The Land Grant University and Workforce Needs

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 19th century, and reached their full power in the first half of the 20th century. The transformation of higher education was, in part, a response to these broader societal changes and, ultimately, a stimulus for further change.

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.

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 19th century, the trend at the beginning of the 21st 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 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 approach 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.

What, then, are the implications for a land grant university? Clearly, new undergraduate curriculum models are needed, perhaps ones that incorporate a more significant service component. In addition, institutions should explore new ways to engage adult learners to help them with life and career transitions throughout their working lives and to prepare them for service careers in retirement.

If readers have comments, they would be much appreciated.

Educating for Democracy

In Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Demoracy, Louise Knight describes three often competing and, in ways, contradictory aspects of democracy that defined the social reform issues of the 1880s and 1890s—the Gilded Age. Today, after more than a century of change, we once again find that many of the issues facing social reformers in the Gilded Age are still very much alive. The various ways in which we define democracy continue to shape—and, in some ways, confuse—the public conversation about the future of the United States.

The three aspects of democracy are:

· Political Democracy – The right of individuals to vote

· Economic Democracy – The right of individuals to work in their own best interest, to compete, to be one’s own boss.

· Social Democracy – The right of individuals to expect equal treatment

In the 1880s and 1890s, each of these dimensions was controversial and, to some extent, there were opposing definitions of the terms. In the area of political democracy, for instance, women did not have the right to vote, but there was an active suffrage movement. In the area of economic democracy, there were competing visions, with one group arguing that capitalists had the right to become rich at the expense of workers and another arguing for a “democracy of wealth.” In the area of social democracy, the issue had to do with the treatment of the poor and of immigrants; as John Dewey put it, Democracy is a social, that is to say, an ethical conception.”

Today, the issues have changed only on the surface. While political democracy extends to almost everyone these days, every election sees attempts to disqualify whole classes of people at the voting site, especially the homeless and otherwise disenfranchised.

Economic democracy received a setback just this week, when the Supreme Court ruled that corporations—which are not citizens as defined by the Constitution—have been given the right to spend as much money as they wish on political campaigns. The potential result is that voices of non-corporations will simply be crowded out of a public discourse that increasingly is dominated by commercial media. Not only will be poor be challenged at the polls, they will be silenced in the campaigns leading up to November.

Social democracy—the idea of our society as an ethical concept—is constantly stressed by the intrusion of corporate and commercial influence and by the way in which communications media have replaced thoughtful discourse with radicalized ideology. Increasingly we live in a society in which common ground is harder to find and where the common good is harder to define. The United State Congress has failed utterly to find a middle path. Too many special interests keep the focus on the extremes rather than on the common good.

There has been significant progress in political democracy over the past century. Women and minorities now have the right to vote, for instance. In the area of economic democracy, we’ve seen great stride forward with Social Security, Medicare, and improved access to education. However, the underlying tensions between pure self-interest and a social ethic are still there and, increasingly, raw. We have not achieved social democracy and that limits our ability to truly achieve political and economic democracy.

What does this have to do with education? It suggests to me that, as our society becomes transformed by information technology and global economics, we need to put renewed emphasis on “civics” education. When I was in high school, we had a full year of “Civics” in ninth grade and another full year of “Problems of Democracy” as seniors. However, that is not always the case. The Pennsylvania Board of Education standards lists the following standard:

Civics and Government. Study of United States constitutional democracy, its values and principles, study of the Constitution of the Commonwealth and government including the study of principles, operations, and documents of government, rights and responsibilities of citizenship, how governments work and international relations.

However, this is one of four subsets of “Social Studies,” which is one of eight academic standards. Not exactly a priority.

Higher education appears to assume that students have had a good grounding in Civics before they come to college. While most curricula require some American history as part of the general undergraduate course distribution, there are few courses that give students an understanding of issues and their impact on the student as citizen.

As public discourse becomes increasingly controlled by corporations, it is essential that we educated citizens to be critical consumers of this discourse and develop in them the skills of citizenship. In the 1920s, Columbia University experimented with a first-year “Contemporary Civilizations” curriculum designed as a response to the changing social conditions after World War I. As the 1919 course catalog noted:

“The chief features of the intellectual, economic, and political life of today are treated and considered in their dependence on and difference from the past. The great events of the last century in the history of the countries now more closely linked in international relations are reviewed, and the insistent problems, internal and international, which they are now facing are given detailed consideration. By thus giving the student, early in his college course, objective material on which to base his own judgment, it is thought he will be aided in intelligent participation in the civilization of his own day (The Meaning of General Education, p. 36).

