The future of the University is a popular topic among University administrators, consultants and others. It is hard to address this issue, but I will offer my perspective based on what I have seen.
I see a lack of vision and leadership that is causing a slow but certain decline in a great university. The University of Minnesota is trying to juggle two public functions: It is trying to be a classical university and to provide professional training. The vision of the University is being lost in this juggling act. In addition, we are, in an uncritical way, adopting a corporate style of thinking. This alone could cause disaster.
This corporatization wave is flooding universities, ours most notably. The resulting thick bureaucracy, perverse incentives and detailed control of faculty will lead to a loss of intellectual freedom. Intellectually controlled faculties cannot do what universities have been so successful at for centuries. Imposing a corporate management style might be appropriate for a training institute, but this imposition is a mortal wound to the classical university. This is one of those very bad ideas that should be abandoned at once.
One of the functions we are trying to fulfill is to be a classical university of the sort that has evolved since the middle ages. The productivity of the classical university is not measured by hours taught. It is measured by the downstream productivity to the society of the students it educates. By this measure, productivity has been fantastic. The classical university largely created modern Western civilization. This is why a university was established in the Minnesota Territory. This is why generations of Minnesotans have worked to make this a great university.
Today, we have an institution that has slipped in the rankings and is no longer one of the nation’s top 20 research universities, but which still has a faculty that brings in over $300 million in research income from outside the University. This money provides direct support for over 10,000 jobs and is still generating the downstream productivity I mentioned. The University’s continuing decline threatens this productivity.
Let me give one example of downstream productivity not specific to Minnesota. The World Wide Web was invented by physicists who were doing cutting-edge research. The Web was simply a tool to enable communication among members of that world-wide research community. The Web has, of course, now spawned an immense industry. Most of us do not know that it started in a scientific research field usually thought so arcane that it would create nothing practical. The innovative spirit of the classical university is in creations of this sort.
The classical university has goals other than research. At its best, it educates students to a level of intellectual strength and flexibility not possible anywhere else. Its purpose is to train the mind. The deep belief behind the classical university is that a person with intellectual strength and flexibility can learn whatever he or she needs for a job. This has succeeded in practice despite centuries of economic and social upheaval in the West.
The other function we have, assigned to us when we were set up as a state university, is to provide professional training. The aim of professional training is to get students into a first job. (To some extent, we also provide some further professional training to people already employed.) Professional training at a classical university can succeed brilliantly — look at the Harvard medical school.
Minnesota has made many poor decisions concerning the balance between the classical university and professional education in the last few decades. The Legislature has steadily transferred resources out of the classical university without compensating for this loss with new resources. If the classical university is sacrificed on this altar, the University of Minnesota will in effect become a good community college surrounded by good trade schools. Research and research income will vanish. Those 10,000 jobs will vanish. The faculty who develop the intellectual strengths we expect in our graduates will go elsewhere. The people of Minnesota will lose.
We are watching a slow decline toward becoming a university whose intellectual center is moribund. Once this happens, the periphery will begin to rot. Why are we allowing this? It is due to a lack of genuine leadership. We need a firm belief in the ideal of the classical university and a desire to preserve it in the face of our threatened decline.
Instead, I see a spectacle in which the governing board of the institution does exactly the thing that can destroy the University most quickly. This is the tenure code proposed by the Board of Regents. It is both an attack on the classical university and a symptom of a deep malaise.
Faculty and students must reassert their belief both in the classical university and in a balanced role for the professional training the state asks us to do. Of course, we cannot act alone. Minnesota is not a large state that can preserve its university on the margin.
Citizens and civic leaders have to seriously want a prestigious, classical university here and they have to nurture it. The ultimate choice is up to them. We all need to encourage them to make the right choice.
Thomas Walsh is a professor in the Department of Physics. He is also the co-coordinator of the University Faculty Alliance.