Tremendously self-absorbed, slow as turtles and sporting cookie-cutter looks and approaches.

That's a too-common description of the nation's colleges and universities, Arizona State University President Michael Crow told participants in the Sept. 20-22 Chancellor's Fall Conference.

Titled "Making a Difference: UC Davis' Impact on the Region and State," this year's conference brought some 140 faculty, students, staff, alumni and partners together to discuss the campus's role as a powerful engine for economic vitality, cultural enrichment and societal change.

"As an academy, we're nowhere near ready for the challenges the 21st century will bring," Crow told attendees. "But universities are critically important to the future of the U.S. and the planet. We have to get it right."

Crow posed six questions of academe:

• Are we evolving in ways that provide the highest levels of positive social impact?
• When and why did we decide basic discovery is more important than solving problems?
• Why do all our universities look alike, up and down, across departments, at all levels?
• Why do we focus more on the quality of our incoming students than on the quality and impact of our graduates?
• How are our 12th-century faculty guild model and our 18th-century designs preparing us for the next century and the one to follow?
• Why are universities so resistant to change?

"We're trying at ASU to consciously change," he said, "to be a university that's meaningfully different."

ASU's objective is to build a university that's at the same time academically successful and excellent in every way but in the same instant inclusive. He said the campus has rejected efforts to toughen its admissions standards, instead "focusing on who we produce more than who we attract."

Crow identified several ASU aspirations:

• to embody ASU's cultural, socio-economic and physical setting, leveraging its sense of place.
• to become a force committed to social transformation
• to create the academic culture of a knowledge entrepreneur bringing about change
• to imbed in department hiring and tenure reviews use-inspired scholarship
• to focus on the individual
• to foster "intellectual fusion" or an interdisciplinary approach
• to foster global engagement.

"We're off to a good start," Crow said. "We have significant engagement at the school level and moderate engagement at the faculty level."

The campus has raised $150 million in the last 20 months, received increased state support by "rearticulating its mission," launched a new school, and positively influenced faculty and dean recruitments, Crow said.

"It is and will be difficult," he added. "But we're attractive to faculty who want to be part of this environment."

Partnering

Partnering comes naturally to the UC Davis campus, said Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Virginia Hinshaw.

"UC Davis has enormous strength in this realm that is known internally and externally, well beyond this state," she said. "Society has complex problems. It will continue to take partnerships to solve these problems."

Panelists cited case studies of effective partnering -- including the School of Education's and M.I.N.D. Institute's partnership with St. HOPE Public Schools to create a Smart Start pre-school serving at-risk children, a "benchtop to bedside" collaboration to produce freeze-dried blood platelets to save lives of people injured in remote places, and the use of a one-of-a-kind campus nuclear reactor to examine aging aircraft wings.

Fostering innovation

The greatest innovators can't be isolated to a single individual at a single time, Graduate School of Management Associate Professor Andrew Hargadon told the group.

"Stop thinking of greatness as the ability to do something never done before but to pull existing ideas together in a way that works for everybody," he said, citing examples from Ford, Microsoft, pharmaceutical companies and the music industry.

Some of the greatest pharmaceutical successes have resulted from new combinations of failed drugs, he said. Viagra, for example, he said, was initially explored as a remedy for angina and high blood pressure. The drug company learned it was on to something when, despite the failed testing, patients didn't return their samples.

It's very difficult to innovate within a single area "but there's enormous potential when you move an idea from one area to another," he said. Innovation "brokers" span otherwise disconnected worlds, he said, and "profit by being the first to see how people in one world can benefit from the ideas of another."

Effective brokers bridge old worlds and build new worlds around ideas -- skills that are not necessarily found in a single individual.

If you want to make a difference, Hargadon advises that you should "look to the side, at people working alongside you, and ask what do you know that could help them and what do they know that could help you."

That's where the future lies, he said.

More information available

Summaries of discussion group brainstorming of opportunities and challenges faced by the campus in enhancing its contributions to society in the areas of human and animal health, the environment, technology at the frontiers, cultural enrichment and social well-being, and preparing an educated workforce will soon be posted at http://chancellor.ucdavis.edu/Events/FallConf/default.cfm.

Conference participants' ideas for "telling great stories" of the campus's contributions to society will also be posted there.