On the way home from a particularly windy walk with the dog I was listening to KQED. The program I tuned in during was News Hour with Jim Lehrer, a segment about students in Oklahoma studying wind energy. How brilliant! A state driven by gas money, rich in farmland, and mostly overlooked until their football team rolls through the midwest each year. [Very difficult for a family with roots growing back to Cornhusker territory.] Oklahoma State University brought a fresh perspective to a their technology department and after twenty minutes I am even convinced I should be looking to join their program. Universities spend so much time and money recruiting from far and wide, here this university took a look at what would benefit the students in their own state and ended up developing a program that is going to benefit the whole country. I am so impressed.
Often it is the school system that moves too slowly. It usually takes major commercial industry to slowly shift the curriculum. However it should be the universities that lead the innovation to a new level. The classroom is the place to dream big, to experiment with the endless possibilities new ideas bring, and to branch out the learning experience from your specific field of study to overlap with industries only beginning to shape themselves.
Bravo Oklahoma for seeing a future in your land, for taking the chance within your university to further a new avenue of commerce within your state, and for giving people the tools to prosper without having to migrate to new fields of wealth. The new wind technology program gives accreditation back to wind energy, states with full confidence that we as a nation know that value in it's future, and secures that the students emerging from your program are going to be tomorrow's experts in the field.
And although I will still be yelling "Go Big Red!" on game day whenever I think of Oklahoma I will know that one day I will live in a healthier, safer, more economically secure country because the state took a chance, and they did so with full confidence.
For more information on the radio program that spurred today's bluview visit: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/social_issues/gn_toughchoices/