Toward a Mindful General Education

In The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity, Jeffrey Sachs describes the challenges facing our culture today and offers some ideas for how to overcome them.  He notes, “the problems of America begin at home, with the choices we are making as individuals.  Through clearer thinking, we can become more effective both as individuals and as citizens, reclaiming power from the corporations” (p. 162).  He calls for the creation of a “mindful society” that takes a “middle path” based on the ethical teachings of both Buddha and Aristotle and identifies eight areas that would “extend to a more considered understanding of our social relationships and responsibilities as workers, citizens, and members of the community” (p. 165)—a goal that is consistent with that of general education as I have described it in earlier posts.   The eight dimensions are:

·      Mindfulness of Self – A middle path of personal moderation to balance the craving for wealth with the need for personal happiness.

·      Mindfulness of Work – Seeking meaningful work, in part by better preparing for the work environment and in part by balancing work and other life activities.

·      Mindfulness of Knowledge --  An attitude that one “must always keep an open door to science” and be “open to revision based on new scientific evidence” (p. 170).  This is especially important in a technology-based society in which the scientific basis for the tools of daily life.  Sachs notes that “mindfulness of knowledge, therefore, properly begins with the recognition of the complexity of our economy and the need for scientific and technical expertise to help manage it” (p. 171).

·      Mindfulness of Others – Sachs believes that the most difficult challenge in today’s society may be to revive compassion for others.  This is a challenge both at the persona level, where many Americans have retreated from public life, and at the civic level, where one goal, for instance, is to address issues of poverty.  Mindfulness of others involves creating an ethic that connects individuals to society.

·      Mindfulness of Nature – Sachs believes that today’s society is fundamentally different from previous eras in two ways: (1) global society is “much further removed from nature than in the past” and (2) “human impacts on nature are for the first time in history so great that they threaten the planet’s core biophysical functioning” (p. 175).   This dimension of mindfulness involves recognizing—and responding to—our impact on the natural world in which we live.

·      Mindfulness of the Future—Sachs notes that this dimension “requires a special act of will:  to take moral and practical ownership of the long-term consequences of our actions and to trace those consequences as carefully as possible into the far future (p. 176).  It involves building a new ethic for the future and taking moral responsibility for what will happen as a consequence of our actions.  In civil society, he argues, “a new mindfulness of the future would take seriously the responsibility to link expert forecasts with appropriate policy actions” (p. 178).

·      Mindfulness of Politics – Sachs sees this dimension as a needed “antidote” to the rising power of corporations displacing individual power in a democracy.  He notes, “Americans must regain a proper understanding of the complementary and balanced roles of government and the marketplace” (179).

·      Mindfulness of the World – The final dimension involves the creation of a new “global ethic” that recognizes the interconnectedness of the world, both economically and socially, which has made obsolete the ethic of national and cultural separation.  As Sachs notes, “The combination of unprecedented economic interconnectedness on the one hand, and the deep distrust across national and regional borders on the other, may be the defining paradox of the world economy today” (p. 180).  Resolving this paradox requires a new ethic that emphasizes respect and tolerance of others and a core value of mutual esteem. 

Creating Mindfulness:  A Context for General Education

            Sachs’ ideas about how to overcome the current crises in American civil society translate very well into goals for general education.  His dimensions of mindfulness describe a vision for the relationship of the individual to society that is consistent with the goals of general education that have been described in earlier posts.    

            The question then becomes:  How would one structure a general education curriculum around these goals?   A mindful general education curriculum would have several characteristics:

·      It would be interdisciplinary, bringing the perspectives of different disciplines to bear on understanding complexity in one or more of the eight dimensions. 

·      It would be problem-centered, giving students direct experience in understanding the complexity of a situation and in framing a solution.

·      It would involve inquiry and active learning, conveying core knowledge and skills through the context of understanding problems and finding solutions.

·      It would be foundational, in the sense that it would require students to understand the cultural, theoretical, or historical foundations of the issues involved in one or more of the dimensions.

·      To the extent possible, elements of the curriculum would be experiential and team oriented, encouraging learning by experience. 

·      It would use a variety of methods and media to engage students in active, inquiry-based, problem-centered learning.

