Our University – Stimulus

The most powerful stimulus ever invented, used for good and evil since the beginning of time, and producing both astoundingly positive results and the greatest tragedies in human history, creating vast wealth and pervasive poverty, leading to fulfillment or failure, is competition in a free environment. 

 

Adam Smith I am not.  But I keep both eyes open and this is what I see.

 

American higher education has been the most stimulating form of post secondary learning in the world for the past century.  Credit the Morrill Act during the Civil War, the German polytechnics and the quest to produce new knowledge, and the pioneering leaders at universities like Harvard, Michigan, and Chicago, who transformed the idea of universities as places to cultivate gentlemen, into places to generate knowledge and apply it to real problems.

 

Some things never change.

 

Study might lead to a cure for cancer, a faster computer, or stronger, more drought resistant crops.  The really powerful university recognizes the sustained importance of attending to real problems as well as the more elusive aspects of the human condition joy, fulfillment, faith, and other liberating aspects of our daily existence. 

 

The agendas addressed at a university are driven by a number of forces.  Current events have created a surge of curriculum and research initiatives addressing issues of terrorism and weapons technology and insurgency warfare.  Simultaneously, faculty and students study the ramifications of belief systems and their impact on world, national, state, city, and family order.    

 

Universities need freedom to engage what they believe to be important.  And they don’t need government stimulus, but rather freedom from government intervention.  Any stimulating resource given by one group of people to another creates a quid pro quo.  We see it in the political circles of Illinois and Washington D.C. all the time. 

 

Universities should compete for everything they have.  By everything I mean knowledge and insight:  the real currency for institutions like ours.  The competition is not necessarily for resources, but rather for ideas.  If resources that generate ideas come too easily, the pursuit of new ideas falters. 

 

Good ideas always generate resources, but resources will not always generate good ideas.  Stimuli other than good ideas are redundant at good universities.

 

So it is with our students, a level field in the pursuit of knowledge and insight.  If you look carefully at the concept of grade inflation, you will see that its rise over the past fifty years has led to degradation in the quality of student work, and similar diminution of a student’s ability to perform, even though the grades are going up.  At some institutions the average grades are B+. 

 

Life is always graded on a curve and in its absence inspiration evaporates. 

 

When we give students access to federal loans, access that has not always been earned by performance in high school, we create a burden of debt that cannot be assuaged with high grades. As higher education has become a property right rather than an opportunity, students graduate to fewer jobs with greater debt and less skill than ever before.

 

The students are not stupid.  I find them smart.  However, leadership at every level is robbing them of the right to fail, and may soon institutionalize this crime as national policy.

 

Freedom to fail is the genesis of competition and ultimately, the most potent stimulus package available.

 

According to Blaise Pascal, “Tyranny is the wish to have in one way what can only be had in another.”

Our University – Quality and Quantity

 

When James Walker was president of SIU, he said that he would rather see a very good university of 18,000 students than a mediocre one with 23,000.

 

President James Walker understood universities and how they work. 

 

Jim knew that if quality is high too many students are the problem not too few.  This is not necessarily true for community colleges, regional universities, or liberal arts colleges.  Each is different, each with its own purpose and attractions. 

 

For example in the case of community colleges and their taxing authorities location is paramount.  Local people pay local taxes for access to the community college.  People attend because it is convenient.  If a community college has people from other nations, it is usually because they live in the neighborhood, or they want to get into a university that is close by and has strong transfer relationships.  However, it is not uncommon for a research university to have students from 100 different countries.  We do.

 

Likewise, the quality of the university is not determined by it size.  Princeton, Caltech, MIT, Dartmouth and Rice, are among the very best universities in the world, and the largest of the lot MIT has10, 220 and Caltech only 2,133.  Small by most definitions.

 

Liberal arts colleges are even smaller. Of the best, Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore only one cracks 2,000 students by a few dozen.

 

Small but powerful.

 

Size is not important in relationship to quality except for reaching critical mass in selected disciplines, and this is an academic matter.  After that, size is meaningless.

 

The local merchants in any university community will tell you that they would not trade the research university for a community college of 2 or 3 times the size.  The real value of long term investment – economic development – does not come from size alone.  The related enterprise of a community in which a very good research university resides, is more important than the range of restaurants or the number of retail outlets or filling stations.  These things follow quality too. 

 

Quality breeds resources and business.

 

Striving to be big is not the same thing as striving to be good, and the latter always wins in the end.  Becoming smaller to increase quality could be a powerful posture for a university to take.  For example, if increasing entering ACT scores or class rank of entering freshman drives down size for a season, it will increase competiveness and quality for a generation.  Some claim this is exclusivity and creates a class system. 

