the storage bins and bar codes, and a wood products professor at the construction of the pallets. Marketers mused about what it would take to sell more sweet potatoes in St. Paul or Sao Paolo. We all wondered how a small-time farming operation grew to be the biggest sweet potato exporter in the biggest sweet potato state in the nation.
We need that wonder and engagement now more than ever. In the foreword of a new book called Land Grant Universities of the Future, Peter McGrath lays out a challenge: “Universities that are not engaged with their communities in the 21st century will soon find themselves disengaged from any meaningful relevance to the citizenry of the United States.”
The communities that surround us are in many ways a microcosm of the world, facing many of the grand challenges of our age – loss of population for some; explosive population growth for others; waste disposal; budget shortfalls; aging and diversifying populations; growing income inequality and persistent poverty; skilled worker shortages. The variety of these challenges provides opportunities for researchers in all fields to conduct meaningful research and to test out new ideas close to home, and for graduates of all sorts to go to work for companies or organizations hammering away to solve problems.
And they are. Researchers are testing out hybrids and herbicides at the Upper Coastal Plain Research Center, and extension agents are advising on growing strategies for Scott Farms, but we saw a lot more than that during our tour. The leaders of the Martin Millennium Academy, a Spanish immersion K-8 school we visited in Edgecombe County, learned from the College of Education’s Northeast Leadership Academy. Wilson’s Gig East Exchange credits the Institute for Emerging Issues with jumpstarting innovation efforts in the region. We met NC State alumni who are leading companies, serving on boards, running for office.
Make no mistake: our communities aren’t just waiting around for the universities to find solutions for them. They are discovering their own paths and we can learn from their creativity and insights. The Carolinas Gateway Partnership in Nash and Edgecombe counties is taking advantage of its convergence of rail lines and highways to attract a new intermodal terminal that will attract more companies to come nearby. Farmers still trying to recover from the loss of tobacco income are finding hemp might come close to replacing the income they’ve lost; others are producing existing farm products at greater scale or moving toward more value-added production. Wilson recognized the off-beat appeal of a favorite outsider artist and has made his colorful wind sculptures a central part of its recovering downtown. Outside investors from Raleigh saw the appeal of a dilapidated, iconic mill in Rocky Mount and worked with locals to turn it into a beachhead for urban renewal.
Later in his foreword, McGrath goes on to suggest that “our nation’s communities – rural, urban, and in between – urgently need to partner as equals with the land-grant universities so that together they can work on solutions to the problems of their communities.”
It’s in this partnership of “equals” that the real opportunity lies. The Cooperative Extension Service and ag research stations have known this for decades: crop research is done in dialogue, not in theory.
But the same principles apply in other fields as well. It’s one thing to talk about the theory of community-centered design; it’s another for the College of Design to deploy that process as the people of Princeville work to rebuild the nation’s oldest African-American incorporated town after a flood. It would be easier for the College of Education to talk about what it is like to be a principal of a high-poverty, hard-to-staff, low-performing school than it is to create the kind of school-specific solutions their Northeast Leadership Academy offers. Learning entrepreneurship, or production line design, or new market development or disaster communication is richer, and more useful, if it is done in a real-world setting.
That’s why we need more internship programs like Rural Works!, coops and service learning courses that bring our students into closer relationship with the people they will be working with after graduation before graduation. And why, if we want to maintain “meaningful relevance,” we need to keep doing programs like Connecting in North Carolina to connect our faculty and staff to their new neighbors.