Life for a college president often resembles a series of Kafkaesque choices and activities. We live in a continuously shifting state of realities in which the only predictable constant is the inevitability of more change. Each publication or media source or Internet message, whether academic or business or learned, reiterates this mantra. The Internet has changed the way we communicate and computers are finally breaking out of the science disciplines to make an impact in individual classrooms throughout the curriculum. In fact, the binary world has come to shape our entire political and even intellectual network - you are either for or against, 0 or 1.
Organizations are formed to address the change, committees on college campuses spend hours wrestling with the ramifications of this change, and everywhere the poor provosts have to find money to finance the ever-increasing costs of high technology without which their colleges will fall behind in the competitive race for students and faculty and key staff. Even the faculties are being challenged, as students often arrive on campus with more skills and more talents and more demands for service than at any point in the past. And the vicious cycle begins anew.
Where does all of this leave the small liberal arts college or university? Where do we fit into the paradigm of change, and what impact will this have upon our fundamental mission and the quality of our efforts?
Learning vs. Knowledge
Let me offer some conventional and non-conventional answers. First, I believe there is a continuing confusion about the nature of the paradigm shift, if indeed there is a paradigm shift. What is happening is less a shift of learning and education than a shift in communication and the sharing, manipulation and dissemination of information. We have managed to accelerate the degree to which knowledge and information can be translated from one format to another, one place to another, and one discipline to another. But this change does not mean that learning itself has changed or that actual knowledge has necessarily changed.
On the other hand, some changes are taking place that do have a profound impact on modes of learning and the assimilation of skills. Liberal arts colleges have for decades eschewed, and deliberately so, the storehouse-of-knowledge approach to undergraduate education. Instead, we focus on skills, concepts, approaches, critical thinking - they have been our organizing concepts for nearly two centuries. That others are just now discovering the importance of these approaches suggests much about the history of American higher education.
What the new technologies do is free us from the secretarial function, both in research and the classroom - the literal transmission process for moving information. You might argue that this diminishes the role of the class and the lecturer, and in one sense it does. But in another sense it liberates the professor and allows him or her to focus on the class itself, to convert each class into its own tutorial, and to bring the human touch fully and firmly back into the educational experience. In that sense, whether at the large research institution or the liberal arts college, some deeper and profound changes are underway.
Furthermore the new technologies make possible economies of effort that bring enhanced quality. You now can run interactive simulations of experiments endlessly. The student can observe ad infinitum and still have time to learn. You can create situations in a small liberal arts context that would replicate much of what could be done in a major research laboratory.
Finally, we must remember that undergraduate students are one species, adult learners another, and those thrown into industrial or governmental or military contexts yet others. To suggest that there can be a common paradigm, or even a common format for each of these learners, should trigger cautionary signals, especially among those who have lived through more than one of the promised revolutions in American higher education. A failure to distinguish between these various groups can lead to some interesting cul-de-sacs.
For instance, undergraduates profess a desire to learn and their parents certainly concur. But the reality of acquiring knowledge is more jaded and fragmentary. Some students are naturally gifted learners; they would learn in any environment and many of them do. But to extrapolate - from these highly motivated students to the broader student body - that all students wish to be learners or that they can learn on their own with the assistance of the new Orwellian technology raises a note of caution. If my experience is any indication, many will want to learn, some will actually show the necessary initiative and still others will find the technology repellent to them. Or put more simply, the assumption that we can transform and will transform all of higher education into a learning community remains to be proved. At the same time, it can be argued that the residential college for many of these students can provide a place for maturation and development that will convert them into learners. And indeed some large state universities are creating smaller programs to replicate the perceived advantages of the liberal arts college because we do just that with a large majority of our students.
Cost Reductions vs. Productivity Gains
One mistake made by many information technology advocates is to sell information technology on the basis of cost reduction. At no point in my experience has the information revolution led to cost savings. Rather it has led to increased expectations from faculty and students, to demands for ever more rapid shifts of equipment and software, and to an ever mounting increase - almost Dilbert-like - of staff to support the effort. In fact, my experience with information technology thus far has resulted in lower costs in only three discrete areas: it may help prevent you from going into some esoteric field like a foreign language that could be better done by a consortium; it may help to impose some kind of restraint on the burgeoning costs of research periodicals and other library acquisitions; and it may eventually reduce the ridiculous amounts of time that college presidents and others spend going to conferences that could ideally all be done by computers and interactive video. But these are all marginal savings.
