Technology on Campus: An Uneven Marriage


Copyright 1990 CAUSE From _CAUSE/EFFCT_ Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 
1990. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is 
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                  TECHNOLOGY ON CAMPUS: AN UNEVEN MARRIAGE
                             by Frank Newman

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Frank Newman is President of the Education Commission of the States
(ECS), a compact of states created to assist state political and
education leaders in developing and implementing effective state
education policy. Prior to his appointment at ECS, Dr. Newman was a
Presidential Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of
Teaching and served as President of the University of Rhode Island. He
developed a series of publications known as the Newman reports while he
chaired two task forces established by the Secretaries of Health,
Education and Welfare. His most recent publication is Choosing Quality:
Reducing Conflict Between the State and University.

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ABSTRACT: This article describes the growing disparity in the way 
information technology is being used in four areas of the university -- 
research, administration, the library, and teaching. The author argues 
that little or no progress has been made in using technology in the
teaching/learning process, and advocates changing the incentive and
reward structure so that innovative uses of technology in the classroom
will be as valued as published research. He concludes that institutions
will have to change the way they educate students to ensure their
preparation for modern society.


It is apparent that information technology is leading to a continuing,
profound transformation in American life. It must be evident as well
that it's not just in industry, but of course in the university, that
fundamental changes are occurring. And its potential is not just a
question of what information technology does in research or even in
administration, but in the whole of the university, including the
university's most fundamental task, namely in how it teaches students.
What I would like to argue is that the spread of information
technology has been an uneven process. There are four major elements of
the university that information technology can improve: research,
administration, the library, and teaching. But because of the
extraordinarily different incentives that face faculty and
administrators and students, the different elements of the university
and the different things they do, we get extraordinarily differing
results.

If one looks at the scientific side of the university -- the 
research side -- the only thing one can say about its use of information 
technology is that it is superb. There is an incredible array of 
equipment, an incredible capacity to do things that in many ways leads 
American life and world life. It's not at all unusual to find a 
biochemist in Ithaca in daily contact via computer with biochemists in 
Paris or Frankfurt.

On the administrative side of the university, we've made massive
changes in the last decade or so, and I would argue that universities
are better at information technology than almost all other non-profit
agencies in our society. We all have to recognize that it's hard for
non-profit agencies to make the same kind of investment that for-profit
agencies make. An automated checkout counter at a supermarket has a
financial payback that a records system in a university doesn't have.
And still we've made, I think, very healthy and impressive progress.

When I was first at the University of Rhode Island, about fifteen
years ago, I was struck by something one day. We were talking about a
new computing system we'd put in. We had a very large research grant to
measure how pollution got into the world's oceans, and we had stations
literally all the way from the Antarctic to the Arctic and everywhere in
between. We had this very sophisticated sensing equipment looking at
various contaminants that were entering the oceans from the atmosphere.
This equipment would send data up to a satellite and down to the
University of Rhode Island, where it would be sorted by a sizable
computing system, then separated out to ourselves and six other
institutions, then further processed. The data would be recollected back
at the University and processed for its final results. At the same time
we had this system up and operating, we were debating if we could in
fact link the admissions office, the finance office, the bursars office,
and so on. My suggestion to the head of our computing operation was that
we try moving one of these offices to the Antarctic, one to the Arctic,
and so on. But of course it isn't routine to link those offices, and
thus spare the student that most humiliating experience of all: arriving
at the bursar's office and hearing that the registrar's office hasn't
sent them the papers, and then arriving at the registrar's office only
to find out that it's actually at the financial aid office, and so on.

The third place that one might notice great gains is in the
library. But one would have to say that in the library what we have done
is the obvious, and what we have not done is the profound. We, of
course, have on-line search; we have tremendous capacity to know where
things are. But it is totally irrational that our institutions would buy
the same journals printed on paper and try to store them in the
institutions, when what the faculty and students need is access to the
information in them, not the actual journals themselves.

We are acting the same way printers did in the early days of the
printing press, when they attempted to replicate with the press the
beautiful scripts the monks were creating by hand. That wasn't the point
of the printing press, nor is it the point of information technology to
recreate or transfer electronically something that we've put into a form
that no longer makes any sense.

