Water wars? Thirsty, energy-short China stirs fear - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

Water wars? Thirsty, energy-short China stirs fear - World news - World environment - msnbc.com

Here is an MSNBC report on a long-term issue that may drive international affairs in the coming decade more than the issues that are in the press these days.

Engagement: A Vision for the Land Grant Mission in the Information Era

In the opening pages of The Americans: The Democratic Experience, Daniel Boorstin describes the national spirit in which the land grant university developed:

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades, but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air – so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent, but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again; a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

            Higher education has been part of that ongoing revolution, as human society made the final shift from an agrarian culture to an industrial culture and from a culture based in hereditary aristocracy to one based in democracy.  These transformations began in the late 1800s, gathered momentum in the mid and late 19^th century, and reached their full power in the first half of the 20^th century.   The transformation of higher education was, in part, a response to these broader societal changes and, ultimately, a stimulus for further change. 

Educating for Democratization and Industrialization

            The land grant university can be understood as a response to both democratization and industrialization.  Boorstin describes one of the early advocates for the land grant concept—Jonathan Turner of Illinois—who argued for “A State University for the Industrial Classes.”

All civilized society [Turner noted] was “necessarily divided into two distinct cooperative, not antagonistic, classes”; the “professional” class (doctors, lawyers, men of letters, and preachers) comprised only about 5 percent of the people, while the “industrial” class included all the rest. . . . To build a true democracy, Turner proclaimed, the industrial classes must also have their universities, at least one in each state. . . .The new universities would teach agriculture, manufacturing processes, and bookkeeping; they would provide experimental farms and orchards and herds of stock; and they would be “open to all classes of students above a fixed age, and for any length of time.”  (p. 483)

            The land grant university gave the “industrial classes” the opportunity to gain a higher education and fill new professional roles as engineers, scientists, and educators in an industrializing society.  At the same time, the land grant university responded to a significant issue in society:  how to maintain the pace of industrialization in light of massive immigration and urbanization that were essential to new industries.  The land grant university became a center for research into agricultural productivity and, through the Cooperative Extension Service, took its findings directly to farmers in their fields.  This transformed agriculture and ensured that the growing cities would be able to feed their burgeoning populations.  At the same time, land grant institutions—along with state-owned “normal” schools—provided public school teachers to staff a critical workforce development need:  to ensure that immigrants were acculturated to American life and that more could graduate from high school and move on to higher education. 

The Need for a New Covenant

           

            Two centuries after the first inklings of the democratic and industrial revolutions, we find ourselves a generation into a new transformation—the Information Revolution—and a vastly different set of social needs.  Some comparisons illustrate the need for refreshing our vision of the role of the land grant university:

·      Where the Industrial Revolution was concerned with immigration, the Information Revolution is concerned with globalization; people no longer need to come to the United States to participate in its economy.

·      Where urbanization drove industrialization and public policy in the 19^th century, the trend at the beginning of the 21^st century is ex-urbanization, as technology makes it possible for people to live in geographically dispersed professional communities. 

·      While the need for engineers, business professionals, and new social professionals (educators, health care professionals, etc.) drove higher education in the Industrial Revolution, the Information Revolution requires a larger, more diverse cadre of “knowledge workers” with some level of higher education and the ability to adapt easily to rapid change; the emphasis is less on specific professional training than on innovation.

            A variety of specific societal issues have emerged in the national awareness as signs of change.  Global warming, globalization of the economy, health care access and quality are only a few examples.  Most of these are already being addressed in our institutions.  However, we might also ask whether there are more subtle, underlying needs that should drive innovation in the land grant institution.

            It is becoming increasingly clear that one area where we may see profound change is the workplace itself.  A May 14, 2009, Time Magazine report on “The Future of Work” noted:

Ten years ago, Facebook didn't exist. Ten years before that, we didn't have the Web. So who knows what jobs will be born a decade from now? Though unemployment is at a 25‑year high, work will eventually return. But it won't look the same. No one is going to pay you just to show up. We will see a more flexible, more freelance, more collaborative and far less secure work world.

