The following remarks were given by Dr. Dennis Campion at the 2005 Extension Annual Conference.

I am delighted that the committee selected creativity as a major topic for this year's Annual Conference. In the last two years we have put a new vocabulary on our radar screen. In addition to creativity, we have added innovation, entrepreneurship, scholarship, engagement and benchmarking. By actual terminology or by implication our Strategic Agenda is built on these concepts.

To give several case examples of expression of this new vocabulary:

• The Cook County Extension Expanded Outreach and Programs. A Plan for the 21st Century includes new and innovative programming suitable to a metropolitan clientele. Jim Oliver (Assistant Dean, Urban and Metropolitan Affairs), Nigel Austin (Assistant to the Assistant Dean, Urban and Metropolitan Affairs), Joe Toman (Associate Regional Director, Northeast Region), Willene Buffett (Director, Cook County) and community leaders have done an outstanding job of identifying a broad array of educational programs relevant to the needs and interests of Cook County residents;

• Through the efforts of Dar Knipe (Extension Specialist, Quad Cities Center) and Tony Mendez (Director of the campus Academy of Entrepreneurial Leadership), Dar will be working with faculty Ann Abbot and Darcy Lear, (Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese), who teach entrepreneurship in the Spanish language program, to provide experiential learning opportunities for several undergraduate students next summer;

• Kathryn Barkley was Principle Investigator on a $6 million grant for a school district in the Southern Region under the No Child Left Behind Program. Jaylene Murphy (Educator, Edwardsville Center) is the new leader of this project. Welcome, Jaylene, to your first Annual Conference;

• Opportunities associated with challenge grants have returned a recurring investment of nearly $1 million with community and economic development and youth development being the primary programmatic areas. This was possible because new partnerships were formed in ways not thought of previously;

• The Academy of Extension Excellence has plans to bring better focus to Scholarship of Engagement. Plans are under way for an internal conference on this subject at the Hawthorne Suites, Champaign on March 14-15, 2006. Please mark your calendars and plan on attending. Special thanks to Dave Fischer (Educator, Edwardsville Center), chair, and the other members of the Academy;

• New consortia, built on new platforms, are being put in place, e.g. Extension, IL-IN Sea Grant and Northeast Illinois Planning Commission will involve students, researchers and local government officials. As part of the platform, an Extension person will be located at NIPC headquarters in Chicago. Platforms that provide community settings in which to practice scholarship are key ingredients to successful partnerships;

• Processes are in place to create enabling settings within Extension and our University as a whole: Performance Appraisal and Promotion Task Force led by Gerald Correthers (Northwest Regional Director) with Dr. Peter Kuchinke (College of Education) as consultant, are working to harmonize these key responsibilities with our Strategic Agenda. Others are making recommendations regarding Promotion and Tenure of faculty. Both have elements related to emerging concepts of scholarship of engagement and to reward systems.

Yes, we are in the middle of RETHINKING EXTENSION. We are behaving differently. With a foundation in the W.G.Kellogg commissioned reports in the late 1990's, Land-Grant Universities are returning to their public service roots in a more holistic way. There is a new rhetoric of universities (as a whole) becoming engaged.

"Our mission is to transform lives and serve society by educating, creating knowledge and putting knowledge to work..." is a quote that could be attributed to nearly everyone in this room. That it comes from President Joe White's September 22, 2005 Inaugural Address makes it impressive. It elevates the importance of engagement to the President's level. It is a message that is being reinforced by Chancellor Herman and Dean Easter.

Thomas Friedman, in his book, The World is Flat stated, "We have to do things differently. We are going to have to sort out what to keep, what to discard, what to adapt, what to adopt, where to redo our efforts, and where to intensify our efforts." This quote is very applicable to Extension, or to our University for that matter. Indeed, these words echo comments that Chancellor Herman has made before our faculty and the public.

If we are to do as Friedman suggests in the sense of engagement, and I would argue we must, we will have to call upon our individual and collective creativity and that of the communities with whom we engage.

If we are to be globally preeminent and locally relevant to use Dean Easter's words, we must call upon our creativity and the creativity of the communities with whom we engage. We should accept no less. We cannot win without it.

To go full circle, with a theme of creativity, this conference provides a learning experience that will provide all of us with a significant boost toward creating a brilliant future as we RETHINK EXTENSION.

Strategic Agenda, (2003).
Thomas Friedman, (2005) The World is Flat.

Sincerely,
Dennis R. Campion, Associate Dean
Extension and Outreach