Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/041392/0413120.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 21KB | 402 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 54

COVER STORIES

Campus of The Future


By the year 2000, American colleges and universities will be
lean and mean, service oriented and science minded, multicultural
and increasingly diverse -- if they intend to survive their
fiscal agony

By JOHN ELSON -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Washington, Jeanne
Reid/Boston and James Willwerth/Los Angeles


    If a fourth-grader could gaze into a crystal ball and
envision the college world he or she will enter in the year
2000, it would reveal a mixture of the surprising and the
familiar. Dormitories would probably have the same kinds of
sagging mattresses, desks and bookshelves that have furnished
collegiate rooms for generations. School pennants and posters
would likely be smeared across the walls. But there might be
special TV consoles -- a few colleges have them now -- that
could beam up taped lectures by any professor on campus or even
let students monitor courses from other schools. Built-in
computer terminals, similar to ones in place at Dartmouth, could
tap into the card catalogs of half the college libraries in the
country, call up encyclopedia articles or scan the daily papers.
A glance at the quad outside would show groups of teens in
whatever uniform eventually supplants T shirts and blue jeans,
but also many older students taking courses to change careers,
and even retired couples returning to campus to satisfy their
curiosity about everything from art history to zoology.

    There is, in fact, no need for a crystal ball to envision
the university of the 21st century. Bit by logical bit, it is
taking shape already on dozens of U.S. campuses as
administrators begin to rethink their goals in light of a cost
crunch that, recession or no, promises only to grow worse. From
Kansas' Sterling College to Ohio's Youngstown State, from the
huge State University of New York system (total enrollment: more
than 369,000 on 23 campuses) to tiny Alaska Pacific University
in Anchorage (639 students), officials are deciding not only how
to do the same with less money but also how to do less with
less.

    Budget deficits have led to a sharp drop in both state and
federal funding; public colleges and universities, which had
previously relied on tuition and legislative grants to pay the
bills, now compete aggressively with private institutions for
corporate and foundation grants. Even heavily endowed Ivy League
schools are deferring maintenance and debating whether to lop
off entire academic branches. Yale, for example, is considering
a plan that would close its linguistics department and merge
three branches of engineering into one; Columbia is abandoning
its highly regarded library-science program. Still, the Ivies
are doing better than the vast California State university
system. San Diego State University stirred student anger by
dropping 662 of 5,000 class sections and not rehiring 550
part-time instructors last fall.

    At the same time, critics of the academic establishment
have raised sharp questions about whether U.S. colleges and
universities, for all their reputed excellence, are giving good
value for money, as tuitions rise faster than the inflation
rate. One year at an elite private institution today costs
$23,000; by the year 2000, the price could be as high as
$40,000. Recent scandals, like the misallocation of federal
research funds by Stanford and some other research-minded
universities, have undermined academia's credibility with the
public.

    In some respects, alma mater in Anno Domini 2000 will look
pretty much the way she does now. "Madonna reinvents herself
every season," is the dry observation of Sheldon Hackney,
president of the University of Pennsylvania. "Universities are
much more stable." Nonetheless, experts foresee quite a few
changes -- good as well as bad -- for America's diverse complex
of private and public institutions of higher learning. Items:

    -- The small liberal-arts school with a meager endowment
and a largely local reputation is an "endangered species,"
contends Diane Ravitch, an Assistant Secretary of Education. By
the year 2000 some of these schools will have closed their doors
or merged with larger, more stable schools. Meanwhile, new
schools will open. Some will be two-year community colleges
emphasizing service-oriented courses. Others may be small,
publicly funded schools with innovative liberal-arts programs,
like the University of South Florida's New College or Evergreen
State College in Washington. And there will be much more
intercollege cooperation, as neighboring schools share
facilities and courses to avoid expensive and needless overlaps.
The message: Cut costs, not throats.

