Some 13 million students in American colleges and universities are receiving a quality undergraduate education, but a national center based at the University of Miami aims to make it better. The Reinvention Center, established at Stony Brook University in 2000 and hosted by UM since 2007, was inspired by the Boyer Commission Report, a Carnegie Foundation study that called for a new approach to undergraduate education, particularly at research universities.

“The Boyer Report argued for a new model of education at universities that takes advantage of all the resources—human, intellectual, extracurricular—that accompany research and graduate programs,” explains Reinvention Center director Wendy Katkin, a former associate provost at Stony Brook.

University faculty and senior administrators nationwide who serve on four regional networks help the Reinvention Center in its mission by meeting once a semester to brainstorm ideas. Members of the center’s executive board, including UM senior vice provost and dean of undergraduate education William Scott Green, work closely with Katkin to establish priorities and plan and implement initiatives. Sixty-five institutions have signed on as charter members of the center, which also sponsors roundtables and symposia, prepares papers, and maintains a Web site addressing issues central to undergraduate education.

Hosting the center is likely to “put the University of Miami on the map as a center for undergraduate education,” Katkin says. “The University of Miami is helping to set the agenda for the center, and that means it will benefit by gaining tremendous input from so many people.”