Such a curriculum could work within the distribution system typical of many undergraduate programs.  However, the courses would be multi-disciplinary—ideally, interdisciplinary—perhaps along the lines of the innovative Science, Technology, and Society curriculum (see my September 3, 2010 post on STS).   Many course themes could be developed.  A few off the top of my head:

• Understanding Globalization:  The Idea and Practice of Community 
• The Next 100 Years:  Nurturing Nature
• Human Migration in the Industrial Age
• War on Poverty: Exploring Middle Path Solutions
• The Role of Government in a Democratic Society
• The Role of Free Markets in a Democratic Society
• The Legacy of the Industrial Revolution

General Education and Civil Society: Thoughts On "The Crucible Moment"

In an earlier posting on “General Education and the Engaged University,” I cited the 1948 Truman Commission on Higher Education’s definition of the function of general education at mid-century.  The Commission noted eleven goals that reflect the need to rebuild civil society after a half-century of World War and global financial depression, and attempted to respond to the remarkable changes in the structure of civil society and the revolution in technology that were among the consequences of the 20^th century upheavals.  I had cited the same Commission back in 1988 in The Meaning of General Education, my history of the idea of general education. 

So, I was pleasantly surprised when The Crucible Moment:  College Learning and Democracy’s Future, a report of The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force, also cited the Truman Commission in making its case for re-committing higher education to a curriculum that ensures a  “socially cohesive and economically vibrant U.S. democracy and a viable, just global community.”  This goal, notes the report,  “will require that civic learning and democratic engagement not be sidelined but central, not an afterthought but an anticipated and integral part of K-12 and college education” (p. 20).

Civic education was a focus of K-12 education in the postwar period.  When I was a high school student in the 1960s, at least one class per day was focused on civic education of one kind or another.  Ninth grade was split between Pennsylvania History and “Civics”—an introduction to the Constitution and American government.  Tenth and eleventh grades saw a year of world history and a year of American history.  And twelfth grade was “Problems of Democracy” – POD—a daily excursion into the issues that have faced American democracy throughout its history.  While most histories ended with World War II, POD brought us into the present.   In addition, I recall that the first time I saw film of civil rights protestors being beaten was in tenth grade English. 

This was pretty typical of what the first generation of postwar students experienced.  It is not hard to imagine that this education pre-disposed that generation to embracing the civil society revolution that was to come:  civil rights, women’s rights, the peace movement, gay/lesbian rights.  We were, as it turned out, a democratically engaged generation.  Our education contributed to that.  Similarly, it is not hard to imagine that the lack of civic education that has marked the past generation has contributed to the very odd disconnect between individual citizens and their government that has contributed to the economic chaos and social polarization that defines our present day.

What, then, should higher education do to embrace civic learning and democratic engagement?  Crucible Moment defines civic-minded campuses as having four characteristics:  “. . . such campuses are distinguished by a civic ethos governing campus life, civic literacy as a goal for every graduate, civic inquiry integrated within majors, general education, and technical training, and informed civic action done in concert with others as lifelong practice” (p. 31).

An Opportunity for General Education

The idea of a civically engaged university has the potential to re-invigorate the concept of General Education as our institutions adapt to the changing societal needs of the Information Revolution.

While at some institutions General Education has been reduced to a “distribution requirement”—a collection of introductory courses that give students a glimpse of different disciplines—General Education has a much more important role to play in creating citizens.

We can envision a General Education program that prepares students to be effective citizens of a global information society as having several elements:

·      Knowledge – The cultural foundations of civic democracy—a multi-disciplinary approach that includes history, philosophy, and social change to give students a grounding in the cultural traditions and forces of change.

·      Skills – At one time, the skills section of a general education program focused on communications—public speaking and writing, especially.  In today’s global information society, critical citizenship skills must include how to find and evaluate information, problem-solving, collaboration, and inter-cultural understanding.  These, in turn, require an active learning environment in which students work, individually and together, to local and evaluate information, turn it into knowledge, and apply it to solve problems.

·      Attitudes – This includes understanding the role of globalization in shaping one’s identify and understanding one’s role as an individual in family, local community, national, and global contexts.   It is in this area that the curriculum develops the student’s predisposition to act in different environments.

·      Experience—Just as the Industrial Revolution stimulated the inclusion of laboratory courses to help students understand the scientific process and the standards of scientific research, the global Information Society requires that students gain direct experience in working in different communities.  This can be accomplished through local internships, service-focused study abroad opportunities, or projects that bring together multicultural student teams to explore social issues and find solutions to problems.  This could also be the focus of a capstone course for professional programs.

I expect to explore the details of a general education approach to civic democracy in future positions.  My purpose here is simply to illustrate the range of activities that could be integrated into a curriculum designed to address the issues raised by the Crucible Moment report.