            As early as 2001, a National Academies of Science report, Building a Workforce for the Knowledge Economy, reporting on the “tightness” of the available workforce among trained information technology professionals, noted:

. . . because the underlying information technologies change so rapidly, there is concern that the labor market does not work as efficiently in this arena as economic theory would predict—i.e., that rising wages will not relieve the tightness, at least not “in time.” (p. xiii).

            One reason why labor market ideas created during the industrial period might not work in the information era is that jobs will be distributed well beyond national borders.  Another is that much work is increasingly automated, requiring less intensive human activity.   The number of “jobless recoveries” that we’ve seen in the past few economic turndowns might be one signal of a trend toward a less intensive workforce.  A trend like this could threaten basic democratic foundations of our society by creating a permanent underclass of under-employed workers.  Such a trend would require a significant social policy change to ensure that all Americans were able to support themselves and their families.

             Several social policy options could be envisioned.  For example, instead of having fewer people with jobs, social policy could be directed at having all people work fewer years, somewhat easing entry of young people into the job market.  One way to achieve this goal would be to make national service part of an early retirement system, making room more quickly for younger workers to come into the workforce during the years when they need money to raise their families and allowing older workers to move into volunteer or social-service work through a kind of national pre-retirement service system after their children are raised, allowing them to apply the lessons learned during their working days to the problems facing their communities.

            What, then, are the implications for the land grant university?

Engaging Society

           

            The first step is to re-envision the land grant mission to engage the new society that it serves.   Given the diverse—and often competing—cultures that have evolved in our institutions, the land grant mission must co-exist with other powerful missions.  Over the past century—and especially during the transitional period since World War II—the land grant university has been transformed.  Our land grant universities are now comprehensive research universities.  Their impact—and source of funding for research—often reaches well beyond their state boundaries.  The institutional culture has become more diverse in the process. 

            The comprehensive research university is typically seen as having three components:  teaching, research, and service.  The land-grant mission is often viewed as part of the service component.  There may a tendency, therefore, to isolate the land grant mission from the other competing goals.  That, in my view, would be a mistake.  The land grant mission must be seen as the means by which the university engages with the community across all three components:  Engaged teaching, engaged research, and engaged service.   The land grant mission is thus infused throughout the university.  That said, however, there must also be a champion for this mission within the university leadership.  Typically, that role falls to the Vice President for Extension or Outreach, which typically works on the financial and political periphery of the institution.  In the Information Age land grant university, leadership for the land grant mission should be positioned so that it can champion engagement across all three dimensions of the mission.  Each land grant university has a somewhat different set of cultural and political issues, so there is no single organizational solution.  Nevertheless, finding the right place for the leader who will champion the land grant mission in the diverse culture of our institutions is essential.

            It also is clear that, in the Information Society, the land grant mission must push the boundaries of the institution in at least two directions.   First, higher education needs to engage better with the K-12 segment, helping to improve access to courses that high school graduates will need in order to get into college and, especially, to majors that are important in the Information economy.  This engagement should blur the old boundaries between K-12 and higher education and could lead to accelerated degrees and other innovations at a scale needed to create and maintain the new workforce.  Second, higher education needs to take a lead in creating post-retirement skills for older adults, preparing them to play new roles in their communities after retirement.   Thirdly, higher education needs to build new collaborative relationships—new forms of engagement among universities, communities, and employers that encompass all three dimensions of the higher education mission:  engaged teaching to create and maintain a competitive workforce; engaged research to help businesses, farms, and other employers innovate and stay competitive; and engaged service support communities and families in this new social era.

State Education Budgets: Stimulate Innovation

            This is turning into a tough year for public higher education in the United States.  Since a raft of new Republican Governors took office in state houses around the nation, cuts in higher education have been seen as a special target to help states deal with deficits.  In Pennsylvania, for instance, Republican Governor Tom Corbett has proposed that the Commonwealth cut the state appropriation for its four state-related institutions—Penn State University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University, and Lincoln University—by more than 50%.  That would reduce Pennsylvania’s appropriation for its land grant university—which maintains 24 campuses around the state in addition to the statewide Cooperative Extension Service—to a mere 4 % of the University’s total budget. 

