Information technology has become centrally important to strategic
change in higher education, and there is now a critical interdependence
between the way higher education is organized and the way information
technology is deployed. What's important about information technology is
not its hardware or software but its disrespect for boundaries--all
boundaries, including academic boundaries.
We are at the end of both a century and an era. The idea of the modern
American university, with its graduate programs based on the assumption
that basic knowledge was essential to our economic development, came
into existence between 1895 and 1905. During that very short period:
* professional education was solidified,
* colleges of engineering and agriculture became less applied (and more
connected to the life sciences), and
* business schools came into existence (although they were often called
schools of commerce).
One of the central ideas of that period was that basic science really
does have a payoff and that the research conducted in our institutions
has a profound effect on national social programs.
I think that we're now in a similar decade that will have consequences
just as momentous for the shape of higher education. And I suspect that
one of the things that will be key to making the kind of changes
necessary for the twenty-first century is a rethinking or even an
undoing of boundaries. We need to remember that most of what has
happened in the twentieth century created an infinite division of labor
to perform tasks; in other words, we've solved problems by creating
functionally specialized units to do the things we want to do,
frequently creating new units while not eliminating old units. So
boundaries have, shall we say, abounded.
However, the advent of advanced information technology offers the
promise of allowing us to network complex relationships between
concentrated activities and dispersed activities, to remove boundaries
and combine activities, and to bring things back together. This is the
very opposite of the process that has been going on for the past hundred
years, and we do not yet fully understand what that will mean for
academic departments and the units of administration. Most of the
boundaries within which we currently operate are truly obsolete, and
information technology has not only made them obsolete but makes it
possible to eliminate them, so the question we have to ask ourselves is,
How do we take advantage of that possibility?
But first we need to define--a little more carefully--what challenges
are actually facing us and to define those challenges in a truly public
sense, not a parochial or provincial, institutional sense. That is to
say, we can't listen just to ourselves; we need to listen to others--to
our clients and our patrons.
Defining the Mission
One of the first criticisms we often hear refers to the "balance" of the
educational mission (i.e., the so-called struggle between research,
teaching, and service.) What I'm hearing is that, although research is
certainly terrific and we should continue to do it, the education of our
young people is still a priority, and, similarly, the extension or
continuing education function should allow students to pursue both a
liberal education and a professional education. All of these issues
about the balance of mission are out there, and they are often customer
driven or client driven; they are definitely driven by those folks who
fund us. To strike the right balance on those issues, an educational
institution has to have the right music, the right orchestra, and the
right conductor, and each institution might use a different kind of
music, different kinds of talents, and different kinds of conducting.
Each one of those three functions is complex. Educating freshmen is very
different from educating doctoral students, but both activities are
called "teaching." Likewise, outreach is very complicated, and it can
refer to, say, technology transfer in medical school or the development
of new business management techniques for corporate executives. In other
words, those three labels--teaching, research, and service--mean very
little until you consider what they mean in specific contexts. So we
must meet the challenge of defining our own mission, and not leave it to
other folks.
Accountability
Second, of course, comes the issue of accountability. Individually, I
think we do a pretty good job at being accountable, because most of us
are involved in merit reward systems of one kind or another, even if
they are sometimes a little bit cumbersome and not always desirable. But
individual merit reward systems are obviously not what our patrons and
clients mean when they demand accountability. They have something more
like the corporate annual report in mind, and they're hoping to find
some sort of measure of the value added by our collective activities. Of
course, when the public sector tries to develop accountability measures
they may sometimes turn out to be quite silly, but there's no point in
our complaining if we don't have our own.
Furthermore, most of our collective accountability measures,
unfortunately, take the form of a kind of academic rat race, in which
each institution and each department is pitted against others--when what
we obviously should have is a system of interinstitutional cooperation
and interdepartmental cooperation, rather than some ordinal ranking of
performance.
