Academic says colleges should be national powerhouses

UNIVERSITIES are more like endangered species when they should be national powerhouses, Prof Frank Rhodes, the former president of Cornell University, New York, has said.

He warned that colleges were in danger of extinction because of internal atrophy and super specialisation on the one hand and rapid changes in the environment on the other. He was delivering the third annual Trinity College Dublin/Irish Times lecture in TCD last night.

"Perhaps most damning, in an era when the American people are being asked to sacrifice for the sake of long term strength, universities are perceived as self indulgent, arrogant, and resistant to change," he said.

There were at least three broad trends buffeting higher education our expanded view of knowledge our expanded view of who needs knowledge, and our expanded view of who provides knowledge.

"But despite these expanded views of the place of education, there are several trends which contain the seeds for internal atrophy and rigidity. First, many schools and universities are afflicted with the `cost disease', which has become debilitating in the current environment. Second, despite some 10 centuries of experience with teaching and learning at the university level, we know remarkably little about the cognitive process."

The third factor was that the impact of technology on education so far has been to improve quality but also to increase cost.

Dr Rhodes exhorted an invited audience of educationalists to make some "simple reaffirmations" to the public so it understands research universities are unique and vital, and serve a unique role in society.

Scholarship was a public trust, he said, and universities had an obligation to serve society. The universities had also to reaffirm that teaching was a moral vocation. "We pile on course after course after course. We need to ask ourselves the point behind the courses. Do undergraduates really need the 4,000 choices offered at many American research universities?"

Knowledge would continue to be the new basis of prosperity, national security, public health, and a sustainable environment. "But at the very moment when they have the most to contribute to a knowledge dependent world, universities are strangely ill prepared to carry the revolution forward They are tentative, defensive, unresponsive.

Dr Rhodes, who was born in Warwickshire, England, was Professor of Geology at Cornell and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan. He is the author of five books and more than 70 major scientific articles and monographs.