Higher Education Takes Up Entrepreneurial Challenge

This was a session unlike any other that the twenty-five college and university officials had ever attended. Asked to examine their own commitment to entrepreneurship and to regional cooperation, they responded passionately and provocatively.

Sponsoring the assembly was Ottawa University, the Kauffman Foundation and Ingram's Magazine. Chairing the session was Ottawa's president, John Neal. Hosting the assembly was the Kauffman Foundation, represented at the assembly by Bob Litan, its vice president of Research and Policy. This assembly was part of Ingram's Magazine's ongoing effort to highlight economic and community issues in Kansas City's greater metropolitan area.

This group of presidents, provosts and deans gathered on an unseason-ably cool late July morning in the acoustically perfect Paseo Room of the Kauffman Foundation. Their collective response to the question at hand, in fact, may well result in an ongoing mechanism to seize the entrepreneurial opportunities available in the region and beyond.

The point was made early on that the term "entrepreneur" did not enter the common parlance even in the business world until the 1980s. As Penn Valley's Jackie Snyder observed, "Twenty years ago we could not even find a text book on entrepreneurship."

The introduction of this concept has had an unexpectedly liberating impact on university culture. "Entrepreneurship" with its positive American connotations of freedom and individualism has more or less replaced "capitalism" with its grim, Marxist, mechanistic overtones. What is more, Silicon Valley has given the concept a contem-porary, collegiate look and reality. As a result, administrators now routinely and safely explore the role of entrepreneurship in relation to an institution's own mission.

"It's astonishing to see how the academy has come to largely embrace the issue of entrepreneurship," said Dan Lambert of Baker University. Some of this, suggested Lambert, is necessity-driven. "If I am in a discipline that is losing students," Lambert elaborated, "I have to think creatively." Many of these institutions most surely have.

Participants Include: (Left to right)
Bobby Patton
Central Missouri State University
Paul Engelmann
Central Missouri State University
Barbara Dixon
Truman State University
Jackie Snyder
Penn Valley Community College
Kathleen Collins
Kansas City Art Institute
Cheryl Polson
Kansas State University
Robin Bowen
Rockhurst University
Carolyn Cottrell
Webster University
Greg Cecil
University of Missouri-Columbia
Bob Litan
Kauffman Foundation (Host)

(second row left to right)
Dan Radakovich
Johnson County Community College
Maria Meyers
KCSourceLink/UMKC Bloch Shool of Business
Jim Scanlon
Missouri Western State College
Dan Lambert
Baker University

(back row left to right)
John Neal
Ottawa University (Co-Sponsor/Chair)
Kenny Wilkes
State Representative of Kansas
Sandra Willsie
Kansas City Univ. of Medicine & Biosciences
Grant Chapman
Ottawa University
Tom Bryant
Pittsburg State University
Michael Droge
Park University
Dean Hubbard
Northwest Missouri State University
David Monical
Washburn University
David Arnold
Missouri Western State College
Richard Woodall
Avila University
Tom Gordon
Avila University