    -- Curriculums will show some radical departures from the
past. To justify their existence as servants of society, all
schools will come under pressure to be less theoretical and more
practical in preparing students for careers. There will be more
emphasis on ethics as well as on science and technology,
particularly in courses aimed not at those who intend to major
in chemistry or engineering but at liberal-arts majors who need
at least some scientific literacy. Students will be under
pressure to take two foreign languages, and there will be a
growing emphasis on Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Academia's
international horizons will broaden in other ways. Instead of
a comfy junior year abroad in Paris or Perugia, many
undergraduates will opt for more adventurous and exotic locales
-- Eastern Europe, say, or Southeast Asia.

    -- Great research-oriented universities like Harvard and
Michigan, the pride of higher learning in America, will probably
stay at world-class levels. But both the elite giants and less
prestigious schools will place a stronger emphasis on the
quality of classroom teaching. Professors accustomed to thinking
of research as their real work will be under pressure to spend
time with first- and second-year undergraduates as institutions
adapt to an increasingly diverse academic population -- not just
more women and minorities, but older students and part-timers
with special needs. Even today, only 20% of the nation's
undergraduates are young people between 18 and 22 who are
pursuing a parent-financed education. Two-fifths of all students
today are part-timers, and more than a third are over 25.

    Higher education in the U.S. is big business -- a $100
billion business, to be precise, representing 2.7% of gross
national product. No other nation can boast of so many and such
different institutions: 156 universities, 1,953 four-year
colleges, 1,378 two-year colleges and technical schools. More
than half these are defined as private schools (although nearly
all get some form of state or federal funding). Collectively,
they employ 793,000 faculty members -- not to mention a
supernumerary army of deans and other administrative personnel
-- and accommodate 14 million students. One sign of the
astonishing increase in part-time students: only about 20% of
these knowledge seekers annually receive one or more
certificates of graduation, from A.A. (Associate of Arts) to
Ph.D.

    In contrast to most other industrialized nations, the U.S.
has no central government ministry imposing lockstep conditions
on an untidy educational conglomerate. That is why so many
schools are attempting to seize the future in strikingly
independent ways. Take computers, for instance. At the
University of California, Los Angeles, Egyptian-born senior
professor Maha Ashour-Abis using the smart machines to teach
physics to 140 students. The computers can simulate experiments,
from sound waves being measured in a pool of water to a 3-D,
multicolored representation of molecules colliding.

    Abdalla's course is part of a broader effort by UCLA
administrators to perk up flagging student interest in the
sciences. "We cannot afford to train everyone as a scientist,"
says Clarence Hall, dean of physical sciences. "But there are
hardly any students to teach. Science and engineering are the
engine of economic prog ress, and without some changes, we are
bound to lose the fuel for that engine."

    Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., has found a broader
use for computers. Some 200 classrooms and laboratories have
been wired with a fiber-optics video information system,
complete with color monitors, that allows professors to tap into
the school's library of films, videos and laser discs. Tony
Edmonds, chairman of the history department, uses the system to
teach a course on the Vietnam War. "Now I can discuss the My Lai
massacre, press a button and show a two-minute segment on it,"
he says. "I discuss the antiwar movement and pull up a segment
on Abbie Hoffman." His undergraduates, children of the
sound-bite era, take to the course like, well, MTV. "Of 105
students only 10 got below a B," Edmonds says. "That's never
happened before."

    Next year Edmonds' Vietnam course will be transmitted to
20 off-campus sites around the state. And what about the guest
lecturer who was grounded in Chicago by a snowstorm? No
problem: out-of-town speakers can visit an interactive TV studio
and get beamed directly into a Ball State classroom.

    Just as more and more computer-wise workers will earn
their keep from home offices, a growing number of students can
expect to get their degrees without ever setting foot on campus.
Susan Lerner, 40, of Burnt Ranch, Calif., is doing so now. An
elementary school teacher at a remote Hupa Indian reservation,
she has enrolled in a new M.A. program in educational technology
offered by George Washington University in Washington, 2,500
miles away. Lerner takes two four-hour courses a week, beamed
to her via the satellite dish in her yard, and keeps in touch
with her professors through her computer's electronic bulletin
board. "I want to integrate the use of technology in rural
areas," says Lerner, who expects to get her degree in two years.
"With a modem we can be connected to the rest of the world. With
interactive video, we can offer opportunities that people in
these areas don't ordinarily have."

