The third annual Trinity Dublin/Irish Times Lecture was delivered last night by Prof Frank H.T. Rhodes, former president of Cornell University, New York. The lecture, an edited version of which follows, was entitled. The University National Powerhouse or Endangered Species?
IT IS a great pleasure to be back in Ireland and a great honour to be giving an Irish Times lecture before such a large and attentive audience. One never knows how one will be received so far from home.
On the cusp on the new millennium, we are faced with a new Ireland the nation that produced the Book of Kells 1,000 years ago now produces software. The nation that gave us Bronze Age objects of breathtaking beauty and utility now gives us advances in materials science, biotechnology and engineering.
No longer isolated from the rest of Europe by virtue of its island geography, Ireland is an important player on the world stage. Moreover, Ireland is the only nation in Western Europe with more than 40 per cent of the population below the age of 25. This places enormous demands on the educational system.
In a world of global markets and multinational corporations, satellite television, and almost instantaneous worldwide communication by fax, telephone and computer, the future role of nation states is unclear. But one thing is clear knowledge is, and will continue to be, the new basis of economic prosperity, national security, public health, and a sustainable environment. And it will be no less important for personal fulfilment, societal harmony, and social progress.
The key to national strength Ireland's and that of other nations is no longer natural resources, nor geographic size, nor even military power. It is knowledge.
Knowledge is at the heart of new products, new processes, new systems of surveillance and defence. Knowledge has already given us computers of undreamed of speed and power that fit in the palm of the hand. It has given us vaccines, drugs and treatments for a host of life threatening diseases. The knowledge revolution has surpassed even the industrial revolution in its impact on human life, and it continues to grow apace. Nations that can work smarter not harder will be the ones to lead the world into the new century.
But there is a paradox in this knowledge revolution. 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. Hunkered down behind ivied walls and facing budgetary constraint, many of their members are battling to capture the greatest share of scarce resources or at least to maintain the status quo.
When they should the national powerhouses, universities are more like endangered species. In danger of extinction because of internal atrophy and super specialisation on the one hand and rapid changes in the environment on the other, to which they are responding with difficulty if at all.
Already we are seeing the danger signs in the United States, research universities have been faulted for neglect of undergraduate teaching in favour of inconsequential research fragmented fields of study garbled educational purposes trivialised scholarship improper accounting techniques, particularly with respect to federal research funds falsification of experimental results conflicts of interest preaching politics and the imposition of political correctness.
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.
In his remarkably popular book, The Closing Of The American Mind (p.337), Allan Bloom described the problem this way. "The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines . . . This democracy is really an anarchy, because there are no recognised rules for citizenship and no legitimate titles to rule. In short there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.
Charles Sykes (Profscam, p.4) lays the blame for loss of vision at the feet of the faculty. "Almost single handedly, the professors working steadily and systematically have destroyed the university as a centre of learning and have desolated higher education, which no longer is higher or much of an education.
Yet, as unhappy as many Americans seem to be about aspects of their universities, most also acknowledge the institutions great value to the nation.
Having conquered polio and other devastating diseases with vaccines and antibiotics developed in their labs, surely they have something valuable to offer in the fight against drug resistant tuberculosis and AIDS?"
Having given us the laser, the transistor, and the high speed computer chip, surely they can give us more of the high technology the nation needs to compete in the markets of the world?
Having conferred substantial earnings advantages on their grad surely they can continue to provide economic opportunity to future generations of young people, especially those from groups not formerly well represented in high education?
To understand this paradox, it may be helpful to look at the larger picture for signs of rapid environmental change and internal rigidity, both of which can cause species, and institutions, to become extinct. Under the heading of rapid environmental change, there are at least three broad trends buffeting higher education.
The first is our expanded view of knowledge. In the 13th century, the quadrivium, which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music and the trivium, which consisted of grammar, logic and rhetoric of the Latin language, were thought to represent the sum of all learning.
Today we have a democracy of disciplines, as Allan Bloom asserts, and that democracy has been brought into being by the increasing complexity of various careers. From hotel administration to engineering, from film making to veterinary medicine careers of every sort demand more knowledge of their practitioners than ever before.
Second is our expanded view of who needs knowledge. High level knowledge is no longer something to be reserved for the clergy and members of the learned professions. Today, in America at least, a baccalaureate degree is seen by many as a prerequisite for middle class life. It is the entry level credential for a host of different professions, from education, to physical therapy, to marketing and sales.
Third is our expanded view of who provides knowledge. Universities no longer have a monopoly on the provision of high level training corporations are assuming an ever greater role. Most people can expect to have at least six jobs and possibly two or three different career's during their lives. Lifelong employment in a single company is becoming rare. The watch word now is not life long employment but lifelong employability. And through investment in job training and continuing education, more and more companies are stepping into the educators' role.
These three broad environmental trends have changed the role that universities are expected to play in American life. Universities have already changed from the ivory towers of earlier years. They have become, both by demand and by choice, far more actively involved in the large issues of public life. They are now citizens, partners in a social compact which places great responsibility and high expectations upon them. They provide, not only the products of their research, but also experts who can advise government and business, and graduates with the talent and energy to engage the issues of tomorrow.
But despite those expanded views of the place of education, there are at least three 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. During the years immediately after World War II and extending until at least the early 1970s education was a growth industry offerings were expanded, faculty and students were added, new facilities were built. It became common practice to "grow" one's way to excellence and with resources plentiful and demand high, that strategy made sense.
