"The Principal Challenges to Public Higher Education in the United States"
By Andrew A. Sorensen

There are many striking similarities in the challenges we face not only north and south of the Canada-U.S. border, but also in Australia, Asia, and the United Kingdom. In the interest of brevity, I shall focus on just a few of the numerous challenges that fall under the rubric of parochialism.

(1) The first challenge is the imperative to transcend disciplinary boundaries. During the thirty-eight years I have served as a university professor and administrator, there has been a noticeable shift in the orientation of the professoriate away from fealty to their home institutions, especially as they seek and receive tenure, to loyalty to their respective disciplines. It is my conviction that this shift has increased dramatically over the past couple of decades.

When I began my professorial career, faculty often spoke warmly of devotion to their university. Although they often complained about sub-par salaries, minimal office space, and invariably inadequate parking, even among the perennial malcontents there was grudging admiration for the traditions that the institution preserved and for the heritage the faculty felt privileged to continue -- even if their enthusiasm could hardly be described as unabated.

Particularly in our research universities, as the standards for promotion and tenure have risen, exhibited by the increased emphasis on scholarly productivity -- whether manifested in externally funded research and resultant publications in refereed journals or participation in juried competitions or favorable reviews of one's scholarly work -- we have, perhaps unwittingly, fostered allegiance to peers within the discipline but at other institutions. As we emphasize the importance of raising the bar in search of a more prominent place in the academic landscape, in part by employing professors at peer and peer-aspirant universities to judge our own faculty, we have asserted in at least one respect that orientation to divisions within the academy supercedes allegiance to any given institution.

This phenomenon has a direct analogue among those Peter Drucker designated "knowledge workers" in corporations. He observes: "Communities of practice reaching across corporate boundaries are often stronger than bonds with a particular company." In the preceding sentence substituting the word "institutional" for "corporate" and "university" for "company" succinctly conveys the current situation in the academy. Indeed, a recent conference of scholars across the life sciences, physical sciences and engineering fields was convened in response to a Congressional directive to the NIH asking them "to discuss what needs to be done to encourage progress in the physical sciences that will provide support and underpinning for future advances in the life sciences." Many of the participants opined that the "narrow reward system" and "the rigid departmental boundaries in academia devalue the contributions that faculty make to fields outside their discipline." It is supremely ironic that this perception is widespread at exactly the same time that the NIH and NSF have issued clear guidelines that encourage multidisciplinary and inter-institutional proposals.

(2) This propensity to focus within disciplines provides a segue to our second challenge: to transcend institutional and political boundaries. In virtually each of the fifty states in the American Republic, support for institutions of higher education from our respective legislative bodies has declined substantially over the past few years. Barr has observed that in some jurisdictions governments have recognized that research -- intensive universities stimulate economic development and consequently have increased public funding of these institutions. And Daniels and Trebilcock correctly note that several states increased their funding between 1995 and 2001. However, over the past three or four years, this situation has changed considerably. For the university over which I preside, the appropriations from our state legislature accounted for 38 percent of all university revenues in the year 2000. Four years later that had decreased by more than one-third to 24 percent, parallel to the situation in Australia described by Parker, and the U.K. as described by Bekhradnia.

At a meeting two weeks ago of presidents of U.S. public universities, several commented that the support of their respective legislatives had fallen below 10 percent, with many noting Draconian cuts over the past several years. Indeed, the University of Virginia now receives 8 percent of its annual budget from its state legislature. Daniels and Trebilcock lament the fact that in 2001 government funds account for 47.8 percent of revenues of Ontario universities, "the lowest in Canada," but exactly twice the proportion in my university and about six times greater than the University of Virginia. Although a few states, including my own, are facing the prospect of modest increases in support of higher education for the next fiscal year, in most instances the magnitude of the increments will barely offset the rate of inflation, and surely will not redress the substantial cuts we have experienced recently.

Among the several reasons for us to transcend our respective institutional and political boundaries in finding ways to increase both our efficiency and effectiveness are the following:
(a) In a few instances, although I think the impact is often exaggerated, we can achieve economies of scale in integration of programs and initiatives. For example, in a previous position a sister university and ours, independently of one another, were negotiating for acquisition of computer hardware and software that totaled millions of dollars annually. Because we were one, rather than two compelling parties, we saved $11 million in the first year of the contract.
(b) To my mind, a much more important consequence of transcending institutional boundaries is the synergy of scholarly endeavors that it precipitates. If the activities of faculty and staff working together across these boundaries are coordinated and territorial sensibilities are diminished, we can be enormously more effective in competing for funding and elevating scholarly productivity. This is truly a situation in which the whole can be enormously greater than the sum of its parts. Although there are numerous problems in cross-institutional collaboration -- such as "conflicting policies on intellectual property or procedures for involving human subjects in research," these hurdles can be overcome. One example is the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation grid, which although in a "prototype phase" holds the promise to "be as good as face-to-face communication."
(c) A serendipitous benefit of transcending these boundaries is that faculty and staff morale is enhanced by the sincere belief that the resources of the institution are being used more effectively. If more bang for the buck is actually delivered, and the faculty have irrefutable evidence that their level of productivity has risen as a consequence, the effect on their morale is bound to be salubrious.