            My purpose here is not to explore in any depth why Republican Governors seem to be so anti-education.  My purpose is to suggest that this is, at best, a wrong-headed solution.   The challenge to Pennsylvania and other states is not simply to cut costs, but to re-position education so that their economies can thrive in a new era—the so-called Information Society or Knowledge Society.

            Most of our educational system is organized to support the an industrial economy.  In fact, our system of public universities and public schools is a direct response to the Industrial Revolution.  In those days, policy makers felt that 25% of high school graduates needed to go on to a college degree in order to provide society with the engineers, scientists, teachers, and business managers needed to sustain an industrial economy.  And, in fact, public education has done a great job in meeting that challenge.

           Today, however, we no longer live in an industrial economy.  We live in a globalized, information economy. In this economy, education has become critically important not only to provide managers and professionals, but to enable the broader workforce to compete in a global workforce and to help their employers innovate from the bottom up in a very competitive, constantly changing technology-driven economy.

            The federal government has recognized the realities of this new environment by challenging both K-12 and higher education to increase the percentage of high school graduates who go on to get a college degree from the current rate of 39% to 60% by the year 2020.   Within this vision is a two-fold challenge:  (1) to expand access to higher education so that it can absorb an almost 50% increase in undergraduate students and (2) to expand by about the same percentage the number of high school graduates who are qualified to enter higher education.

            While some cuts to state education appropriations may be needed in the short run, the real challenge to state government is not to vilify teachers and public education in general, but instead to engage educators in how to address this and related education challenges that are intricately connected to economic well-being.  Cutting budgets will not necessarily result in innovation.  Without a new engagement in innovation, cutting school budgets just means larger classes and fewer specialized courses—often, the same courses that students need in order to get into college.

            Rather than simply cut budgets or undercut the role that teachers can play in the lives of our young citizens, let’s acknowledge the need to trim in the short run, but balance that by stimulating innovation in several key areas:

1.            Invest in Dual Enrollment Courses – Many students find themselves in school districts that are either to small or too poorly funded to maintain courses that students need in order to get into college.  Dual enrollment courses are courses offered by colleges and universities that can be taken by high school students and that count toward high school graduation and college credit.   A strategic commitment to dual enrollment will mean that more students will graduate from college not only prepared to move onto higher education, but with some college credits already under their belts.   A long-term dual enrollment strategy could also result in accelerated degree programs that combine high school study with summer internships, bringing better educated employees into the workforce faster.

2.            Invest in STEM – The need for renewed emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curricula has been long recognized at the national and state levels.  These programs are an essential ingredient to creating an Information Age workforce that can attract new industry to a state or help existing companies adapt to the new economy.  A STEM investment could be directly tied to a dual enrollment strategy or could be part of a refocused general education program in the undergraduate curriculum.  It is also an important component to teacher preparation.  

3.            School/Community/Employer Collaborations – One way that higher education can directly serve local communities is by creating collaborative degree programs with local employers in order to build a sustainable workforce.  These collaborations may involve local school districts, employers, and unions and involve a mix of dual enrollment courses, on-campus courses, community service, and workplace internships.  Ultimately, these programs would fund themselves, but state funds would be useful in creating models.

4.            Revitalize Cooperative Extension – The Cooperative Extension Service was created at the height of the Industrial Revolution out of a fear at state and federal government level that the United States would not be able to sustain industrialization—and the urbanization and immigration that went with it—if we could not also improve agricultural production and make farm life more attractive to new generations of farm families.  Today, there is a similar concern that, at the height of the Information Revolution, we need to revitalize our smaller communities in order to bring new knowledge-based businesses that can thrive in smaller communities.  One challenge here is to bring broadband Internet access to our smaller communities so that companies can maintain their global presence while taking advantage of the stability of small town culture.  We need to re-envision the ideals of Cooperative Extension for this new environment.

            In March 2011, we are facing an important turning point.  New governors, brought into power by fear and frustration caused by the Great Recession, have aggressively moved to cut spending as the quickest way to reduce deficits.  With less than four months remaining until the new fiscal year begins, our educational institutions have little time to respond creatively to a significant budget reduction.  The result will be to pull back, rather than to engage around a new agenda.   State governments have an alternative:  engage educators at all levels to save dollars where we can, but also to re-envision the institutional mission of public education in light of the Information Revolution and get us started down the road toward long-term sustainability in a globalized knowledge economy.