Contemporary Civilizations was one of several very innovative general education curricula to emerge in the aftermath of World War I. These innovations suggest that American higher education can, indeed, innovate when faced with dramatically changed social context. Such is the case today. The question—one that I hope readers of this will comment on—is what can we do today, when social, economic, and technological changes are transforming the context in which our students learn.

Rediscovering Higher Education as a Public Good

A recent Time magazine headline –“College Degrees More Expensive, Worth Less in the Job Market”—prompted a wide-ranging discussion on the LinkedIn “Metacognition” group about the nature of higher education in today’s world. It got me thinking about how higher education is perceived in today’s corporate economy-focused environment.

Certainly one reason why college degrees are more expensive these days is that state governments are funding less and less of the total cost of higher education. In part, that is due to a general perception that higher education is a “private good” rather than a “public good.” That is, if our purpose is simply to prepare individuals to get good jobs, then why should taxpayers underwrite an individual benefit? As taxpayer support declines, cost to the individuals goes up. The result: a more expense college degree to the individual graduate with no appreciable change in quality.

The societal role of higher education was addressed by UNESCO this year in the final communique of the 2009 World Conference on Higher Education, which noted: "Faced with the complexity of current and future global challenges, higher education has the social responsibility to advance our understanding of multifaceted issues, which involve social, economic, scientific, and cultural dimensions and our ability to respond to them. It should lead society in generating global knowledge to address global challenges, inter alia food security, climate change, water management, intercultural dialogue, renewable energy and public health." In short, higher education does not end with preparing individuals for jobs; it must, in addition, prepare them to address the broader issues facing society.

That raises a fundamental question for those of us in public higher education: How do we rebuild—in the public perception, in our own sense of mission as institutions and as individual educators, and in practice—the ideal of higher education as a public good in a rapidly changing social environment. In other words, how do we prepare our students to be good citizens in a globalized information society? Part of the problem here is that our curriculum has not adapted significantly to the needs of individuals and communities in this new environment. General education—the part of the curriculum that traditionally has prepared people for citizenship—tends still to be dominated by a distribution of courses that introduce students to the academic disciplines and provide some basic skills (writing, math, basic science, etc.).

One thought would be to move toward a “sandwich” general education curriculum in which general courses are sandwiched around the student’s major/professional curriculum. The first part would provide basic concepts in the key academic disciplines—science, humanities, social sciences—along with critical skills. These might include writing, math, public speaking, but also new skills needed in an information society: collaboration, innovation, finding and evaluating information, team problem solving, inter-cultural understanding, etc. The general education curriculum should also incorporate the technology that drives both professional and personal life—wikis, blogs, online social networking, etc.—so that students develop a sense of the effective (and ethical) uses of these technologies. Student would then move to their professional studies. The final general education component—the top of the sandwich—would be during the student’s senior year, when interdisciplinary courses put their professional studies into the context of life in a global information society. The goal of this upper division general education would be to ensure that individuals enter the workforce with an understanding of ethics, cultural understanding and communications, and the societal implications of their profession.

Early in the Information Society, the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) movement attempted to address these issues through interdisciplinary courses that looked at the interactions among science, technology, and society. Penn State was an early leader in this movement and developed several media-based STS courses in collaboration with faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and Temple University. One, “The Finite Earth,” dealt with the limits to resources. One lesson focused on how to identify and engage the “ethical community” of people who would be affected by science/technology actions and who should be involved in major decisions. Similar courses—ideally conducted as senior seminars—could be constructed in every major as a way to match the private benefits of higher education to the public good.

Living in the Moment

When my mother was at a certain point in the progress of Alzheimer's disease, she had lost the context for many things, but still was very much able to communicate. One day, as we left a restaurant, she told me how much she enjoyed simply being alive and seeing the sunset.

Today, I was reading "Living Buddha, Living Christ" by Thich Nhat Hanh. In it, he writes, "To breathe and know you are alive is wonderful . . . Every moment is an opportunity to breathe life into the Buddha . . . Every moment is an opportunity to manifest the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." It is good to think that, for a time--even if it was caused by Alzheimers--my mother was given the ability to set aside the struggles that marked most of her life to live in the moment and have that kind of wonder.