(3) The third challenge is to transcend barriers of race and class in our search for academic excellence, which is a desired outcome of transcending disciplines as well as institutional and political boundaries. There is an inevitable tension between the drive to enhance an institution's academic reputation, on the one hand, and on the other hand providing access to those who have not been privileged to acquire adequate preparation for university education. It is my firm belief that those two goals need not be mutually exclusive. In fact, I submit that we have a moral responsibility to provide access to our very best institutions to families who were unable to afford the economic, pedagogic and psychological support to prepare their children for university work. In Barr's words, "It is immoral if people with the aptitudes and desire are denied access if they cannot afford it." Over thirty years ago, Trow urged us -- as we made the transition from elite to mass higher education -- to balance considerations of equity and access with maintaining excellence. Hayoe and Zha offer compelling evidence from Taiwan that this balance can be achieved, which I can corroborate from my own experience in Taiwan overseeing a graduate program sponsored by their Ministry of Health.

Daniels and Trebilcock appropriately recommend "government intervention … to ensure equality of opportunity for all students." But unless we can develop policies to dampen the effect of the regressive transfer caused by the use of general tax revenues to fund higher education, a phenomenon noted by Chapman and Greenaway -- among others, we shall continue to discriminate against students from low-income families. Thus Barr's intriguing analysis of recent developments in the U.K. to overcome these disparities merit emulation and special consideration on this side of the Atlantic.

In virtually all public universities in the United States, we continue to raise tuition at a rate greater than inflation to offset cuts in legislative appropriations. This, however, merely exacerbates the regressiveness of government funding and, as Daniels and Trebilcock point out, "reduces the opportunity of less well-off individuals to benefit from post-secondary education." In many states south of the border we have superimposed yet another layer of regressive transfer on top of the two created by government funding and student fees: a number of our universities derive huge economic benefit from lottery revenues, to which the poor and near-poor contribute at a disproportionately high level.

(4) The fourth challenge is to foster a truly entrepreneurial culture within the academy without compromising our institutional integrity. As we embark on this path, we must maintain our passionate commitment to open intellectual inquiry and resist what my late colleague "Kit" Lasch characterized in The Revolt of the Elites as "the university's assimilation into the corporate order." Or in Bekhradnia's formulation, the university must be a moral conscience for our society. While it is absolutely essential to assert that the fiscal tail cannot be allowed to wag the academic dog, we must not be indifferent to the societal needs that funding agencies address. In the United States, for example, the National Institutes of Health has provided exponential increases in funding for research into HIV infection and AIDS. It would be indefensible for a university with faculty whose scholarly interests were in this field to say: "We refuse to do HIV research for the sole reason that we don't want the NIH suggesting that we should pursue their priorities."

The conundrum facing us is to determine how our research universities might dip deeper into the innovation stream, and—to extend the metaphor—simultaneously build bridges between our educational programs and technological innovations on one shore, and across that stream to what knowledge-driven businesses need. As corporations cut back on research and development done in-house, looking for external sources of innovation and breakthrough developments, we may respond to some of their overtures without compromising the integrity of our mission. Given our desperate need to cultivate other sources of funding, it is imperative that we become more aggressive in generating revenues from the intellectual property of our faculty, and in the process create high quality jobs for our graduates. Given the impetus at research universities around the globe to exploit the knowledge revolution, Bekhradnia offered -- although tongue-in-cheek -- a formula for a university desirous of establishing a unique niche in the academy: stimulate the development of an economy that is not driven by the knowledge revolution. But irrespective of the role one believes is appropriate for our institutions in this increasingly global economy, there is a universal demand for upward social mobility that our students expect their universities to facilitate.

The challenges before us are monumental, and in several respects our near term prospects are formidable. To borrow a theme from Jim Collins' best-selling book, we need a "good-to-great transformation." But Collins warns that such transformations "never happened in one fell swoop. Like pushing on a giant, heavy fly wheel, it takes a lot of effort to get the thing moving at all, but with persistent pushing in a consistent direction over a long period of time, the fly wheel builds momentum eventually hitting a point of breakthrough."

I truly believe that if we find ways to transcend academic disciplines, institutional and political boundaries, race and class barriers in order to elevate the quality of research and teaching in all public universities and at the same time invest in the knowledge-revolution driven industries that are capable of transforming the economy of our respective regions, we shall move from good-to-great universities, and in the process accomplish far more than if we work in splendid isolation from one another, or if we persist in pouring new wine into old bottles.

Quite frankly, however, success will not occur without a long-term commitment from government, business and education. As pointed out by Harvard Professor Michael Porter, who has served as our principal consultant on a program to foster public-private partnerships between universities and knowledge-revolution driven industries, the race we are in is not a sprint; it's a marathon. The momentum required to meet in a sustained fashion the challenges I have described will be achieved only if we are dedicated to the synergy of purpose that commitment to coherence will yield. However, we will be highly successful only if, in concert with our sister institutions, we are able to serve as a driving force in shaping higher education in North America for the twenty-first century.