This is one of a series of postings that I am planning on the broad topic of General Education for an Information Society.  Comments and discussion are very welcome. 

General Education and the Engaged University

This week, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett announced his second annual budget proposal.  Last year, he sparked a lot of controversy by proposing a 50% reduction in state funding for Penn State.  This year, he proposes to cut the state appropriation to Penn State, Pitt, and Temple by 30% and to the State System of Higher Education by 20%.   The rationale is straightforward:  Pennsylvania government is not generating enough revenue to fund at a higher level.

Certainly, the specific percentages will be subject to negotiation over the next few months.  However, we can expect that the final number will still be a significant reduction in state support.  The impact will be to further shift the cost of higher education from the taxpayer to the individual student. This reinforces a fundamental question that has underpinned much public discussion over the past decade:  Is higher education a public good, which enriches the entire community, or is it a private good, that primarily benefits the individuals who attend and graduate?

The idea of higher education as a “private” good came into focus for me recently, when a LinkedIn discussion quoted an institution that had done an “ROI” report.  It used salary gains by alums as the primary measure of ROI, although it also noted the positive economic impact on the local community in which the campus is located.   By using this approach, the institution essentially bought into the idea that its value can be measured in terms of how a student’s investment in tuition dollars is returned through increased salary.  It is the “private good” argument.

However, it misses several important considerations.  Prime among these is the fact that the student pays for only part of his/her education.  The rest is paid by direct state appropriation and, increasingly, by state and federal student financial aid.  The taxpayer has a huge investment in the education of each individual who graduates from a higher education institution in the United States.  That includes for-profit institutions, which are at the very top of the pile of institutions that receive federal financial aid.

A second, perhaps less obvious factor is that a college education is not meant simply to prepare one for a profession.  The college curriculum has two distinct components.  One is the upper-division professional component—the major and minor.  The other is the general education component.  At most institutions, this is the broad “liberal arts” curriculum that introduces students to the culture in which they live, with the goal of preparing them to better participate as a member of society.  To be sure, for some institutions this idea has eroded to become a simplistic “distribution” curriculum that gives students a taste of the major disciplines.  However, other institutions have taken care to ensure that their graduates are prepared to be both citizens and professionals.

In 1948, as America was finding its way into a new world order after two World Wars that effectively ended the social order that had been set into motion by the Enlightenment and set the stage for a global society and the Information Revolution, a Presidential Commission on Higher Education issued a report, Higher Education for American Democracy, which stated that “The crucial task for higher education today . . . is to provide a unified general education for American youth . . . General education should give the student the values, attitudes, knowledge, and skills that will equip him to live rightly and well in a free society” (quoted in Gail Kennedy, Education for Democracy, 1952).  The Commission outlined eleven objectives for general education:

1.            To develop for the regulation of one’s personal and civic life a code of behavior based on ethical principles consistent with democratic ideals.

2.            To participate actively as an informed and responsible citizen in solving the social, economic, and political problems of one’s community, State, and Nation.

3.            To recognize interdependence of the different peoples of the world and one’s personal responsibility for fostering international understanding and peace.

4.            To understand the common phenomena in one’s physical environment, to apply habits of scientific thought to both personal and civic problems, and to appreciate the implications of scientific discoveries for human welfare.

5.            To understand the ideas of others and to express one’s own effectively.

6.            To attain a satisfactory emotional and social adjustment.

7.            To maintain and improve [one’s] own health and to cooperate actively and intelligently in solving community health problems.

8.            To understand and enjoy literature, art, music, and other cultural activities as expressions of personal and social experience, and to participate to some extent in some form of creative activity.

9.            To acquire the knowledge and attitudes basic to a satisfying family life.

10.            To choose a socially useful and personally satisfying vocation that will permit one to use to the full[one’s] particular interests and abilities.

11.            To acquire and use the skills and habits involved in critical and constructive thinking.

            Today, one can argue that the global Information Society requires a fresh assessment of general education.  Regardless, institutions of higher education that rely on tax support need to articulate how their curriculum helps advance the total society and not simply the careers of individuals.   We cannot walk away from our societal mission just because times are tough.  Instead, we need to find new ways to express how we are engaged with society and to communicate that to all of our stakeholders.  The general education curriculum is one component of that. 

A strategic engagement initiative should also include a strategy for engaging through outreach, research, and technology transfer.  It is time for the academic community to look up and look out, beyond our campuses, and to engage our institutions with the broader society that they serve. 