I used to think, particularly when I was a graduate student, that
librarians were modeled after Swiss bankers. The Swiss banker says to
you, "I have the gold. It is here in the vaults. My job is to make sure
it stays here. Your job is to try and get it. Let the contest begin."
This is more or less the way librarians have looked at books. And when
one raises the potential of information technology with librarians, they
say, "Aha, a Philistine! You do not love books." I do love books. But as
a scholar, I am not interested in whether the library has in its
possession two million or four million books. We shouldn't measure the
library's quality by the number of books it has, but by its capacity to
put into our hands the most usable information at the lowest possible
cost and at the greatest possible convenience. What I'm saying is that
in this third element, the library, we have moved into doing all the
obvious things, but now we must transform librarians into people who see
themselves as the keeper of the keys to access, not the keeper of the
books.

Teaching: A Low-Tech Bastion

In the fourth and most important element of the university,
teaching and learning, we are still in the category that we in the
academic world euphemistically call "potential" -- we've made 
practically no progress. The average university in this country, in 
terms of its use of information technology in teaching, is substantially 
behind the typical elementary and secondary school. This may come as a 
surprise, but elementary and secondary schools in the U.S. are not at 
the forefront of technology use. Surprisingly, it is industry and the 
military that have really pioneered in teaching with information 
technology.

This lack of progress is not because of technical limitations, but
because of the organizational mode and the policies of the university.
It is how we make the investment decisions and who makes them. It is the
traditions and incentives of how we do things in the academic community.

Computing is not the first technology to come along that has failed
to penetrate the teaching and learning process in the university, or in
education in general in the United States. If you think back to such
things as learning machines, when they first came in they were focused
on elementary and secondary schools, but there was considerable hope
that they would become a major force in higher education. They did not;
they're not used at all at this point. Television, for example, was the
source of a great many expensive major experiments in elementary,
secondary, and higher education.

There was some modest success. There was a program when I was at
Stanford that's still operating in a limited way, where students can
take classes at remote locations from the campus. SMU pioneered that and
Florida did a lot, as did the University of Mid-America and a variety of
others, and there are still some experiments going on. I remember we had
a major computer-assisted instruction program at Stanford where you
could take Russian either by a computer or by an instructor. None of
these programs has failed due to lack of funding. We poured millions
and millions of dollars into them. They failed because they did not
penetrate in any effective way the incentive system for their use within
the academic process.

Other than research, the great exception to this long string of
failures, particularly with the faculty, is word processing. As you
know, word processing in only a matter of a couple of years penetrated
right across faculties in our country.

Why did this occur? Why did faculty members, who had resisted every
other form of technology, adopt word processing? For faculty members
word processing was a direct personal benefit. Personal benefit. The
faculty member found, as the rest of us have, that word processing is
freedom. Word processing does not challenge who is in charge of the
classroom. Word processing does not diminish the faculty member. Word
processing does not threaten the faculty member. And so, as a
consequence, it moved very rapidly.

Our assumptions about how ideas spread in the academic world are
generally faulty. We tend to believe, first of all, that there is a
single spectrum of how new ideas spread -- that research, development, 
and dissemination occur in a linear mode, i.e., that some brilliant
researcher at a remote and theoretical point develops something, he or
she passes it on to another researcher who makes it more profound and
practical, who passes it on to an applied researcher who turns it into a
technology, who moves it on to somebody who turns it into an actual
product, and so on through this linear spectrum.

We know that research shows that's not true. The process involves a
great deal of back and forth; there's not one spectrum, there are
multiple spectrums. The user has a profound influence on the process,
more innovation is often required in user technology than in the
original concepts, and so on. Still, we are tied to this single-spectrum
concept and we think things are going to go that way. Then we add to
that the academic's version, which is that the way new ideas emerge is
through exhortation, rather than incentives, so we in the academic world
are very good at exhortation. It's why faculty meetings are the way they
are. We do not get up at a faculty meeting and think through the
political strategy to get our point across; we get up and announce that
we have thought it through and here is the answer, now all you idiots
are a little slow, but I'm sure you can see it. This produces the
expected response, which is "no."

     What are the incentives within the 
     university system that we can tap into?

First, one must understand something fundamental about the
university world. Teaching is the stable force around which the
university is organized. Hard money appointments are teaching
appointments, fixed appointments. We expect someone who is appointed to
the economics department to be in the economics department permanently.
The courses taught are subject primarily to internal review. We do not
have an external view of what should be taught in economics. We do not
externally measure how well courses are being taught.

Research, on the other hand, is a variable. Research teams are made
up for a given project, a project grant must be submitted, peer review
process is gone through -- it's intensely competitive. The competitive
grant is received, the team is established, the research goes on, and
when the research grant comes to an end the team is disbanded unless it
is successful in proposing another grant.

