JOHNSON C. SMITH UNIVERSITY
Charlotte, North Carolina
The University College provides a comprehensive experience designed to connect first-year students to the institution, preparing students for university life and beyond. In doing so, the college strives to develop students’ communication, ability to reason, leadership, and career skills. The college operates three interrelated divisions: the First-Year Experience, the Biddle Institute, and Liberal Studies.
The First-Year Experience supports students’ transition to the university and the enrichment of their academic skills. It coordinates orientation and retention programmes, academic support services, and professional development programmes. It also manages the Hub, an academic support center that houses the Academic Center for Excellence Advising, Student Support Services, Math Lab, and the Writing Studio.
The Biddle Institute innovatively offers research and direct student services. Using strengths-based assessments, it investigates and provides academic support to students admitted to the university. Students are given “strengths awareness trainings” and are connected with in-classroom learning and out-of-class experiences. These trainings result in structured support programming through faculty teaming and intrusive advising as well as co-curricular excursions, academic success workshops, and community service activities. They also provide a greater institutional understanding of the extent to which grit, perseverance, or motivation can predict college success.
Liberal Studies delivers the core curriculum of the general education. It strengthens students’ competencies as critical thinkers, capable writers, and cogent speakers. Courses also promote student development as life-long learners and global leaders. This division manages the academic experience for all students who are undecided about a major degree programme of study.
‘Why do we do what we do? For what good purpose? […] Is it to screen out those I perceive not contributing to quality? […] Or do I need to rethink the very meaning of quality, so that it’s inclusive and it’s diverse? […] Education is not meant to screen; it is meant to include. And for what purpose? To use John Silber’s words, to “maintain the promise of democracy”’.
— President Ronald L. Carter
RONALD L. CARTER
President of Johnson C. Smith University
Years of Service: 2008–2017
Ronald L. Carter graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Morehouse College with a BA in Sociology and Philosophy in 1971, then earned a Master of Theology degree and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion from Boston University. In the 1980s he moved to South Africa to work at University of the North, then becoming dean of students at a historically white institution, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He returned to the United States in 1997 as the provost and dean of faculty at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. He became the thirteenth president of JCSU on 1 July 2008 and served until 31 December 2017.
Under his leadership, the mission of JCSU expanded to focus on the future of the institution, concentrating on the demographic shifts and challenges facing higher education. His team increased the university’s majors, expanded academic offerings, and developed new and innovative programmes to support student success. With robust fundraising campaigns, an increased endowment, and the university’s investments in the Charlotte community, JCSU has become a model of an independent urban university.
How has your personal journey informed your motivations to do this work?
I have always been in higher education. From the time I enrolled at Morehouse College to my first job at Boston University, where I was—and don’t laugh, the janitor, but a janitor in higher education—I always felt, ‘This is where I can envision myself: in higher education’. I found emotional strength. I found emotional security. I learned how to network. I progressed from being a graduate student, working as a cleaner, to becoming a mentor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for African-American Studies at Boston University, then becoming assistant director in the Center, then becoming director, then becoming dean of students at the university.
The way people live and learn at their “growing edge” is to always have a vision of themselves they can summon. To be able to be patient with themselves, but persistent. To have the emotional strength to hang tough with that vision, and to look for ways to be comfortable with that vision, and then to take advantage of networking. That’s fabulous, to be able to seek people and opportunities and co-create realities around that. This is the way one thrives. That’s my journey in higher education and why I’m still in higher education.
I learned how to be a passionate “change agent” in South Africa. Throughout my life, I knew I wanted to change things, but I couldn’t figure out, ‘How do I articulate it?’. In South Africa I found the language, the force of the language, the “gripping language” for radical transformation. One of my tasks was to bring together with an official from the United States (who was part of USAID) the seven national student leaders who had been tasked by the exile parent bodies to overthrow de Klerk’s government. We were told, ‘You will never make it happen’, because these young people had been fighting each other; they were at odds with each other. We came up with a scenario to make it happen, but it required working with each group separately for over a year, listening to the values that prompted them, that sustained them, that kept them persistent—though impatient. We created a “gripping language” that we thought they all could speak. I’ll never forget the day they all agreed to come to a meeting, to see them sitting around a table saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to put our differences aside and look at why we are doing what we are doing, for what purpose’. We kept that in front of them, and they emerged as a group to do what needed to be done. All that prepared me for what I’m doing here at Smith.
That is a defining characteristic of a “change agent”. You have to be patient and persistent when you’re most alone. You never lose sight of the vision. That was the beginning of being able to talk to these student leaders because they said, ‘We know that you’re not here to just kick the dust’. That’s the statement they had about foreigners who came into South Africa: They were kicking dust to make money. I was there because I believed they were going to be the future of South Africa, and I had a commitment to doing what I could to help.
What does innovation mean to you in the context of your work as an institutional leader?