Convergence or Transformation: Optional Futures for Distance Education

Note:  This is a reposting of a speech that I gave on June 11, 2008, at the National University Telecommunications Network conference in Park City, Utah, where I received a distinguished service award.  

In 1992, I was invited by the American Center for the Study of Distance Education to project long-term trends in the field.  It was an interesting time to be looking forward.   We were about a decade into the rise of video in distance education—the movement from correspondence study to broadcast telecourses and satellite-delivered live interactive courses (the latter of which had spurred creation of NUTN in the early 1980s), but it was clear that the Internet was on the horizon.   I identified four trends:

·      The simultaneous diversification and convergence of technologies.

·      Changing relationships with students

·      Changing relationships among institutions

·      The emergence of a new mainstream

            On the technology side—this was a year before the first web browser I hasten to note—there were already multiple ways to deliver video, audio, and print and to facilitate interaction through all three media.   It was clear, however, that, amid this diversity, institutions needed to think in terms of convergence.   We could not afford to have video, audio, print, and computer all in separate organizational silos.  My prediction was that “organizational structures that do not facilitate a mixing of technologies will find it difficult to reach their full potential in this new environment.”   This, in turn, would create a “new institutional infrastructure” where use of technology for instruction would be considered alongside its use for administrative and research applications, creating a “broader community of interest.” 

            If that was true for the technologies of the early 1990s, it is true in spades today as we consider how the Internet has changed the university infrastructure and created new communities (or, in the absence of these communities, has paralyzed innovation) at our institutions.   

            The second trend was a changing relationship between our institutions and our students and, particularly, the rise of synchronous and asynchronous “learning communities” as a critical pedagogical issue.   I also mentioned another relationship issue: the rise of the “empowered student” or “community of scholars” as a result of students having better direct access to large databases, video and textual materials—what we now call “learning objects.”   This trend, I suggested, “will require that we rethink our definition of instruction, our assessment of learning, and our ideas about curriculum.”

            Today, we are still experimenting in this area, but with much higher stakes as the Web moves from a publishing environment to a collaboration environment and we enter what some are calling a “conversation economy.”    Blogs, wikis, Facebook, You-Tube, social bookmarking—all of these Web 2.0 applications are creating a demand for a new, more collaborative, more inquiry-oriented approach to learning—on campus and off—that reflects how people use technology at work and at home.   The goal posts have moved a long way ahead of us on this issue, but there are some great things happening around the world as educators experiment with these new tools and as institutions and governments begin to set new policies on sharing content.

             The third trend area was a forecast that the use of new technologies would also change relationships among institutions.   The examples I cited in 1992—the University of Mid-America, the International University Consortium, the National Universities Degree Consortium and the Mind Extension University—have long since passed from the scene, but we are seeing new forms of collaboration.  Two examples point to the scope of change that is now gathering momentum:  the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA) and its mission of offering collaborative online degree programs for adults that no single institution can offer alone, and the CourseShare initiative in the CIC—the academic counterpart of the Big Ten—which uses online learning to share rarely-taught language across institutions to regular, full-time undergraduates on campus.    When you look internationally, you can begin to see potential that is just now being explored.   In the international sphere, collaboration takes many forms.  Almost every regional association for open and distance education has an initiative to develop quality standards that will facilitate sharing, for instance.  There are individual examples of institutions sharing courses at the graduate level, such as Penn State, the Universities of Leeds and Southampton in the UK allowing their graduate students to take online courses in Geographic Information Systems from each other’s programs.  Perhaps the most dramatic collaborative initiative internationally is the Open Educational Resources movement.   Here, the potential was articulated by a leadership group that met in Cape Town, South Africa, and issues the “Cape Town Declaration:”

…we call on educators, authors and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be licensed to facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone, ideally imposing no legal constraints other than a requirement by the creator for appropriate attribution or the sharing of derivative works. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

            I projected one other trend back in 1992:  The emergence of a new mainstream in American higher education in which distance education is fully integrated into a broader institutional strategy to respond to what I called the “currents of social change.”    This has been a little less easy to track, but I suspect each institution represented here has seen some evidence of this kind of convergence.  At Penn State, for instance, our online distance education program, the World Campus—which offered its first fully online courses a decade ago—is now a leading part of a broader institution-wide consortium called Penn State Online that tries to coordinate among the many different applications of online learning for students on campus and inter-campus, as well as at a distance.   Several degree programs developed for distance education are now being offered as “blended” programs at some of our smaller campuses; some academic colleges have created their own online services to support on-campus instruction and then make these courses available to World Campus students.  We an also point to project like the National enter for Academic Transformation and the CIC CourseShare initiative as examples of distance education techniques being used to improve instruction on campus. 

