East Carolina's path offers markers for UNCC's identity quest
By Mary Schulken, Charlotte Observer
GREENVILLE, N.C. - The drowsy countryside along U.S. 264 East gives little hint what lies ahead in this city of 60,000 people: a state university (North Carolina's third largest) with nearly 100 years of history.
Yet at Greenville's western limits, the five-story Brody School of Medicine pops out of the rural landscape. Motor on downtown, and there's the main campus of East Carolina University, where high-rise 1960s dorms gradually give way to Spanish-style buildings circa 1907.
Similarly, some 250 miles southwest, on Charlotte's outer edge of congestion, you don't expect what's behind the entrance to UNC Charlotte. Tall, plain concrete dorms mix with new, traditional brick buildings -- $300 million in new construction to be exact -- on North Carolina's fourth largest campus.
The two institutions have more in common than size.
Both have relatively new doctoral/research programs, established later than those at North Carolina's larger public universities.
Both have ties to distinct geographic and demographic communities. East Carolina focuses on the rural counties east of Interstate 95, the state's least populated region. UNCC is at the core of the 13-county region surrounding Charlotte, the state's most metropolitan area.
Yet there are big differences.
Pirate fans will be quick to note ECU has a football program.
Just as promptly, 49er fans will point out the basketball team's appearances in the NCAA tournament.
Yet there is another, more critical variance: East Carolina and UNCC are at different points on the path to maturity. One has a distinct identity. The other must develop that identity.
East Carolina is the university of the East. In North Carolina and in the broader academic world it is known for regional outreach, training teachers and training rural doctors.
UNCC has an emerging engineering program and a ground-breaking photo-optics program. Yet branding the university is one of the critical challenges awaiting its new chancellor, Phil Dubois, who began work July 15.
Dubois has ideas. He talks about a university that is flexible and responsive to the changing urban region that is its home.
No one is better prepared than Jim Smith, East Carolina's provost, to talk about waypoints in a university's growth. He came to the campus in 1969 as a professor of philosophy. He has served as special assistant to three chancellors.
During that time East Carolina reached critical mass, academically, financially and historically. Smith is reluctant to compare one university's experience with that of another. Yet he describes East Carolina's evolution as the right blend of organization, numbers and vision.
The organization piece is straightforward: A university has to be structured for research and fund-raising, Smith said.
The numbers come with time. The longer history a university has, the more living alumni it has -- and the more money it can raise.
The vision thing is a little more complicated.
Smith saw deliberate choices, careful politics and persistence. He offers these suggestions for a university out to make its mark:
• Find your assets and play them. Most of those assets are local.
"Be motivated by the place," he said. "See the prospects of slingshot acceleration."
• Be careful how you work it with the office of the president of North Carolina's 16-campus university system. In particular, he advises patience.
"You can't go from a sow's ear to silk purse in five years," he said.
• Work hard on the tipping point, and find an "aspirant peer."
"You need to look to someone who does what you want to do well, and learn from them," Smith said.
What pitfalls does he caution against?
Turf.
Forgetting the public good.
Forgetting that the students come first.
In the next few years, UNCC will travel, in accelerated fashion, the same ground East Carolina has covered. Football may or may not be a part of that journey. A law school ought to be.
But a university has to have an identity.
If you believe Jim Smith, that comes down to vision. And the vision is up to Phil Dubois.
Mary Schulken