I use the words of Adam Kahane, in the book Solving Tough Problems: we have a commitment to co-creating new realities around natural processes. The symbolic thinking in co-creating new realities is summed up in innovation, that we have an inward journey around what we see as possible. It taps into the good purpose for why we want to see things progress. We want to ameliorate, if you will, things that keep us from living and learning at our “growing edge”. So, the more we define the purpose, and the more we see how this purpose can lead to progress, we see something that comes together in a new way. We say this is an innovation, something that now can be communicated in a way that leads to progress on common ground.
Innovation is a social-relational concept. You may see something; I may see something. We get together and we start asking, ‘What if?’. That involves what Adam Kahane calls “scenario planning”. We don’t say to each other, ‘That’s silly, that’s not going to work’. We just keep saying, ‘What if? What if?’. If you carry this responsibility of innovation at your university, you will wrestle with your own thinking. But at certain points, you get up from your desk and you say to somebody, ‘I have this idea. I want to engage you with it’. That engagement is what gives substance. So we live as co-creators.
How did you experience the severity of external pressures on your institution?
The board of trustees in 2008 when I came aboard, I describe as a group of futurists. They were asking what kind of institution should Johnson C. Smith University be in 2020, in 2025. As they were raising that question, Chronicle Research Services came out with ‘The College of 2020: Students,’3 which said that by 2020, the majority of students attending colleges and universities will come from minority groups. For the first time in contemporary American history, the white American student would be in the minority. The board saw this and said, ‘If that is the case, how do we change ourselves in a radical way to be ready to educate this 2020 college student?’.
That tough question led us to ask what risks we were prepared to take. What values were we prepared to renegotiate? And what would be—and I use this over and over—the “gripping language” that would allow us to create an enlarged horizon?
So we made a commitment. Johnson C. Smith University would go through radical transformation. That was a turning point for all of us. I’m a firm believer that we often make mistakes by talking about strategic plans before we have a scenario. So I said, ‘Why don’t we describe—envision—all these processes we’re talking about?’. That’s where the concept of the “independent new urban university” emerged, a concept that had been written about by Jake Shrum. The title was Democracy’s Last Stand. He said that if we do not create universities around certain core principles, we will fail at our overriding purpose to protect democracy.
When we looked at our history from the Biddle Institute at Johnson C. Smith University, all our core values related to the defining characteristics of an “independent new urban university”. So that became our scenario. From there, we started looking at every aspect of the university in terms of how we would co-create this new reality, how we would finance it, what risks we would have to take. We knew that we would be on a bumpy ride; nevertheless, we had the courage and vision to do it. Because we can become this dream, we can become this vision, and in becoming this vision, we can add to the knowledge base of the country.
How would you describe the leadership structure you created?
We have to work hard to first make sure that everyone understands the vision. We have to work with them to embrace the vision once they understand it. And then we’ve got to get them to become it. All three must be in place if this radical transformation is going to take place.
In order to understand it, we have to engage in “representative thinking”. It is not my vision; it is the university’s vision. It represents our best thinking. In order for you to give substance to best thinking, you cannot have a subsidiary model of management, where the president speaks to the trustees and then turns and speaks to his administrative team, and the administrative team then speaks to their managers, and the managers then speak to the staff, and the staff speaks to the students. That is not the way it works. If you want to engage in representative thinking you must have cross-functional teams that have authority. So we made a commitment that we would have a flat organizational structure here at Smith that would be managed by groups that are cross-functional. Then we say to everyone, ‘It’s my responsibility”. We have to be accessible, we have to be out there so people can embrace what we are talking about.
I said to the deans, ‘You are going to become a council of deans. You are going to work together to solve problems in common’, and that way we don’t have layers in the academy. Conflict is good as long as you engage in the conflict for a better purpose. Conflict has a high value in radical transformation, but it is not conflict without trusting each other, being patient with each other, being willing to raise tough questions, being committed to our good failures. That’s what we facilitate in radical change, and that’s the role of positive failure, because it tells us there’s still something missing. Take it, go back, and innovate around it.
How did you frame your vision for this work? What was the story you told about why this was important?
Why do we do what we do? For what good purpose? When we wrestle with those questions, we see that we have to be intellectually honest. I can talk about quality education, but I ask, ‘For what purpose?’. Is it to screen out those I perceive to not be contributing to quality? And with this sanitized version, and with students already ordained to succeed, can I then say this is “quality” because I have screened out those who do not contribute? Or do I need to rethink the very meaning of quality, so that it’s inclusive and it’s diverse? When I look within and then look out, my commitment is to diversity and inclusion. The purpose of education is to give everybody a common ground where they can grow their capacity, and as teachers and administrators, we are nutrients to fertilize the soil in which that person is growing. We are there to attend to their growth possibilities.
