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A typical scientific paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw—not significant in itself but as an element in a grander scheme. This technique, of soliciting many modest contributions to the store of human knowledge, has been the secret of Western science since the seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert.
- Lewis Thomas, quoting John Zimmerman, in Lives of a Cell
There have been a number of articles recently in Change and elsewhere focused on the consequences to higher education of the “Great Recession.” In this issue, Kent Chabotar describes the effects it has had on small private institutions and the strategies their presidents have adopted for dealing with it, while Brian Prescott traces the history of Colorado's voucher experiment, which predated the recession but was a reaction to a similar drying up of state resources resulting from a taxpayer revolt. Meanwhile, there have been debates in Washington about whether the current business model for higher education is broken, and a number of observers have pointed out that large infusions of stimulus money have only postponed the day when we must reckon with a permanently constrained fiscal base (the “new normal”).
As long ago as 1976, George Bonham (then editor of Change) said that higher education must become “more effective in the use of available resources”; that need has now become imperative. Clearly we must figure out to how to do our business more efficiently. In doing so, I think we need to keep in mind two things: there are no silver bullets, and there are no Lone Rangers.
No silver bullets. Part of the solution to our fiscal dilemma lies in the cumulative effect of a lot of small strategies of the sort that Chabotar describes: closing underenrolled programs, pruning curricula instead of treating them like add-a-bead necklaces, being strategic about budget cuts, improving persistence and completion, and so on. But those strategies will have a significant effect on our collective enterprise only if the successful ones—such as the courses that produce more learning at lower cost featured by the National Center for Academic Transformation or the supplemental learning that Julie Phelps describes in her interview by Joni Finney in this issue—spread.
What was that Tom Lehrer lyric? “Plagiarize/Let no one else's work evade your eyes, /Remember why the good lord made your eyes, /So don't shade your eyes” (“Lobachevsky”). Those eyes need to be directed not just at our “peers” but at those we tend to resist comparison to—for-profit institutions, for example, as Peter Smith points out. Why is that sector flourishing while many non-profit colleges and universities are floundering? Some approaches won't work across institutional types—no research university can give up the expectation that its faculty will contribute to the development of knowledge, and no land-grant can afford to relinquish its public-service mission. But more standardization and tightening of the curriculum, for instance, might not be a bad idea, given the loose, baggy monsters some majors have become.
K-12 education may have some lessons to offer us as well: Kati Haycock's description in this issue of the common core standards that the states are adopting reminds me that one of the recommendations left dangling from the Spellings Commission's work is that colleges develop not just public learning goals but also standards for learning.
No Lone Rangers. “The times,” said Machiavelli, “are more powerful than our brains”—or at least our brains working in isolation. But as John Zimmerman and Lewis Thomas knew, a key breakthrough in Western thought was that problems that are too big and complex for any one individual to understand, never mind solve, can be dealt with through collective thought and action.
There are some difficulties that can best be attacked through the combined intelligence and experience of those within the academy. Colleges can, and many already do, collaborate with each other on activities such as library acquisitions and purchasing, as Chabotar mentions. But even some problems that seem thoroughly academic, such as how to make make remediation an enabler of rather than an impediment to student success, require that we bring in other partners. Policy-makers' cooperation will be required to change funding strategies and policy positions in order to enable and motivate better approaches to this seemingly intractable problem, for instance, and foundations can provide—indeed, they have provided—the resources to jump-start this work.
Partnerships have to be broad to be effective at the kind of scale this era requires, and they need to transgress borders that are sometimes policed by attack dogs. In the previous issue, Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman talked about policy changes that will be required to lower costs significantly, virtually all of which require politicians, policy-makers, and academics to work together. They point out that no college or coalition of colleges can solve the problem of spiraling health-care costs by itself, for instance. Sometimes those coalitions can go astray, as they seem to have in the Colorado voucher experiment, where politicians' flawed reasoning about access was not challenged by higher education leaders intent on releasing themselves from TABOR's claws. But failures are at least as instructive as successes; I suspect any other state will take notice of the Colorado results before trying the voucher solution.
Both imitation and working collectively go against the academic grain. We prize individuality and originality, neither of which is conducive to replicating proven strategies. We are fiercely protective of “intellectual property.” And sometimes the mutual distrust between academic leaders and politicians prevents cooperation on issues of vital interest to both. Meanwhile the “not-invented-here” syndrome can lead colleges to feverishly reinvent the wheel.
But there are encouraging signs: whole sectors of higher education working on voluntary accountability models, the nation-wide focus on remediation as a key impediment to realizing graduation goals, the setting of those goals in a number of states, assessment projects in which the same strategies (e.g., portfolio review in the Association of American Colleges and Universities' VALUE project or the Council of Independent Colleges' adoption of the CLA across many of its member institutions) are tested across institutions and the results shared.
Maybe we in higher education have learned what scientists realized long ago: complex systems can only be changed through collaborative action. The day of the Lone Ranger, like that of the lone scientist, is over.
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