Public vs Private Good: Options for the Public University

Speaking at a Penn State conference, “The Legacy and the Promise: 150 Years of Land-Grant Universities,”on June 24, 2011, Penn State President Graham Spanier noted five challenges to the future of the land grant ideal:  privatization, globalization of public higher education, the erosion of public commitment to land-grant mission, 21st-century students' complex needs, and the quality of student learning in the context of today's faculty reward system.

"The privatization of American public higher education is one of the key trends out there, and the reason it is so relevant to the land-grant discussion is that many of the functions that universities like ours provide for our states have no offsetting income source. There is no tuition for what we do in fulfilling our land-grant mission," Spanier said. "There may be support for undergraduate education, but there is little or no opportunity to generate income in many of the units that we have considered fundamental to our land-grant activities. That is why decreasing commitment from state government has increasing implications, particularly in this area."

This is not a new issue, but it is gathering momentum in the current political climate.  As early as 2005 President Spanier warned of “public higher education’s slow slide to privatization” due to skyrocketing tuition costs.   At the same 2005 event, Katharine Lyall, president emeritus of the University of Wisconsin, commented on declining state support for higher education, noting, “America is rapidly privatizing its public colleges and universities, whose mission used to be to serve the public good.  But if private donors and corporations are providing much of a university’s budget, then they will set the agenda, perhaps in ways the public likes and perhaps not.  Public control is slipping away.”  (See the New York Times website for a full report on the 2005 discussion:  http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/16/education/16college.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1309960952-CqQLudVp5Qywcxe1guXrVwe1guXrV )

Even earlier, in 1999, the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land Grant Universities (which Graham Spanier chaired) noted in its report, Returning to Our Roots:  The Engaged Institution:

One challenge we face is growing public frustration with what is seen to be our unresponsiveness. At the root of the criticism is a perception that we are out of touch and out of date. Another part of the issue is that although society has problems, our institutions have “disciplines.” In the end, what these complaints add up to is a perception that, despite the resources and expertise available on our campuses, our institutions are not well organized to bring them to bear on local problems in a coherent way.

The problem, it seems, is both external to the university and internal.  On one hand, there is the increasingly market-centered conservative political leadership, which believes in reducing the size and scope of government in favor of the private sector.  Healthy markets, this view believes, will create healthy societies.  The purpose of higher education (in fact, education generally) in this view is to create professionals who will fill roles in free markets.  Education, seen as purely vocational, is thus a private good.   On the other hand, a significant number of faculty members see our state and land grant institutions primarily as research universities; their careers increasingly are reliant on corporate research grants, private sector consulting, and building relationships with alumni who work in the private sector.  For these academics, serving the public good is confined to the largely unrewarded “service” component of the tripartite mission of teaching, research, and service.

These trends have been unfolding for a full generation.  Its roots might lie in a reaction against the social activism of the 1970s or in the wide acceptance of free market philosophy during the 1980s.   However, it has also been a transformative generation: the first full generation of the Information Revolution.  One could argue that this transformation has exacerbated the problem.   In fact, if we look back at the same period in the 1800s—the first generation into the Industrial Revolution—we can see that the existing higher education system was not particularly responsive to the societal needs generated by the Industrial Revolution.  It took new institutions—the land grant universities and state universities—to ensure that higher education was engaged in the social transformation of that era:  the need to create teachers to educate the children of immigrants, the need to create new kinds of professionals for an industrial economy, and the need to engage academics in improving agricultural production needed to sustain urbanization and immigration.  Interestingly, it is the social purpose of the same institutions that, in today’s transformation, is now being challenged.

How should higher education respond to this challenge?  I can see at least four options:

1.            Accept the fact that the public no longer sees education as a public good and speed the move to privatization.  This option recognizes that, if there is no substance left to the land grant covenant, it would be best to simply move on to other sources of funding.  I suspect there is already a sizable cadre of faculty and administrators that would be happy to privatize their institutions in order to better position them for closer, multi-dimensional relationships with corporate sponsors. 