            Another evidence of convergence—of the mainstreaming of distance education—is the incredible growth in the number of institutions that now offer degree programs online to off-campus students and, equally important, a commitment not just to courses, but to complete degree programs.   As far back as 2004, the annual Sloan survey, Growing by Degrees, reported that 44 percent of all institutions that offered Master’s degree programs offered at least one program online.  Sixty-five percent of institutions were using primarily core faculty to teach their online courses—a rate comparable to face-to-face courses.    In short, online distance education is emerging as an ongoing commitment of academic units, reflected in the long-term commitment to degree programs and to the assignment of core faculty to serve both on-campus and distant students.

            The most recent Sloan report—Online Nation—notes that the number of students taking at least one online course has growth to 3.48 million in 2006, more than double the number reported four years earlier (p.7).   While the Sloan surveys do not distinguish between truly distant students, full-time commuter students, and resident on-campus students, I think it is safe to assume that this dramatic growth is the result not just of increases in adult students at a distance but also increases in the number of commuter students taking online courses for convenience and scheduling flexibility, and the number of full-time on-campus students taking online course as part of their campus curriculum.   In fact, a Penn State undergraduate student told me last year that he has not had one semester in which he did not have at least one course that had a significant online component.

             However, online learning is not having an equal effect at all institutions.  Online Nation reported that the greatest impact is in public colleges and universities, with community colleges leading, followed by public universities.  The impact has been least felt on private, baccalaureate institutions (p. 12).   In other words, those institutions that have a mission to serve off-campus or commuter students are more likely to fully embrace online distance education than those whose mission is more campus-centric.   Interestingly, a clear majority--59.1 percent--of academic leaders now see online learning as “critical to the long-term strategy” of their institutions (p.16).

            Clearly distance education and the mainstream have converged and, in the process, the mainstream has been changed and distance education—at least in some cases—has been more fully embraced—or is being re-invented—as a strategy for the total institution.   This has been driven partly by market forces—the rising importance of continuing education for adults who are already in the workforce, by the need for local institutions to more effectively compete for commuter students, and by the growing willingness of traditional-age students to study online.  Last, but certainly not least, the convergence has been driven by economics—the need to cut costs and improve efficiency on campus and the need to generate new tuition revenues from nontraditional students in light of reduced government funding and increased competition. 

            All that said, today, we are working in a vastly different environment—both inside and outside our institutions—than when distance educators began experimenting with online 15 years ago.   People have begun to notice that the Information Revolution is not so much about how quickly information is broadcast, but about how it brings people and ideas together in new ways.  We are beginning to realize that the Knowledge Society, in reality, is a “Skills Society.”  Providing access, convenience, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness will continue to be important issues, but the emerging question for the next decade or so is:  how can we help individuals learn how to build and sustain new communities built around collaboration and sharing of knowledge to solve both local and, increasingly, global problems?  For those of us in distance education, the challenge is more focused:  How can we use what we’ve learned about online distance education to help transform our institutions to meet the needs of this emerging society?

            We can envision a broader strategic horizon in which distance education is a key part of a more complex picture, one that includes fully online courses offered to students both on campus and at a distance, hybrid courses offered on campus and through continuing education, blended programs that mix distance education and site-based experiences, and, more generally, an academic environment in which e-learning is seen as a utility available to all faculty and students.  Access will continue to be a critical strategic issues, along with efficiency on campus and, perhaps most important, continuing to evolve a new pedagogy that responds to the new needs of individuals and their communities.  A generation into the Information Revolution, some new trends are emerging that may signal where we need to go.   All of them have something to do with the idea of building community, so let me use that as an organizing metaphor.

            Traditionally, we tend to think of communities as local.  A community is a village or a neighborhood of people who live inter-dependent lives.  You may own the town bank, but my son teaches your daughter in the local school.  The kids we went to school with grow the food we eat, work, run the shops where we buy what we need, attend the same churches, etc.   In a globalized economy that kind of highly localized interdependence is harder to find.  Online learning removes geographic and time as defining characteristics of interaction.   We need to re-perceive the whole idea of community to understand how we are inter-dependent in today’s world and to develop the skills needed to work together in a new environment.  For higher education, this has implications at several levels:

            At the institutional level, we need to re-define the communities we serve and re-articulate our mission in those communities.   For most of us, distance education has meant reaching very far beyond our local campus community in order to aggregate markets for specialized programs or serve widely dispersed professional groups.     The very first Penn State teleconference through NUTN, as an example, allowed our Nuclear Engineering faculty to share with their colleagues around the country what they had learned from analyzing videotape of the core at the Three-Mile Island nuclear plant after the accent there.   Today, we are starting to see institutions use online distance education as a way of more effective serving local commuting students who cannot always come to campus.  In addition, the movement toward blended programs is allowing institutions to more easily develop programs that respond to local needs by mixing on campus and online activities. Online dual enrollment courses—which allow high school students to simultaneously earn high school graduation credit and college undergraduate credit—signal another new relationship between higher education and the schools that is another trend in this area.  These are starting points for rethinking how our institutions relate to our local communities. 

            At the faculty level, new kinds of academic communities are emerging that may redefine the relationship between faculty members and their institutions in the long run.  Projects like the CIC’s CourseShare, the Great Plains IDEA, and the Worldwide University Network’s shared programs—all of which I mentioned earlier—bring faculty from multiple institutions into an inter-institutional community where they can expand the impact of their specialized research.  And, of course, the Open Educational Resources movement—something that began outside the distance education community but that presents great opportunities for it—allows faculties to retain control of their intellectual property so that they can share it with colleagues around the world.

            Central to this transformation is the student.  Here, “community” has two meanings.  The first is the need to prepare students—of all ages—to become effective citizens and professionals in this new society—call it a conversation economy, an age of cognition, a knowledge society, a global information society, etc.  Today’s world demands that people have the skill to work collaboratively across boundaries and to participate in communities that are not defined by geography and time.   This, in turn, calls for a new pedagogy that redefines what we mean by a “learning community.”   For most public colleges and universities—which need to be responsive to workforce and community needs—the new environment demands a curriculum that not only ensures that students gain discipline-based core knowledge but that also emphasizes active and collaborative learning, inquiry-based approaches that help students create useable knowledge out of information and apply that to solving problems.   One can envision this as a new general education—not an introduction to the disciplines, but the development of general skills and attitudes that cut across all disciplines.   Recent innovations with Web 2.0 innovations—blogs, wikis, etc.—point the way, but there is much to do before a new pedagogy is fully understood, accepted, and integrated into a new curriculum.

            Finally, we can apply the “community” metaphor to new relationships that are beginning to emerge between institutions.   We can anticipate more collaborative degree programs, especially at the graduate level.  We can also anticipate that Open Educational Resources movement will stimulate new partnerships among institutions that have related specialties and between universities in developed countries and those in developing or transitional countries.  These new partnerships most likely will be highly variable.  Some may focus on undergraduate curricula, others on graduate programs or collaborative research that builds institutional capacity, or assistance to industries served by multiple institutions.    Later this month, for example, the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education is holding a meeting in Ecuador to explore the idea of collaborative doctoral programs—what the organizers are calling “sandwich” programs—in which faculty members from Latin American institutions can earn their doctorates from Northern institutions while building a research capacity at their home university.  The programs would use online elements to reduce the amount of time Latin American faculty members would spend away from their home institutions, in an attempt to reduce the academic brain drain.

            The international dimension of distance education in a transformed university was brought into focus by Stemenka Uvalic from UNESCO, at a distance education conference sponsored by CREAD in Ecuador in May 2008.  She painted this picture in her keynote:  There are now 132 million postsecondary students worldwide; China and India have doubled their enrollments in the past decade.  However, countries are having trouble funding capacity to handle demand.  This has stimulated three trends: (1) new private (profit and nonprofit) institutions that do not receive government funds (she noted that 80% of postsecondary students in Japan are now in private institutions); (2) student mobility-2.4 million students went abroad in 2004, with 1 in 16 postsecondary students from Africa going abroad; and (3) the growth in open and distance learning (ODL).  The number of open universities has doubled in Commonwealth countries; the number of for-profit online providers is growing globally.  This has an impact on student mobility.  Fully a third of all international students enrolled in Australian institutions studied from their home country in 2004.  Uvalic projected that “cross-border distance education may become the most significant development” in the years ahead. 

