PUMR Executive Summary

PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance (PUMR)

Universities harnessing global imaginations & unlocking talents of all people throughout the world,
to co-identify, co-create and co-produce flourishing futures with external partners
from business, industry, civil and voluntary services and the community  

initiated by

PASCAL International Observatory

Executive Summary

PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance (PUMR) is an ongoing and developing programme among college and university members of the PASCAL International Observatory.  Our members in PASCAL affirm our commitments to using the best principles of social capital, place management, and lifelong learning for inspiring strategic partnerships with regional policy makers (both public and private) to improve the quality of life within the regions. 

PASCAL’s PUMR programme helps us improve the effectiveness of our regional partnerships by creating a learning network among our college and university peers.   Regional engagement is still a new art within higher education.  Many of our own institutions still struggle to achieve widespread commitment to the goals.  We have much to learn from the experiences of our peers, and we have a responsibility to the profession to document our learning and disseminate it broadly.

Our learning network begins with an endowment of knowledge about successful university engagement that has been pioneered by PASCAL member Professor James Powell of Salford University (UK).[1]   By using this knowledge as a starting point, PUMR goes beyond simply reaching out to society. It is it is a programme for constructive action fueled by the knowledge, skills and facilities offered by colleges and universities.  PUMR participants pledge to develop new models for regional transformation and modern renaissance, and new ways of working for the co-identification of problems considered worthy by society.  The current knowledge base includes the following key factors: 

• University partnerships need to be socially inclusive in order to achieve sustainable success.  This includes engaging all communities within our region, and all communities within our own colleges and universities to help transform their lives and enable citizens to flourish[2]

• Regional engagements build value through co-creation.  Value comes from working together with partners to co-identify problems, co-design solutions, and co-produce outcomes that address important problems[3] 

• At these particular times to help the drive for socially inclusive economic prosperity and wealth creation in the richest sense of the phrase wealth[4]

• Engagements co-create many different types of value.  Even though today’s economic climate may place greater emphasis on co-creating economic value, any truly modern regional renaissance co-produces many different types of value[5]

• The concept of “eco-versity” is one helpful way to provide a more “balanced scorecard” for our engagements.  Its “triple bottom line” of environmental, economic, and social sustainability is key to everything we do, but we need better metrics[6]

• Enterprising academics must reach out aggressively to add value because its partners often don’t know how to start sustainable relationships with higher education institutions[7]

• Co-creating real value with partners in our regions also co-creates high quality research and learning opportunities for faculty and students because real solutions blend interdisciplinary points of view with the full complexity of social, cultural, and economic settings[8].

PASCAL’s Advisory Board has set up a working party to develop an initial work plan for the PUMR programme.  Our goal is to create a “virtuous learning circle” that will allow participants to expand this knowledge base on a continuous basis, disseminate it through meetings, workshops, professional exchanges, peer consulting opportunities, and formal publication outlets, by:

• Developing a physical and virtual social network to enable ‘virtuous knowledge sharing’ on community empowerment to enable citizens and professionals to flourish

• Coaching improved projects and programme delivery in this areas for continuous improvement

• Advising senior academic leadership on appropriate strategy to ensure the engagement of academics to become more outwardly enterprising and empowering of communities

• Validating universities who want to be considered as ‘PASCAL Universities for a Modern Renaissance’

• Developing guidance processes, in the form of a questioning framework, to help academics effect the cultural change needed for improving their practice

The PASCAL International Observatory welcomes the opportunity to work with any university that seeks to participate in this exciting new initiative. For more information, please contact James Powell at [email protected] or [email protected]