The net effect is that there is an enormous variation in how
teaching and research function. If, for example, one were talking with a
microbiologist, and that microbiologist had just read an article about a
new research concept at another university where they had just developed
a new form of information technology that was essential to making this
new measurement and that had moved them way out in front, the first
thing that person would say is, "I've got to get that information
technology here, now, instantly. I will be out of business unless I get
that!"

If, in fact, at the same university there was also a new idea about
how to teach microbiology and an article on it appeared in a journal and
we told a microbiologist on our campus about the article, he would say,
"I know how to teach microbiology." There would be no interest in it or
pursuit of it; there would be no consequences for failing to obtain that
technology. This is reinforced by the tenure system, the promotion
system, the pay system, the prestige system of the academy. As a
result, the way one moves ahead in the academic world is through intense
concern about advances in the field of research and in publication, but
there is no comparable set of incentives or rewards for the same
behavior on the teaching and learning side.

You may say that's true only at research universities. It was true
only at research universities thirty years ago; it has been inexorably
spreading to the other institutions of higher education. I'm on the
board of a very good liberal arts college and we had a retreat. Twelve
members of the faculty were invited to join us. We had a fascinating
retreat, and over and over again the faculty members kept coming back to
the need for much greater research facilities at the college. Finally,
one of the board members said in frustration, "We want you to be at the
head of the line in scholarship, but we're not asking you to be great
researchers, we're asking you to be great teachers, and we know you've
got to be good scholars, but why all this emphasis on research?" A young
psychologist said, "You don't understand. With your idea of what the
faculty role is, I would be stuck here for life. It's not just that I
couldn't go to Berkeley or Harvard or Yale or Michigan. I couldn't go to
Williams or Swarthmore." And the board was stunned and they turned to me
and asked if what he said was true, and I said absolutely it's true. It
is true. So the concept has spread. Publication and competitive grants
have become the coin of the realm.

The same is not true on the teaching side. The net result is that
there is no incentive with regard to new approaches to teaching and
learning. In fact, there are some important negatives to their
introduction. For example, we know many things today about how to teach
that we didn't know twenty or forty years ago. We have a great deal of
research; we don't use it. We know, for example, that involvement on the
student's part in learning is essential to the learning process. We know
that when a student is actively involved in the classroom--
participating, discussing, doing research projects -- the rate of 
learning leaps up. But in fact, 85 percent of the time in American 
higher education we lecture at students.

We've asked faculty members why they lecture to students and they
come back with two major answers. First, they want control of the class,
and second, they don't want to be embarrassed. How can a faculty member
with a Ph.D. in the subject be embarrassed by a student? The student
might ask a question he or she doesn't know the answer to.

We asked a group of faculty members this, including one of the most
distinguished academics in the United States who is the provost of a
major university, and he said, "I tried once to engage a class in
discussion, and I was totally embarrassed. I didn't know how to do it.
They asked me questions I didn't know the answers to. I'll never do that
again."

I was at Cornell once to give a talk to alumni leaders and a
student group they call the Cornell Tradition. They had selected a
faculty member to participate because they thought he had a great sense
of community involvement. One of the things he said that stunned
everybody was, "I don't allow student involvement in my classroom. I
talk, they listen." A student asked him if he didn't feel the students
had something to contribute. He said, "No, I'm the one that's organized,
they're not."

Now, those are extreme cases, but they represent a great deal of
what's going on. So by tradition, reinforced by the tenure process, by
how we pay and reward people, and by the mode by which finances flow
within the university, we have a situation in which on the research side
there are incentives and an intense interest in the latest techniques,
but on the teaching and learning side there's an intense interest in the
status quo. Or to put it another way, the status quo has too much
"status."

In between are the administrative and library sides in which the
incentives are more mixed and in which progress has proceeded at a
slower rate than the research rate, but a faster rate than teaching-
learning.

In the research side of academic life the half-life of ideas and
equipment is very short and we expect change. On the teaching side, we
expect buildings, professors, books, and particularly professors' ideas
to last decades.

How do we change the incentive and 
reward structure so the teaching side
has some of the attributes of the 
research side?

