First, there is little doubt that the American system of higher education since World War II is one of the great successes of our society. Certainly, that is true in California. We have been often cited as the world model for "how to do" mass higher education--how to serve large numbers of people with high-quality higher education.

I submit as the first contextual point that California's success is both a strength and a weakness. By and large, it is much more difficult for those successful institutions that have been acknowledged as such to look beyond their boundaries and identify emerging problems. It is hard for them to see those things in the environment that may suggest that future success will not keep flowing from the same factors that brought success in the past. It is hard for them to recognize that different kinds of behavior may be necessary. Certainly, we have seen this in the corporate sector. The most successful corporations in the world--the automobile industry and companies like IBM and General Motors, for example--were initially unable to recognize those signs in the environment which called for fundamental change. They believed that doing better what they had always done would still allow them to compete. They suffered great dislocation as a result. Higher education, therefore, must put accountability issues in the context of recognizing, yes, we are successful, but as individuals and as institutions, that very success can get in the way of change." There is a kind of hubris that comes from success. When individuals or institutions fail, they know they must go back to the drawing board--they know they have to try something new. It might seem unfair when colleges and universities have worked so hard and have been, by any real world standard, so successful in meeting many of society's expectations that they too should be asked to go back to their drawing boards. It makes us very uncomfortable to have to think in different ways about the future.

Secondly, a few things that I will say this morning are critical of current directions and practices. They may seem harsh to some of you. But I certainly do not believe higher education's problems are attributable to malevolent people, people who have set out to do bad things to students, colleges and universities. I do believe, however, that there are good and bad ideas about California higher education, and that the only way we can sort the good ideas from the bad ones is to encourage more open discussion and more hard-edged debate than in the past. If it is worth debating the future directions of health care, the environment and public schools, it is worth having equally serious--though civil, I would hope--arguments about the future of higher education.

Finally, I am going to try to complicate your lives this morning. I will share my questions with you, but not offer you answers. I honestly do not have answers, for much of the struggle in California is still about defining the questions. What are the issues we should be worrying about? Robert Reich, before he went to the federal government, wrote a provocative introduction to a book called The Power of Public Ideas. He pointed out that people reveal their critical values when they ask, "What is the question?" By framing a central question or questions, we establish priorities. For instance, whether the welfare problem is defined in terms of making people self-reliant or in terms of getting rid of the welfare queens, the definition of the problem assumes critical values and will influence the answers. In relation to higher education in California, we are still trying to frame the question, and there is little consensus among those making the attempt.

The issue of accountability is tough to grapple with once you get beyond criticism of specific regulatory initiatives. It is tough because there is no longer much clarity about the public purposes and responsibilities of higher education. An almost fifty-year consensus in American society--implicit or explicit--on higher education's basic goals, values and purposes has eroded, and these now need to be discussed, argued about and re-articulated. California needs a sense of purpose. Why is the state in the business of higher education, for example, and how should we make choices about who is to be served? These fundamental issues of purpose plague us, and the discussion must reach down--or up--to that level. This not a conversation that can happen just among education professionals. This is the public's business as well as our own; we must widen the discussion.

Another way of putting this is that many of us have been fortunate to have lived and worked in a period of great consensus about higher education and its goals. When there is such a high degree of consensus in society, policy makers and leaders have great latitude to make mid-course adjustments to turn the ship five or six degrees this way or that. But once consensus breaks down (an erosion rather than explosion in the case of higher education), then a new consensus is required, one that has to include the public that must pay for higher education and that expects to be served by it.

In California, the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education embodied that consensus. The concept of higher education as a vehicle to opportunity and to world class research capacity has helped to hold together the consensus around the Master Plan. But at this time it is fair to say that this cluster of ideas has broken apart as an operational framework for how we do the business of higher education in California.

Two studies by the California Higher Education Policy Center are relevant here. One report by Jack McCurdy examines what has happened to community colleges in California over the last three years. The second is an essay by William Pickens, who has constructed a thirty-five year data base on the funding of higher education in California. Both, written independently without the authors even speaking to each other, as far as I know, came to the same conclusion: since about 1990, the Master Plan for Higher Education ceased to be the operational framework for decisions in higher education. Nobody voted it down or threw it out. Rather, it was quietly ignored. Governmental and institutional decisions had very little to do with it--particularly the decision, during a time of great economic hardship for the people of California, to reduce higher education opportunity. If there was one single foremost driver of the Master Plan, without which nothing else would have happened, it was the vision of opportunity. But enrollments were reduced by some 200,000 students at a time when, in fact, one would have expected them to go up. Part of this was attributable to the mischief of the State Legislature, especially with respect to community college fees, and part of it was done deliberately by educational policy makers, particularly in the California State University.

Another part of the Master Plan that seems to have become less functional involves private higher education. It has always been very important to California that private independent colleges and universities be allowed, for the public interest as well as for their own, to play a major role in meeting enrollment demand. When I came to the California Postsecondary Education Commission in the late 1970s, the average Cal Grant would cover approximately 70 percent of the average tuition of a private college. These grants then provided choice for some students, and they also reduced the need for the state to build additional capacity. The Cal Grant program has pretty much deteriorated, now covering from 30 to 40 percent of tuition at private colleges and universities. At the very time when the state faces enormous growth, it has crippled our ability to use the capacity of private institutions.

Finally, one reason why California's system worked better than those in most states was--for all the state's reputation around the country of flakiness--it was a highly disciplined system. We did not allow colleges and universities--and some still bridle over it--to offer advanced graduate programs just because their faculties wanted them. We did not put campuses in communities just because their politicians were powerful. But it seems ironic to me that this discipline has now broken down completely at a time when resources are tight and every decision has enormous opportunity costs. For instance, by investing in a new California State University campus in a location that does not have the population to support it, the state has provided a sad example of lack of disciplined commitment to access. Clark Kerr, in his memoir of the development of the Master Plan, said the last straw--one that convinced the Legislature that they would bankrupt the state without a Master Plan--was the decision to build Stanislaus State in Turlock. This is not to say that Turlock has not turned into a good college, but there was no rationale for that decision--except for a political one. In the 1950s and 1960s, abundant resources hid this and similar mistakes--no one in Los Angeles was turned away from college because funds were shifted to a political campus in Turlock. But the state cannot afford such mistakes in the future.

Is the Master Plan dead? If so, the public is not disturbed--at least, not yet. The Master Plan has not been repealed by the Legislature. But one must ask: "Where do the major concepts of the Master Plan connect with reality in the actual decision-making process?" The answer is that the connection has withered. This erosion does not mean that parts of the Master Plan are not still working; it does not mean that none of it can or should be saved. But the policy framework within which higher education operates has deteriorated fundamentally. We are back to very basic questions: Why is California in the business of higher education? How much opportunity should be offered? To whom? What functions of higher education will be subsidized at what levels? At which institutions and for which individuals? Is California's organizational system of large, multicampus systems the appropriate model for the 1990s and beyond?

These questions are much more fundamental than, for instance, the debates about State Post-secondary Review Entities (SPREs) and accreditation--important as those debates may be. These questions require clarification of the fundamental purposes of higher education and, once those purposes are clarified, of the nature of the policy infrastructure required to meet those purposes. This is not a discussion that can be settled in a small room by a handful of educational leaders, administrators, politicians, or board members. If a new consensus can be built and can endure, its building will entail a larger and a more public conversation.