As part of its ongoing plan to become Louisiana’s flagship university, the University has initiated a series of meetings and forums to focus on the Flagship Agenda and determine how to best meet its goals.
In a Jan. 22, 2003, Reveille article, Chancellor Mark Emmert said the idea of a national flagship university refers to making the University one of the leading public universities in the country, with distinguished research and graduate and undergraduate education.
To further this process, Chancellor John Lombardi of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provided insight into what it means to be a flagship university in a public lecture Thursday morning.
“The purpose of a flagship university is to bring national standards to the state,” Lombardi said. “You get no points for being the best in the state.”
Lombardi stressed that those universities wishing to become the flagship university in its state must “hold up a flag of national excellence.”
Lombardi also emphasized that while organizational charts featuring defined roles of chancellors, vice chancellors and other officials often give people a sense of security, the importance of a university lies within the departments themselves, which Lombardi referred to as “guilds.”
These guilds include academic units such as history departments, biology departments and mathematics departments, all of which are connected to similar units at other universities.
“That guild is not an entity that belongs to the university,” Lombardi said. “They are intellectual units.”
Lombardi said while it is the job of the guilds to perform teaching and research, it is the job of administrators to form a protective shell around the guilds to ensure their productivity.
“The core business of the university is teaching and research,” Lombardi said. “All other things are just by-products.”
Dr. Russell Chapman, dean of the School of the Coast and Environment, said he believed Chancellor Lombardi’s ideas were practical and could benefit the University.
“Chancellor Lombardi’s remarks on the need to measure progress or improvement in academic units against discipline-specific national standards and to reward success with additional funding certainly comes across as a straightforward method of ensuring improvement in individual programs, and consequently an improvement in the University’s overall standing,” Chapman said.
While in Baton Rouge, Lombardi will be serving as a Public Policy Fellow with the Manship School of Mass Communication’s Reilly Center for Media and Public Affairs. In addition to his lecture, Lombardi will be meeting with University faculty, department heads and community leaders to discuss the Flagship Agenda.
University moves toward flagship status
February 28, 2003