Rethinking General Education in Tight Economic Times

Today’s newspaper reported on the second Penn State undergraduate program to be evaluated for closure through the curriculum review process that is now underway.  Both programs—Science, Technology, and Society Program and Integrative Arts—share some important traits: (1) they are both interdisciplinary (STS is also inter-college) and (2) they began as general education initiatives that evolved into undergraduate majors.

It probably is natural that this evolution would take place.  A research university is a highly decentralized culture where the academic department is the basic family unit.  Faculty members who create these initiatives tend to be broad thinkers who identify with the broader culture outside academia rather than with the family unit.  However, after the initial wave of innovation, faculty members in programs like these tend to create a new family unit within the culture of the institution.  Interdisciplinary initiatives become their own departments; once-radical views adjust, however uncomfortably, to the older culture.   Some ideas—area studies programs are a good example—find long-term homes in a college.  Others never quite fit in. 

Perhaps the part of the curriculum that suffers most from this is general education, for which these programs were launched in the first place.   One solution might be to focus more attention on interdisciplinarity in general education.  This has been done at Penn State several times over the years.  As an undergraduate student in the 1960s, some of my best general education courses were interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities.  There were also a series of interdisciplinary courses in the sciences:  Physical Sciences 07 and 08, Biological Sciences 01, 02, and 03, and others.  These courses provided a good overview of the liberal arts and science worldviews for nonmajors.  They were focused on understanding humanistic and scientific thinking, but not necessarily how those ways of thinking could help us live a better life.  The old idea of general education as the “distribution” part of the undergraduate curriculum was reinforced:  general education was about getting to know something about disciplines that were not in your major. 

There is another view of general education.   In this view, the majors and minors prepare students for the professions, but general education prepares students to be productive citizens and happy individuals.   This kind of general education is naturally interdisciplinary, because it is focused on the external world and its problems, rather than on the traditional structure of the institution.  This approach took root in the first half of the twentieth century.  Columbia’s Contemporary Civilizations Program and Chicago’s Great Books Program are two examples.  A truly interdisciplinary general education program would follow in the path of these groundbreaking programs and, at the same time, provide an environment in which new ideas could flourish across disciplines.

As institutions revisit their curricula to find savings, they should also step back and look more broadly at the purpose of the curriculum.  General education serves a different purpose than do the majors and minors.  An interdisciplinary general education, envisioned as preparing students to be productive citizens, would allow institutions to protect some space for innovation while also avoiding the creation of un-productive majors.  Perhaps this economy gives us an occasion for a fresh look at general education.

Logic and Faith

John Dewey once wrote that the worst thing that ever happened to western civilization was our acceptance of the ideas of the classical Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. They believed in the existence of pure, ideal exemplars for “forms” of great ideas. Dewey, on the other hand, believed human beings can never truly understand these ideal forms, assuming that they exist. Dewey advocated for logic in philosophy, but not as a means of finding absolute truth. Instead, he saw logic as a tool of inquiry. In this sense, the means—inquiry—was consistent with the end—true to Dewey’s ultimate test of learning. Since ideal forms could not be discovered, the goal of philosophy was to improve our ability to inquire and to increasingly improve our understanding of what is essentially an unknowable reality.

Everyday science bears out Dewey’s sense of things. The more we learn about the universe around us, the better tools we develop to gather information, the more we understand the limits of our ability to truly know about the world around us. We know from dogs that human beings cannot hear the full spectrum of sound. We know that there is a spectrum of light waves that are invisible to the human eye. We guess that there may be dimensions beyond the three that we can directly experience, and we think there may be a fourth dimension—time—that we sense but that we can measure only in its passing. We’ve invented tools that can sharpen our senses. However, we are not able to invent tools that can help us understand what we cannot otherwise sense. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Is there a “sixth sense?” We debate it. The evidence of our five senses does not give us confidence, but we debate it because there are phenomena that we cannot otherwise explain. Is there a seventh sense? An eighth? If time is the fourth dimension, is there a fifth? A sixth? We don’t know. But we can explore. We can inquire.

