Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2010

University Day Speaker Touts The Ways UNC Engages Students

Heather Munroe-Blum ’ 83 (PhD) might not be a university president today if she hadn’t come to Chapel Hill to get a degree.

“The quality of the engagement between students and professors was
exceptional at UNC,” says Munroe-Blum, principal and vice chancellor
of McGill University in Montreal. “They did what great teachers do —
to see things in students that they might not see in themselves. They
expanded my sense of the possible that way.”
Besides her doctorate in epidemiology, she also received an honorary
doctor of science degree at Carolina’s Commencement in 2008. She was
this year’s keynote speaker at University Day ceremonies on Oct. 12, as
UNC continued its recent focus on the theme of innovation and how
what occurs at Carolina can help solve the world’s biggest problems.

For Munroe-Blum, mobilizing education talent and innovation to
benefit a local community and showing students what is possible is what

DAN SEARS ’ 72

Heather Munroe-Blum ’ 83 (PhD) has led McGill University since 2003. The 34,000-student university ranks 19th globally in the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings. It was ranked first in Canada. (UNC ranked 57th globally and 22nd in the U.S.)

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universities are all about — and what will have the broadest impact to propel society forward.

“Universities that develop knowledge technology and bring it to the
learning experience and provide an international experience at the same
time are preparing our citizens to be successful in the world,” she says.
“Society is enriched by universities. We shouldn’t forget about the origi-
nal purpose of the university, which is to have an institution in society
where the ability to pursue any question, to debate any topic and
exchange ideas on any theme, is encouraged and protected. UNC is a
glowing example of that.”
Munroe-Blum believes the entire university community is responsible
for animating its own institutions and making them places that welcome
creative people who come to learn.

“We need to bring the broad enterprise of research to enhance the
undergraduate student experience, as well as being a large part of the
graduate student experience,” she says. “And research universities haven’t
done that as well as they could. We also need to make an international
learning experience a hallmark of a university education, and that doesn’t
mean by having programs that are replicas abroad of what you have at
home, but rather creating an innovative experience with a culture and a
community in another part of the world.”
Scientific and scholarly success have a lot to do with a university’s rep-
utation, she says, which in turn affects the ability of the university to
serve the public purpose.

“A university has to be really clear on what its distinctive mission is,”
she said. “And that means knowing something about your own strengths
as an institution.”
Munroe-Blum serves on the Internationalization Committee of the
Association of American Universities and chairs the Association of
Universities and Colleges of Canada’s Standing Advisory Committee on
University Research. She is a member of Canada’s Science, Technology
and Innovation Council, the U.S. National Research Council’s
Committee on Research Universities, the Canada Foundation for
Innovation and the Trilateral Commission.

— Don Evans ’ 80

An excerpt from Heather Munroe-Blum’s University Day address:

“I was on an airplane in March of 1979, coming from a frozen Canadian winter for my first visit to Chapel Hill. … As the plane took off, I sat uncertainly in my seat, my husband by my side. I had never been south of New York state, was about to make my first visit to North Carolina — and the American South. I was contemplating committing myself to several years of study in this foreign place. ‘What do you think it will be like?’ I asked my husband, who was reading a magazine. ‘Well,’ he said, holding up the cover of his magazine, ‘it is 78 degrees in Chapel Hill, the sun is shining and the basketball team is on the cover of Sports Illustrated. It must be a pretty good place.’And it sure was.”