> 1. Question one covers the relationship between the higher ed
> institution and the outside world. Learning implies correctly
> interpreting the external environment. What is the external
> environment telling us right now about what higher education
> needs to address? What are the "slow trends" affecting higher
> education? What are some hypothetical or concrete thumbnail
> sketches for addressing them? (One good example of a slow trend
> affecting higher education is the demographics of the student
> population which has special implications for both academic and
> student affairs).
>
The current relationship between higher ed and the outside world
needs to address dramatic changes in our political position. We face as
well not only changed demographics, but an increasing pace of change and
technology for information. Several important aspects of these trends,
which "seem" sudden but in fact have been building for decades, are
noteworthy, and all require investment. Thus all acquire a political color
in this time of "no new taxes" and "government cutbacks."
First, the "technology" of interaction between students and profs
is little changed, in most places, for millenia. The ideal is still
face-to-face interaction in real time, and for decent reasons - reading
facial and body language to gauge a student's understanding, facilitating
interaction among students, providing direct supervision of labs, etc. are
all activities now deemed central to "teaching" (even though many of us do
acknowledge that "teaching" is no longer a "fill 'em up" exercise of
transmitting "facts" to be regurgitated). We have much thinking to do about
how the escalation of available, accessible facts and the technology to
transmit and to process them, should be taken into account. Example:
students now can enter templates for analysis into computers. Should they
be permitted to use these on exams? Or how about downloading up-to-date
information on a company's performance? Meanwhile, the costs of technology
exploration, integration, and update are large, and the implications of
decisions on these matters larger still. Those who are cut out of access
may be permanent members of an unemployable underclass, with all that
implies.
Second, as the world students face has shifted toward more
intensive competition, much of it computer-mediated and much of it
international, all students need to know a lot more about other cultures,
other countries' capabilities, AND computers. Most curricula have not kept
up, in my view. Yet most US corporations still don't seem alert to any
benefit they might gain by hiring "international business" concentrators,
for instance (at undergraduate or MBA levels, these folks don't tend to get
international jobs). And most US corporations don't seem to have
internalized the outcomes of their own frequent reports, that interpersonal
skills, communication capabilities, and cross-functional thinking are
important: the corporations continue to hire the techies, but tell us that
when they fire 'em, it's for want of these same skills that don't seem to
figure in the hiring process. The disjuncture between views means that
higher ed is facing conflicting requirements, and thus is often seen as
"unresponsive." Nor has higher ed done a good job of communicating its
rationales for numerous decisions on curriculum, requirements, tenure, and
the like: these decisions, taken in isolation, appear irrational or
self-serving at best.
A key trend that results around us today is an "anti-intellectual"
attack on higher ed as obsolete or not relevant or too expensive (and
perhaps too "politically correct"). Despite the enormous growth of the US
economy since World War II, much of it explicitly fueled by the
availability of hoards of GI Bill graduates and a massive expansion in
publically available education for many whose background was not elite,
higher ed budgets have been cut by 20% and more in many states. While the
world is getting more complicated (science, math, humanities and social
sciences all thereby becoming more complicated as well), and while
competition is increasing (Japan graduates more engineers than we do), the
US is cutting back on education.
I conclude that we have not made our case with the American public
for why they should support higher ed, assuming instead that it was
obvious. One reason, I think, is that higher ed has had a tradition of
even-handedness, disinterest (or at least the appearance of disinterest),
and eschewing political contest, for the most part. Yet our opponents have
no such qualms, nor are they beyond misstating or egregiously distorting
what they do not understand. I'm reminded of the outrageous behavior of my
son when he was younger: he would do things I couldn't imagine he'd have to
be told not to. In a similar fashion, ideological attacks on higher ed are
something many of us never imagined, because we thought nobody would ever
have to be told that education fuels economic growth and smooths class
differences by providing a pathway to prosperity for the best and the
brightest of any socio-economic group - if we continue to fund scholarships
and loans for those who haven't the money to pay. By contrast, the current
arguments to cut off the support of education enshrine and cast into
concrete the present social divisions (with larger income differentials
between the top and the bottom than at any time in many decades).
