H. Martin Lancaster, President
North Carolina Community College System
Basic Skills/Family Literacy Conference
New Bern, NC
August 1, 2007
Thank you. Governor Perdue. President Ralls. Dr. Parker. Mr. Mills. Community college colleagues and friends.
I appreciate the invitation to be with you, especially in this beautiful old town. My sister and her family live here, and I am always happy to spend time in one of North Carolina's finest communities.
I will confess to some nostalgia, however. This will be my last appearance at your conference, as I have announced my plans to retire in May of 2008.
Let me begin by congratulating all of you for your part in the very successful evaluation of Basic Skills conducted this year by the US Department of Education. While praise for Dr. Randy Whitfield and all of you NEVER surprises me, it certainly DELIGHTS me, and I thank you ALL for helping prove once more that our community college system is the nation's best!!
I’ve been thinking lately about what set me on the path to an extremely satisfying time with community colleges.
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. Back then, we didn’t have Learn and Earn, Huskins or dual enrollment -- and I didn't know my fellow speaker here, Earl Mills, who doubtless could have taught me everything I needed to know about building!!
So instead I went to Carolina and prepared for what has been 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 as I look toward the completion of my time with you.
As I thought about what I wanted to say, I looked over some of my speeches from the past decade, and I came to the rather obvious conclusion that I should start with the literal definition of "architecture” -- the buildings in which our students learn.
My personal recollections will be dominated by the Higher Education Bonds of 2000 – at the time, the nation's largest public higher education bond pumping 600 million dollars into new buildings and renovation and repair of existing buildings for community colleges, plus $2.5 billion for public universities.
As of May, the State Board had approved the commitment of almost all the bond money and leveraged hundreds of millions more in local matching funds. Of the system’s almost 400 projects, most are complete and virtually all the rest are in progress.
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 not only the reality of great new classrooms, shops and labs for more students in your colleges, but lots of jobs in construction and opportunities for historically under-utilized businesses -- and for your students.
There's another kind of architecture important in education these days. That's the technological architecture -- the infrastructure of information and instruction. In the first System instructors’ conference I attended, in 1998, I said:
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." 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. Basic Skills, of course, was early in the game, with great partnerships with UNC-TV and lots of computer-based instruction and testing.
Last year, our curriculum registrations for distance learning topped 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 on-line, too. Thanks to Governor Perdue's leadership, the Virtual Public School is up and running.
I'm guessing that there are at least a handful of you out there wondering -- do we really need all this? Will we ever catch up and keep up? I confess that I've had those thoughts as we struggle to stay on the cutting edge -- but I am now convinced that we MUST keep up -- because our students in this 21st century demand that we do so.
In February, the State Board of Community Colleges hosted the annual meeting of the Joint Education Boards. We met at the gorgeous campus of the SAS Institute in Cary, home of the world's largest privately owned software company. Our host, SAS co-founder Dr. Jim Goodnight, welcomed us with a striking thought. He said:
Today's students live in an interactive, technology rich, communications dominated environment, with cell phones,iPods, PDAs, computers and video everywhere. They have a very sophisticated understanding of how to use them. And hen we send them to school to sit in rows, listen to lectures and look at the blackboard. No wonder they're bored and eager to drop out. We can't keep doing that!
Jim was talking mostly about K-12 schools -- but I was listening, too!
More important than technology and buildings, however, is the human architecture of community colleges -- leaders, supporters, faculty and staff. 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. We must always, always, always put people first.
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 low pay for faculty and staff positions at many of our community colleges. I can't say all, because some colleges have raised their salaries above national averages.
A few years ago, the General Assembly pledged to move pay for faculty and professional salaries to the national average within five years and appropriated funds for raises beyond the general state employee raises. 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 12th out of 16 states in the southeast and 41st nationally.
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 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. North Carolina’s community college employees deserve to be in the penthouse, not the cellar!
The last kind of architecture I want to talk about it the conceptual kind -- the philosophy that 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" -- decide what you want to do first and then work on what it looks like. That assumes that we all have the same idea about what we ought to be doing!
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 surely prefers Low Country cottages, French Provincial, Victorian or something completely new!
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." For community colleges, however, I suggest a different shape, one that was developed here in North Carolina in the 1940s at tiny, experimental Black Mountain College where a man who had failed at a lot of things had come to figure out what to do next.
The man was R. Buckminster Fuller. 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 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.
Fuller said, "Don't fight forces. Use them."
The dome uses weight and gravity to stay up and hold together. What are our forces? And are we fighting them or using them? Do we face change, or do we seek change?
