H. Martin Lancaster
President, North Carolina Community College System
North Carolina Association of Community College Trustees Newsletter
Fall 2006
“…..develop a globally and multi-culturally competent workforce…”
In September, the State Board of Community Colleges expanded the mission statement of the North Carolina Community College System to acknowledge formally for the first time our responsibility to help our students compete in a world-wide economy.
“Global education” isn’t a new idea for our colleges. Many of the institutions you serve already have partnerships with international institutions and businesses, excellent travel programs and extensive experience with foreign students. We are becoming accustomed to headlines that remind us that we have to learn more about how people in other countries learn and think and work, if we are to keep up with the booming economies of China, India and other fast-rising countries.
What is new, however, is the structured approach we are taking at the System Office to encourage and highlight specific, productive exchanges with the potential to benefit every college in the system.
In 2001, the System Office sponsored the first Global Education Conference for the North Carolina Community College System, and we began to inventory the great programs already underway and analyze what else we needed.
At about the same time, we embarked on ambitious, long-term relationships with higher education institutions in other countries. Three years ago, I wrote in this column about the work in Thailand, where trustees, presidents and system staff are helping that country build a community college system from the ground up. At that time, we were also just beginning to explore partnerships with colleges and universities in the United Kingdom.
Now, those plans and ideas have turned into specific results with human faces. We are well on the way to hammering out an agreement with the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland to create degree-completion partnerships with our community colleges.
We have also begun a series of faculty exchanges with Northern Ireland. In May, Denise Drum Baker, Professor of Fine Arts at Sandhills Community College, inaugurated the program by changing places for six weeks with Jasper McKinney, an artist who is also assistant director and former head of the School of Art, Creativity and Engineering at the Newry Institute near Belfast. She came back refreshed, energized and inspired to develop a transatlantic project on the art of communication based on postcards. When she reported on her experience to the State Board, the members were ready to pack their bags and volunteer for the next trip.
We can’t all do that, but I hope that as our commitment to truly global education expands, many more faculty, staff, trustees and especially students can experience the delight – and plain hard work! – of international study. Professor Baker benefited from strong support from President John Dempsey at Sandhills, and other presidents have let us know that they have faculty lined up and ready to go.
Members of the General Assembly have already told us that they think that broadening global perspectives for North Carolinians is an important task for the community college system. In 2007, we will be asking them to back up their enthusiasm with financial support. I know that I can count on trustees to help us make that case.
It’s taken us more than 40 years, but our system is beginning to act on the wisdom of Dr. Dallas Herring, often called the “spiritual godfather” of North Carolina’s community colleges. Dr. Herring said in December of 1962:
“We are set down at the doorsteps of a teeming universe of people whose problems, whether we like it or not, are our problems, whose sickness and whose health are immediately and permanently our concern. We say with Socrates, but with much more urgency than he, that we are not citizens of Athens or Greece, but citizens of the world.”
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