H. Martin Lancaster, President
North Carolina Community College System
"Changing Architecture"
North Carolina Community College System Conference 2006
Keynote Address
Sunday, October 8
Koury Center, Greensboro, NC
(This is the speech President Lancaster planned to deliver. His remarks were replaced by a surprise tribute from colleagues to his service to community colleges.)
Thank you. I am as always honored to be able to speak to the System Conference. This is the fourth time I have had such an opportunity, and I am particularly privileged to be designated the keynote speaker for a gathering with such an inspiring theme.
This year’s theme is "Celebrating Learning Colleges: Showcasing Our Success." As your conference program says:
By embracing the concept of the Learning College, we place the student first and provide educational experiences for learners anyplace and anytime. This commitment represents a significant dedication to changing the traditional architecture of education.
I like this theme and statement first, because I'm in a mood to celebrate. This academic year is my tenth one as President of the North Carolina Community College System. I can now count myself as something of a veteran and enjoy the chance to look back at accomplishments as well as forward to challenges.
Second, we all believe in putting students first. In a system as big as ours, it's easy to spend every day tangled in the details of funding and planning and strategizing. The only reason we do any of it is to help our students, as Dallas Herring says, to take "one more step" toward where they want to be in life.
And finally, I like that word "architecture." When I was growing up on a farm in Wayne County, I dreamed of being an architect -- designing buildings that looked good and worked well. But my rural high school didn't offer enough math to get me into NC State's design school -- and this was before the days of community colleges, dual enrollment and Huskins courses. So instead I went to Carolina and prepared for what has been and is a very satisfying career in law, public service and now education -- building lives instead of structures.
However, I can't resist returning to that early ambition and have built my remarks today around that reference to "changing the traditional architecture of education."
As I thought about what I wanted to say, I looked over my speeches from the past three conferences, and I came to the rather obvious conclusion that I should start with the literal definition of "architecture of education" -- the buildings in which our students learn. At my second conference, in October of 2000, we were just a few days away from Election Day. Maybe others remember that day because someone they liked -- or didn't like -- won a public office. In North Carolina's community colleges, however, we remember it as the day that the nation's largest public higher education bond passed by a whopping margin, pumping 600 million dollars into new buildings and renovation and repair of existing buildings for community colleges, plus $2.5 billion for public universities.
I asked for your help then, and I got it, as leaders, faculty, staff, students, trustees and friends of community colleges helped roll up a victory margin of more than 70 percent!
What kind of changes has that money and the other dollars that investment has attracted made in our "educational architecture"?
As of July 31, the State Board had approved the commitment of 92 percent of the bond money, $552 million, and leveraged hundreds of millions more in local matching funds. Of the system’s 391 projects, 199 are complete and 132 are under construction or design. Three projects are pending land acquisitions, two are out to bid, and 16 have been announced for designer services. The colleges’ use of Historically Underutilized Businesses (HUB), including African American, Hispanic, female and other minority contractors, is almost 13 percent of the total contractors employed and exceeds the state’s goal of 10 percent. Behind all those numbers is the reality of great new classrooms, shops and labs for more students in your colleges, plus lots of jobs in construction!
There's another kind of architecture important in education these days. That's the technological architecture -- the infrastructure of information and instruction. At my first conference, in 1998, I made this statement:
When advances in computers and software come about, we must be careful to incorporate them into our methods of instruction so as to maximize the student's potential to learn. Of course, it may mean that we have to change our methods of instruction so as to utilize the great potential of these new technologies. It may mean that you may need to teach a course over the Internet.
As the young people say -- "duh." Doesn't that sound naive? "We may have to change our methods?" In 1998, we had a number of broadcast telecourses in cooperation with UNC-TV, some two-way video and a small handful of experiments with on-line courses.
In 2006, our curriculum registrations for distance learning top 180,000, and by far most of those are on-line. Our Virtual Learning Community, created by a powerful partnership of leadership, faculty and staff, is a model for cooperative development of quality on-line courses. Thousands more busy people sign on for continuing education, too. Our students are way ahead of us. While I think about computers as a gateway into distance education, they are using their iPods and cell phones, and imaginative instructors are keeping up.
The technology of instruction is the most important architecture of this kind, of course, but we also have impressive new computer-based systems for data collection and for the day-to-day management of our colleges. Most of you probably know what C-I-S means -- our College Information System, the nation's largest integrated data system for higher education. We started work on it several years ago in part to respond to the General Assembly's requirement for solid data about measurable results. Now, thanks to very hard work from many of you, the whole system is almost in place, connecting us in ways we have never been connected before.
More important than technology and buildings, however, is the human architecture of the North Carolina community college system -- the leaders, supporters, faculty and staff. The students are the structure, but we must have a strong foundation. A great teacher can inspire a student sitting under a tree as well as in a high-tech lab, and I want to make sure you understand that always, always, always we put people, not buildings, first in what we do.