Now, in a time of modest growth and in some cases contraction, education must adopt another approach. The constraints on growth demand restraint in spending. Institutions are being forced to set priorities and form partnerships, both within their own institutions and with other institutions and other sectors of society.
The ivory tower in its splendid isolation is no more.
Second, despite some 10 centuries of experience with teaching and learning at the university level, we know remarkably little about the cognitive process. What is the optimal class size for student learning? Does it vary by level and field? What is the optimal balance between the didactic and the Socratic method? Between lectures and labs? How can we make use of new technologies to assist learning?
Third, the impact of technology on education, at least so far, has been to improve quality but also to increase cost. We have added new capabilities for data base searches, computerised library searches, e-mail, on-line course registration and unlimited access to the Internet.
At my own institution, professors are putting their lecture notes on the web and holding "virtual" office hours to answer students' questions.
But by and large we have not used this new technological capability to reduce our "people" cost, which in universities accounts for a substantial part of the budget. This is in marked contrast to the industry experience, where the introduction of technology has of\en been accompanied by down sizing and reduction in workforce.
In their greater social engagement, universities have themselves undergone significant changes, some of them controversial and confusing. I believe these changes are the reflection of deeper changes rooted in America's character.
The most critical deeper changes are inclusiveness, professionalisation, and the ascendancy of science.
First, universities have deliberately become more inclusive in their membership and in their programmes of study and research. In aggregate they have made a deliberate and far reaching commitment to equal access and social mobility. The origin of this commitment in the United States can be traced back to the founding of the land grant universities in the 19th century, but the pace of the process has accelerated in the last 50 years, and it has come to embrace all institutions, private as well as public.
Universities have also become more inclusive in their curricula. They have responded to public needs by offering new fields of study from environmental health, safety and policy issues, to urban and regional planning, from gerontology to real estate management. These inclusive changes in membership and in programmes, and the growth in size they have brought with them, have effectively ended the isolation of the campus and transformed the nature of the university.
Second, over the last 50 years American university studies have become far more professional in the scope of their curriculums and far more practical in their orientation.
It is not the presence of professional and practical studies that is new, but rather their dominance. Most of the new additions are professional, while longer established schools of medicine, dentistry, public health, law, engineering, architecture, agriculture, management, public communication, and other professional disciplines loom larger than ever before, both in enrolment and in influence.
Third, the ascendancy of science, both as a professional study and as a dominating influence, has noticeably changed the culture of the university. Unlike most other countries, the US concentrates much of its basic research in universities rather than in government laboratories and institutes. Alongside the desirable results of this the closer linkage of the basic sciences to medicine and engineering the practical benefits of the association of education and research there have been results of more debatable value.
It is the cumulative effect of these changes, which began to build around the turn of the century and accelerated rapidly after World War II, that underlies virtually all the charges levelled against America's universities.
American's research universities may attract half the world's graduate students, but they also attract controversy as they try to resolve the political, social and cultural conflicts of the larger society. Like it or not, the moral influence of the great universities has diminished as they have assumed new responsibilities and new priorities and established new partnerships with business and government.
I would not presume to reform society at large, but I do have some ideas for our universities. To quote Adlai Stevenson, in What I Think (Harper & Row, 1955) "Criticism, in its fairest and most honest form, is the attempt to test whether what is, might not be better.
I believe there are four simple reaffirmations we need to make to the public if they are to understand that research universities are unique and vital, and serve a role that no other institutions in our society can fill.
The first affirmation is this scholarship is a public trust. Our scholarship is supported by the public, and that puts two obligations on us that I see rarely fulfilled.
First, as creators of knowledge, we must also engage in explanation and application where appropriate. We need to become advocates of scholarship because our voice is not being raised in response to our critics. Most of us regard our scholarship as completed when it is published, exhibited or performed. But we need to move beyond mere publication to explanation and advocacy for research as such. We hear again and again that useful research is the only kind worthy of support by the state or federal government. We must become champions of the scholarship we represent.
Second. Within this affirmation of scholarship as a public trust, we must also begin to build bridges internally so that we link research to the undergraduate experience in increasingly effective ways build bridges to the community and linkages between our colleges.
Yet, although we have greatly expanded the breadth and scope of our offerings, we have tended to wall off the various parts of knowledge into administratively separate units that have little incentive to interact. Each department within a university is a largely autonomous unit, but the departmental structures we have created may have outlived their usefulness as more and more of the most interesting questions are being posed, not within the individual disciplines, but at the boundaries where they intersect.
The second reaffirmation I believe universities must make is that service is a societal obligation. Our greatest service is providing educated men and women and highly trained professionals for society at large, but we should also re-examine other ways in which universities are of service. Not every research programme will yield marketable results, and I would be the first to argue for a strong programme of federally funded basic research. But if service is truly a societal obligation, then we must do far better than we have in ensuring that the fruits of our research are developed for the public good.
The third reaffirmation is that teaching is a moral vocation. I believe teaching has a moral dimension because of its impact not just on the mind but on the character and the will and I believe, as most of you probably do, that it is a "calling", and not just a means of earning a living, that allows us to do research. If teaching is the core business of faculty members, as I believe it should be, both the content and the method of teaching should attract our attention and our concern.
But the verbal reaffirmation in the absence of consistent behaviour and improved performance unlikely to be persuasive. It is easy to affirm, but difficult to implement the changes that are needed. We must walk the talk if we are to restore public trust and service the public needs.
And there is an urgency to take action. I said earlier that species become endangered in two ways. By inward atrophy and super specialisation and by rapid changes in the external environment. We face both dangers.