2.            Maintain the social mission of our institutions, regardless of whether state government is able to fund that mission.  The underlying problem with the first option is that it assumes that the public good mission of land grant universities is not really a mission, but just something we did because money was there to do it.  That makes it easy to walk away from the relationship if the money dries up.   However, Option Two assumes that serving the public good is, in fact, the mission—the soul—of the institution.   If public funds are not available to support the mission, then funds must be found elsewhere, but the mission itself must not fail.  Today’s public universities attract far more money from other sources than from direct state appropriations.  The challenge is to direct these funds to support the core mission—the public good mission.  One option is to reserve a specific percentage of all gifts, sports revenue, auxiliary enterprises, and other discretionary dollars to support the public mission.  For instance, if a donor gives money for a building, then 5% of that amount could be set aside to reduce the cost of tuition for in-state undergraduate students or to support county Extension offices.  Similarly, indirect costs recovered from federal or corporate research grants could be used to support core public good activities.  The key to this option is to ensure that all activities that generate revenue contribute to the public mission at one level or another.

3.            Organize the institution so that the public purpose can co-exist with the private purpose.   It is often difficult for the public mission to find a voice in an academic conversation that is dominated by individuals whose research and teaching is more directed to private good.  Public good activities are diverse—they range from evening/weekend programs to conferences to county-based Extension activities to branch campuses, community-based action research, and summer camps for kids to name a few—and, too often, they are unconnected.  The institutional urge to decentralize the administrative and operational support for these activities further weakens the ability of the institution to speak with one voice on its public mission.  The solution at some institutions may be to bring all of these activities under one senior administrator so that there is a leadership voice for the public mission.  This does not mean that individual academic units would be free to ignore the mission (in fact, there should be a strong governance system to ensure that academic units also have a voice in these activities), but that there would be an organization that would help them innovate at very little financial risk or investment by the individual academic unit. 

4.            Embrace the public mission and work with the public sector to develop a new strategy for engagement.  Ultimately, if the commitment to and understanding of the university’s public mission has become blurred both by the public and by the institution, perhaps the best step would be to start from scratch:  to bring together both university and public thought leaders to (1) define and better understand the problems facing the state a generation into the Information Revolution and (2) agree on how the university can help individuals and social institutions (including government, employers, and social service organizations like K-12 schools) better respond to the challenges of the new societal context presented by the Information Society.   A first step would be to convene a relatively small group of thought leaders to discuss the issues facing the state and to identify the broad areas where the university can best engage to help address issues.  This would result in a strategic vision for engagement, which would be used as a discussion paper with smaller groups organized by region and/or by common interest (schools, health care, workforce development, industry, etc.).  The original thought leadership group would then convene again to review the results of these smaller workshops and to agree on a five-year engagement strategy that would drive state funding, institutional fund-raising, and outreach programming.  A subset of the thought leadership group could meet annually as an advisory panel to review progress.

This final option would result in a new and openly accessible covenant with the public and a new focus for engagement.  It would also entail risk—especially the risk of the university losing its ability to act independently based on its own assessment of public need.  This and other risks would have to be accommodated in designing this new approach to engagement.  In the end, the challenge is to ensure that the public good that is generated is worth the risk.

Ensuring Quality in Cross-Border Inter-Institutional Collaborations

On June 20, 2011, I had the honor of keynoting a Policy Forum sponsored by the International Council for Open and Distance Education (ICDE).  Since its founding in the 1930s (when distance education focused on correspondence study), ICDE has been the single global organization of institutions and individuals involved in open and distance education using a wide range of technologies.   Its membership is truly international.   The policy forum focused on ICDE's role in ensuring quality as institutions collaborate to deliver distance education programs and resources across national borders.

The Policy Forum preceded the ICDE Standing Council of Presidents meeting, which focused on the role of distance education in the new economy.

It was great to be a part of this global dialog, which provided a look over the horizon at the future of higher education in a globalized information society.

From the Typewriter to the Cloud: The Impact of Technology on Writing

One of this year’s finds at the annual AAUW book sale at Penn State was “The Writer’s Chapbook,” a collection of reflections about writing by top authors, drawn from their interviews in “The Paris Review.”   Reading it the other day, I stumbled over several authors commenting on the impact of the typewriter on writing. 

The biographer Leon Edel talked about Henry James, who must have been one of the early adopters of this new technology.  Here’s what he said:  “He began dictating directly to the typewriter.  It’s a case of the medium being the message and with dictation he ran into longer sentences, and parenthetical remarks, and when he revised what he had dictated he tended to add further flourishes.  In the old days, when he wrote in longhand he was much briefer and crisper, but now he luxuriated in fine phrases and he was exquisitely baroque.”