We realized if we were really going to be diverse and inclusive, we could not continue with traditional standards in admitting students. We started looking at this concept of “non-cognitive variables”. We acknowledged there were cognitive variables. Then we said, ‘There are meta-cognitive variables; that’s the intersection where the cognitive and non-cognitive meet’. That becomes a strength perspective. We were saying, ‘Why not admit students on their strength perspective of themselves? What are we capable of doing to help them realize it?’. All of a sudden, we were seeing a new way of educating students who had been excluded, and by golly they were doing just as well as the students who came the traditional way. We’re living the longitudinal study. Now we’re saying, ‘We can become a new urban university committed to diversity and inclusion. We have access points for all students, and we can educate them to excellence’.
We have to wrestle with how to bring in students who are not meeting traditional requirements without dumbing down anything. We said University College will be the place where liberal education will be taught, where students who have not declared a major will have a safe space to find their way to a major, and where students who’ve met some but not all of the criteria can be supported through intrusive advising.
Johnson C. Smith is an institution that lives, breathes, and promotes cultural competency for the good of the community. So we created a Master of Social Work programme that has a strong focus in an innovative way around cultural competency. Then we realized that could translate into everything we were doing at the university, which then says to the public at large, ‘If you are looking to educate this new demographic, Johnson C. Smith is the best place to learn how to do it. We’ve been doing it for 150 years, and we have informed visions, and we’re doing research’. And by golly we are going to get in the forefront because we’re culturally competent to do it without embarrassment, without apology. That’s how we see ourselves.
Education is not meant to screen; it is meant to include. And for what purpose? To use John Silber’s words, to ‘maintain the promise of democracy’. It’s our responsibility to come up with new approaches that will break through traditional paradigms. We are constitutionally fit to be diverse and inclusive. And all who are like-minded, come. But if you want to be diverse and not inclusive, don’t come here. Whether you are a faculty member, a wanna-be administrator, or even a student, just don’t come.
We’re standing around the fire, talking, and something emerges that we all realize: this is ours. I never told the story by myself because I have trustees who are with me telling the story. I have faculty, I have students, and we tell the story. When we tell the story that way, it becomes contagious. Other people want to just sit and listen and say, ‘Well, I see something I can add to the story’. Come on in, sit down, stir the fire, and let’s see what keeps coming out of it.
Johnson C. Smith University Visual Case Study
Executive Leadership
President Carter guided the transformation through persistent and challenging questions and by pushing leaders to identify problems within each initiative. He developed “flat” cross-functional teams and a Deans Council. Carter understood that innovation at the university is not a linear process, but rather an iterative response to its environment.
Spark
In response to research showing that by 2020 most prospective college students would be minorities, the board of trustees challenged President Carter to transform the organization to ensure it would be prepared to educate this new demographic.
Sense-Making
To design this future institution, the leadership team examined other models for inspiration, such as the University College. Through robust community engagement, they ultimately created a solution unique to Johnson C. Smith, a design championed by President Carter.
New Vision
As a natural expression of their mission as an HBCU, leaders reconsidered how their institution could dismantle systemic barriers and inequities in access to higher education. They designed innovative new criteria to evaluate applicants using “non-cognitive variables” to signal potential for success in higher education. These students would then receive wrap-around support to ensure their success.
Team/Mandate
To support and accelerate this transformation, groups were reorganized into cross-functional teams with broad decision-making authority, creating a “flat” organization. Values of courage and transparency were demonstrated throughout levels of leadership.
Iteration
Flat organizational structure allowed cross-functional teams to evaluate alternatives and make changes in design.
Johnson C. Smith University
The University College
THE BIDDLE INSTITUTE
Investigates and provides academic support to new students using the following strengths-based assessments:
• Biddle Freshman Program: “Support programming” that includes faculty-teaming, intrusive advising, academic success workshops, and 13 credit-hour limits
• Center for the Study of Metacognative Variables: Research think-tank that studies non-cognitive and metacognitive skills as predictive factors for student success
• Sit Lux Initiative: Programme that mandates Biddle Freshman Program activities with intrusive mentoring and interventions
FIRST-YEAR
EXPERIENCE
Supports students’ transition to the university and the enrichment of academic skills.
LIBERAL STUDIES
Delivers the core curriculum.
Who They Serve
As a small private liberal arts university with HBCU traditions, Johnson C. Smith enrolls 1,600 students from diverse backgrounds.
Providing Access
Students admitted through the Biddle Institute must meet either the minimum GPA or standardized test score, as well as answer questions designed to assess non-cognitive assets.
Enabling Success
The University College provides a comprehensive experience designed to connect first-year students to the institution, preparing students for university life and beyond. In doing so, the College develops students’ communication, reasoning, leadership, and career skills through three interrelated divisions: the First-Year Experience, the Biddle Institute, and Liberal Studies.
3 Martin Van Der Werf and Grant Sabatier, ‘The College of 2020: Students’, 19 June 2009, http://blogs.lt.vt.edu/inventthefuture2020/the-college-of-2020-students/