Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 6, 1994 TAG: 9403080013
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By GEORGE W. JOHNSON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But in addressing both the poor prospects of state funding and the onset of a new era in university development, it has been easy to get the two issues - dollars and innovation - entangled.
These are not two sides to an argument, but two new realities that need to be better understood.
We are constantly told that we live in a global economy, that the economy is knowledge-driven and that, in the future, American business must look to universities for the kind of well-prepared "knowledge workers" on which a competitive future depends. This is the conventional argument for business support of higher education.
But this consideration, vital as it is, does not suggest all the significant elements of the issue. Amid the cultural diversity of a world grown intimate in the information age, we must cope with complexity that quite literally boggles the mind.
We are awash in data. We know too much. We know that most of the systems that interest us daily - politics, economics, the weather - are predictably unpredictable. If we are to do business, if we are to conduct our lives on anything like a rational basis, we have to cope with complex systems, derive knowledge from information and distill wisdom from chaos.
This is nothing less than the central mission of a university - and why our universities are the essential instruments of a competitive, knowledge-driven economy.
Despite what we see happening around us, we often think of college in 19th-century terms. In that model, drawn from a time when only 10 to 15 percent of the high-school class (mostly young gentlemen) were considered worthy of a higher education, college students were moved away from the temptations of the city and acculturated within the reclusive walls of a dormitory or fraternity house.
There the students were homogenized and bonded through a combination of booze, hazing and football. Their education was modeled on that embodiment of the industrial age - the factory. On an academic conveyor belt that moved precisely through four years, 18- to 21-year-olds sat in a classroom for fifteen 50-minute periods a week, 16 weeks a semester. They were then inspected, given the academic stamp of approval, and shipped out to become the next generation of leaders.
That model has almost nothing to do with current realities.
At metropolitan universities - and the vast majority are metropolitan - student enrollment is remarkably diverse. At a typical institution like George Mason University, graduate students comprise a third of the number. The median age of undergraduate students is 23; the mean 22. One in eight undergraduates is married and has a family. Eighty percent work; half of those who live in the dorms work off campus. They are highly mobile: three out of five attend more than one institution. And 25 percent come from families in which English is not the first language.
For these students, the factory model no longer suffices. Instruction must be custom-tailored, the way most information-age services are structured.
Universities have made surprising, and largely unreported, progress here.
An English-department chairman, for instance, has transformed his usual course in American fiction into one that enrolls twice the previous number of students, and teaches them in a more intense and productive way. Doubling the class size and adding a graduate assistant, he lectures once a week. To this he adds the resources of an electronic classroom, using interactive video, hypertext, tapes, etc.
The class is divided into small groups of about 10 each. These groups are responsible for holding discussions among themselves and for reporting the minutes of these meetings through electronic mail to a weekly class newspaper. Workshops are also conducted electronically, bolstered by regular visits from the professor and his assistant.
Electronic mail holds the class together. Contact between professor and students is no longer limited to class and office hours. This particular professor logged some 80 hours of computer time in correspondence with students; the students, conferring with the professor or their classmates, logged over 400 hours.
In such a format, the professor becomes the navigator, directing each student through the course material, pointing out the special resources needed. (The library holdings are now available from any office or work station.)
The exchanges are much more intense and serious than they are in a conventional class, and often the most reticent student becomes the most voluble over e-mail.
Indeed, a new intellectual community is formed, friendships are made, and diverse personalities find a common bond.
To provide the necessary guidance, the professor must have a full command of his subject and be a ``full'' professor in the complete sense of the term. One can quickly see how such a format lends itself to larger classes, guided by larger teams of instructors. In such a team, the role of full-professor has to be filled by the generalist, not the specialist.
One sees here the same need that has emergedAs in health care , and is now recognizedin legal studies, there is simply too much information for any one human being to master.
Amid a welter of data, each professor should learn to teach exploration and mapping, coping with complexity, and reintegration of special and general interests.
In this new university model, teaching and research are seamlessly joined, since professors must pursue research to chart the known and unknown seas their students must traverse. Teaching and advising again become indivisible.
The contact credit-hour equation is broken. The conventional input measure of a ``credit'' shifts to an output measure of accomplishment. We should remember that e-mail, a technology that has been around so long it is no longer considered ``hi-techy,'' enabled these changes. Radical change has already occurred.
A diverse student body and a new instructional network to accommodate that diversity are already part of our culture. They just have not been recognized until recently.
Instead, we have become preoccupied with productivity and cost-saving. In some states, including Virginia, tuition has risen to levels that threaten to privatize public universities. Across the region, state funding for higher education, when adjusted for inflation, has not increased since 1984. Yet enrollments have risen 16 percent, and the growing number of students eligible for admission looms ominously.
Universities, especially public ones, have to assure taxpayers that they are not wasting money and are working to capacity. That is always an obligation, particularly when the economy falters. But we must acknowledge that - in ways both tangible and intangible - higher education contributes to the productivity of society as a whole.
This may be forgotten when revenues falter. To balance its state budget, Virginia has looked to university budgets for tax dollars it can divert - or replace with tuition or bond issues. As a result, in but three years Virginia's position among the states plummeted from 22nd in tax dollars per student to 43rd.
Universities have been forced to take Draconian measures to survive. They have let support services deteriorate in order to preserve the classroom, and, by increasing class sizes and cutting positions, they have done what they should not: degrade the quality of coursework.
American universities, still generally considered the best in the world, need moral as well as financial support to meet the new century. They cannot live on loaves and fishes, and they need to feel their enterprise is encouraged.
The story of what Virginia universities have accomplished during hard times needs to be told at least as often as "profscam" anecdotes. Our graduates' satisfaction (running well over 90 percent) ought to be remarked as often as our tuition increases, and the reasons for both should be better explained.
George W. Johnson is president of George Mason University.
by CNB