Friday Focus: Innovate Paths Forward
October 1, 2020
— by Evon Peter, vice chancellor for rural, community and Native education
It is October of the year 2020. Winter is coming. We are in a pandemic. The roots of hegemony are shaken. We are facing the imminent need to adapt and transform on personal and systemic levels. The future is what we will make of it. It almost feels like stating the obvious of where we are at is somehow a medley of plots and one-liners from several hit television shows and movies. And we are living it.
We have known for generations that the systemic path we are on at the state, national and global levels is inequitable and unsustainable, and 2020 is helping that to become increasingly apparent. There is no better time than now to further increase our awareness, knowledge, and skills; and put it to work toward a collective lift to courageously innovate new paths forward.
The good news is that we are not beginning from scratch. UAF is uniquely positioned to step up on a more significant level to address global challenges on both a local level and global scale. We have decades of accumulated knowledge, experience, and data across the social and physical sciences, and expertise in workforce fields. We have most of the pieces to the puzzle, and where we lack, we have partners.
I was refreshed on our research capacity and preparedness at a meeting with the Northwest Commission accreditation team this week, where we had representatives from the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, Institute for Arctic Biology, Geophysical Institute, International Arctic Research Center, College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, Institute of Northern Engineering, and the Center for Alaska Native Health Research. They spoke about our expertise in renewable energy integration into micro-grids, remote sensing capacity, undergraduate and graduate research opportunities, and research in climate change, human health, marine and terrestrial species, and community level collaborations, among other topics.
When these research engines are combined with our academic, workforce, community campus, and student capacity and expertise, we are ripe with potential. It is a time for us to stretch our imaginations, implement new strategies, and embrace change that may require us to increase our flexibility. I think that universities of the future will need to be more nimble and dynamic than those of past generations. Let’s have wisdom be at the foundation, but innovation be the driver.
Friday Focus is a column written by a different member of UAF’s leadership team every week. On occasion, a guest writer is asked to contribute a column.