Let me make at least one proposal. I think there are ways to
shorten the time of response in the longtime constant university
organization. One way is to think about funding strategies. For example,
if in fact it has turned out to be useful to have such intense peer
review grants as a base for the research side, can we not use the same
thing on the teaching side? As a matter of fact, an attempt was made at
that in 1972. The Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education
(FIPSE) was created as the national foundation for the support of that
kind of work in teaching and learning, and it has worked extremely well.
Its only problem is it has about $20 million a year to spend, and the
research side has about $6 billion to spend in universities. But one
could expand that. One could, for example, create a much bigger matching
fund on the part of the federal government, matched by the states. New
Jersey and Ohio already have such funds and have begun to expand them.

We can change the reward concept. Tenure ought to be a function not
just of the ability to create new ideas in research, but also of the
ability to create new ideas in teaching. It's hard to do that unless
it's reinforced by the kinds of grants we're talking about. But tenure
and promotion ought to be that way, and boards ought to insist on that.

Evaluation for students and faculty will encourage this. There is a
slowly growing movement toward better evaluation and assessment of
students. What are students actually learning? The more we know about
how much students are learning, the more dissatisfied we will be with
the current modes of teaching. We also see a steadily growing mode of
evaluation of teaching across the country where student evaluations and
peer evaluations of teaching are being used. All of these things will
enhance the willingness to address how to improve teaching and learning
and the more we advance that, the more we're going to be interested in
the question of information technology.

What would we expect information 
technology to add to teaching and
learning?

All across America and all across the world people are saying the
only way we're going to succeed is if people get involved, think,
participate, be creative, take risks. In other words, become empowered.

Does the education system in the U.S. empower people? Yes and no.
More than the Japanese system, because many Americans go to school and
work, too. More than most other systems, but nowhere near enough. We
don't expect to teach students to be empowered. Students are not
empowered in the classroom. The professor tells them the problem, tells
them the answer, and they tell it back on the exam. That's not
empowerment. You can't learn to be creative by listening to a lecture
about how Einstein was creative. You can't learn to be empowered by
listening to a lecture about how Xerox was turned around from a money-
losing company to once again the greatest copying machine company in the
world. You have to be a participant yourself.

Business leaders now find themselves deeply involved in education.
Across the nation they are involved with people like ourselves, trying
to reshape the education system, including the university system,
because they see it as non-empowering. Does the system encourage
students to be creative? No. Being creative for a college student is the
kiss of failure.

We put the following question to 300 students across the country:

You are taking a multiple choice exam, you answer the first four out of
five questions and get to the fifth and realize the question is written
wrong. You know what the professor is trying to ask, but the question is
written wrong. Would you be willing to first answer the question, then
say, "However, I think the question should be written this way. Then it
would be a better question and I would answer it this way."

All 300 said the same thing: "Not on your life. You would get killed,
because the professor wouldn't like that." But wouldn't it show you are
creative and thoughtful? "You've got to be kidding!" We may want them to
be creative, we may be very interested in their creativity, but they
don't think so. And I think they're right.

My point is we've got to transform the learning process. Ted Sizer,
who is probably the most influential proponent of active learning in
this country, says a student has to be the worker of the learning
process and the teacher the coach. Another way to put that is the
faculty and student have to start together on a learning experiment.
It's not that the faculty member is full of knowledge and must disgorge
it to the student; it's that the student and faculty member must learn
together. That's the process. And information technology makes it
possible for the faculty member and student together to be learners. It
connects the student and faculty member to a vast array of information
they can search together.

I'm on the board of a university center that's dealing with
U.S./Russia problems, and we developed and sent out a new teaching
program to high schools and colleges: "U.S./Soviet Union and Nuclear
Alternatives." The mode of the program is for students to use material
and then make choices. We sketched several scenarios: should the U.S.
search for ways to gain dominance over the Russians? Should we search
for ways for mutual accommodation and so forth? With access to
information that makes the exercise meaningful, the student is
transformed.

What happens in the ordinary process when faculty lecture? They
say, "Your assignment tonight is to read Chapter 2 and we'll discuss
that on Wednesday." What does the student say? "Do we have to read all
of Chapter 2? Are there any particular pages you had in mind?" When you
turn it around the other way and say, "We're in this together, and we've
got to figure out if Alternative 2 is better than Alternative 4,"
students start going through the material and reading everything they
can get their hands on; they're excited. They remember it, they make
judgments, and they put themselves on the line.

Information technology is valuable not when it is a substitute for
the teacher -- not a talking head on a TV tape at the front of the room
substituting for the teacher -- but when it expands the concept of the
student as learner and as a colleague of thefaculty member. So game
theory, modeling, and involvement is what it's all about. It's
excitement that matters in learning. Somebody told me not long ago that
the trouble is that teaching is like the Hawthorne effect: it may not
last. Teaching is the Hawthorne effect and it does last. Students learn
when they're excited because they think somebody cares.

