[382] in magellan
A Choice of Transformations for the 21st-Century University
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Anderson)
Tue Feb 1 10:11:41 2000
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Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2000 10:08:18 -0500
To: itlt@mit.edu, magellan@mit.edu
From: Greg Anderson <ganderso@MIT.EDU>
This week's issue of the Chronicle has an interesting piece by James
Duderstadt (former President of UMich) about possible models for
universities in the future. This is an excerpt from a forthcoming book.
As we continue to evolve the IS role in the richness of MIT's current and
planned initiatives, we can begin to see and shape the Institute model for
the future.
Greg
This story from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com)
____________________________________________________________
From the issue dated February 4, 2000
A Choice of Transformations for the 21st-Century University
By JAMES J. DUDERSTADT
The remarkable resilience of U.S. colleges and universities
-- their capacity to adapt to new societal demands over the
past several centuries -- has occurred because our
institutions are intensely entrepreneurial. Faculty members
have had the freedom, the encouragement, and the incentives to
move toward varying goals in highly flexible and innovative
ways.
Today, in a time of unprecedented change, our challenge is to
tap that energy and creativity to transform institutions of
higher education into entirely new paradigms. We must respond
to the rapidly evolving needs of numerous and diverse
stakeholders, question existing premises and arrangements, and
eliminate unnecessary processes and administrative structures.
Faculty members and administrators should work together to
provide an environment in which change is regarded not as
threatening but rather as an exhilarating opportunity to
engage in the primary activity of a college or university:
learning, in all its many forms.
The traditional model of higher education -- four-year,
classroom-based undergraduate education on a residential
campus; graduate education in academic disciplines and
professional schools; and faculty members who are active in
teaching, research, and service -- is already inadequate to
describe much of higher education today. Given the current
pace of change, colleges and universities may be virtually
unrecognizable in the future.
Although we can never predict the future with absolute
certainty, we in higher education are not relieved of the
responsibility of vision. We must consider a broad range of
possibilities for the college and university of the 21st
century, looking for new models that suggest the extraordinary
transformations that institutions may undergo in the years
ahead. Among them:
* The World University. The American research university
dominates much of the world's scholarship and research. U.S.
colleges and universities currently enroll more than 490,000
foreign students, according to the Institute of International
Education, and also attract faculty members from throughout
the world.
In the near future, some institutions will become even more
global in character. We may see the establishment of several
world universities, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, as focal points for various types of study of
international issues -- political, cultural, economic, and
technological.
Such universities would view their marketplace as the world,
rather than as a particular nation or region. Although rooted
in a local culture, they would reflect far greater
international diversity in their students, faculties, and
academic programs. They also would be funded through
international in addition to national or state resources.
* The Diverse University. Our institutions serve a society of
growing diversity -- ethnic, racial, cultural, economic, and
geographical -- and that new reality will only continue to
intensify. Although our colleges and universities have taken
steps to better reflect such diversity on their campuses, we
might imagine a bolder model. The diverse university would
draw its intellectual strength and character from the rich
diversity of humankind, and provide an environment in which
people respect and tolerate diversity in living, working, and
learning together as scholars and teachers.
For universities to thrive today, we must be open to a
multiplicity of approaches and opinions. At the same time, we
must recognize that an institution of higher education is
first and foremost a "uni"-versity, not a "di"-versity. Our
challenge will be to weave together the dual objectives of
unity and diversity in a way that best serves our mission and
society.
* The Creative University.The professions that have dominated
the late 20th century have been those that manage knowledge
and wealth -- professions such as law, business, and politics.
Yet, as predicted by the futurist Peter Drucker, our society
increasingly values those activities that actually create new
knowledge -- professions such as art, music, architecture, and
engineering.
Perhaps some higher-education institutions of the 21st century
will also shift their intellectual focus and priority from the
preservation or transmission of knowledge to the process of
creation itself. Such institutions may need to organize
themselves quite differently, stressing forms of pedagogy and
extracurricular experiences that teach and nurture the art and
skills of creativity. For instance, some may replace the
classroom with the studio, or shift the role of the faculty
member from that of a teacher to that of the leader of a
creative team.
As part of those efforts, colleges and universities might form
strategic alliances with other institutions, organizations, or
groups whose activities are characterized by creativity -- for
example, the art world, the entertainment industry, or even
Madison Avenue. One current model is the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory.
* The Divisionless University. The higher-education
institution of the future will be far less specialized and far
more integrated. A web of structures, some real and some
virtual, will provide both horizontal and vertical integration
among the disciplines.
We have already witnessed the blurring of the distinction
between basic and applied research, between science and
engineering, and among the various scientific disciplines. So,
too, we are seeing a far more intimate relationship between
basic academic disciplines and the professions. For example,
clinical departments in medicine are conducting much of the
most important basic biological research in areas such as
human gene therapy. The professional schools of business, law,
public health, and social work are deeply engaged in
fundamental scholarship as well as teaching in the social
sciences. And the humanities are continually energizing and
nourishing the performing arts -- and vice versa.
* The Cyberspace University. Some of our institutions -- both
traditional universities such as the University of California
at Los Angeles and the Pennsylvania State University, as well
as newly emerging universities like the University of Phoenix
-- are already well on their way to becoming "knowledge
servers," linked into a vast information network, providing
their services to whoever might request them. As distributed
virtual environments become more common, we might even
conceive of a time when the classroom experience itself
becomes a commodity, provided to anyone, anywhere, anytime --
for a price.
A cyberspace university has its limitations. Obviously, it
couldn't offer a residential component, an element that can
be critical, especially in serving undergraduates. Yet the
possibilities opened up by computer-mediated distance learning
and collaboration promise to enhance the intellectual
environment for everyone.