We can also have faith. Throughout history, religions have been attempts to explain why things are the way they are. Some seem to hit closer to explaining things than do others. But they are all attempts to understand what cannot be directly sensed. Often, the problem with religion is that it eventually loses confidence in true faith and falls back on literal absolutes. And, given the fact that the religion’s texts often have been translated multiple times through the years, often in quite different cultural contexts, their literal “truths” are sometimes hard to decipher. Regardless, faith is better seen, not as unquestioning adherence to dogma, but as another way to guide inquiry.

Logic and faith work together to help us understand a world that we experience, but that we cannot fully sense.

Blowin' in the Wind

Tonight, to Pandora—the Internet radio application—I heard a live version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary. They introduced the song by saying something to this effect: “This song asks nine questions; our answers to them will determine the fate of this generation.” They then launched into a particularly beautiful, even soulful version of Dylan’s song.

It reminded me of the first time that I hear Bob Dylan sing this song. I was in my early teens. We were at my cousin’s summer campsite at Pymatuning State Park. The radio was on in the background and PPM’s version of the song was playing. Then, the DJ came on and said, with a bit of a smirk in his voice, “Do you want to hear this song by the guy who wrote it?” Then he played Bob Dylan’s version as a joke.

That winter, my mother bought us a stereo for Christmas and, for me, a copy of Dylan’s album, “The Times They are a Changin’.” That Christmas, she introduced me to the voice of my generation. Thanks, Mom.

Penn State's STS Pogram: A Future in General Education?

In September, I posted on this blog a piece about the death of Dr. Rustum Roy, who was, among other achievements, one of the founders of the interdisciplinary Science, Technology, and Society curriculum at Penn State.  Recently, I was sad to read in the Centre Daily Times that Penn State is considering closing this program, pending Faculty Senate approval.  I am sad not only for Dr. Roy’s memory, but for the lost potential to Penn State’s general education program.

            A Wikipedia entry about STS indicates that more than two dozen universities worldwide have developed baccalaureate programs in STS.  Since 2005, four U.S. institutions have launched new STS programs.  Penn State’s STS curriculum—a collaboration between the colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts—is positioned as an undergraduate minor.  Here, perhaps, lies the problem. STS developed in an era that launched a number of “area studies” programs—Women’s Studies, Asian Studies, African-American Studies, etc.  Many of these area studies have become established as academic departments in their own right.  STS, however, might better be structured not as a separate research and teaching area, but as a component of general education.

            Wikipedia defines STS as “the study of how social, political, and cultural values affect scientific research and technological innovation, and how these in turn affect society, politics, and culture.”  It emerged as an interdisciplinary innovation in the 1960s, a time up general social upheaval, but also a time when we were just becoming aware that a new dynamic was forming.  Call it the Information Age or the Knowledge Society, or whatever, this new age required citizens who could see the intricate interactions among scientific research, technological innovation, and social values.  We are now a generation into this new era, but I don’t think we are past the point where we need to educate citizens about the interactions among science, technology, and society.  If anything, this kind of interdisciplinary curriculum is more urgent than ever.

            The ultimate value of STS, then, may not be as a separate research and teaching specialty.  Instead, its real value may be as part of a general education curriculum.   One can imagine (as I suggested in my earlier posting about STS) a complete general education curriculum structured around STS as a theme, similar to the old Contemporary Civilizations program at Columbia.  However, STS is more likely to gain acceptance as an option within a more traditional distribution-style general education curriculum.   It is easy to visualize STS courses that would meet general education distribution requirements in science, social sciences, and humanities.  The interdisciplinary nature of STS courses would facilitate cross-posting over several distribution areas.   In addition, institutions could develop upper-division STS courses that serve as interdisciplinary, issues-focused baccalaureate capstone courses that send new professionals out into the workplace better prepared to deal with STS-related issues in their fields.

            I fully understand why Science, Technology, and Society as a minor area would be considered for closure.  However, re-conceiving the STS vision within the general education curriculum would be a great way to maintain the heart of the program and prepare undergraduates to engage in a society that continues to be transformed by science and technology.