Posted on: Sunday, February 20, 2005

COMMENTARY
What should our colleges be doing?

By John Griffin

What kind of higher education institutions do we want for our children and grandchildren? Is the future a revamped and more decentralized University of Hawai'i or more for-profit ventures like the University of Phoenix, with its growing O'ahu branch?

Questions like that came to mind earlier this month during a two-day conference here with this daunting title: "Universities of the Future: Globalization and Higher Education — Who Governs? For Whom?"

Two dozen national and local scholars and administrators wrestled with such issues under the sponsorship of the World Academy of Art and Science, the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research and the University of Hawai'i's Center for Future Studies. Hawai'i participants included two former UH presidents, Harlan Cleveland and Fujio Matsuda. Interim president David McClain was a first-night speaker.

Eventually, a book should emerge from the proceedings and follow-up papers to make the picture clearer. But for now, these are some of the points I took from the hours of discussion:

• Higher education today offers a mixture of diversity and new directions. For example, "lifelong education" with its lack of time restraints on when one attends is widely predicted. Some ask how it will change today's youth orientation in teaching and in classes that will become more "gray" in makeup.

• Students will also move in and out of higher education rather than attend for fixed amounts of time. Many more are already working. Others seem to be going through what's called "prolonged adolescence," a byproduct of people living longer.

• The old debate between education for serious inquiry and creative thought versus training for jobs is evolving. Think pluralism — small colleges or slimmed down universities for elite liberal arts education; major research institutions; separate professional training or for lower-level job skills; community colleges doing even more; and new blends of all those.

There may be more hybrid "intersect" institutions that blend public and private, profit and nonprofit, and cut across national and international borders where different standards meet.

• The dumbing down or "Wal-Martization" of higher education was noted and sometimes decried. Still, the nationwide University of Phoenix, with its 200,000 students online and in classes, was also cited as an effective model that gives students attentive service, convenient hours and help with job placement, areas in which UH has sometimes fallen short in the past.

• Declining state support for public universities is a problem, including in Hawai'i. It fosters more "academic capitalism" meaning efforts to get federal and private research grants and even promote university business operations. While such enterprises can be admirable and an assist to needed autonomy, some fear they will detract from the teaching functions and emphasis on students.

One joke around the Manoa campus is that UH has gone from being a state-supported institution to state-assisted, to being one that is just located in the state of Hawai'i.

• Various references were made to "outsourcing" university administrations (presumably not to far-off India, but that wasn't clear). Some classes already can be outsourced in that the professor is elsewhere and comes in via televised lectures.

Online classes have been around for years and seem bound to grow. One conference participant referred to the Internet as "the new mind-altering substance" that can replace brick-and-mortar libraries and even lecturers.

And don't just shake your head at those video games our kids play. Soon universities and others will be using more "edugames" to teach classes. The military increasingly uses battlefield simulations to train for the real thing. Why not universities?

• It's possible to worry — in the growing high-tech era when more education is online and off campus — that students will lose the "high touch" social contact that has been a humanizing part of higher education. But for many working students there is already less such campus activity; one expert says it's amazing how much warmth and feeling people get from contacts in the cyber world.

• Governance questions were big with this group, as indicated by the conference title. One visiting expert noted that universities and their administrators "have the power to define what it means to be smart."

But a visiting futurist wrote beforehand: "Now is not the time to be talking about the governance of the university of the future. Now is the time to talk about the relevance of the university to the future."

Others noted a vast difference between how universities are organized (by subjects and disciplines) and the way the rest of society operates (stressing interrelated problems and solutions). They said universities need to train more people to see overall situations rather than pieces of the puzzle.

• Globalism is both with us now and a growing wave of the future. Global implications, problems as well as opportunities, should not be isolated but part of all departments and many classes.

Increased international cooperation among universities is also essential and growing. One example noted at the conference was the "University of the Arctic," an ongoing cooperative venture of institutions in seven far-north countries.

At the same time, the point was made that everything doesn't have to be globalized. For example, maybe scientific literacy is more important for more Americans. Also, while some suggested that other media (television, the Internet) are becoming more important than reading and writing for students today, it was said that English may be a more important subject in California, with its influx of Latinos.

How about Hawai'i in all of the above?

UH-Manoa got a healthy share of criticism as overly bureaucratic, too closed, secretive, weak on recruiting, and beset with structural problems that include fiefdoms that don't talk to each other enough in this age of globalism and interlocking problems.

And yet I also came away with positive feelings about the 10-campus system being in transition. Manoa may and should become more of an elite (Berkeley-like) institution with top-level liberal arts students and research. The medical and law schools could be spun off on their own. Traditional four-year B.A. and B.S. instruction can be spread out to expanded community colleges, as well as West O'ahu and Hilo, which is itself becoming a dynamic hybrid.

Overall, I left the conference with more good feelings than bad ones about the future of U.S. higher education in a world where we face increasing competition and are not "with it" enough. Some first-rate minds are dealing with these issues.

But just as they say war is too vital to be left to the generals alone, so too is all education — from preschool to lifelong advanced learning — too important to be left to educators alone.

Parents today seem more attuned to dealing with preschool-12 issues. Now they need to be more with it in looking at the future of higher education for those children and grandchildren.

John Griffin, a frequent contributor, is a former Advertiser editorial-page editor