Conrad Aiken, noting that he never used a carbon copy “because that made me self-conscious,” wrote, “I can remember discussing the effect of the typewriter on our work with Tom Eliot because he was moving to the typewriter about the time I was.  And I remember our agreeing that it made for a slight change of style in the prose-that you tended to use more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style—and that one must be careful about that . . . But that was a passing phase only.  We both soon discovered that we were just as free to let the style throw itself into the air as we had been writing manually.”

I suspect it is too bad that Henry James dictated rather than take to the keyboard himself. 

These couple of examples also made me wonder:  how has word processing changed style over the past two decades?  One imagines that the ability for infinite self-correction should free the imagination and allow writers to be more spontaneous, on one hand, and more precise on the other hand.  Then, add the Internet as a publishing environment.  I have to think that the ability to immediately publish one’s thoughts would lead to shorter pieces more focused on the immediacy of insight rather than on long, complexly woven pieces—a tendency reinforced by the limitations on length imposed by Twitter.  However, there is also the inevitable temptation to constantly revisit and revise—to not let good enough alone in this environment.  This suggests the need for a new artistic ethos:  that the writer, having written, must move on.   But it also raises a question about the relationship between writer and reader and how readers engage with the writer in the creative process.   In this new environment, is writing about the finished product or does the reader gain artistic insight in the process itself?

Worth exploring more.  Any thoughts?

If 60 Is the New 18 . . . --Higher Education for the "New" Adult

In the May 15, 2011 issue of Newsweek, Susan Cheever wrote, “If 50 is the new 30, 60-ish is in many ways a new kind of 18.  We are coming of old age in a way that parallels our first coming of age.  As we head for 60 we know that statistically we are old.  But we don’t feel old, and we may even be more physically active than we were at 18 when we had never heard of Core Fusion or Bikram Yoga.”   She adds, “We joke about being carded when we ask for the senior rate. Our desire to obey the rules can fall away. Life is suddenly very short and very precious. We are coming to the end of this wonderful ride. Now is the time! If we are not going to speak out and act out at 60, when will we?”

Cheever was writing about the marital woes of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  However, her comment raises a different question for those of us interested in the intersection of education and society:  How do our educational institutions prepare people to be productive citizens, professionals, and individuals when, for most, life will extend well beyond the traditional “three score and ten”?  

Just as our educational system itself was designed for an agricultural and industrial society, it also assumes that the goal is to prepare young people for a single career.   Now, a generation into the Information Revolution, as we adapt our institutions to the needs of this new society, we also need to figure out how best to prepare our citizenry for a live that has a much longer—and more active—third act, one that (as Jeremy Rifkin suggested in The End of Work) could allow mature adults who are past their parenting roles to engage in new ways with their community and the broader society. 

 Certainly, this could be one aspect of revitalizing the general education curriculum:  helping undergraduate students develop a sense of themselves as citizens of both a civil and a professional community.  And, certainly, this could be a sub-goal of a new societal expectation—a nonmilitary kind of Selective Service (perhaps integrating Vista, Peace Corps, and related services)—that young people would complete a year of public service before they enter the adult workforce—to prepare them, as they enter the workforce, to think about what role they might play in society after their working years are over. 

While those ideas may be dramatic enough—difficult enough to get our institutions and our state and federal governments to envision and implement—we should ask:  What else can we do to prepare adults for an active, service-oriented third act?  If Rifkin’s ideas come to pass, employers may well want to work with colleges/universities to prepare their mid-career staff for an effective transition to public service in order to make headroom for younger employees.   We may even want to envision a new kind of degree or certificate that helps adults prepare for the transition. 

It will take time for a very different view of higher education’s role in society to catch hold. It is worth thinking about now.  What do you think?

Memorial Day Flowers

This morning, we drove to the little village of Burnside, Pennsylvania, to put flowers on the graves of Karen's grandparents and great-grandparents for Memorial Day.  It was a quiet drive on a Sunday morning through the rural Central Pennsylvania countryside, much of it following the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.  This has been a wet spring, and it was threatening to rain later in the day, so we were in a hurry to get the job done.

The cemetery had been mowed earlier in the week, possibly for the first time this spring.  It was a rough mowing, and one of our first tasks was to clear away the clippings.  Another family was there--a local couple whose parents knew Karen's grandmother well.  They came prepared with a grass rake (the husband was on the cutting crew, it turns out) and they lent it to us to clear our graves.  Then, we planted a total of 8 geraniums and a more than a dozen ageratims at four graves.