 

It does in this sense: The people who come to study at excellent universities mean business, and that means business. 

 

Last week our pastor reflected on playing sandlot baseball.  He recalled that as often as not there was an odd number of people available to play, and as a youngster he always wanted to get on the team with the most players, assuming that size would give the team a leg up.  He soon figured out, that if you got on the smaller team and it had the fastest runners and some home run hitters, ability would trump size every time. 

 

In defending a policy of open admissions at the City University of New York that utterly failed and nearly ruined a once proud institution that counts Jonas Salk among its graduates, Robert J. Kibbee only got it half right:  “The quality of a university is measured more by the kind of student it turns out than the kind it takes in”.

 

The Southern Illinois preacher understood the equation.

 

 

 

Our University – Ideologues and Pragmatists

 

In the tension between ideology and pragmatism, that delicate balance, lives the genius of leadership. 

 

Ideologues are often associated with narrow-mindedness and a small view of the world.  People who hold strong views related to their faith are often portrayed as ideologues.  Likewise, an elected official welded to issues important to him is classified an ideologue.  Webster’s suggests that an ideologue is an impractical idealist, or a theorist.  That not being enough it continues, such people “are often blindly partisan advocates or adherents of a particular ideology.” 

 

Even when the ideology might be service, propriety, honesty and sincerity? 

 

A leader blindly committed to being honest?  What a breath of fresh air.

 

Imagine a university professor who is driven to understand the “truth” about relationships between various subatomic particles and gives up all aspects of the search that colors, distorts, or clouds her thinking about such relationships.

 

I would say that we have a great physicist.

 

Imagine an elected official who does all she can to serve the people she was elected to serve and is driven toward sincere service in a way that outweighs all else: her own needs take a backseat to the needs of the city, state or nation.

 

We would give our eyeteeth for such people, we wonder where they are, why we can’t find them.

 

While on the one hand we want an unwavering commitment to ideologies that relate to consistency and fairness, truth and integrity, they often come with strings attached.   

 

Hello pragmatism.

 

In American philosophy pragmatists like C. S. Peirce and William James pronounced that meaning is found in practical consequences, that function should impact thinking, and what is important should be weighed against observable results.  Hard to argue with this.

 

On the one hand I like this very much, on the other it frightens me. 

 

The committed researcher and the dedicated political leader need not fret over practical consequences.  Discoverers and leaders, similar types I hold, are best served to leave judgment of idea and work to others:  at our university, peer reviewers, at city hall, voters and commentators.

 

Time tells the truth.  Always.

 

Sooner or later the electorate, or the search committee, or the hiring executive, asks, “Is this person the right kind of ideologue?”  Does the leader or discoverer have any ideology at all, even a single idea?  Are they committed to something other than service of self?

 

Paul Simon had the uncanny ability to be both an ideologue for values of decency, honesty and fairness, but at the same time wanted to get things done.  During the announcement of David Yepsen as the new director of the Paul Simon Institute, I was reminded of Paul’s quip to me one day about having a “do tank” at SIU rather than a “think tank.”  Don’t ever believe the Senator was not always thinking about big ideas. 

 

Doing was one of them.

 

My admiration for him and his way of doing things was never exceeded by my disagreement with him on some issues.  He said and did the same things on Michigan Avenue, State Highway 51, on The Hill, and in his office… when it was just the two of us.  Consistency, commitment and transparency: always everywhere the same. 

 

Our university, at every level, needs commitment to principles of excellence, integrity, trust and honesty, just as our cities, our states, and our nation.  This deep pragmatism may be the most important idea in leadership.

 

We would trade our eyeteeth for such ideology.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our University – The Importance of Teaching Values

It is interesting that in a short period of time, 12 years, educators go from expressing a keen interest in teaching values, to no interest at all.  I am not sure what makes this discussion so difficult but I do know that students, even in graduate school, are still learning values; they learn them from experience, and study.  Study, of course, is one form of experience.   

 

Members of the faculty of any university know that they teach values, but they would rather say that they teach math, or physics, or literature, or sociology.  I believe that in every one of those actions, values are taught and they become part of the student experience.  Frequently this aspect of the work of faculty members is downplayed.  It suggests a level of responsibility that is a great burden to bear.

 

We are afraid of it.

 

Every discipline is taught from a cultural perspective.  Some would say that can’t be so in the case of calculus for example.  It is a trans-cultural discipline.

 

Not really.

