Walls and Quads, Campus and Community

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Walls and Quads, Campus and Community

Opinion

Walls and Quads, Campus and Community

6/29/2004

By Kenneth C. Green

This institutional investment in IT infrastructure reflects, in part, campus efforts to maintain colleges and universities as what Edward Morrison, executive director of the Center for Regional Economic Development (REI) at Case Western Reserve University, describes as “quality, connected places.”

Of course colleges and universities have always struggled to be “quality, connected places.” The core of the connection in academe (the network, if you will) has been scholarship: journals, books, and professional correspondence, along with academic meetings and collegial banter, are the key elements of academic connectivity. The highly connected among us are what the sociologists of academe describe as cosmopolitans, focused on and identifying with our professional identities (Chaucer scholar, mathematician, psychologist, or even CIO) over our institutional affiliations (professor or administrator at Acme College).

The Internet and the Web, of course, have helped to redefine the meaning of connectedness, and have also provided us with new metaphors to describe it. But it was the late Clark Kerr, a labor economist by training, president of the University of California system in the 1960s, and a key force behind the influential Master Plan for Higher Education in California, who offered early predictions about what IT would mean for academe and the university’s relationship with local and national economies and communities. Writing in 1963, Kerr observed that “what the railroads did for the second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of this century may be done by the second half of this century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point for national growth. And the university is at the center of the knowledge process.”

So let’s connect the digital dots. Four decades ago Kerr predicts that information technology “will be the focal point for [future] national growth,” and that “universities are at the center of the [IT] process.” Now back to Ed Morrison at REI: if the essential elements of convergence in the manufacturing economy were labor, capital, and material, Morrison’s work suggests that the critical converging elements for the information economy are brainpower, innovation, and “quality, connected places”—resources found at two- and four-year colleges and universities.

Taken together, Kerr and Morrison suggest that in the information economy, colleges and universities can (indeed should!) be actively engaged in the economic development. And this engagement g'es beyond the traditional reports that chart the ebb and flow of industries and opportunities. A key element of this “new engagement” is the network—both the physical network and the network as a metaphor. The physical wired network can be seen as an extension of the traditional barriers that have separated campus and community and it also has limits. However, the movement to wireless makes the network porous, open, and accessible. The emerging examples of campus-community, network-centered engagement are interesting These projects are coalescing under the banner of Digital Cities. In Cleveland, the OneCleveland project provides a compelling example of university leadership linked to technology engagement, economic development, and civic commitment. Other similar initiatives are emerging in the US and elsewhere in Europe and Asia.

Colleges and universities will not necessarily lead the civic efforts to convert 20th century manufacturing centers into 21st century digital cities. But they have an important role to play, offering the key elements of brainpower and connection that will be essential in these initiatives. The network is an element of—and a metaphor for—these initiatives.

Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at The Claremont Graduate University, is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project, a comprehensive, continuing study of the role of information technology at higher education institutions in the United States (www.campuscomputing.net).
View more articles by Kenneth Green.