Heading home, we saw a young couple rafting on the Susquehanna and another man fishing in the middle of the stream.  It was nice to drive through the small towns--Mahaffey, Curwensville, Grampian--and enjoy a Sunday drive.  We got home without any serious rain and in time for Sunday brunch. 

Later this week, I will head to Hermitage to put flowers on my family's graves.  That is a bit less involved, since the cemetery does not allow live flowers.  But I look forward to it every year, nevertheless.

I suspect that this Memorial Day tradition is one that is already fading, but I do enjoy it.  It is nice to feel connected, even briefly,  to family and community this way.

Being an Adult Student

On May 13, I was honored and delighted to give some remarks at the induction ceremony for Penn State's chapter of Alpha Sigma Lambda, the honorary society for adult learners.  Most of my career has been focused on creating access for adult learners through continuing and distance education, so I was especially pleased that my colleagues invited me back to meet with this year's inductees on graduation weekend.  Here are my remarks:

Let me add my welcome to the inductees who are able to be with us tonight and those who are not with us.   I can’t tell you how wonderful it is to see the progress that Alpha Sigma Lambda has made over the past few years and the growth in adult learners here at Penn State.   For you, it is an incredible personal achievement—only those of us who have been adult learners know just how powerful this experience can be—but it also gives me a great deal of professional satisfaction, as someone who has spent many years advocating and organizing continuing and distance education programs, to see how the adult learner has moved into the mainstream of Penn State. 

            I recently interviewed Karen Cator, the director of educational technology for the U.S. Department of Education.  She noted that the Administration has set a goal of increasing the percentage of high school graduates who go on to earn a college degree from the current 39% to 60% by the year 2020.  That means greatly increasing the number of high school graduates who are prepared to enter college, but it also means doing a much better job of serving high school grads who have already entered the workforce and started their families.   In short, we are about to enter an era where the traditional boundaries between higher education and K-12 education and between higher education and the workplace will be blurred and where helping adult learners will be central to the societal strategy of creating and sustaining the talent that our communities need to compete in the information society.  So, tonight, we are celebrating both your personal achievement and your role as a pioneer in a new era of adult learning. 

            For me, this is an exciting development because, like you, I have been an adult student, too.   We can argue over when one starts to be an adult, but I thought of myself as an adult learner from pretty early on.  I had not originally thought I would be able to go to college, but I got the chance when Penn State opened a campus—the Shenango Campus—in my home community.  That meant that I could live at home, work at night, and go to college during the day.  I had started working at our local Arby’s while still in high school.  By the time I started at Penn State, I was working as a shift manager, and, for one summer, travelled to Denver to open two new restaurants there.   I thought that might be my future.  So, when I knew I would be coming to State College to finish my baccalaureate, I suggested to the company that they open a store here and I could manage it while I finished my undergrad degree.  They, in their wisdom, told me—this was in 1968—that they had done the research and there was no market for fast food in State College! 

            It was, for me, a fortunate market research mistake.  When I got here I needed a job, and a fellow student at East Halls suggested that, since I was a journalism major (I later switched to English), I should go across the street to Wagner Building and get a job at the university’s public TV station—what is now WPSU-TV—writing press releases.   As it turned out, they didn’t have any writing jobs, but they did hire me as a part-time production assistant.  I learned all about television production during those two years—running camera, doing lighting and audio, painting sets—we did just about everything—and, when I graduated, they hired me as a full time production assistant.  I had something that few of my fellow English students had when we graduated in 1970:  a union job with benefits.

            Eventually, I moved out of the studio and into Programming where, first, I did on-air promotion.  Then, a couple of years after graduation, I became the public information director for the station.  Finally, I got to write press releases!  And handle all sorts of other PR and publications work.   When I decided to work on a master’s degree, my first thought was to get a Master’s in Journalism, since I was working in both television and in public information.   I talked with the Department Head, who told me—much to my surprise—that I didn’t need a master’s in journalism, since by then I had several years of good professional experience under my belt.  His advice—some of the best I got in my education—was to get a degree, but get it in something I loved.  So, I got my master’s in English, too. 

            In those days, our philosophy in public broadcasting was that the role of public information was to create an informed viewer—the first step in engaging the viewer in our programs.  Over time, we developed other kinds of engagement:  providing supplementary materials for local shows (for instance, for our “TV Quarterbacks” show with Joe Paterno, I interviewed all the coaches and did a poster on the roles of the different positions), organizing community activities with local social service organizations, sending faculty out to libraries to discuss programs, and, ultimately, organizing credit and noncredit courses around our programs.  We also produced programs designed specifically for use in K-12 classrooms.  Eventually, these were all gathered into a “Viewer Services” unit, which I was asked to head.   Then, in the early 1980s, we combined WPSU with our on-campus instructional media group, and I focused exclusively on instructional activities as Director of Instructional Media. 

