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It's no secret that American higher education is facing a daunting set of challenges. While public opinion surveys show that the public thinks a collegiate education is more important than ever, states across the country are reducing financial resources for their public colleges and universities—which are, in turn, eliminating programs or raising prices. Meanwhile critics (with books such as Academically Adrift) are asking whether college students are really learning anything. If any conclusion can be drawn from all of this, it is that there is a greater need than ever for innovation and creativity in providing a better learning experience for new generations of students in an era of limited resources.
This past year marked the death of one of the great innovators in higher education. Virginia Smith (1923–2010) was the founding director of the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) and subsequently president of Vassar College. In retrospect, Smith's years with FIPSE (1973–77) were a golden age of innovation. A FIPSE grant in the very first year of operation, for example, helped Alverno College develop a whole new approach to assessment in the liberal arts that has been widely studied both in this country and overseas. Many other important ideas and institutions came out of Smith's work, and the successes of FIPSE during the Smith era suggest some lessons for today's foundations and other funders as they try to stimulate the kinds of innovation that she enabled.
John Immerwahr (john.immerwahr@villanova.edu) is a senior research fellow at the Public Agenda and a professor of philosophy at Villanova University. In collaboration with the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, he has authored a number of reports on public attitudes toward higher education. This article draws to some extent on an earlier report (available at www.highereducation.org), “Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education: The Early Years” (2002), by John Immerwahr, Virginia B. Smith, and her early colleagues at FIPSE. All of the anonymous quotations from staff members and grant recipients are taken from this report. The quotations from Virginia Smith are taken from Virginia B. Smith, “FIPSE's Early Years,” published in Change (September/October 2002). A number of FIPSE staffers and grant recipients were interviewed for this article, including Victor Alicea, Charles Bunting, Dennis Keller, Ray Lewis, Janet Lieberman, Carol Stoel, and Jill Tarule.
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