STATE HIGHER EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES AND THE STATES RESEARCH UNIVERSITY: A TIME WITHIN THE UNIVERSITY TO COLLABORATE ON PUBLIC POLICY AND BUSINESS ENTERPRISE OF COMMUNITY GROWTH

The need for state higher educational agencies and state research universities to perform more than their traditional role requires them to consider taking on the additional role of urging and assisting a municipal, county, or state regional (community) government and businesses to concurrently enhance community growth and integrate and expand economic development. Community, state, and federal policy-makers and business managers can give greater support to this additional role by demanding state research universities and state higher educational agencies (agencies) promote and support broader and useful intellectual collaboration among departments, schools, and colleges (intellectual units). Greater collaboration is needed so that university resources may be harnessed in order to find and develop ends and grounds and create specific public and private means and projects to enhance community growth and expand and integrate economic development. Collaboration among intellectual units within the university must be effectively regulated and managed by these agencies. The reasons are that intellectual collaboration supports community policymakers, business decisionmakers, and public and private managers by making contributions to enhance community growth and to integrate and expand economic development. Specifically, these contributions support and aid the design, coordination, and implementation of government policies and business decisions to enhance public policy and expand business enterprise. Intellectual collaboration must also be consistent with the university’s intellectual and other missions and purposes. Perhaps, “[t]he day of the university as an ivory tower . . . is drawing to a close, and the dawn of one in which it becomes a driver of regional and city economies beckons.” This closing may be unnecessarily premature, but the economic driver is on point where collaboration within the university can expand the university’s traditional mission and focuses this expanded mission on the public policy and business enterprise, driving both community growth and economic development. View More