But most colleges and universities are highly decentralized, almost
feudal structures, where cooperation is not always rewarded--just as
virtue is not always rewarded. I say that to remind myself that
decentralized management, after all, is a virtue, because it empowers
people down the system. And yet the fact is, if you don't have the units
of a decentralized system interconnected and aligned to the overall
institutional mission and vision, then you will end up having excellent
units but competing with each other and destroying one another. No other
modern institution fosters civil war between two otherwise excellent
units so that both can be less excellent after the war. This seems to me
to be one of the prices to pay when we decentralize management.
The Growing Knowledge Base
The rate of change in the knowledge base, of course, is another issue.
It was one thing when we had a moderate rate of change in knowledge and
all of it could be published. It was a nice balance between the amount
of knowledge being created and the page carrying that knowledge. And it
had a wonderful equilibrium, which may have reached its apogee around
1960--a time when the printed word and the creation of knowledge seemed
technologically right for each other. But since that time, the rate of
change has accelerated so much that there are now multimedia forms of
expression. It doesn't mean that the book disappears but that the book
now will share the stage with a variety of other ways in which we
express, store, and present information. There will be some functionally
specific ways in which different kinds of media are appropriate for
different kinds of information. But the rate of growth of knowledge, it
seems to me, has created a catastrophe in our scientific literature.
That is, we no longer have the means to present it in a timely fashion
through the normal print media.
The rate of change in the knowledge base also has all sorts of
organizational implications, because it's blurring the nice tidiness of
the curricular and departmental structure around which we currently
organize our universities. We've really basically only increased the
number of units to cope with the rate of change. We've not redesigned
those units to cope with the rate of change.
Limited Resources
And finally, the thing that most people like to put at the top, but
which I put at the bottom because I am an optimist, is resource
limitations. All of this is going on in an environment in which we are
in a static state, or worse, in which we are experiencing declining
revenue sources. My view of this, too, concerns the more important
question that we have to ask ourselves relative to the changing and
declining composition of our revenue. It's not just that the revenue
from state sources has declined, but during the past twenty years, the
sources of our revenue, particularly in larger or more complex
institutions, have changed.
If we look at the issue of costs, we've got to realize that we don't do
anything on our campuses now that has one single source of revenue. I'm
a kind of market broker; I'm trying to find money from five, six, or
seven different sources to leverage an activity. Very little can be done
with one source of money. I think that's more important than the decline
in any one source.
Fragmented Responses
Now I don't want to argue that there has been no response to the changes
just described. I think that during the past ten years there has been an
enormous, very creative, and perhaps unheralded and unrecorded
responsiveness in higher education. It's not the lack of response and
energy, or even lack of commitment, but, rather, that the responses are,
in fact, piecemeal rather than systemic, and therefore have no
prioritization in any vision or mission so we may know where we're
going. But the responsiveness simply represents a lot of bricks that
make a nice pile but not yet a street or an avenue.
One of the phenomena of recent years is the indispensability of
universities to the economic development of their particular locality.
Of course, the Japanese would smile at this because by that reasoning,
we are putting, say, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in competition with
each other in terms of economic development. This surely isn't very
smart; all great research universities need to have a national rather
than a merely local mission. But economic development still needs to be
patched into the fundamental educational mission of the universities,
because we're not in the business of economic development, except
insofar as we're in the business of developing human capital.
Teaching awards are another nonfix. We decide that we've got these great
teachers who are unrewarded, so we find the most theatrical, effective
freshman teacher we can, teaching the two subjects we don't really want
taught, and give that teacher an award. Does that make sense? Should we
concentrate more on individual performance or, perhaps, idiosyncratic
performance, rather than on curriculum changes and systemic efforts by
teams of good folk to do different things? The real issue, from the
students' perspective, is whether they are in the right courses, whether
they are being advised to be in the right courses, whether there is
enough balance between large and small courses, and whether, in fact,
there is direction to what they are doing that is being provided by the
advising system. That is what students thought is important. Now, how we
address those issues is a very different kind of investment from the one
in which if you believe you have a lot of faculty who don't like
teaching, or when they do teach, they do a lousy job. I think we greatly
overemphasize that.