Forward-thinking institutions of higher education should also
consider and implement other, more novel, paradigms,
including:
* The Adult University. Research universities must make
extensive investments to attract world-class scholars,
maintain extensive libraries, and construct state-of-the-art
laboratory facilities -- all to achieve excellence in advanced
education and scholarship. Certain institutions may decide
that it is simply no longer cost-effective to provide
general-education programs for young high-school graduates.
Instead, like some European and Asian universities, they may
admit only advanced, academically and emotionally mature
students, directly into graduate and professional schools. For
instance, the University of Oxford and the University of
Cambridge effectively admit undergraduates into upper-division
studies, relying on secondary schools to provide general
education.
An adult-university approach would relieve research
institutions of the responsibilities of general education and
parenting -- roles for which many are not well suited, because
their faculty members concentrate more on scholarship than on
guiding the intellectual and emotional maturation of students.
This approach might also allow research universities to shed
their activities in remedial education, a rather inappropriate
use of their costly resources.
Such a focusing of efforts might even reduce the public
criticism that is often aimed at large, high-priced research
universities. While students and parents may complain about
the education that undergraduates receive at those
institutions, most appear quite happy with the quality of
graduate and professional education. Furthermore, they seem
quite willing to pay the necessary tuition, both because they
accept the higher costs of advanced education and training,
and because they see clearly the benefits of the degrees to
their careers.
* The Lifelong University. In this model, an institution would
commit itself, perhaps even through a contractual
relationship, to a lifetime of interaction with its students.
It would provide them with the education necessary to respond
to their changing goals and needs after they graduated and
throughout the rest of their lives. Many universities are
beginning to move in that direction by rapidly expanding
educational opportunities for alumni, ranging from
campus-based colleges to distance-learning courses.
In addition, institutions would design programs to bring
together students with alumni who have established themselves
in particular careers -- thereby blurring the distinction
between student and graduate, between the college and the
external world. Lifelong universities would, for instance,
seek the active participation of alumni in academic programs
as teachers, advisers, and role models.
* The Ubiquitous University. In the future, higher-education
institutions might be conceived as nexuses of our public
culture, systems that link and connect social institutions:
schools, libraries, museums, performing-arts organizations,
hospitals, parks, news media, and the growing universe of
information providers on the Internet. Perhaps ubiquitous
universities will be new social life-forms, capable of
providing community learning centers and knowledge networks
that are open and available to all.
Those institutions might be physically located hubs, or they
might be distributed in cyberspace. They might evolve from
existing colleges and universities or appear as entirely new
constructs, quite different from anything we have experienced.
Although many colleges will experiment through distance
learning or extension programs, the most creative efforts may
come from the for-profit sector -- as a result of better
access to risk capital and a more entrepreneurial culture.
* The Laboratory University. As a rule, major corporations
invest several percent of their gross revenues in research and
development. Ironically, however, although the contemporary
university stresses research as a part of its mission, it
actually invests very little to investigate future forms of
teaching, scholarship, and service.
For example, if the University of Michigan were to follow the
trend in business and government, it would invest roughly
$30-million to $40-million per year in such research. In
reality, like most universities, it spends only a fraction of
that amount, perhaps $1-million to $2-million per year. Such
an underinvestment in research on issues related to the core
activities of higher education has become a serious problem,
as the future of traditional colleges becomes increasingly
uncertain.
The laboratory university could be a prototype of what a
higher-education institution of the 21st century might be -- a
testing site where new models would be developed and studied.
Such an academic enterprise would propagate a risk-tolerant
culture, in which students and faculty would be strongly
encouraged to "go for it," and in which failure would be
accepted as part of the learning process, associated with
ambitious goals rather than poor performance.
Those paradigms could be regarded merely as abstract planning
scenarios. But they had a more pragmatic purpose at Michigan
during the 1990's, when the university began a major effort to
transform itself to better serve the changing world. In that
process, we realized that the forces driving change were so
strong that we needed to do far more than contemplate the
possibilities through abstract study and debate. We decided to
build, as working experiments, several prototypes of future
learning institutions. Considering such new paradigms provided
a framework for that effort.
In fact, all of the specific experiments we embarked upon had
aspects of one of more of these paradigms. We established
campuses in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, connecting them
through robust information technology, to study the
implications of becoming a world university. We significantly
enhanced the racial diversity of our students, examining the
theme of the diverse university. As a model of the creative
university, we launched major initiatives like the "Media
Union," a sophisticated multimedia environment that linked the
visual and performing arts with the engineering, business, and
other professional schools. And we developed an array of
additional initiatives and ventures, all designed to explore
the future.
To be sure, some of those experiments were costly. Some were
harshly criticized by people who prefer the status quo. Every
experiment ran a high risk of failure, and a few crashed in
flames -- spectacularly, at times. But all of them were
important in envisioning the possible futures that our
institution may face.
It is unlikely that any college or university will assume the
exact form of any one of the models. And the models themselves
must adapt to an environment of continual change.
But each paradigm has features that will almost certainly be
part of the character of higher education in America in this
century. Each represents a path that we should explore, as we
seek to determine the nature of those institutions that can
best serve a rapidly changing world.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it, according
to an old saying in engineering. By envisioning and seeking to
understand the paradigms of the college or university of the
21st century, we will, in fact, take steps to create them.
James J. Duderstadt is president emeritus and a professor of
science and engineering at the University of Michigan. This
essay is adapted from A University for the 21st Century, to be
published in March by the University of Michigan Press. All
rights reserved.
_________________________________________________________________
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http://chronicle.com/weekly/v46/i22/22b00601.htm
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Copyright 2000 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