Wouldn't it be nice if North Carolina's community college people were first on pay scales?
From the day I walked in the door in 1997, I have been shocked at the low pay for faculty and staff positions at many of our community colleges. I can't say all, because we do have some colleges who have raised their salaries above national averages.
The State Board, system staff and I have worked hard every legislative session to make that situation better. Your Faculty Association, founded since I have been on the job, has been an incredibly effective partner, as have the Associations of Trustees and Presidents, the many organizations representing staff positions and the academic discipline areas.
We have made some progress. A few years ago, the General Assembly pledged to move pay for faculty and professional salaries to the national average within five years and set aside money for raises beyond the general state employee raises. This past year, legislators funded a six-percent increase plus a bonus. We have established minimum salaries for qualified instructors and addressed specific needs of adjunct faculty, too. But we haven't done enough!
While we've been creeping up the salary ladder, other states have been leaping ahead. Despite recent increases, we are still 15th out of 16th states in the southeast and 46th nationally. We're ahead only of Montana, Louisiana, Arkansas and North Dakota. Our average salary for full-time faculty is almost $12,000 below the national average. At the University of North Carolina system, they're fighting to put their faculty in the top 20 percent among their peers. Somehow, we have to find a way to convince our lawmakers and taxpayers that we must raise our own sights at community colleges beyond the national average and then achieve that goal. I can't keep telling the rest of the world that we have the nation's third-largest and clearly the best community college system, when we are paying you, the people who make it so, as though you couldn't get a job anywhere else! I guess the architectural metaphor that works here is the cellar. All of you deserve to be in the penthouse, not the cellar!
The last kind of architecture I want to talk about it the conceptual kind -- the design or, if you will, the idea or the philosophy that comes before we start building or even sketching. That's the part of architecture that deals with what we envision, with where we are in the landscape, with what our boundaries are, and with what we have to do to begin to shape a structure that suits us.
Most of us probably know the mantra of the great architect of the Chicago skyline, Louis Henry Sullivan. He said, "Form ever follows function" -- meaning decide what you want to do first and then work on what it looks like. That assumes that we and the system for which we work have the same idea about what we ought to be doing -- what the "function" should be.
Ours is a system with 58 institutions, 800,000-plus students, maybe 24,000 faculty and staff, more than 700 trustees, 58 strong presidents, 21 State Board members and several million taxpayers. Getting us all to agree on one philosophy is about as likely to happen as persuading every developer in North Carolina to use the same Colonial house plan. I know in some of our communities, we might think that must be what's happening -- but somebody somewhere surely prefers Cape Cod, French Provincial, Victorian or something completely new and daring.
I hear a lot of design references in conversation these days. Discussions and plans need a "framework." We have a "box" to stay in or to think "outside of." In thinking about community colleges, however, I prefer a different shape, one that was developed here in North Carolina in the 1940s at the tiny, experimental Black Mountain College where a man who had failed at a lot of things had come to try to figure out what to do next.
The man was R. Buckminster Fuller, whom we now recognize as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. The PBS series American Masters described Fuller this way:
There are few men who can justly claim to have revolutionized their discipline. R. Buckminster Fuller revolutionized many. "Bucky," as he was known to most, was a designer, architect, poet, educator, engineer, philosopher, environmentalist, and, above all, humanitarian. Driven by the belief that humanity's major problems were hunger and homelessness he dedicated his life to solving those problems through inexpensive and efficient design.
Fuller's great invention was, of course, the geodesic dome -- a collection of interconnected triangles arranged around parts of a sphere. Fuller discovered that, unlike conventional buildings, his dome actually got stronger the bigger it got, a quality related to the distribution of stresses throughout the structure. Because I am a lawyer, not an architect, that's about as far as I'll go with that explanation! I will share, however, a powerful quote from Fuller that speaks to the strength of his revolutionary design and its applicability to the "changing architecture of education."
Fuller said, "Don't fight forces. Use them."
The dome uses weight and gravity to stay up and hold together -- becoming ever stronger as it shelters more and more space.
What are our forces? And are we fighting them or using them? Do we face change, or do we seek change?
Two years ago, I talked to you at length about important findings from the most recent State Of The South report from MDC, Inc., a think tank in Chapel Hill. I talked about the changing nature of our population, as new North Carolinians pour in from Mexico, Central American and other Spanish-speaking areas; from southeast Asia and from Eastern Europe. I talked about the shake-out in traditional industries and agriculture. I talked about the struggles of certain minority groups, especially men in those groups, to finish high school, start college and finish with good skills. I talked about the changing ages of our students -- at the upper end, as older workers lose their jobs and restless retirees move into our state; and at the younger end as high school students look to us for a jump-start on college and careers. And I talked about changing funding patterns, as North Carolinians realize we can't have the very best education and continue to have very low taxes.