    Anticipating a surge in "distance learning," cable
entrepreneur Glenn Jones in 1987 founded the Mind Extension
University. Based in Englewood, Colo., it beams college-credit
courses to 36,000 students across the country, under the aegis
of such established institutions as the University of Minnesota
and Penn State. Last fall a branch of the University of Maryland
began offering the nation's first four-year bachelor of arts
program via Mind Extension; 60 students are enrolled. "Today's
students are often working," explains Paul Hamlin, the Maryland
dean in charge of the program. "They need to be able to compete,
and they want a flexible format. Because of time constraints --
children, jobs, commutes -- they can't go to the typical
campus."

    It's not only the students who have changing needs. So do
the various communities that colleges and universities are
trying to serve. Inside what was once the ivory tower, there is
a growing interest in new kinds of alliances with business. In
St. Louis, Washington University and Monsanto Co. have linked
up in biomedical research projects involving proteins and
peptides, as part of a search for more sophisticated drugs. On
the campus of the University of California, Irvine, Hitachi has
built a high-tech research lab, which it shares with U.C.'s
top-flight biochemistry department. Critics worry about the
ethics of this cozy arrangement, despite strict
conflict-of-interest rules drawn up by the university. "What
forms of industrial cohabitation should a state-funded
university permit?" asks Michael Schrage, a research affiliate
at M.I.T. "It's one thing for a campus to encourage private
industry to participate in research. It is quite another to have
facilities that blur the line between private and proprietary."

    Similar questions have been asked about the efforts of
some publicly funded schools to justify their existence by
trying to fulfill immediate community needs. The University of
New Hampshire has been able to squeeze additional funds from
New Hampshire's traditionally tight-fisted legislature by
polishing its public image with projects like developing a
non-toxic bacterium that virtually eliminated black flies, which
plagued some of the state's tourist resorts. But the
university's president, Dale Nitzschke, allows that catering to
the lawmakers' whims is a high-risk proposition. "We don't enjoy
a separation anymore between the university and the political
system," he says. "It is critical that we don't become pawns of
the government, the legislature or business and industry. If we
lose our autonomy, we've lost the ball game."

    During the great expansion that took place after World War
II, American colleges and universities sought to be all things
to all people. In the new age of austerity, schools are being
forced to rethink their missions, decide what they can do best
and -- in a form of academic triage -- abandon certain fields
of learning to others. Rice University in Houston has often
been called "the Harvard of the South" (although these days the
motto should be reversed, claims its president, George Rupp).
Rice has flourished by trying to recruit National Merit
scholars, who constitute 40% of the class of 1995, and by
developing a national reputation for superb teaching in the
sciences and social sciences.

    It is fairly common these days for neighboring colleges to
share talents and facilities, particularly in arcane
specialties. For example, one-third of the graduate students in
a cognitive-psychology class at Carnegie-Mellon University are
actually enrolled at the nearby University of Pittsburgh. Many
experts believe that much more can be done to eliminate overlap.
"Worcester County in Massachusetts has at least five colleges,"
says Arnold Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Corp. and a
member of that state's Higher Education Coordinating Council.
"If one has an outstanding physics department, it would make
sense for the other four to phase out physics and build their
own strengths."

    What if three schools in Maine decided to offer more
courses on Eastern Europe? Harvard sociologist David Riesman has
a proposal: "I can imagine Colby, Bates and Bowdoin, for
example, deciding that one would concentrate on Romania, one on
Bulgaria and one on Czechoslovakia. They could have
interchangeable programs that all students could use for
semesters abroad."

    But institutions need not always be neighbors to
collaborate fruitfully. Last month American University signed
an agreement with Japan's Ritseumeikan University to offer a
joint master's degree in international relations from both
schools. "Students would spend one year in Washington, D.C., and
one year in Kyoto," explains A.U. president Joseph Duffey, who
wants to set up a similar program in business administration.

