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2006
Faculty and Staff CONVOCATION |
| THE NEXT UWGB |
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There’s just a taste of the activities, more or less routine,
that we will be involved in over the coming academic year. Challenges and
opportunities but ones I am confident we will very successfully get our
hands around. What I really want to talk about this morning, though, are a different set of challenges and opportunities. These are not routine and, as we approach them, our thinking cannot be routine. We are about building what I like to call “the next UWGB.” We do that every year, of course, even if only in small ways. But, I am thinking back to the origins of our University. Chancellor Weidner and his colleagues were given the challenge of building a new university. In so doing, they were explicitly charged with responding to the criticisms of American higher education then reverberating through the turbulent ‘60’s. We have come, along with the rest of the state, through some difficult times over the last five years. There are signs that things are turning. There are many positives: the Growth Agenda, philanthropic support, a strongly supportive region. But, I must caution against the danger of thinking that brighter futures mean a return to business as usual. The Changing Environment Clearly, the environment is changing rapidly. And not in ways I would have predicted as I left college 37 years ago. As a proud baccalaureate graduate, I was prepared to enter a world that would see unrelenting progress toward greater tolerance, fewer wars, ever more effective divisions between the important realms of religion and government, deeper understanding of and acceptance of basic scientific principles, greater roles for international approaches as mindless and destructive versions of nationalism waned, and the increasing importance of ever-advancing knowledge in settling our conflicts. And, an ever more prosperous world with plentiful free time for personal enrichment. What actually happened? You know the coda: • A flattening world in which knowledge is ever more important but less and less constrained by political boundaries. And, less and less enveloped by the walls of the academy. • Even as knowledge becomes the key to competitive edges, prejudice, nationalism, ethnic hatreds, and jihads, whatever the religion, abound. • In our country, greater and greater public disinvestment in higher education, hand in hand with a politics more and more often defining the role of government in promoting the common good as no more than simply protecting the pursuit of private interest. • Anti-intellectualism that is fashionable and takes forms ranging from denial of global warming to attacks on evolution. On the last point, a quick aside. I am reminded of Garrison Keillor’s definition of evolution. “The theory that life evolves toward ever more intelligent forms. … Everywhere, that is, but Kansas.” Critiques One other change. Like those febrile 60’s that gave birth to the first UWGB, we are in a period of much ferment concerning the future of public higher education. Much ferment. Many critiques. Now, I don’t mean the loud but often substantively frivolous complaints down in Madison. Those critiques are important, politically, and we must respond but these attacks have nothing to do with what it means to be a university. I am talking about the critics who aim at fundamental transformation of American higher education. I have been reading them over the last year as part of my service on several AASCU national commissions. Consider as illustrative of a much larger literature, two of the most recent. Last September, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, charged with “developing a comprehensive national strategy for postsecondary education that will meet the needs of America’s diverse population and also address the economic and workforce needs of the country’s future.” During the same year, Derek Bok’s latest book on higher education came out with the pull-no-punches title, America’s Under Achieving Colleges. I do recommend this book to you for your critical reading. Maybe not polar opposites but we have here the report of a commission appointed by an administration that’s greatest gift to American higher education in its first four years was to have a Department of Education that ignored us, that focused only on K-12. (A gift that only lasted for the first term.) And, a book by an esteemed president emeritus of Harvard, somebody who knows us better than we might want. And there is a lot in common in their critiques. Our critics are saying the next university must provide: • Access across the life span independent of economic means, race, or gender, certainly, and, perhaps, also significantly more independent of the depth of academic preparation with which students begin their post-secondary educational experiences. • Student success rates far higher than is currently the case with the focus on success shifting from retention to degree production. • Academic quality that is not merely asserted nor defined in terms of resource inputs but, that is demonstrated through positive consequences for learning, doing so in ways that permit comparisons among programs, faculties, and universities. |
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• Ever stronger orientation to students, communities, public
and private enterprises as our “customers” with the effectiveness