This is the more distressing in that what is proposed as an
alternative use for the money is funding unnecessary weapons systems (that
even the Pentagon doesn't want), further tax decreases for corporations
(already paying a lesser fraction of total tax than at any time for
decades) and for the top echelons (over $150,000 / year family income) that
have benefitted so enormously during the past two decades. One B-1B bomber
will fund an awful lot of education .
Still, higher ed has got to address the changes in economic
competition, complexity, science, and technology as well as demographics if
the political attack is to be countered. There is some truth to the
criticisms that higher ed is overly bureaucratic, unresponsive to students,
and so on. There are better ways, more efficient and more effective ways,
of handling the administrative side of education, and we need to use them.
There are larger issues of information management and interpretation that
our students need to be helped to understand and master. And we in higher
ed have an enormous task ahead of us to bring ourselves and our thinking
into stronger position for the 21st Century - without abandoning wholesale
the valuable insights of our past. We won't be able to do it without much
change, paying close attention to the issues, concerns and trends we need
to equip our students (and ourselves) to deal with, among them:
- Burgeoning technology that revolutionizes (potential) access to
information of all sorts. How can students cope? What should they know to
both utilize information effectively, and avoid being misled by spurious
precision, "information" contrary to sense that is in fact MISinformation,
senseless "statistical" studies, and the like? What about the ethical and
societal issues of information access, personal privacy, and social good
(the current disputes about the SATAN program and Internet pornography
offering two examples)? How do long-held higher ed values affect our
thinking on these issues?
- Increasing economic competiton and complexity. What changes are
necessary in the way we teach students, what we teach them, and what
students we teach to address the very different economy of the coming
century? How do we reach "retreads" who have been downsized out of jobs, or
may be? How do we encourage genuine life-long learning as a preventative
measure to obviate downsizing in the future? How can people be really
prepared for multiple jobs and careers in their lifetime, preferably
without the economic fallout we've seen recently? How can they be prepared
to be effective citizens in so complex a world? (We need a new restatement
of the value of liberal arts and sciences education, as well as
professional education.)
- Intensifying multinational competition. What do students need to
know about learning a new culture and language to compete effectively? How
about the business norms of other societies? How can these insights be
removed, in students' thinking and that of our other constituencies, from
"luxuries" to their proper, necessary role?
- Awareness of the increasing fragility of our ecosystem. How can
we make our case, with students as with competitors, that we must be
stewards of the earth or lose our place on it? Nor is it enough to mend our
ways in the US alone, without addressing the enormous problems elsewhere:
this is a systemic problem, not a local one (the ecological catastrophies
of the old East Bloc are one case in point; those in the developing world
another). Population growth, pollution, ozone depletion and greenhouse gas
increases are interactive, not separate issues.
- Increasingly complex human skills and communications
requirements. The very wisdom that older observers counsel is precisely
what young people (and those focused on immediate results) find so
"irrelevant." How shall we communicate the importance of these factors and
build them into the way we teach? How do we build into our society a
genuine commitment to learning organizations, since that's the bottom line?
I could go on, but I think my concerns are already clear: the
traditional role of higher ed in transmitting the wisdom of the past intact
has already been called into serious question, resulting in many new roles
for higher ed that put it squarely into the realm of political contest.
Higher ed must recognize this larger trend and take its case to the public
at large. Either we convince the public we're worth supporting, whether or
not they agree with us on any particular issue; or, losing support of
different constituencies on different issues, we will be eliminated.
MXJELI@MAIL.WM.EDU
Mariann Jelinek
Richard C. Kraemer Professor of Business
Graduate School of Business,
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA 23185
Tel. (804) 221-2882 FAX: (804) 229-6135