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[Note: This commentary was written for the group of American Association of Universities provosts who reviewed and critiqued the Vision 2010 products and process at a September 1995 meeting.]
"The only disaster worse than a short-sighted statesman is a very far-sighted one."
-- Bismarck
The crucial focus for future planning, Bismarck suggests, is the middle distance: for us in 1995, the year 2010 seems just about right. What has Vision 2010 managed to glimpse out there for the university? From our New Orleans meeting, the following "driving issues" emerged:
Are these the issues that immediately concern all of you university provosts? Bill Frye, the Provost of Emory University, was kind enough to send me a copy of his recent report: Choices and Responsibility: Shaping Emory's Future. As an informal check on our proceedings, I read the Report with these driving issues in mind and found there all but one or two. Perhaps then, in broad outline at least, our heterogenous group synthesized a valid agenda.
How did we think these issues would inter-vary? 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.
The debates about the X axis, "Literacy," were every bit as vexed. The groups generally agreed that digital information changes the nature of literacy. One New Orleans participant, who has played a vital planning role at Apple Computer, stressed repeatedly that the image threatens to usurp the word in digital expression. I argued in reply that digital literacy is built around a new mixture of word, image, and sound. "Literacy" came to mean, in our conversation, the set of core competencies which the student should have.
To explore how these change in a digital universe would require a book of its own (and indeed I have written one), but the groups in both New Orleans and Chicago accepted this fundamental change in the educational core as a given. About such a change, however, there has been, little discussion in the university world. Around the X axis clustered, too, debates about the costs, distribution, and social equity of the computer equipment a digital curriculum requires.
Believe it or not, there were some things that we did not talk about. With the exception of one remark, we said nothing about the "Third Awakening" as it is sometimes called, the explosion of religion in current American life and its effects on higher education. We said almost nothing about the culture wars, the kulturkampf between puritan Right and Left, which so divides American campuses--and so blinds us to our new competition. Although we talked about faculty productivity, we never considered student productivity. We did not discuss possible radical changes in the tax laws and their effect of universities' tax-exempt status. And, although we did discuss certification at some length, we never even touched on grade inflation--our devaluation of the currency we use in this, our vital monopoly.
We could have discussed with more perspicacity the difference between training and education. It is one of the great unexamined cliches we will have to examine if we are to understand productivity in knowledge work. We did not discuss the implications of digital communication for university institutional practices, for disciplines and departments, course structure and curricular design. Beyond all these, we didn't discuss the biggest change which digital communication brings with it, a change in economics. In an information society, the scarce commodity which economics allocates is not information. We're swimming in that. The the commodity in short supply, the commodity which economics has to allocate, is the attention that converts data into usable information This reconfiguration into an economics of attention provides the bridge along which we could have moved more easily from our narrow focus on digital information to our larger one on the future shape of the university. It is only in terms of such an economics that we can really think the central issue: What is knowledge work (the X axis) and how do you measure its productivity (the Y axis)? Perhaps a provostial (provostian?) discussion might begin there.
I have not begun to do justice to the richness of our discussions, as they emerge from my own notes and from the transcripts of all the meetings. I hope I have made clear, however, how important it is to be part of such discussions, rather than to read a report of them. Herein lies the next stage of the Vision 2010 enterprise. We don't want to write a report to go on the shelf with all the others. Instead, we want to invent a way to stimulate mid-term planning where it must occur if it is to do any good: on particular campuses, using local knowledge, making local decisions, generating a local matrix, involving a particular professoriate and administration, inventing an individual management structure to meet the competitive world rather than wall it out. A way to do this, we've been thinking, might be to produce an interactive CD-ROM on university planning, a collaborate planning tool along the lines of Sim City or Sim Health. This production, which would be organized on the basic axes which emerged from the Vision 2010 meetings--the nature of knowledge work and the productivity of such work--would include the R&D agenda implied by such a matrix. It would allow individual campuses to enter their own data and agenda, and see what possible futures might emerge. What do you think of this idea? What better ideas might we ponder?
Bismarck was right. Looking way out is nothing but a rain dance and, given a charismatic performer, rain dances can be dangerous. But it is also dangerous not to look beyond tomorrow's crisis. What we have really been pondering in our deliberations thus far is the need for machinery that will allow us, on a regular basis, to look out into the middle distance. If we learn to do that, we will know how to change, and yet preserve that core enterprise of teaching and inquiry which is our heart of hearts.
