Remarks by
William R. Brody, President
The Johns Hopkins University The University in the Twenty-first Century:
Adapting to Stay Relevant
UNIVERSITY CONTINUING EDUCATION ASSOCIATION CONVENTION
SATURDAY, APRIL 4, 1998 / CHICAGO [Introduction by UCEA president Gordon Nick Mueller] Thank you, Nick. Good morning. I am delighted to be here this morning, and honored to have been invited by the University Continuing Education Association to launch the 83rd annual conference with this morning s address. If you look in your programs you ll find that the general topic of my presentation is to be the future of the university and the need of all of our institutions to adapt, to some degree, in order to remain relevant, and, I assume, useful. Specifically, I have been asked to address the questions, To what extent will our future students be learning through the virtual campus as opposed to the real one? How will increased internationalization affect our priorities? How will it affect students choices and decisions in education? and finally, just to make sure all the bases are covered, How can universities provide education that is of high quality and yet affordable, one that prepares students for the marketplace--including jobs that may not have been invented yet--and enables them to engage in continuous learning for a lifetime that will probably encompass several different careers? That s quite a selection of topics to try to cover, but at least I m lucky enough to have a good audience here this morning. I ve discovered good audiences are important. [INTERNATIONAL FALLS STORY] So I will try to keep my remarks focused for the audience at hand, and try to look ahead, like the title of this talk suggests, to what we can expect in the future. But I will warn you in advance that predicting the future is always a hazardous affair, even for those of us who have been hired, to some extent, to do exactly that. So I will probably conclude with as many--or more--questions as answers. Luckily, there are microphones set up in the audience and I will leave plenty of time to hear your own thoughts, ideas and suggestions at the end of my remarks. Perhaps by outlining some of the key issues confronting all of us we can initiate an ongoing conversation around these topics that will carry you through to Monday s closing banquet. There are certainly no shortage of issues at stake. For this much seems certain: change in our society and in the world at large is propelling higher education to new activities and new arrangements we couldn t have imagined ten or fifteen years ago. We all know that the so-called traditional student -- 18 to 22 years of age, just out of high school, enrolled full time in a college or university and living on or near campus--is hardly much of a tradition anymore. And while I am always a little bit suspicious of grand declarations assigning a year or a decade specific values, I think we can begin this conference by declaring, with some confidence, that the knowledge age is upon us, and with it, our colleges and universities have entered the Era of Continuing--and Continuous--Education. The question remains, however, how and in what way we are to respond to this new need and these new obligations. I m thankful this is not something I have been called upon to answer alone. In addition to a variety of thought-provoking break-out sessions over the next three days, the organizers of this conference deserve special commendation for bringing Alan Kay, Brent Staples and Bob Galvin to Chicago for this event. Each has special insights into the opportunities and the challenges that lie before us. There are few individuals, if any, who can speak to the issue of the power of technology to change individual and institutional behavior with quite the authority of Alan Kay. Brent Staples is sure to provide eloquent and compelling testimony concerning the social and moral imperatives we face in harnessing these new capabilities to address profound and persistent inequities in American society. And Bob Galvin s leadership in issues of quality and technological innovation will no doubt offer a rare first-hand account of what leaders in corporate America are thinking they want and need in this new age of continuing and continuous education. I am honored to share the rostrum and participate in the discussion with these individuals. Let me begin by saying that the title of my remarks this morning are somewhat misleading. As we look at the future of universities throughout the world, applying the description Adapting to Stay Relevant in some way suggests that universities are in imminent danger of losing their relevance. I don t think so. I don t believe the relevance of the university is endangered. Universities are one of the core institutions of Western Society. Their tremendous importance and success is made apparent by the fact that they have become equally fundamental to the operation of almost every non-Western Society. The university as an institution is one of the most successful and venerable cultural artifacts of the West. And one of the most enduring. In fact, you could say that the university is one of--if not the--defining institutions of western civilization. Former University of California president Clark Kerr used to like to remind people that about eighty-five institutions in the Western world established by the year 1520 still exist today in some recognizable form, with similar functions and with unbroken histories. These include the Catholic church, the Parliaments of the Isle of Man, Iceland and Great Britain, several Swiss cantons... and seventy universities. People have suggested the advent of ubiquitous networked databases spells the end of the university s central role as collector, conservator and purveyor of the knowledge base that defines our society; that it signals the universities demise as the central, physical repository of our civilization s intellectual content. Again, I must play the role of the contrarian. While I do agree that information is in the process of becoming increasingly dispersed and decentralized, I would argue that, fundamentally, the university s function as simple collector of information began disappearing about the same time that books began differentiating themselves in value. When books were hand- copied, the great labor and effort involved in producing them assured that, to some degree, every book had worth. With the introduction of printing at the end of the 15th century, this changed. Now there were valuable books and disposable books. It quickly became the function of the university to try to differentiate between the two--however imperfectly--and conserve and expand upon the knowledge in one while disregarding the other. We moved from being information collectors to knowledge validators--a much more demanding and difficult proposition. But also tremendously more valuable, both for ourselves and for society at large. People began to turn to us not just for our store of knowledge, but more importantly, for our ability to validate, analyze and make use of that knowledge. Earlier I referred to the Knowledge Age, and said it would be the Age of Continuing and Continuous Education. Knowledge Age was a deliberate misnomer on my part; it looks forward to something that has not yet occurred. As anyone will tell you, we are not yet in the knowledge age; we are in the Information Age. There s a huge disjunct between the two. In the information age, the progress of analog and digital communications technology from telephone and radio to television, satellites, faxes and computers, has increased our access to information at a dizzying rate. I am amazed whenever I read an article about the joys of instant access to information through the Internet. Are there really people out there who crave more information crossing their desk or their desktop? Uncontrolled information has become a burden, not a resource. Who among us fails to suffer from information overload? With hundreds of cable t.v. channels added to the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, books, to say nothing of junk mail, one hardly has time to waste surfing the net. In fact, what we crave is better access to knowledge, not information. Knowledge is content that is assimilated, collated and interpreted to provide a unique perspective that helps us perform a task, solve a problem, or stimulate our intellect. The paradox of our times is that we are inundated by information yet starved for knowledge. But in addition to being a paradox, it is also an opportunity and, I would argue, an obligation for the university s continuing preeminence. Now more than ever, there is a fundamental need for interpretation, for a hierarchial sorting and a process of validation for information. That s because in cyberspace, information is essentially value-neutral. As anyone who has cruised the Web can tell you, it s a wild and unruly electronic world out there. Conspiracy theories share equal electronic space with the Human Genome Database; alien abductions and important scholarly debates bump into one another in the ether; great literature and gross pornography stand jowl by naked cheek. Now more than ever, the relevance of the university in terms of its ability to help differentiate the needless from the necessary is of critical importance to our society. Yet I don t want for a moment to diminish the reality we are all facing: this is a time of tremendous challenge for all of us in higher education. But not, as I said, in terms of losing our relevance. Rather, I believe we are experiencing something equally dramatic and perhaps more drastic in effect: the loss of our exclusivity franchise. Until recently, post-secondary education was, for all intents and purposes, the exclusive domain of the nation s colleges and universities. We owned the market, and kept control of it through a fairly rigorous program of peer-review, accreditation and standardized testing. Although we tolerated--and even encouraged- -tremendous variation within the set framework, at the end of the day, if you wanted a college degree or similar credentialing you had to come to one of us. And the higher the level of credentialing, the fewer institutions that were available to offer such degrees. Moreover, we helped protect and enhance the value of those degrees by promoting--or at least tacitly encouraging--state certified professional credentialing systems that used awarded degrees as an indicator of base levels of competence. Anyone who doubts that this system is now under tremendous stress need only read the newspaper on any given day. Even among the fraternity of educators there is now open talk of the need to drastically alter or completely abandon the way we have been doing business for the past 100 years. Here, for instance, is my colleague from Maryland, Don Langenberg, chancellor of the University of Maryland system, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Many of you will probably remember reading this opinion piece. Don wrote: We must abandon the notion that age and exposure to some particular quantity of formal instruction are relevant indicators of an individual s educational progress or ability to function in the classroom or on the job. He went on to propose the elimination of diplomas and degrees in favor of a universal college-credit banking system that would be used to create a student performance profile that would more accurately reflect the real achievements of each student. Don made his suggestion based upon the idea that we have entered the Era of Continuing and Continuous Education. In such a world-- where one never really finishes formal instruction and classes are an ongoing, though perhaps sporadic, part of life--what counts is not years attended or slips of paper awarded, but what is learned. It is a vision of a world where quantifiable knowledge and skills preempt degrees and diplomas. If that s the world we are now entering--and there are many indications that this is the case--then clearly, the role of colleges and universities as the exclusive source of post secondary education is at an end. And it may even be possible to imagine a day when the primacy of the current institutions of higher education is challenged. Where will that challenge come from? A number of sources, probably. Perhaps some of you saw the article in the New York Times recently about American students going overseas for their degrees because they can purchase equivalent educations there for much less money. It used to be that going to college overseas was for the rich; perhaps someday soon an overseas diploma will be the mark of a savvy shopper. We are also already seeing the compressed college diploma. At Stanford, president Gerhard Casper has commented that an increasing number of students are choosing to graduate in three years. Some of them are