Where may universities' competition come from during the next decade? (Yale vs. Microsoft?)

The clearest and most succinct introduction we can give to the label applied to the y axis of the Vision 2010 matrix is taken from a commentary on the project's progress by Richard Lanham, professor emeritus at UCLA and a participant in all of the Vision 2010 meetings and seminars. You can read through this excerpt below, and the extended history of the discussion that follows it, or you can move directl y to the ongoing discussion of this topic.

An introduction to the "Competition" axis, by Richard Lanham

Let's start with the Y axis, "Competition." Think of it as a cluster of responses to the following quotation, which I have taken from an authoritative venture-capital investment report:

As a result, we believe education represents the most fertile new market for investors in many years. It has a combination of large size (approximately the same size as health care), disgruntled users, low utilization of technology, and the highest strategic importance of any activity in which this country engages. . . . Finally, existing managements are sleepy after years of monopoly.

There are people out there who plan to move in on our operation, to carve chunks out of it for profit. One of them attended our New Orleans meeting, and another was in Chicago. Digital information systems make this much easier to do. "We are not talking about Yale vs. Harvard," one participant said, "We're talking about Yale vs. Microsoft." The entertainment business has designs upon us, too, as the ubiquitous neologism "edutainment" testifies. The Internet is making it possible for individual professors to set up business on their own in electronic space, and to contract their services out to universities wanting to purchase them. One of the scenarios reports that "Monash U. in Australia now teaches 25,000 students through a network spreading over southeast Asia." Potential competitors are popping up on every side. These competitors constitute a danger that, people in the meetings said again and again, the university world simply doesn't comprehend. "How difficult," one of them remarked, "it is to get urgency without emergency."

What prevents us from feeling the heat? First, a matter of principle. It is a central principle of the university world that "we are not a business" and thus cannot be held to business standards of productivity. We are sans pareil. But if you cannot be compared to any other corporate endeavor, then by definition you cannot have any competitors. Our meetings broke through this handy defense again and again, comparing the university to all sorts of other enterprises.

Second, a matter of structure. The structure of university management, it was repeatedly argued, also insulates the university from the competition building up around it. After all, providing such insulation is what university administrations think their central business. The faculty wants to be protected so that it can do its work; the administration exists to provide that protection. The pressures can arise from direct competitors, or from demography, or from alternate means of certification, or from demands for accountability, or plain shortage of money. It doesn't matter where they come from; management's job is to protect the faculty from them. There is no mechanism to introduce the faculty to the future because the whole system is designed to prevent its introduction. The problem is structural.

One participant in the Chicago meeting compared this management-labor structure to the automobile industry in which he worked to put himself through the University of Michigan. The labor costs grew more and more inflated, the work practices more and more sclerotic, but so long as low productivity could be passed along to the customer, management could protect the labor force from the outside world. When the Japanese came knocking, the whole protective structure collapsed. The same thing, many of us felt, will happen to the university.

The debate about the "Competition" axis came back again and again to a central question: What is the theory of the institution?" What is your "core competency"? What is the non-negotiable center of the enterprise? We should not be surprised at this question. Digital technology has asked it of just about every economic activity in America. In New Orleans, it got focused in a wordy encyclopedic way: "How, by, and for whom will higher knowledge, information, and skills and values be produced, distributed, stored, discovered, evaluated, interpreted, protected, financed, in the year 2010?"

(One participant suggested that we junk the matrix and write a separate scenario for each participle in this statement. We politely considered this gorgon and then passed hurriedly on, but in fact such an itemized list probably does constitute the group's real agenda. ) Another participant answered the question more briefly: the university's core resources are stored knowledge, expert knowledge, discovery, and innovation.

Why do we have so much trouble defining what business we are in? Because it has changed and grown so over the last 50 years? Certainly, but I think the difficulty runs deeper. It returns us to our departure point, the digital revolution. We are trying to define ourselves in a new kind of society, an information society rather than an industrial society. Peter Drucker writes, in the essay we have sent you, that "we need systematic work on the quality of knowledge and the productivity of knowledge." Neither, he argues, has even been defined yet. The confusions that clustered around the Y axis all came from this undefined category--the productivity of knowledge. Until we understand what the productivity of knowledge means, we will not be able to define the theory of the institution. If we refuse to think about it at all, because "the university is not a business," then, of course, Game Over.

Drucker again:

The productivity of knowledge work--still abysmally low--will become the economic challenge of the knowledge society. On it will depend the competitive position of every single country, every single industry, every single institution within society.

An extended history of the Vision 2010 discussion of "competition"

The discussion surrounding the topic of competition was extensive. In addition to those points Richard Lanham touches on in his synopsis, the topic was linked to many other issues: for example, questions of equity and elitism. As one participant at the New Orleans seminar asked: "What happens if knowledge production reverts to ten to fifteen percent of the world's population? And ten or fifteen percent of the world's population makes, designs, generates stuff for the rest? What happens to education in the world?" Some of the other issues around "competition" are synopsized below.

Education vs. training

Central to the issue of competition was the distinction between liberal education and skills training, the distinction between "learning in the sense of teaching very generalized problem-solving skills--intellectual curiosity--and much more task-oriented or competence-oriented learning to do specific things," according to a participant in New Orleans, who went on to add, "As soon as you get into that competence-oriented learning there are tons of competitors out there."

These competitors for the skills training market were indeed numerous: participants identified corporate training programs, industrial apprenticeship programs, test preparation organizations such as Stanley Kaplan, independent training organizations such as Sylvan Learning Centers, and even software companies as just a few such competitors.

Several participants argued that skills training as such was coming to be more highly valued in the public's mind than the sort of education traditionally offered by universities. One reason for this perception is the difficulty new college graduates often have entering the job market.

Smaller, swifter competitors

There was also the sense through all of the meetings and seminars that in the competition for higher education "consumers," the race would go to the nimble. Digital technologies will give smaller, lighter-weight organizations the muscle and the reach to go after increasing numbers of students. These technologies may make customization of learning environments more feasible than ever before, including customization of services by age, by types of learning styles, by types of intelligence (and Howard Gardner's paradigm of multiple types of intelligence was brought up regularly), and so on. Such customization, it was believed, may be easiest for small, upstart educational organizations. These organizations may also be favored if the current climate of impatience with heavy-duty institutions continues unchanged.

There was agreement that many of the new and nimble educational competitors may emerge elsewhere in the world, outside the current advanced markets. New organizations there will have two distinct advantages: societies not constrained by existing organizations and institutional practices and therefore able to adapt instantaneously to the changes technology will bring, and direct access to a burgeoning population eager to join the worldwide market economy.

Competition for faculty

Some participants argued that universities would soon be competing with new competitors not only for students, but also for "the factors of production"--faculty. There was a particular belief that faculty who desired to produce new multimedia tools would end up signing on with publishers rather than universities.

The good news?

An incipient digital revolution could also benefit universities in many ways. Some participants saw the university's offering of old-fashioned, analytical, linear, quantified instruction as putting it in a highly desirable niche in an increasingly hypertextual and multimedia world. There was also a belief that competition was less about dollars and students than about values. From this line of argument the real competition will come from those organizations whose values are similar to those of universities, and the competition will be over how those values are delivered in society. One participant termed this a question of "social legitimacy": should education be seen as a private, money-producing concern, or should it be seen as a civic good?

These were some of the thoughts the question of competition provoked in the Vision 2010 seminars and meetings. Please share your thoughts on this topic in the ongoing online discussion of competition.

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