            Clearly, distance education has converged with the mainstream of higher education over the past decade.  The challenge for the future is for us to help stimulate a broader transformation that will allow higher education to meet the emerging needs of a maturing knowledge society in which very local communities are affected by global events.  This is a momentous year on several fronts.  On December 10, we will celebrate the 60^th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.  Distance education organizations around the world are collaborating to produce special issues of their journal to recognize the unique role of distance education in providing equitable access to education.  But this is also the 40^th anniversary year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, both of whom died in the process of trying to make real the ideals of the Declaration.  It is a reminder to us that these rights are not “natural laws” but need to be claimed and made new in every generation.  Higher education is a unique institution when it comes to helping our communities and individuals in them fulfill the promise of the Declaration.   Our generations are lucky to be working at a time when distance education has the potential to help our institutions realize the mission of public education in a new and more complete way than has ever before been possible as our institutions adapt themselves to the needs of the Information Age. We can’t do this on our own, but I think the distance education community—all of us in this room—have the experience and, as a result, the perspective, that can help stimulate and guide change in each of our institutions.  It is an important challenge and a wonderful opportunity at the same time.

            Thank you again for the Distinguished Service Award and for allowing me to share these ideas with you today.

After the Scandal

All of us who have been touched by Penn State over the years cannot go untouched by the Sandusky child abuse case—the charge that the former Penn State football coach had molested young boys who were in his care through his leadership of the Second Mile charity and that Penn State leaders failed to properly report the abuse.

I have lived in State College most of my adult life.  I came here in 1968 as a junior and was lucky to get a full-time job at Penn State when I graduated.  I left in 1987 and returned in 1994 as an Outreach administrator until my retirement in 2007.   Jerry Sandusky was a neighbor when our son was a little boy.  I’ve worked closely with Tim Curley’s brothers at Penn State and know Gary Schultz as a colleague and leader.  I even worked with Joe Paterno when I was in public broadcasting and he produced a weekly show, TV Quarterbacks, during the football season.  One year, in an attempt to lure more viewers, I interviewed all of the coaches to develop a give-away poster that described the role of each player. 

Most people seem to think that this scandal is about the football program.  However, the impact is surely to be felt well beyond Beaver Stadium.  And that is what bothers me most.  For me and for many others, the football program is an interesting sideline to the university’s true mission as a public land grant university: to extend access to education and service to all Pennsylvanians in order to build a stable and productive society.  Penn State has 24 campuses in addition to the University Park campus.  One of them, the Shenango Campus, opened in Mercer County the year before I graduated from high school.  If it were not for that new campus opening in my backyard, I may not have been able to go to college.  It allowed me to live at home and to work pretty much full time while I completed the first two years of my undergraduate education and then to seamlessly move to University Park to finish my degree.  There are thousands of Pennsylvanians who have had the same experience of Penn State.

In the final decade of my career at Penn State, I was responsible for developing the university’s 25^th campus—the online World Campus.  Through it, we are now able to provide full baccalaureate and graduate degree programs to working adults around Pennsylvania and, indeed, around the world.  It is the natural extension of the land grant mission for the Information Society.  

For many thousands of alums in Pennsylvania and elsewhere the real meaning of the university lies in its commitment to helping students—both young people and adults—achieve their life goals by making education accessible while simultaneously ensuring quality.  There are, of course, other aspects of Penn State’s mission.  Some see it more as a research institution, for instance. Penn State research has made significant contributions to improving the quality of life around the world, from agricultural production to new materials that are used in artificial knees to nanotechnology to understanding and combating global climate change—all in the spirit of the land grant vision.  Then, of course, there is the service element that helps individuals and organizations implement the results of research to improve the quality of life.  Ultimately, it is the interaction among these three missions—teaching, research, and service--that has made Penn State a great university.

The current scandal must run its course.   I suspect it will change Penn State in the process.  However, when it has died down, I do hope that the University will again focus its energies to how to re-articulate and re-commit its considerable talents to the land grant mission –to the integration of teaching, research, and service—in light of the challenges presented to our economy and culture by globalization and information technology.   This, more than football or anything else, will ensure that Penn State continues to be a great university for many years to come.

Sachs' "Mixed Economy"--A Middle Path

I am continuing to read Jeffrey Sachs’ The Price of Civilization.  It is like taking a crash course in modern economics.  Sachs’ discussion of the current political and cultural context of economics makes me think that the struggle is not between two opposing views of how to manage government within the context of our constitutional democracy.  Instead, I am beginning to think that the struggle is between democracy itself and a plutocracy in which a tiny minority of super-rich elites rule on the backs of an increasingly poor working class, buffered by a small professional class. 