coming in loaded with advanced placement credit. Others are simply doubling up on their credit hours while in school. We re beginning to see what should be an obvious truth--college students are price sensitive and will change their behavior according to incentives and disincentives in cost. How much more will they react, and how far afield will they go? That remains an open question. I think its fair to speculate that when we witness this kind of behavior during some of the best of economic times--when consumer confidence in the economy and belief in the future is at, or near, all-time highs--it s probably safe to assume that we ll see it multiplied many times over when we fall from this economic high and enter the next trough. What options will they choose? Certification in specific skills as opposed to academic diplomas? Virtual universities? Job training skills in small, focused increments? Private, for-profit non-accredited learning centers? Again, it s difficult to know precisely, other than to be fairly confident the market will throw out all these possibilities, and others yet unthought of, in an effort to meet a real need. So clearly we face changing markets for our services. In the past, when the market for higher education grew, by default, it belonged to us. From 1945 to 1975 we rode the tsunami of pent-up demand, GI bill subsidies, increased expectations and an explosion of eligible college-aged students. For a number of reasons, during that time, America s colleges and universities proved themselves very effective and efficient at growth. We grew tremendously--not only when you count the number of students enrolled or diplomas awarded, but also in the total number of institutions of higher learning, and in the number of degree and diploma-awarding programs offered. Today, we can no longer count on the kind of growth in demand coupled with the unwavering public support that brought us to our current position. There s a certain irony in this. We can look forward to the approaching baby boomlet maturing to college age; we have helped create a vast pool of educated and credentialed potential customers who might want or need further education; and the one inescapable consequence of the Information Age is the growing demand for more, and higher levels, of education for all workers, spread out over the course of their careers. Yet I think all of us here this morning would agree that we can no longer simply assume that this large and growing market belongs exclusively to us. For some time now I ve been urging my colleagues at Hopkins and throughout higher education to pay close attention to the developments in the health care industry. Managed care, a system designed to wring excess cost out of the delivery of medicine, has done this--rather painfully--by closing hospitals, reducing lengths of stay, squeezing providers and shifting costs away from high-expense centers. As the president of a university with an academic health center, this is of great concern and takes a lot of my time and attention. In fact, just the other day, a faculty member complained to me that he wished I would devote the same time and effort to issues confronting Arts and Sciences as I do the School of Medicine. My reply was that everyone should be paying close attention to what is going on in medicine, because the painful choices this discipline now confronts were brought about by circumstances similar--almost identical--to those we see today in higher education. Namely, continued increases in cost significantly in excess of inflation; an inability or unwillingness on the part of service providers to make the painful choices necessary to control those costs; public perception of a decline in quality and grave concern over issues of access to the services provided. Cost, quality and access are what drove the tremendous changes in health care we ve been experiencing. Many hospitals went through painful retrenchment; some merged; some gave up their non-profit status and became for-profit corporations; a significant number simply closed their doors forever. Could this be the future of higher education? Absolutely. I would not be at all surprised if, in the near future, we were to see colleges and universities merge, or go out of business, or perhaps give up their physical campuses and full-time faculty to become virtual institutions, or switch from non-profit to for-profit status. These changes loom primarily because of issues of productivity. I think if you filled this room with university presidents, almost everyone of them could relate the same story, of an earnest and well-meaning trustee coming up and saying something like, Bill, if only we ran the university like a business--like we do at IBM- -that s the answer. Let s apply business practices to our operations and we ll solve this productivity issue once and for all. I have discovered this is not as easy, or desirable, as people would like to think. What most people mean when they say run more like a business is a model of command and control structure that can effectively control costs and easily improve efficiencies. In that model, resources are allocated according to their return; centers of low return, or profit, are disbanded and centers of high return--where you re actually making money--are enhanced. The trouble is, universities are not businesses in this conventional sense. We are an organization where our capital walks out the door every evening on two legs--that s our faculty. And without the faculty we can t run the business. We don t have customers coming in to buy Toyotas or Cadillacs; we have people coming to us because of the reputation and talents of our faculty. Because of this, the management structures we ve created are designed, fundamentally, to further the activities, interests and pursuits of the faculty. Now this structure works exceedingly well in the growth phase, as I mentioned earlier. When we were the only game in town, and every year we could count on more and more customers, it was relatively easy to accommodate the occasional non-productive faculty member or under-performing department. When you re growing it s easy to add new faculty, create new departments, unveil new initiatives and generally ignore the lack of productivity in a particular facet of the organization. But when that growth phase slows or stops, and you suddenly find yourself tenured into long-term irreversible commitments, you