James Duderstadt is president of the University of Michigan. This is an excerpt from a paper he delivered at the Stanford Forum for Higher Education Futures earlier this year.
Over the past year I've run a simple experiment. I've asked various groups to assess the degree of change they believe universities will undergo during the 1990s, ranked on a scale from zero to ten, with zero as the status quo and ten, radical change. I have found that faculty generally respond with estimates of three or four--there will be change but nothing earthshaking. Academic administrators--deans, provosts and the like--tend to believe there will be more radical change, say on the order of seven or eight on the ten-point scale. But when I ask university presidents the same question, their responses bound off the scale: Their average assessment is that the magnitude of change in our institutions will be about a 20! My own sense is that's about right.
Where We Are and How We Got Here
Before exploring change in higher education, it is helpful to understand what the modern research university has become. Part of the dilemma is that very few people, on campus or off, know. The public tends to think of the university in a very traditional way, with students sitting in large classrooms listening to senior faculty members lecture on Shakespeare. The faculty thinks of Oxbridge--themselves as dons, and their students as serious scholars. The federal government sees just another research and development contractor or healthcare provider--a supplicant for the public purse. A brief analysis of the research university's mission shows the reality is far more complex. The classic triad of education, research and service branches extensively.
Let me suggest the image of the modern research university as a complex, international conglomerate of highly diverse businesses. My school, the University of Michigan, for example, has an annual budget of more than $2.5 billion. "The University of Michigan, Inc." would rank roughly 200th on the Fortune 500 list.
Our several campuses educate about 50,000 students at an operating cost of about $800 million a year. We are a major federal research and development laboratory with more than $400 million a year in grants and contracts. We run a massive healthcare company. Last December we formed a nonprofit entity, the Michigan Health Corporation, that will allow us to make equity investments in joint ventures.
We also have our own captive insurance company since we are too big to buy insurance. And, we are actively involved in providing a wide array of knowledge services--from degree programs offered in Hong Kong, Seoul and Paris to cyberspace-based activities such as managing part of the Internet. Finally, we are also involved in entertainment--the Michigan Wolverines.
This kind of "corporate" organization is typical of many large research universities across the nation. We all have become conglomerates because of the interests and efforts of our faculty. We are prime examples of loosely coupled, adaptive systems that have grown in complexity as their various components have responded to environmental changes--each component pursuing its own particular goals. We are a "learning organization," to use the business term. Beyond that, we are also a holding company for thousands of faculty entrepreneurs.
But there are some problems with this reality. We may be in danger of diluting our core businesses of teaching and scholarship by engaging in so many diverse activities. And we have demonstrated a remarkable inability to eliminate outmoded and obsolete activities. Consequently, considerable underbrush clogs our enterprise even as we grow. Outdated policies, procedures and practices increasingly stifle our best and most creative people.
The Challenge of Change
Change is nothing new to higher education. As one of civilization's most enduring institutions, the university has been quite extraordinary in its capacity to change and adapt to serve society. Far from being immutable, the university has changed considerably over time and continues to do so today.
Many observers focus on immediate challenges such as the rapidly growing costs of quality education and research during a period of limited resources, the erosion of public trust and confidence in higher education, or the deterioration in the relationship between research universities and the federal government. But our institutions will be affected more profoundly by powerful societal changes driving transformation: the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of our people; the growing interdependence of nations; and the degree to which knowledge itself has become the key driving force in determining economic prosperity, national security and social well-being.
One frequently thinks of the primary missions of the university in terms of teaching, research and service. But these roles can also be regarded as simply the 20th-century manifestations of the more fundamental roles of creating, preserving, integrating, transmitting and applying knowledge. And while it is clear that these fundamental university roles have not changed over time, the way in which these missions have been realized has changed dramatically.
Consider, for example, the role of teaching (i.e., transmitting knowledge). While we generally think of a professor teaching to a classroom of students who read assigned texts, write papers, solve problems or perform experiments, and take examinations, this type of instruction is a relatively recent form of pedagogy. Throughout the last millennium, the more common form of learning was through apprenticeship.
The classroom itself may soon be replaced by more appropriate and efficient learning experiences. Indeed, such a paradigm shift may be forced upon the faculty by the students themselves. Today's students are members of the "digital" generation. They have spent their early lives surrounded by robust, visual, electronic media--"Sesame Street," MTV, home computers, video games, cyberspace networks, and virtual reality.
Hence, faculty members of the 21st century university could well be asked to set aside their roles as teachers to become designers of learning experiences, processes and environments. Tomorrow's faculty may have to discard the present style of solitary learning experiences in which students tend to learn primarily on their own through reading, writing and problem solving. Instead they may be asked to develop collective learning experiences in which students work and learn together, with the faculty member becoming more of a consultant or a coach than a teacher.
The preservation of knowledge is one of the most rapidly changing functions of the university. The computer, or more precisely the digital convergence of various media, has already supplanted the printing press in impacting knowledge. For centuries the intellectual focal point of the university has been the library--civilization's knowledge preserved as a collection of written works. Yet today such knowledge exists in many forms beyond print. Text, graphics, sound, algorithms, virtual reality simulations exist literally "in the ether" as digital representations over worldwide networks, accessible to anyone, not just a privileged few in academe.
Conclusion
There is an increasing sense among American higher education's leaders and constituencies that the 1990s will represent a period of significant change on the part of our universities. If we are to respond successfully to the challenges, opportunities and responsibilities before us, we will need to develop the capacity to transform ourselves using entirely new paradigms that better serve a rapidly changing society and a profoundly changing world.
We must seek to remove the constraints that prevent our institutions from responding promptly and flexibly. We must eliminate unnecessary processes and administrative structures, question existing premises and arrangements, and challenge, excite and embolden the members of our university communities to embark on this great adventure. Our challenge is to work together to provide an environment in which such change is regarded not as a threat but as an exhilarating opportunity to engage in the primary activity of a university: learning--in all its many forms--to better serve our world.
The remarkable resilience of our institutions, their capacity to adapt to change, has existed in the past because in many ways they are intensely entrepreneurial, transactional cultures. We have provided our faculty the freedom, the encouragement and the incentives to move toward their personal goals in highly flexible ways, and they have done so through good times and bad. Unfortunately, their efforts have frequently led today to organizations that are too comprehensive, complex and detached from their core mission of learning.
The challenge is to tap this great source of creativity and energy associated with entrepreneurial activity in a way that preserves our fundamental mission and values. In a sense we need to continue to encourage our tradition of natural evolution that has been so successful in responding to a changing world, but to do so with greater strategic intent. Rather than continuing to evolve as an unconstrained transactional entrepreneurial culture, we need to guide this process to preserve our core missions, characteristics and values.
We must also develop greater capacity to redirect our resources toward our highest priorities. While we are facing a period of more constrained resources, I believe that most of our institutions will continue to grow. After all, the knowledge business is a "growth industry." Yet, to use a gardening analogy, we need to develop the capacity to prune and shape this growth so that it is more strategic.
In summary, I share the sense among most of my colleagues as presidents of universities that the 1990s will see extraordinary changes in the nature of higher education and the nature of our institutions. A key element will be to provide ourselves with the flexibility and capacity to change in order to serve a changing society. But we must change in such a way that we preserve fundamental aspects of our characters and values. This capacity for change--for renewal--is the key objective that we have to strive for in the years ahead. As the university has done many times in the past, it must transform itself again to meet the future.