Where's Joe Hill?

This morning I listened again to Joan Baez’s wonderful rendition of “Joe Hill.”

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you or me.

Says I, “But Joe you’re ten years dead.” “I never died,” says he.

“The copper bosses killed you, Joe. They shot you,Joe,” says I.

“It takes more than guns to kill a man,” says Joe. “I didn’t die.”

And standing there as big as life and smiling with his eyes,

Says Joe, “What they can never kill went on to organize.”

From San Diego up to Maine, in every mine and mill

When workingmen defend their rights, that’s where you’ll find Joe Hill.

It is sad to think how far we have drifted from the vision that Joe Hill and people like him worked to achieve so many years ago. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, long after those early struggles to gain basic rights for working people. But I remember well how tough it was when my uncles went on strike in the Shenango Valley mills when I was a boy and how they hoped that the hardships that the strikes imposed on their families would result not just in better days, but better years ahead.

Today, the corporate takeover of American life is very nearly complete. Executives take huge salaries and bonuses, while working to rescind the hard-won benefits of the people who actually make the things America exports. Working people have been diverted by divisive social issues like abortion and homosexual rights—the bread and circuses of today’s right-wing politicians--while the corporations have undermined the fundamental rights of workers to health care, job security, and a decent wage.

I can only hope that the current recession gives us pause to consider a new social morality that replaces the neo-conservative “gilded age” with a more humble commitment to social responsibility.

Re-Perceiving the Land Grant University: Engaging Communities

The original mission of the Land Grant university was very much a response to social and economic needs that arose as a generation into the Industrial Revolution in the late 19^th century and early 20^th centuries. Today, a generation into the Information Revolution, we again must ask: What are the needs of society to which we can respond?

Among the critical problems that the land grant university addressed—and that defined its position in American life for several generations—was the need to greatly improve agricultural production. In the 1880s and 1890s, the United States was undergoing a two-front social revolution: rapid urbanization, as industry located near existing population and transportation centers, growing small river towns into major cities; and mass immigration, as millions came from Europe and elsewhere to find new opportunities and, in the process, provide the manpower for growing industries. A critical concern was that the nation maintain—and improve—its agricultural base in order to support urbanization and immigration.

The problem was partly one for science: how to improve agricultural productivity and sustainability of farms in order to produce more food for the cities. However, there was another dimension: literally, “how to keep them down on the farm.” Rural life was hard. Farm families did not have access to modern conveniences such as electricity and telephones. Even mail delivery was a problem until Rural Free Delivery was created in the 1890s—itself a response to the concern about improving the quality of rural life.

Land grant universities addressed these issues with a series of remarkable innovations (many of which we now take for granted, but that were radical changes in higher education in their day). These included:

• Cooperative Extension Service, which coordinated funding from county, state, and federal sources to bring university expertise directly into communities. The result was the ideal of the Country Agent standing with the farmer in the field, working together on problems.
• Four-H and Home Life programs that improved the quality of family life in rural areas and encouraged young people to stay in agriculture.
• Correspondence study, which took advantage of Rural Free Delivery to extend both noncredit and credit courses to individuals in rural areas.
• Management Development services that provided training to small business owners.

Over the years, other innovations built on these early departures, including the application of the extension concept to energy and environmental issues in the late 20^th century, investments in educational broadcasting to better reach homes and schools, and impact research as a way of integrating the faculty member’s teaching, service, and research functions.

Engaging Communities in the Information Society

A generation into the Information Society, we must ask at least two questions:

(1) What are the problems to which the resources of our land grant universities should be directed?

(2) What innovations are needed to ensure an effective long-term response?

Several broad social issues come immediately to mind:

• · Climate Change – How will climate change affect the productivity and viability of communities in our individual states? This issue is at least as important to the health of our society as was agricultural production in the early 20^th century.
• Globalization – What must our communities to do remain economically viable in a global community?
• · Innovation – Given the move of heavy industry off shore, we need to create the capacity for innovation at the community level so that new ideas can take root and grow locally.
• · Inter-Cultural Education – Increasingly, immigration will be replaced by networking that allows people to stay in their home countries while participating in the American economy. The United States will be less of a nation of immigrants and more of a networked culture, with each of us working with people from different cultures on a regular basis. Just as we created a K-12 education sector to respond to immigration, we now need schools that will produce local citizens who can participate in this new environment.

