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.

Robert J. Sternberg worked at private, elite institutions for 40 years. He's now the provost at Oklahoma State University and has a new appreciation of land-grant universities. In this essay from Inside Higher Ed, he shares seven reasons to value them, ending with questions:

Whereas some of us may think of land-grant institutions as needing to emulate the most elite institutions, perhaps these elite institutions would benefit as much or more from adopting some of the land-grant values. As our society becomes ever more socially and economically stratified and the middle class vanishes, with high correlations between educational opportunities and socioeconomic status, we have an obligation, as a society, to ask whether things are going where we want them to go. What kinds of leaders do we want to develop? Is it possible that the huge emphasis on memory and analytical skills reflected by tests such as the SAT and ACT, and embodied in college-admissions processes, are having effects opposite to what we as a society might hope for? Are we producing leaders who are analytically adept but who fail in a wise and emotionally connected way to engage deeply with the crises our society currently is facing? Do we want a society in which we care more about how narrowly smart people are than about how wise and ethical they are? Land-grant institutions in many ways reflect the ideals of the American dream. They have a unique role in helping to achieve that dream that is not being captured by magazine ratings based on narrow criteria that have led our society to a precipice.