of our service to them as the primary rationale for our existence as publicly
supported institutions. • Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency through applications of technology, innovation, partnerships with other institutions, and entirely different ways to organize our ways of work, our learning environments, and learning opportunities. I could go on. But, if you are like me, you may already be feeling uncomfortable. Where are the values that motivated us to accept what is really not so much a job as it is a calling? Basic research for its own sake; pushing the frontiers of knowledge and battling ignorance; challenging the status quo; providing our students with education essential for not just economically but, more importantly, intellectually, artistically, and emotionally richer lives. Lessons to Learn But, before we blindly reject the pressures that exist to transform our institutions, let’s do what academics should always do: See if there are some insights we might gain from a glance at history. Please consider the two momentous times of change in American higher education: those associated with the Morrill Act leading, shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, to the land grant universities, and the GI Bill after World War II leading to a dramatic expansion in access to higher education. With hindsight, both were positive, transformative events. It is not hyperbole to say that the land grant system of universities became the envy of the rest of the world. And, so much of what we enjoy today as a comfortable society traces back to the expansion in access to higher education supported by the GI Bill. Both followed wars that, perhaps more than any others, transformed the nation and the nation’s understanding of its destiny. Will the war on terror be similarly transforming? What is often forgotten is that both the Morrill Act and the GI Bill were opposed by the higher education establishments of the time. The private institutions dominant at the time of the Civil War did not want public institutions catering to the “agricultural and mechanical” classes. And, the doors to universities had to be forced open by the GI Bill, which was opposed in Congress by universities greatly concerned with what these untutored, nontraditional students might bring to their comfortable campuses. I think there is a lesson here. If there is major change in the making for American higher education, will we, the educational establishment of today, have the ability and the wisdom to step outside our comfort zone in order to effectively guide and shape that coming change? The Ball Remains in Our Court Here, then, is the most important insight I can offer this morning. The change is coming, yes. But how it is to be fully realized remains in our hands. For now, at least. If all we do is try to perpetuate the status quo, then we will lose the opportunity to shape the new university. If we are willing to take control, though, then I think we will find that the traditional values that I mentioned as motivating me – pushing frontiers of knowledge, challenging the status quo, enriching intellectual life – remain at the core. However, they will be being realized in transformed ways. Think of those who built the first UWGB. They did not adopt solutions being forced by a wider society. No, they listened to critiques. Really listened. Then, they did what academics do best: seek to understand the dynamics behind the criticisms, think innovatively, and come up with approaches far more creative than anything the critics could have come up with. Is there really any more exciting prospect than to think that our challenge, today, is to begin building the next UWGB? Our challenge, though, is significantly greater than that faced by those who built the first UWGB. And, it is not because of today’s political environment, current fiscal realities, or such. It is because we already have a university. A status quo in which we are all personally and professionally invested. You know the old joke about how many faculty does it take to change a light bulb? The answer: CHANGE???? I am again asking if we can step outside our comfort zones – like those who built the first UWGB – to think creatively about ourselves and our University. I am not about to prescribe what the next UWGB should look like. I could not begin to match the collective creativity here in this room. This much I do know, though: We will not make the great progress of which we are capable unless we let go of predilections to hang on to the known and familiar. And, may sound strange for a chancellor to say, we must more often fail. Those who started this University did some things that failed, things that, with the value of hindsight, now even look a bit foolish. So what? They corrected the problems. And that’s what it really comes down to in my mind: Do we have the confidence in ourselves to learn from experiences – good and bad – and to take corrective action as necessary? I sure believe in our capacity to do so. Why do I think we need to fail more? Because I believe we need to experiment more. |
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TOP OF PAGE Office of the Chancellor, David A Cofrin Library, Suite 810, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, 2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311-7001 Phone: 920-465-2207 E-mail: shepardb@uwgb.edu Comments to: Chancellor's Web Manager Revised: 08/23/2006 |