    Many colleges, in the era of permanent retrenchment, will
have to offer a narrower range of courses than in the past. But
this does not necessarily mean intellectual deprivation. John
Silber, the acerbic and outspoken president of Boston
University, complains that he has seen "an increasing number of
too small classes and too many courses. We have about 150
courses that study the human mind. But all that we know about
the human mind could be taught in 30. A course on the effect of
Anna on Sigmund Freud is fine. But it's part of the waste that
is commonplace at big research universities. Small colleges
cannot afford that kind of narcissism."

    So what is the alternative? One answer is offered by
Adelphi University, on New York's Long Island, which was on the
verge of bankruptcy when Peter Diamandopoulos was named
president seven years ago. His strategy: trim fat by linking
Adelphi's professional schools, notably in business, social work
and nursing, with its undergraduate studies and by introducing
an imaginative core curriculum that encompasses ethics as well
as arts and sciences. One part of the curriculum deals with "the
nature of modernity" and ranges from war and economic
development to breakthroughs in technology.

    For better or worse, many experts believe that the battle
over what is commonly called multiculturalism is winding down.
That is, there is an emerging consensus that every curriculum
needs broadening to encompass the cultural experience of women
and minorities -- but not at the denigration of D.W.M.s (Dead
White Males). Robert Wood, who is Henry Luce professor of
Democratic Institutions and the Social Order at Wesleyan
University, argues for balance. "In the past five years, we have
generally had two counsels on curriculum, and they're both
wrong. Allan Bloom ((The Closing of the American Mind)) and
others basically say, `Don't read anything after the Age of the
Enlightenment.' Then we have our present multicultural movement
saying every culture should be explored. We need some consensus
on this. What we should do is concentrate on how to train
competent Americans."

    And how should colleges do that? Wood has a three-part
program. "We've got to teach economics to every student. It
conveys a rigor and quantitative skill that all students should
understand before they look at political or social institutions.
We should require the study of communications, especially visual
ones, and not just with some tired old journalist teaching
students how the front page is put together. And third, we need
to offer real science courses to the non-science student. Most
hard scientists tend to belittle non-majors, assuming them to
be cognitively inferior. The teachers keep on doing what they're
trained to do, expecting the non-majors to sink or swim."

    Wood is also concerned, as are many other educators, about
the problem of attracting -- and keeping -- minority students.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, blacks and
Hispanics were only half as likely as whites to have completed
four or more years of college in 1990. Probably no school has
given more thought to the problem than Occidental College of Los
Angeles, where 44% of this year's first-year class is nonwhite.
President John B. Slaughter, who is black, believes many
nonwhites need a kind of social and cultural head start to
prepare them for college life. He strongly supports a program
begun by his predecessor that invites about 50 "students of
color" to spend five weeks of the summer on campus, prior to
their enrollment. There is some course work but also reassurance
that they are not alone in a potentially threatening,
predominantly white environment. "I would have felt very
alienated without the summer program," recalls senior Diana
Hong, who is Hispanic. "You start school with 49 friends."

    Academia's code word for the future, in the view of some,
is "accountability" -- both to the students it hopes to serve
and the public that pays the bills, either by taxes, tuition or
gifts. In Hiatt's view, "too many higher education institutions
have been run like government, and that means they have been run
badly." One inevitable consequence of imitating or emulating
government has been bureaucratic bloat: a self-perpetuating
nomenklatura of assistant deans, development officers and other
office-bound personnel. "Harvard doesn't have a financial
problem, it has a management problem," contends B.U.'s Silber.

    Some innovative schools -- Rice among them -- have chosen
to dismantle their bureaucracies to devote more resources to
labs, libraries and classrooms. "Higher education has to see
itself as having an enhanced obligation to society and the
community," says Arthur Hauptman, a Washington-based educational
consultant. Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching, is even blunter. "Universities and
colleges," he warns, "will be either engaged or judged
irrelevant." To measure by its noble past and present
accomplishments -- even amid fiscal agony -- odds are strong
that higher learning in America will find a way to compete and
survive. Like Fortune's annual list of the 500 top U.S.
industrial corporations, the pecking order of academic
excellence is bound to see eventual changes. But too much is at
stake, in pride and passion, for the entire empire of academia
to fall ignobly into mediocrity, somnolence and sloth.