And finally, the big way to administrative advancement is to be a
program surgeon, lopping off programs to save money. Unfortunately,
administrators who do this are usually remote surgeons who have no idea
what they're amputating. What they usually do is get together a group of
faculty (preferably tough guys--you know, the ones who think they
understand quality) to find a weak program to exterminate. And then, a
little later, you find out, oh gee, the program we dropped contained
three courses that were essential as basic courses to other programs.
We're going to have to rehire three people to teach what we just
dropped. So the easy fix that I call "program surgery," disconnected to
vision and mission, is disconnected to the fact that human capital is
capable of retraining.
Using Information Technology for Systemic Change
My frustration is that we are not getting any sustained systemic
responses out of these areas. We need to think of a connection between
what we should be doing in information technology and the future of
higher education, because we need databased planning and decisions, not
the kind of plans and decisions you get from five or six faculty who
think they understand all about academic quality (usually physicists and
economists who don't understand anything that isn't a mainline science)
and who want to eliminate often quite indispensable parts of the
university because those parts don't look like physics or economics and
therefore couldn't possibly have quality.
Client-sensitive services are something that we are not particularly
good at. I believe that we need to have much more feedback from our
clients, particularly our students, our parents, and, of course, our
faculty, who frequently are grouped as one unit. The faculty are not
necessarily the obstacle to change; it is that some faculty are
obstacles to change, and I think they, too, have to be viewed as
clients. Since we usually have no data on what they feel, it is the
squeakiest wheel that we hear rather than a more systemic feedback of
their feelings.
Getting Organized
The first thing we need to do is begin to think about some strategic
ways of going about what we want to do. We need to define our mission
and start talking about alignment. We need to make it very clear that
there is in fact a larger scale of commitment and that this priority
setting is the most important intellectual exercise in the institution.
And so, as we begin to align our mission, the next step is connecting
that mission to some critical need.
We need to recognize and support the need for a new learning
environment. We're in the middle of public horror over how little our
faculty teach: the small number of their hours in the classroom, the
high number of hours or number of sections taught by teaching
assistants, and so on. You know and I know that, in fact, learning
occurs or ought to occur all of the time. The classroom is not
necessarily the only learning environment. Is a fifty-minute class
optimal? I don't know; it probably isn't. And so here we are--trapping
ourselves into a public audit of what we do, based on a classroom
section system developed around about 1895 and perfected around about
1905.
We need to change the nature of the learning environment and
particularly the use of distributed computing, instructional software,
video, and a variety of other media we've not even begun to imagine. And
finally, we need to view libraries as networks of information sources
and resources. The reference library, for example, is obviously a major
breakthrough. I think the nature of the library and its role on campus
are going to be enhanced rather than diminished. I believe we can
enhance our intellectuality while still preserving certain historical
and unchanging ways in which knowledge will be made and consumed. We
cannot quite see how to preserve that 500-year-old something that we all
revere in the context of the twenty-first century-information retrieval
system. We have to get beyond that and not see it as a zero-sum game.
Breaking Down Barriers
Information technology can play a major role in breaking down both the
mental barriers imposed on us by nineteenth-century thinking and the
physical barriers that become meaningless on the twenty-first-century
educational scene, replete with new learning environments and networked
resources. Redefining boundaries both within and outside the university
is going to be key to the future of great universities: there will be
megadepartments or institutes, not these "clusters" of small units, and
there will be interinstitutional cooperation, a blurring of boundaries,
and a rethinking of the word "complementary" rather than "competition,"
all of which are going to be important.
So information technology is driving these changes, and it will continue
to play a major role in the reshaping of higher education to meet the
needs of the next century. As physical boundaries crumble, new
connections are being forged electronically, and the idea of "global
village" is fast approaching reality. We need to meet that new reality,
and just as the origin of the modern university arose from decisive
changes that defined boundaries that today are obsolete, so information
technologists are turning that obsolescence into a dynamic vision of the
future.