What other issues should the land grant university address in order to be relevant to the Information Society? What radical innovations are needed today?

General Education and the Information Society

The general education curriculum, as it evolved through most of the 20^th century, is a product of higher education’s adaptation to the Industrial Revolution. The question today is whether that curriculum will meet the needs of individuals and society a generation into the Information Revolution. Does the changing societal context demand that we re-perceive General Education for what various writers have dubbed the Information Society, the Knowledge Society, the Skills Society, or Conversation Society?

The Industrial Revolution required a higher level of education for professionals who would create industrial innovations. At the same time, America was becoming urbanized and, due to waves of new immigrants, much more diverse. Recognizing that higher education increasingly was serving a spectrum of students much broader demographically and vocationally than were served by the classical curriculum, innovators like Dewey, Meiklejohn, and Hutchins determined that General Education was not just about liberating the individual, but about preparing individual students from a broad spectrum of backgrounds to function effectively in society as professionals and citizens.

By the 1950s, the idea of General Education as a purposeful and comprehensive curriculum intimately involved in the needs of a democratic society were firmly rooted. The Truman Commission on Higher Education listed eleven principles or goals for General Education that summed up the function of General Education at mid-century:

• · An ethical code of behavior
• · Informed and responsible citizen solving problems
• · Global interdependence
• · Habits of scientific thought in personal and civic problems
• · Understanding others and expressing one’s self
• · Enjoyment and understanding of literature and the arts
• · The ability to create a satisfying family life
• · The ability to choose a useful and satisfying vocation
• · Developing critical and constructive thinking habits

Still, by the 1980s—when the first impact of the Information Revolution on daily life was beginning to be felt—several national reports decried the disarray in the undergraduate curriculum. One, sponsored by the National Institutes on Education argued that excessive vocationalism had weakened the ability of a baccalaureate degree to “foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society” (Scully, 1984, p. 1).

A quarter of a century later, the concerns are just as real, but we have a better sense of how the revolution in information and communications technology is affecting the problem. We are now a generation into the Information Revolution. And, just as educators a generation into the Information Revolution grappled with the rise of the “utilitarian university,” we are struggling to understand just what it takes to prepare individuals to thrive as citizens and professionals in a globalized knowledge society.

Drivers of Pedagogical Change

Several societal factors are driving the need for changes in our approach to General Education. Prime among these is how the Information Revolution has changed the way we think about knowledge and information. Today, information is ubiquitously available on the web. In this environment, education is less about the transfer of already organized knowledge than about how to find and evaluate information and turn it into useable knowledge that can be used to solve problems and provide meaningful insights. Active inquiry, as a result, becomes both a means and an end of General Education--a core skill of the new curriculum.

The rapidity of change in a global economy is also changing how we work. Increasingly, work tends to get done by teams—often virtual—teams with members at multiple locations. This work environment puts greater emphasis on collaboration rather than individual competition. Similarly, rapid changes in knowledge require an environment of continual, bottom-up innovation. Collaboration and innovation are both professional and civic skills that need to be taught. Even on the most informal level—as evidenced by Facebook and Twitter today—students need to develop a social ethos to guide how they interact with social networks so that they can develop and sustain professional, civic, and personal relationships through both face-to-face and virtual networks.

An underlying feature of the Information Society is that technology has removed geography as a delimiting factor in how we live and work in communities. Members of an Information Society live and work in “distributed communities” (we may need a better term to describe this phenomenon) that accomplish much of their work through technology. This includes virtual working teams, professional associations, and a wide variety of social networks. The boundaries of these communities tend to blur, as people include both social and professional contacts in the same network. Inter-cultural understanding takes on a new immediacy: every culture is potentially present in our virtual communities. General Education, with its emphasis on educating the student for success within the context of his/her society, can help individuals define how to conduct themselves in these new communities.

Knowledge creation, collaboration, innovation, and community building are workplace and civic skills that should be incorporated into General Education for the Information Society. The challenge of General Education in this new environment is:

• · To create lifelong learners who can create knowledge
• · To instill problem-solving and innovation as both workplace and civic skills
• · To develop the skills of collaboration across cultures and across geography
• · To help students understand the nature of the communities in which they live and work so that they can become effective members of these communities.

This suggests a new General Education pedagogy that is resource-centered, inquiry-based, and problem-oriented and, perhaps, one that is better integrated with the professional studies part of the undergraduate curriculum.