 

The development of calculus embodies contributions from Newton, Leibnitz, Eudoxus, Archimedes, Lin Hui, Ibn al-Haythan, Seki Kowa, Cavalieri, and Schwarz.  Count the cultural and geographic divides, differences of world view, religious and moral perspectives in this incomplete, impromptu list.  The distinctive cultures that give life to an approach to the world have pieces and parts of many value systems, difficult to see, and therefore making calculus appear valueless. 

 

Calculus is laden with value.  We can’t see the lines of demarcation between one culture and another anymore, and how each contributes to a commonly held set of principles, so we think calculus is free of cultural interpolation. In fact it is so full of it we are blinded. 

 

We can’t see the trees for the forest.

 

To suggest this means that mathematics is trans-cultural, has no value associated with it, and should be devoid of cultural perspective is the same as claiming that my grandchildren have no specific and powerful relationship to my grandparents, and my wife’s grandparents, and their grandparents and so on. 

 

The French revolution embodied the conflict between two value systems: those of the monarchs and their subjects, ever so well represented by Queen Marie Antoinette’s suggestion upon hearing that the populace had no bread, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!” , “Let them eat cake!”   In an effort to unite the people of France, the framers of the revolution purportedly rallied the masses with the motto, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, freedom, equality, brotherhood.

 

These conflicting cultures are stabilized by the infusion of fraternity in the complex questions that vex us all from time to time.  We can see the cultural divides here.  The genius of the revolutionaries was that they understood the importance of fraternity in addressing complex problems.  Fraternity buffers and allows the mixing of differing value systems to be present, not lost, and included, not excluded.  Divergence becomes convergence. 

 

This is exactly why we must teach values at our university; even in subject areas where we don’t think they exist.  Otherwise, economist and thinker E. F. Schumacher had a profound warning for us: 

 

Divergent problems offend the logical mind, which wishes to remove tension by coming down on one side or the other, but they provoke, stimulate and sharpen the higher human faculties, without which man is nothing but a clever animal.

Our University – Lessons of a Struggling Economy

As the eternal optimist, I have pondered the lessons available in watching the national response to the economic challenges that we face, and how some instruction or, should providence smile on us, some wisdom, might be valuable for our university.  There are at least two lessons for our university that fall out of current events.   

 

Universities are a bit like our national government.  Both require a mix of public and private participation, but too much of the one and you end up with a centrally controlled system and little attention paid to the individual and the community at the local level. 

 

An overdose of the other leads to the depths of social Darwinism. 

 

Like the federal government the genius, and there is never enough of it, is finding the balance.  For the federal government, what can elected officials do in concert with the private sector?  For the university, what can the state do in concert with students, alumni, and others who have a dog in the hunt for excellence at our university? 

 

The automobile industry exhibits sluggishness in the face of change, something universities are famous for.  In the case of industry, executive leadership only focused on profit is the target of unions only interested in worker protection.

 

The truth, of course, is balancing these two views.  A process of “iron sharpening iron.”

 

Lesson one, conflicting forces are tools of refinement; strength is squeezed from the intersections of such forces.

 

Responding to the immediate needs of the market and adjusting to meet those while simultaneously losing long term vision is a danger clearly presented in the current mortgage crunch.  What is the purpose of a home mortgage?  Is it something that should be available to all no matter the ability to repay?  If it is available to all, who decides why one family gets a loan and another does not?  Like the university the first cause of action must be up front. 

 

The mortgage industry lost its vision by coming to believe – I would say since the late nineties – that its purpose was to change society through home ownership and generate capital in so doing. 

 

Sorry, that does not get it for me. 

 

Rather the purpose of the mortgage industry is to make available to people who have earned it, the ability to buy an affordable home.

 

If that changes society, so be it.

 

Here is the parallel structure for the university.  Un- or under-prepared students come for an education and need to borrow to get one, nearly 80% of the undergraduates’ at most public institutions.  If qualification and ability to repay are absent this is a tragic mistake.  The university qualification means academic preparation.  A good education loan, as is the case with a good home mortgage, is given to those proven. Students who do not demonstrate a strong persuasion for study and academic work should not be expected to bear the cost of an education that they cannot attain, not for lack of funds,  readily available loans have provided that, but for lack of preparation, ability or inclination.

 

In both cases people lose confidence in the system.  They begin to believe that the system has failed them.  Actually the system, through lost focus, has failed itself causing non beneficiaries to bear the burden of failure.   Both are cases of well intended but misplaced social engineering, every bit as debilitating as unbridled social Darwinism.  Agile, focused industry and universities make the world a better place, but only when first causes are attended to.

 

Lesson two, remember purpose.   Free rides are never all they are cracked up to be for our nation or our university. 

 

And they are never free.