            It was an exciting period of technical innovation.  In a very short period of time, we moved from being able to serve only our 29-country broadcast area to having a statewide educational cable TV channel and, starting in the late 1970s, experimenting with satellite delivery throughout the Appalachian region.  By the 1980s, we were offering national live satellite teleconferences.  Our very first satellite conference gave nuclear science faculty around the country their first chance to look at video from the damaged core inside the Three Mile Island nuclear plant.  By the mid 1980s, we were using videoconferencing to extend a master’s degree in education from University Park to campuses in Western Pennsylvania and were producing video courses for national delivery through PBS.  At the same time—while the World Wide Web was not yet upon us—we were experimenting with creating digital content and simulations on videodisc.

            Throughout this period, our emphasis as an organization was not on a particular technology, but on how we could use various technologies to extend access to education both for young people and for adults in both formal and informal settings, in groups and individually.   

            By this time, I had decided that I wanted to stay in higher education.  That meant getting a doctorate, so I enrolled part-time—taking one course per semester—in the doctoral program in Higher Education (we didn’t have a separate program in Adult Education at that time).   The first course I took was a survey of American higher education, and I decided during that course that I would focus my research on the topic of general education.  For most of us, general education is the “distribution” component of an undergraduate education—the stuff we need to take before we get to our major courses.  Over the years, however, general education has meant many things to many people.  I decided to write a history of general education, which brought me into a circle of educational philosophers from John Dewey to Robert Hutchins and, by extension, pioneering social educators like Jane Addams.  It was quite a wonderful journey on its own.  It was also, on hindsight, nice to be able to work on the cutting edge of technology during the day, but, at night, be able to retreat into a century of philosophy and educational innovation.  My advisor, Hans Flexner, took me under his wing and encouraged me to develop my dissertation into a book, which eventually was published by Teachers College Press at Columbia University.

            The interesting thing is that the two parts of my life were never quite separated.  What we were doing with technology in both K-12 and higher education was, it turned out, simply a part of the next phase of educational innovation, the history of which I had been studying in my doctoral program.   The two perspectives worked pretty well together, as things turned out.   My doctoral work gave me a new perspective on the role of what we were by then calling “distance education”—a perspective I might not have developed if I had specialized in an area closer to my daily work environment.  I was able to focus not so much on technology or public media per se, but on the social drivers that were stimulating innovation and on the broader implications for universities.  This became very helpful when we launched the World Campus.

            So, if there is one lesson that I can pass along from my experience as an adult learner, it is the advice that the Journalism Department Head gave me back in the 1970s and which I discovered again as I researched the history of general education:  Study what you love and then apply that to your work.

            The way higher education is structured, we have a tendency, as we advance in education, to become ever more narrow in our scope.  We move from a very general high school education to an undergraduate education where we start, typically, by becoming generally acquainted with a lot of different disciplines (introductory biology, college algebra, surveys of American history and English literature, introductions to psychology and sociology), etc.  in our first two years to a strong focus on one discipline in our junior and senior years.   When we move on to graduate school, we tend to narrow our focus even further within our own discipline.  By the time we get to a doctoral program, we are encouraged to specialize even further.

            This is not a practical approach for us adult learners.  Because we already have experience as workers, as heads of families, and as citizens who are involved in many ways in our communities, the challenge for us is not necessarily to specialize—I acknowledge that we all need a focus in our work—but to develop a new dimension, a new facet to our lives that puts our personal and professional experiences into a new context and that allows us to bring all of our experiences and knowledge to new situations. 

            This is especially important today.  In many ways, the Information Society is also the Innovation Society.  Things are changing pretty quickly out there, and our employers—regardless of the field—need people who can innovate on the front lines to help our organizations be competitive in this new society.

            So, let me leave you with this idea.  As you move ahead and continue your education after this weekend’s graduations, look for opportunities not only to develop specialized knowledge and skills, but also to expand your horizons, to add new perspectives that will allow you to be successful in the unknown territory that lies ahead.

            Congratulations, again, and my thanks to Dr.  Rubba for inviting me to join you tonight.

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.