The major savings cannot be realized because their achievement would tear apart the educational process itself: deep savings can only come through the reduction of faculty positions. Contrary to what most faculty believe, the real money in the college is not the administration but faculty positions. But to reduce those positions is to take away, even at the research universities, the very people who make the final difference in the educational process. In saying this I am not defending outmoded ways of doing business, or disciplines that need redefinition, or even that most holy grail: student-faculty ratios. Rather I am urging that we remember that teaching and educating are possibly different from learning, if learning is defined as simply the acquisition of skills without their utilization. Or if learning is seen as only the ability to pass certain standard sets of formalized examinations which themselves reflect a binary and not always reflective approach.
Can we enhance "productivity" - the very term that makes faculty shudder and calls into question all of the leadership skills of an institution's hierarchy? Such gains are far more likely at the larger institutions, but obviously could help all of us in so far as we can contain our staff costs through the introduction of technologies that help with registration, with record keeping, and with the movement of administrative information from place to place. But to bolster these productivity gains, we must now encourage the teacher to use technology to free up time that can be used to guide, to assist, to formulate, to challenge, to verify and to connect the student with the world of intellect and reflection. Nowhere is this more important than at the undergraduate level where these interactions form the heart of our educational mission and where the private liberal arts college has always and continues to make the major difference.
Coping with Change
Are we doing enough in this regard? Are our faculty ready to change roles? And where will all of this lead? "No," must be the answer to the first question. Helping the faculty to survive in this age of transition is not easy. Older colleagues feel threatened, others remember how their disciplines got shredded in the wars to establish quantitative techniques in the 1960s, and still others simply are not interested. But there are subtle peer pressures that can often move the most obdurate - have the faculty conduct its business by e-mail; offer lucrative course development grants; fund conference travel; provide technical support that can answer the most mundane problem; establish teaching centers that show how the technology can be harnessed and have it staffed with senior people who themselves have made the change; make the president at least have some sense of what is going on, if only to be a cheerleader in the operation.
The net effect of these efforts should be an enhanced quality of instruction, a deepening appreciation of qualitative improvements in the nature of the instruction and in its outcomes. And these approaches should allow more rapid assessments as to their own utility.
But there will be a downside to this momentum: the already-present drive among new and younger faculty to associate more with their discipline and their subject area than with their college will increase through e-mail and the Internet. If you are talking across the world all of the time to your fellow co-workers in the study of Austrian history, as I do from time to time, how much attention are you likely to devote to more mundane duties, such as teaching students? Also, a person who acquires the technological skills for teaching may rely more on those skills, rather than his or her knowledge of the discipline. This person then becomes the technocrat, rather than the professor.
Furthermore, change for the sheer sake of change may become for the faculty member the order of the day, with teaching and its equipment and its demands becoming the overriding consideration, driving out research and all other scholarly activities. While some state legislators and former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett will probably applaud this new total attention to teaching, it will only harm the academic enterprise in the long run - a "Mr. Chips" with a computer is still a "Mr. Chips," and an institution only needs so many of them.
Or to put it another way, we can recall Isaiah Berlin's dichotomy between the hedgehog and the fox in his analysis of Tolstoy's War and Peace. The hedgehog knows one thing and seeks one thing, the fox chases after many things. We must remember that education and learning at their best are not training, not just learning, but the total experience of maturation, reflection, and of intellectual, even spiritual development. Liberal arts colleges have for a very long time focused their efforts on one kind of education and our strength lies in continuing to do so. Liberal arts colleges have a role in the pluralism of American higher education that have given them definable excellence in the past and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future. In this adventure, we will have some fun and make some mistakes and should never entirely take ourselves too seriously.
Samuel R. Williamson is President of the University of the South and previously served as Provost and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.