How to Be a Model Public University

This past year has been an exciting one for the campus. It has also been a time of deep soul-searching. We – faculty, staff and students, as well as alumni and other members of UC San Diego’s extended community – have been seeking, in the words of Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla, to “establish a unifying shared vision for our entire campus.” What has emerged clearly so far is not only a renewed focus on education and the student experience but also that the value of a public university lies in its impact on the public.

“Student-centered, research-oriented, service-oriented” – these are the phrases Chancellor Khosla has found best describe our campus now and will help guide it into the future. They are also, I believe, apt descriptions of what many in the Division of Social Sciences see as our own core mission, and what we have endeavored to do for many years.

As you read this newsletter’s spotlight on retiring professor Michael Cole of Communication, you will learn (or be reminded) that he has been a pioneer in socially relevant and reciprocally engaged research, improving outcomes for disadvantaged school children, for the past three decades. New examples in this tradition include the project team, recently organized into the nonprofit Foundation for Learning Equality, working on the Khan Academy Lite app. This remarkable group of students aims to bring the wealth of educational content available on the Internet to the 60 percent of the world without access to the Internet. These are but two examples you’ll find in this edition of e-Connection. There are many others.

I am proud that complementing these efforts we also now have new centers in the division that are explicitly dedicated to this sort of work. These include, among others, the Center on Global Justice and the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research.

The discussion that we began this year about our campus’s mission, our values and how to be a model public university will deepen and broaden over the coming year. I look forward to it, and I welcome your own comments about these very important issues.