Reclaiming Purpose & Stewardship

Ashish Vaidya reflects on his experience at institutions like Cal State Channel Islands to illustrate the role of regional public universities as “stewards of place.” He emphasizes the importance of aligning academic programs, research, and service with the needs of local communities, particularly in workforce development and student mobility. Drawing on the success of community-driven program design, he highlights the value of deep engagement and responsiveness. While this mission often lacks dedicated funding, Vaidya points to foundations, businesses, and state agencies as key partners in sustaining impact. He calls for greater collaboration and joint accountability to build a viable, community-centered higher education model.

The concept of stewardship of place actually was developed about 20 years ago. And the notion, especially for regional public universities, was a question of identity. You know, the elite flagship campuses had a very clear identity. The community colleges had a very clear identity. Career & technical education, you know, providing vocational training and so on and so forth. All these institutions in the middle were sort of caught between saying we're not quite a community college, but we're not quite a research public flagship either. And so this question is, 'What are we?" And for me, it was a revelation almost two decades ago. What we are stewards of place, and when you think about it that way, you start really appreciating what the role of the university is. And I think it was most impactful for me when I started at Cal State Channel Islands, which was a brand new university in Ventura County in Southern California. That region and that community had waited nearly four decades for a 4-year public university, and I went there with lots of excitement about building programs and so on and so forth and very quickly thanks to my great friend and mentor the president at the time said, "Ashish, this is their university. This is the community's university, so our job is to go out and listen and hear what they are saying and what programs do they want that's going to drive economic [success]?" So we develop programs like environmental science and nursing, but the foundational programs for sure based on what was actually the needs of biotechnology; all these programs came about not because the faculty said it would be a good idea but because this was the needs of the workforce and the talent needs of that. So the concept of stewardship of place to me can be explained in the following way. The university aligns its teaching, its scholarship, its research, and its service mission to the needs of the community. And you focus your curriculum, you focus your research, to some extent community-based research, you focus your service, whether it's faculty and staff, if you're members of the school board, or you're taking - you're part of that whole network and ecosystem of the community. And so we were both encouraged to, and we encouraged others to say, 'Be members of your you know councils and advisory boards, be active in your libraries in your you know in the in the community because you're as much a part of the community.' The community should not see a difference between this ivory tower on the hill, but they should look at this and say, 'That's our university' and if that's the narrative, this is our university. I think you've accomplished that, so it it's it is really a question of. And so leaders have to be very intentional about doing this doesn't happen overnight. It's a constant reminder of why we're here 80% or 90%, on the average, of regional public university students come from within a 50-mile radius of that campus, and more than 80 or 90% go back into those communities. So they're your future workforce leaders. They're your future mayors. They're your future legislators. You build those alliances, and they're going to stay with you because it's like, yeah, that's my school. That's my university. And that's the narrative that needs to be more firmly ingrained. I think there are opportunities for ways in which you can actually create a different approach to creating that business model. And one that I'm more and more compelled by right now, especially now since I'm working so much with foundations, is, you know, again, think about all the people that could benefit from a stewardship mission. So you have foundations that are particularly interested in some of the work that that that's going on. You have businesses that are there. The states still have a predominantly huge role, and maybe to a smaller extent, the federal government does, not as much perhaps, but again, when you take states like California or some of the larger states, those models can be replicated in other parts of the [country]. So, if you're looking to incentivize innovation that comes out of you know work that is happening at the regional level, why not? If there's a great entrepreneurship model that works in the Inland Empire that you know, suddenly you're finding more and more you know young folks going into this. Well maybe we can use that in Atlanta. Maybe we can do it somewhere else. This is what the whole network issue, right? So, is there a way to say, because you know while the the each individual flow of money is limited, but when you put it all together it can make a [difference], but you have to insist on collaboration too. It doesn't happen if everybody, you know, I mean the way NSF - I mean yes, there is some collaboration that happens but most people... the money flows to what you know, one institution at a time, you know. But I think this notion of joint funding and joint accountability I think could be quite different. I mean we we talk about how important collaboration is, and then we just fall flat when it actually, you know, makes it happen.