There's another big advantage to this. Technology, as has turned
out to be the case in industry, narrows the gap between the student and
the faculty member. Think about what happens in your office. Word
processing narrows the gap between you and your secretary. You're both
doing word processing -- and your secretary's better at it than you are!

We should narrow the gap between student and teacher because we're
trying to say, "We are on a great and exciting journey of learning
together; it is never ending. It is not that I am a faculty member and I
am finished in my learning process."

In 1870 the president of Princeton was asked what his task was with
regard to the students that came to college. He said, "God in his wisdom
has left students unfinished. My job is to finish that task." Well,
that's a little arrogant as I view it. When I was a president I never
quite had that view. There were people I saw as unfinished, but the
faculty member isn't finished either. None of us is finished. We ought
to see teaching and learning as a journey.

What are the dangers in all this?

One danger is that as information technology comes along we may
further exacerbate our current problems, namely that faculty are
increasingly focused on their discipline, increasingly less focused on
students. When you get modems and you can work at your home we may see
even less of the faculty. And information technology may, in fact,
create even more of an estrangement. That's a real danger. It has
advantages of links to peers, but that may mean less links to the
students and the on-campus academic community.

There is a danger that information technology could narrow the
focus of what's available to the student in the way of information. If
the only concept we have is a narrow information system and we don't
link the student to a very broad information body, the student will see
only what's in the machine and think that's the universe of knowledge.
That could be terribly dangerous.

There is a danger that universities could become much less
significant in our lives if they do not master what we are talking
about. Why? Because the world has become such a competitive and urgent
place that the failure to educate people to be able to take risks, to be
able to think creatively, to be able to think in an empowered sense, to
be able to take initiative -- -- the failure to do that will mean that 
people outside the university will begin to take over those functions.

There is going to be a revolution of learning, just as the advent of the
printing press created a revolution. When that happened, information
became available beyond the few to the many. And when that happened, one
could not hold back the idea that learning can go on for all people, and
gradually the idea of learning for all people began to take root. It
took a long time.

The same thing is happening now. We're changing the mode of
learning one more time. I think it is going to be just as fundamental a
transformation, and the same questions are going to be asked. Who is
eligible to be a learner? Who has control of the information? What is
the influence of the publisher, for example? What is the relationship of
the author versus the teacher? These are all going to transform the role
of teaching and learning, transform the university. It is so crucial
because today we must empower students; we must make these
transformations.

Now why should I tell all this to information technology
professionals? Why shouldn't you say, well this is fine, but this isn't
for me, it's for the presidents, and the boards, and the governors.
We're in the process of telling them, too. The Education Commission of
the States is attempting to create a growing interest across the country
in these factors with a major new initiative, and to create new forces
such as competitive grants for improving teaching and learning in order
to try to transform the university's role. But information technology
professionals on campus have a stake too, and you ought to be a force in
the transformation, because it is these factors that hold back the
spread of information technologies more evenly across the university.

The revolution you have wrought on campus has had a good start:
you've gotten a significant part of the university to understand that
it's now in a never-ending changing world, that there is no fixed
university in the Allan Bloom sense.

Do you remember Bloom's argument in The Closing of the American
Mind? -- If we could only go back to the great university like the 
school I went to as a child, where we discussed Descarte, Machiavelli, 
Rousseau.... I remember when I was in elementary school. I never 
discussed Machiavelli, Descarte, or Rousseau. I never had anybody say to 
me, "Hey, you goin' out to play stickball at recess?" "Nah, we're having 
a little seminar on Machiavelli. And the other guys are getting together 
over there on Rousseau; they've got a big question about the social 
contract, and stick ball is one form, but there are other forms of the 
social contract ... " Never happened to me. And it never happened to 
Allan Bloom.

We have finally figured out something. That in significant ways the
university cannot do what it thought it would be able to do, that is to
say, rest in timeless, pristine form. It must change because society is
changing and it has only accepted that halfway. Our mutual task is to
get the university community to see that the other half of its psyche
must also accept this. There is no fixed, golden period to which it can
return, no fixed mode of operating which it can maintain. The university
must accept this continuity of change as the only way forward if it's
going to perform its role in modern society.

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This article was adapted from the keynote address delivered by Dr.
Newman at the CAUSE National Conference in San Diego on November 29,
1989.

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