MDC, Inc., a think tank in Chapel Hill, produces a comprehensive report called "State of the South" every two or three years. The 2007 version is packed with vital information 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. It describes the shake-out in traditional industries and agriculture and the struggles of certain minority groups to move up the economic ladder. The report notes the continued erosion of the rural south even as the metropolitan areas boom.
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. Indeed, MDC specifically praises community colleges systems, including ours, as keys to the continuing economic transformation of the south -- and singles out Family Literacy Programs as a great success story in intergenerational learning.
Here are just a few examples of other 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 first spoke to the Trustees Association ten years ago, 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. Now, we have BioNetwork, our portion of North Carolina's statewide investment in growing that fascinating industry, started with GoldenLEAF funds and continued by the state.
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. Literacy and GED were huge parts of helping the thousands of laid-off workers who had never finished high school. Now, Rowan-Cabarrus is helping its students find pathways into the dramatic North Carolina Biotech Research Center spearheaded by the David Murdock and the Dole Food Company.
Look at the progress we are making -- especially that YOU 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 North Carolina community colleges involved with the "Achieving the Dream" project of the Lumina Foundation. I applaud the generosity of the NC Glaxo SmithKline Foundation in funding the Breaking Through Initiative, which has a big presence at your convention. 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, we have been in the business of dual enrollment, Huskins Bill and College Tech Prep. Three 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, Learn and Earn On-Line, 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.
I am not naďve about the demands these high-school programs put on community colleges. The financial demands are huge, and so far, much of the money is going elsewhere. The new money for the on-line portion is a happy exception. We have policy and campus culture issues to navigate – we’re in the business of adult education, and the rights and expectations of 30, 40 and 50 year olds for attention and service cannot be pushed aside as our state rushes to cater to 14 and 15 year olds who aren’t succeeding in places that are supposed to teach them.
On the University side, our partnerships are increasingly vital in meeting urgent workforce needs The most obvious alliance is in college transfer. 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 that – that goes to all of you who helped create it. We have a brand-new agreement with the private institutions, too.
I have a particular interest in the way university partnerships are helping community colleges meet the state’s urgent needs for classroom teachers. Terrific programs like the Appalachian Learning Alliance, Wachovia Partnership East and the pioneering efforts of Coastal Carolina with NC-Wilmington have made the concept of “home-grown teachers” a reality.
Two of our colleges have recently entered into impressive new agreements with members of the University System to transfer technical degrees.
In April, Wake Tech signed an historic agreement with East Carolina University's College of Technology and Computer Science, which provides a curriculum that allows AAS degree graduates in an industrial or technology-driven field to transfer credit hours and complete a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Technology (BSIT) degree. Wake Tech is the first major contributing educational institution to participate in this program with 23 AAS degrees eligible for transfer. I hope to see many more colleges follow suit.
In May, Craven Community College here in New Bern entered into a partnership called “University Connections,” with ECU and NC State University. This partnership starts in the fall and will enable Craven Community College students to get a degree from East Carolina or N.C. State without leaving the county. Seventeen degree programs — including business, communications, health information, industrial technology, education and nursing — will be available through University Connections totally on the Craven campus.
The unprecedented transition of our state’s economy from low skills/low wage manufacturing to high skills/high wage industry and services will require these great programs and more if we are to prepare the workforce of the future. We have made those transitions in the past and often done so without adequate resources from the General Assembly. I urge you to support my successor, as you have supported me, in efforts to do more to obtain the resources our System needs to serve the workforce of the future and to provide the education that all of our citizens need for this great new day. More and more, we must work jointly with universities on economic development, on continuing education and, very importantly, on faculty development. The University is blessed with much stronger support than we in the General Assembly. Thus it behooves us to work with them in every way possible to fulfill our state’s destiny.
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 geodesic domes 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 ten years of the kind of building I never imagined I would be doing -- working with you to build better LIVES for the people of our state. Or as the late Dallas Herring was fond of saying, moving them "one more step" toward where they want to be.
I leave you today with some thoughts that have often been attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Current scholars say they come from elsewhere, but I like them well enough to share them with you anyway. When I measure the past decade of my life, yes, I'll be looking at budgets and salaries and signed agreements. But I'll be looking at other things, too -- with deep gratitude that my time with all of you has helped me achieve them as well.
"The measure of success --
- To raise a child,
- To leave a garden for others to enjoy,
- To bring happiness to someone else;
- To know someone has been helped in times of adversity by what you did or said,
- To leave a part of you with someone younger;
- To grow from someone older. "
Thank you for your time and attention -- I will be happy to take your questions.
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