IF I TOLD YOU that the University of South Carolina had identified six initiatives to drive its $1 billion fundraising campaign, you’d probably guess that one of them had to do with fuel-cell, nuclear and other sustainable energy. You’d be right.
You might think back to the spring when the deposed Darla Moore upstaged deposee Gov. Nikki Haley by pledging a $5 million down payment for a new Ronald E. McNair Center, and figure that another would involve Boeing-friendly aerospace research. Right again.
And knowing President Harris Pastides’ background in public health, you’d have to guess there was some medical research in the mix, though the word “biotherapeutics” might not roll off your tongue. That’s designing treatments for individuals, such as USC/MUSC professor Dr. Martin Morad’s attempts to use an individual’s cells to grow new cardiac cells in the laboratory to replace dead ones after a heart attack or cardiac disease. It is, Dr. Pastides says, “something that can catapult the state of South Carolina, the University of South Carolina, the Medical University of South Carolina into a whole new stratosphere.”
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I won’t deny the potential for the personalized heart cells, but if you’re interested in the civic life of our state, the less obvious initiatives are far more exciting.
It would not be fair to say that the university is going to devote all of its attention to these six initiatives, which were picked not just because they’re important but also because they generated the right answer to at least one of these three questions: Do we have a head start? How stiff is the competition? Is the initiative fundable? But the admittedly generic goals that back up the strategic plan and lead to these extremely specific initiatives are the culmination of a planning process that has been going on since Dr. Pastides was sworn in as president in 2008. And it was clear when he visited our editorial board recently that the Big Six — some of which involve fully operational programs, some still barely formed ideas — represent the direction Dr. Pastides wants to take the university in.
• The one that will raise a few eyebrows is the rule-of-law initiative, which involves “creating a university-based home where international judges and lawyers and law students and government officials and even corporate executives can study the fundamental importance of the rule of law to an organized society.” Indeed, after Dr. Pastides and I discussed it for a few minutes, executive editor Mark Lett asked a question no one would have imagined asking about the other initiatives: Why this?
In fact, though, it might line up the best against the criteria. Teaching and encouraging developing nations to adopt the rule of law is a priority for the Defense Department — which means there’s money available to fund it; and USC alumni Sen. Lindsey Graham has been among the most outspoken advocates of the concept. USC Trustee William Hubbard chairs the American Bar Association’s World Justice Project, which developed the Rule of Law Index that is used to evaluate how well nations put law and justice ahead of political cronyism and brute force. Dr. Pastides is a senior advisor to that project, and was instrumental in creating the index.
And as Dr. Pastides put it, “the field is not dense with competitors.” Although Stanford University has a rule-of-law program, university officials haven’t come across any similar programs as they’ve started making grant applications and recruiting faculty.
• You know how sometimes you feel obliged to do something, but you just don’t feel confident that you’re up to it? That’s pretty much how Dr. Pastides describes the proposal to break through the ivory-tower approach to public education and do something practical to help move it forward in our state. (He seems to have no such hesitation about the higher-ed component of this initiative — making higher education more accessible to South Carolinians.)
The idea of tackling public education wasn’t initially on the list, and officials still can’t say what it will involve, but as they shopped around their other ideas and got formal and informal feedback, they kept being reminded that our state’s most daunting challenge involves education. The idea of doing more than simply putting out academic research and wishing the schools the best of luck was daunting because Dr. Pastides “didn’t want to commit the university to doing something that would five years from now be a ‘So what?’”
Eventually he concluded, rightly, that “You can’t call yourself the flagship university of the state of South Carolina if you’re disengaged from being part of that progress.”
• Clearly the effort Dr. Pastides feels the most passionately about is an expansion of the civility initiative he launched in 2009. This broader leadership initiative is the one that will be the most difficult to measure, but if it succeeds, he’s probably correct in saying it will be the most important, because it seeks to transform huge numbers of South Carolinians, which in turn would transform our state. Dr. Pastides traces the idea to one of the questions the university asks college recruits: What makes a great leader? The answers run the gamut from intelligence to good looks (“You’d be surprised at how fundamentally bad” they are), and “when you tease all of this through, I think what too many people are saying is ‘Anybody but me.’”
“What I want to do is turn that whole thing around,” he said. “And I think the University of South Carolina is one of the best places on the planet to do this because … I want to show people that you can come out of a working-class or a middle-class background in a small state like South Carolina and shoot for the stars. And we want to teach people how to do that.”
The initiative will include seminars centered around reading biographies, business-school courses on such technical aspects of leadership as risk-taking, community service and civic engagement, beginning with voting, and will lead to an “alternate transcript” that shows students’ leadership engagement.
Will the university succeed with all of these initiatives? That seems like a lot to hope for, though it’s impossible to say. But it’s certainly a bold agenda, and success on any one of them could pay huge dividends for both the school and our state.
Ms. Scoppe can be reached at cscoppe@thestate.com or (803) 771-8571.
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