In Change magazine's current issue, John Seely Brown, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, and Richard Adler, examine the role of land-grant universities and their part in the "now" and the "future." While keeping a very broad perspective, they eventually examine as a case study North Carolina State University, its Centennial Campus, and review a number of learning and research initiatives, such as: Red Hat Software, MedWestvaco, and NC Textile Connect - digging even deeper into some of the latter's projects: William Shinn's Aorta, Mansour Mohammed's process, LAAMScience and APJet - as well as the North Carolina Program for Forensic Science.

In search of new models of learning for the 21st century, we visited North Carolina State University, a 120-year-old land-grant institution located in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State provides some interesting clues about how America's land-grant colleges and universities might reinvent their mission for the 21st century. While initiatives similar to the ones at NC State can be found at other institutions, the school is worth studying because of its relatively long history of innovation and its commitment to expanding the meaning of “engagement.”

NC State has developed a reputation for pioneering an expanded definition of the university around the concept of actively engaging with the larger community and the regional economy. The pursuit of greater engagement has inspired the development of new academic practices that blend old and new forms of learning—practices that honor both the traditional transmission of codified knowledge and new forms of knowledge building through inquiry, speculation, and problem-solving.

This “blended” model of education is the foundation of an ecosystem in which students and faculty operate in the territory between the intellectual activity associated with the academy's imperative to ask questions in a manner that does not typically happen elsewhere and the pragmatism necessary to create impact in real-world settings. This is a complex territory, because it is often conflictive by nature. Yet it is precisely in the negotiation of conflicts that resiliency is formed.