           

To find a counterpart, I suspect we need to look back not to the Roaring Twenties or the Gilded Age of the Industrial period, but further to the landed aristocracy of the agrarian Middle Ages.  While that aristocracy was based on land—the proper form of wealth in an agrarian era—today’s aristocracy is based on market wealth, a wealth that manipulates markets rather than produce goods that improve the lives of people.   Just as the landed barons controlled the government of the Middle Ages, the corporate/finance barons are attempting to control democratic government today, rending it in the words of one presidential candidate, “inconsequential” and opening the door to direct corporate control.

Ultimately, I suspect, this is what the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are really rallying against.  And, I further suspect, it is what concerned the Tea Party before they were taken over by the plutocrats.   At its most absolute, the fight, is not just to determine which political party will control government.  The fight is for idea of democracy itself.  

That said, it is absolutely essential that people not drift to extremes.  Neither a corporate plutocracy, in which government is inconsequential, nor a socialist government, in which the market is controlled centrally, are likely to produce long-term health for society.  What has proven to be successful—and which made the United States the most successful country in the world for most of the 20^th century—according to Sachs is a mixed economy, in which corporations are generally free to produce goods and service and the government serves to do those things that are necessary for a happy life but that do not produce profit:  build roads and train systems, create levees and dams to control rivers and avoid floods, fund basic research that often has no immediate profit value.  And, I would add, regulate the activities of corporations only so that they do not work against the best interests of the population as a whole.

Ultimately, we need to focus not on the extremes, but on the balance—the mix, if you will—between these two aspects of a healthy democratic society.  Government and business are the Yin and Yang of a successful economy.  Together—as we found in the half-century between the Great Depression and the Reagan Revolution—they can create a wonderful society.  As we have seen elsewhere in the world, without that balance one gets failure at either extreme, whether it be the socialism of the USSR or the plutocratic oil dictatorships of the Middle East that are now being dismantled by the Arab Spring. 

Moderation, rather than extreme idealogy, is the key.  We need to reward politicians who have a long view and who are able to see the value of a diverse American “us.”

Globalizing Agricultural Extension?

Last night, I attended a meeting of the Torch Club—a group of people from a variety of professions and disciplines who meet monthly for dinner and a talk by one of the members.  Our speaker last night was Dr. Steve Smith, professor emeritus of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology at Penn State.  His topic:  “Traditional Agriculture in Latin America.”

Steve focused on how village farmers in Peru used centuries-old techniques, including terracing to raise a variety of crops year-around in a very arid climate.   It was, at one level, a very interesting travelogue, with wonderful photos of rural Peru and the farming families who produce 27 or more varieties of potatoes and other vegetables in this demanding climate.  However, at another level, it was a brilliant insight into how important these traditional farming techniques are becoming as the world changes. 

As Steve described traditional threshing process used in Peru, others in the group raised their hands to say, “That’s also done in Egypt” and “I’ve seen that in Turkey, too.”  Steve noted that there are more than a billion traditional farmers worldwide and that their work is critical to the economic health of many countries around the world.  He also reported that, in the next 30 years, the world’s demand for food will grow by 50%.  In the past, agriculturalists looked to the Green Revolution to meet this demand.  However, the impact of the Green Revolution has begun to level off.  Supporting traditional farmers—and helping them improve the output of traditional farming techniques—will be critical to meeting the world’s need for food in the next generation.  Steve emphasized that the goal should not be to replace traditional farming with something else.  These traditional techniques have proven to be effective in mountainous and arid areas where other approaches would fail.  The key is to help these farmers be more productive within the context of their traditional methods.

America’s research excellence in agriculture began as a response to the Industrial Revolution.  The societal worry then (in the late 1800s) was that we might not be able to support the immigration and urbanization that drove industrialization; we feared we could not produce enough food to feed the cities.  Land grant universities took responsibility for agricultural education and research and for extending that knowledge to farmers and rural communities through the Cooperative Extension Service.  It was, in reflection, a wonderful example of governments and social institutions working together in a sustained effort to meet an ongoing societal need.  American agricultural education became a model for the world.

Today we are living in a globalized Information Society.  The challenge will be to find productive ways in which our universities—in the United States and elsewhere—can help make traditional farming and other forms of farming around the world more productive in the decades ahead.  Do we need a global counterpart to the 19^th century U.S. commitment to agricultural research and education?