begin to realize we lack some of the tools that businesses routinely use to further their activities. In boom cycles, businesses grow; during the busts, if they are managed well, they get rid of the non-productive people and programs. The trouble is, most colleges and universities emerged from that 40-year boom cycle following World War II without having figured out how to make these painful adjustments. And so they haven t. While farming, and manufacturing, and banking and virtually every other segment of our economy has begun to make significant productivity gains over the past 10 to 15 years, higher education has largely continued to do things in much the same way it did 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. The unfortunate result is that, relative to average family income, we have become more and more expensive over that time. Currently, there seems to be great--and perhaps even disproportionate--hope that technology will resolve all of this. While I am optimistic that new and developing technologies will, in fact, revolutionize how we teach and conduct our business, I am wary of putting too much faith in its ability to solve all our problems. Sometimes people are too eager to believe in the miracles of modern technology. I'm reminded of a recent speech I heard by the CEO of Deutsche Telecom, who talked about how technology was changing telecommunications completely. But it certainly wasn't the answer for everyone. He gave his 92-year-old mother a cellular telephone, and every day thereafter she would call him long distance and they would have these long conversations, this from someone who never called for more than a millisecond in the past. Finally, he said, Mama, you can't go on calling me like this, this is going to cost you a lot of money. She said, Oh no it isn't, they haven't come to hook it up yet. So I think we need to be a little wary when advocates claim that asynchronous learning on the Web, or CD ROM instruction or the wired classroom are the answers to all our difficulties. There is undoubtedly great potential in these fields, but we need to move forward recognizing that even the best technological infrastructure won t be able to overcome a bloated bureaucracy, or profoundly unproductive departments. Luckily, our schools and departments of continuing studies have prepared us for the demands and the rewards of the computer and electronics revolutions. I know some of you have been involved in distance education and asynchronous learning almost since the introduction of radio. Computers and networked systems are simply new tools, not new concepts to your way of thinking. At Johns Hopkins, we have been involved in continuing studies for many, many years: our School of Continuing Studies, then known as College Courses for Teachers, opened in 1909, less than 40 years after Hopkins was founded. Most people in Baltimore are surprised when I tell them that about half our students are part-time and non-traditional students. In addition to our School of Continuing Studies, each of our other academic divisions is free to offer its own courses on a part-time basis--and they do. For instance, we are in the process of rolling out our Business of Medicine Program to a national audience by partnering our Schools of Medicine and Continuing Studies with Sylvan Learning Systems, which has a nationwide network of computer learning centers in key cities across the country. I suspect that in the future, such partnering, between divisions within one institution, or between two or more different schools, and in particular, between the non-profit educational institutions and the for-profit business sector, will become essential -- if not the norm. This is an area where we can clearly hope to expand our student base without risking the huge costs and difficulties associated with establishing new schools or mounting entirely new programs. As we move into these areas, however, we must be increasingly mindful of what our dean of Continuing Studies, Stanley Gabor, likes to refer to as the cost of quality. Too often in the past--and today-- there has been a tendency by the administration to see the life-long learner as an opportunity for a school to get something for virtually nothing. Frequently, there has not been enough attention paid and resources devoted to faculty development, scholarships and academic support services. Without the necessary investment in quality, the growth sought by many institutions through Continuing Education will be stunted, or may not occur at all. We also must provide our continuing education programs with venture capital to start new and innovative programs and take the kinds of risks already common among our competitors coming from the proprietary side of the market. In other words, as we lose our franchise of exclusivity and have to compete harder and smarter for the lifelong learner of the future, we will have to devote the same kind of careful attention to developing and retaining the best faculty in part time education that we now spend with our traditional faculty. This is the unique challenge that faces every person in this room today. As the nature of your business becomes increasingly important to the strength and even the survival of your institution, will you be able, forcefully and effectively, to make the case for the cost of quality? Your tradition is a rich heritage of educational innovation. Now that this innovative spirit is essential, and now that your skill in creating and adapting new educational delivery systems is acknowledged, are you prepared to step forward and lead your presidents and provosts in rethinking the way we organize our assets, and operate our facilities? As I said at the beginning of my remarks, my vision into the future is probably no less clouded than anyone else s. We know change is coming, and based upon what we ve already seen, I think we can predict the broader trends: more need for education, but more competition; increased cost pressures and increasingly sophisticated and price-sensitive consumers; tremendous opportunities, but risks far greater than at any time in the past. This morning I may not have succeeded in delivering the secret of success in the face of all these challenges, but I hope I have at least opened some new perspectives on the issue and encouraged some different thinking. If so, I would be happy at this time to take any of your questions. Thank you. | 