I view each of these findings as forces, and I am proud that North Carolina's community colleges are indeed using them as impetus for positive change instead of trying simply to push them away.
Here are just a few examples of creative thinking that's just as dramatic as the first domes must have been in the landscape of western North Carolina!
Look at biotechnology. When I made my first speech to you, I might have heard that word, but I'm sure if I had, I thought it had to do with San Francisco or maybe Boston. When last I spoke to you, we had Golden LEAF money to establish BioNetwork, our portion of North Carolina's statewide investment in growing that fascinating industry. Now, we have state funding, BioWorks training popping up all over the state, an amazing BioBus mobile lab, six competitiveness centers, and a worldwide reputation for top quality and turn-on-a-dime response for educating and training the workforce of this new industry sector.
Many, many people have contributed to that success. I think of Garland Elliott at Vance-Granville, who knew that a big industry in his area had to have good training and worked tirelessly to help get BioWorks started.
I think of President Ray Bailey at Asheville-Buncombe Tech, who looked at an enormous donated building full of labs, added up his bond money and saw potential for a business incubator for biotech companies. When people in his area pushed back and said, "But Ray, western North Carolina doesn't have any biotech!" he pushed forward, saying, "That's the point, isn't it?" And now western North Carolina definitely has biotech growing at AB Tech, and the BioBusiness Center is headquartered there.
I think of President Pat Skinner at Gaston College. Just a few years ago, her service area was the worldwide heart of the textile business, and then it was bled dry by international competition. When we called for volunteers to help staff a biotech booth at the State Fair about five years ago, President Skinner herself picked up the phone and said, "We don't have biotech in our area, I don't know much about it, but I know we're going to need something, so count me in!" She volunteered personally, put her very capable staff to work on every possible avenue to be involved, tried for a few grants and missed, tried again, and now houses the BioEd center for curriculum development and the Duke Energy BioWorks training lab.
Look at how we're serving the people who need us most. The good folks at Rowan-Cabarrus know about changing architecture. They were as shocked as the rest of the state when giant Pillowtex closed down and then crashed down under the wrecking ball. But they didn't waste time worrying. They helped people who lost their jobs find training to get new ones, and now they are part and parcel of the dramatic North Carolina Biotech Research Center spearheaded by the David Murdock and the Dole Food Company.
Look at the progress we are making in opening doors for everybody, regardless of age, color or gender. Many of you are doing wonderful work teaching Spanish-speakers English and English-speakers Spanish! I am proud of the progress underway at the four North Carolina community colleges involved with the "Achieving the Dream" project of the Lumina Foundation -- Durham Tech, Guilford Tech, Martin and Wayne. I also continue to be the number-one fan of the Minority Male Mentoring project which has changed so many lives for the better.
Look at the tremendous progress we are making with our partners in public schools and in universities. For decades, of course, we have been in the business of dual enrollment, Huskins Bill and College Tech Prep. Two years ago, our state was in the early stages of high school reform, largely funded by Gates Foundation money, state investment and the enthusiastic leadership of Governor Easley. Now, Learn and Earn, Early College and Middle College High Schools are everywhere in North Carolina, and almost all of them are on community college campuses or at least with a strong community college component.
We have a long history of cooperation with public and private universities, too. The comprehensive articulation agreement with the UNC System was put in place just as I came to this system, so I won't take credit for the idea! That goes to all of you who helped work it out, who developed good relationships with individual institutions before that and who are today helping make it better. I cannot say enough about how important it is to our students that we have such strong allies in the independent colleges and universities and in our public university system. The most obvious alliance is in college transfer, but it is not the only one. More and more, we work jointly with universities on economic development, on continuing education and, very importantly, on faculty development.
I also cannot say enough about how delighted I am that Erskine Bowles now occupies the President's Office at the University System. As are many of you, I am a graduate of the University. Chapel Hill is my alma mater. I know that our state has been well-served by strong leadership over many years at the University. President Bowles is, however, truly building a new architecture for collaboration. We are working now on joint budget presentations, bold approaches to attacking critical shortages of teachers and nurses and real solutions to the tremendous challenges of remediation for high school graduates who simply are not ready for college work.
President Bowles and I have a session tomorrow at 1:30. The title is "View from the Top," but what we're really interested in is ideas from the field -- YOU! I hope to see you there.
Thoughts about collaboration bring me back to Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic dome.
Remember that those domes work because they distribute stress over a flexible frame. Picture a geodesic dome in your mind, however, and you'll recognize that they work for one other very important reason, too. Those triangles connect in a powerful interlocking frame. The triangles don't do anything special on their own. You have to put them together to use the forces that ultimately support them.
I thank you for almost ten years of the kind of building I never imagined I would be doing. I look forward to seeing just how big and how strong our "dome" can become.
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