My previous post looked at the evolution of higher education, some of the reasons behind the public’s recent distrust of research universities, and proposed a renewed statement of the purpose of universities around the creation and dissemination of knowledge, at least some of which addresses moral formation and civic responsibility. This post provides some more specific ideas about how to deliver on that purpose and regain the public’s trust.
My own academic background – including degrees from an Episcopalian liberal arts college and the University of Oxford, and faculty positions at the Roman Catholic University of Notre Dame and the nonsectarian Cornell University – and research experience give me an appreciation for the diversity of colleges and universities, and a basis for some modest steps toward reform and a better future for research universities.
When I was asked recently to reflect on why I’d spent so much of my career creating interdisciplinary research teams and connecting them to NGOs, government agencies, and industry, I realized that both my desire and comfort in doing so came from my liberal arts education. Half of my undergraduate courses were in the humanities and social sciences. Even as a doctoral student in zoology at Oxford, discussions in my college’s graduate common room continued my education via peers in disciplines—and with perspectives–far from my own.
It turns out that I’m not unusual: Liberal arts college graduates earn Ph.D.s at twice the per capita rate of other bachelor degree recipients. As a professor, it has seemed natural to me to bring the ideas and values from different disciplines into constructive collision. It also seemed essential to my goal to foster research to serve society, and is a key focus of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
On the other hand, the interdisciplinary research in which I’ve engaged has been rooted in the deep expertise and research experience that each collaborator brings from their discipline. My collaborators and I are specialists making the extra effort to apply our different skills to a common problem beyond the scope of any one discipline. Such interdisciplinary work is not possible without the research infrastructure and personnel, including graduate students and postdocs, that only large universities possess. The same attributes that make universities engines of innovation that serve society bring them into tension with providing anything like the whole-person approach to undergraduate education from centuries past.
Thus, universities are now under attack for the high costs of providing specialized training required for research-driven innovation that the U.S. government demanded in past decades and, simultaneously, for being unable to provide a coherent, broad liberal arts education of the whole person, including the development of nuanced values that enable thoughtful citizenship. Even in today’s liberal arts colleges, the intellectual public square is more diverse and necessarily more pluralistic than the colleges of earlier centuries that often denied entry to non-Protestant Christians, Jews, Blacks, and others. At their best, today’s liberal arts colleges still foster flexibility of mind, critical thinking skills, and a joy in engaging respectfully around even deeply held disagreements.
What sorts of reforms can the public and the government reasonably expect research universities to make? Universities must now do at least two related and very difficult things that can only be accomplished in partnership with federal and state governments and parents and students paying for a bachelor’s degree at a university.
First, university leaders must lower costs while rejecting the false notion that the primary purpose of a college degree is higher lifetime income before any more state legislatures and the federal government instantiate that as the determinant of government funding. Instead, university leaders must proclaim that education’s purpose is to shape a life that has value not just to the educated individual but to fellow humans and the institutions that sustain our common life. One way this could be done is to reestablish stronger core curricula that create an intellectual common ground appropriate to a pluralistic society. Such common ground cannot be defined by one religious tradition as in centuries past; rather, it must be informed by different traditions of defining the good life. It must model and provide a training ground for respectful conversation about the values underlying personal choice, a commitment to the common good, and a strong sense of the responsibility – not just the rights – of citizenship.
Second, in reforming research programs and infrastructure, university leaders need to encourage more applied research in all disciplines. Two key components to doing so, which are currently represented in only a few parts of some universities and not at all in many universities, are openness to the needs of citizens and the various public and private sector organizations that represent diverse interests; and hiring and empowerment of nonfaculty expert staff to serve as the bridges between the university and citizen stakeholders. This means breaking down the barriers between basic and applied research – removing the academic halo from theoretical and basic research and the academic stigma from applied research. Both are essential to universities and society.
As Gordon Gee argued in “Land-Grant Universities of the Future,” even many land-grant universities have devalued applied research. Restoring a high value on the continuum of basic to applied research, and seeking societal input on research agendas, is precisely what we aim to do at Cornell Atkinson.
David M. Lodge is the Francis J. DiSalvo Director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability