Wisconsin Public Television University Place  David Ward Interest in Today's Public Higher Education  March 29, 2012 UP706    cc >> David Ward, who returned to the leadership helm at UW-Madison in July 2011, having previously served in the position between 1993 and 2000. During his last tenure, Chancellor Ward was a champion for reinvigorating the Wisconsin Idea. I believe that he's come back to do it yet again. He's led a variety of conversations and initiatives across this campus about the importance of community and public service. He's had a wide and variety set of experiences around the world in higher education and in public and professional life, and I know I've learned a tremendous amount from him and I'm very grateful that he's taken the time to be here today. [APPLAUSE]  >> David Ward: Well, I'm here by accident, but, nevertheless, I'll be here with conviction. Richard, I'm very happy to see you. We were together in my past life in Washington on a commission. We never agree, sometimes agree, try to agree, fail to agree, but whatever. Let me say that what this is about today as we look at the Wisconsin Idea, and I tend to agree with this kind of polarized reaction to it. 

Either it's a very virtuous inspiration as to what we can do and we can take an early 20th century idea and use it in this century, or it's a little bit outdated and desperately in need of an updating. But what it really does is it talks about how ideas relate to policy and how policy relates to practice. And in that sense, it has a universality. So the content of the idea and the content of the policy and how policy moves to practice can, in fact, vary, but the Wisconsin Idea, when it works well, is when those linkages work well. So you can vary the content, but the fact that ideas can get to practice through policy, it seems to me, has nothing but virtue, and the Wisconsin Idea was really about that. I think that the second issue is the issue of public higher education. And I think that one of the great challenges we're having is the nexus, the consensus, that connected those three items, particularly following World War II when I think there was a deep consensus created, which I think my generation was one of the primary beneficiaries, I think the higher education almost is a public utility. That idea, I think, over the last 30 years has been stressed. The problem, I think, is that the stress has been so gradual that the radical rethinking of what we are as a public utility, or whether we even are a public utility, has occurred so gradually that only now, retrospectively, do we believe something really big happened and that we now need to cope with it. And I think that gradualism and our coping with what the changes were means that the new order that we're trying to confront is one that has been slowly evolving but which now can not be put in reverse. 

In some respects when there is slow change we have what's called a pendulum theory of policy responses. It's so slow that you hope you can always put it back. So the pendulum swings and you can always sort of get back there. The pendulum, I think, that was swinging from, let's say, 1980 to the last three or four years, I think has fallen off its pin. And I don't think the pin is up there anymore for it to be re-hung on either. So I think it is a new social world, a new world in which the reconnecting of ideas, policy, and practice is absolutely imperative. And it may be that this decade is going to be as important to a different future for higher education as that that followed World War II or, indeed, the progressive decade of the year 1900-1910. If you were to think of the history of American higher education, I think those two decades would stand out as having a very special role in who we are. I think, I hope that this decade will also have that virtue. By way of a summary, let's say what was the working assumption that we had that connected ideas, policy, and practice that is broken or that has come unglued. 

And I think it's one that really was connected to several principles. One of them was some deep commitment to access and that access to higher education had public value. Public value in the sense of generating opportunities to mobility, but, also, I think public value in a more narrow utilitarian sense of serving economic interest and, to some degree, even global competitiveness. There was, in fact, in that period a sense of two worlds, the communist world, a democratic world, a democratic capitalist world. So I think there was a great sense of a public virtue. Those virtues varied depending on whether you're right or left. Perhaps a deep commitment to social democracy on the one part, a deep commitment to national competitiveness on the part of others. But there was still a common commitment, the idea that there should be a deep and perhaps majoritarian investment in public higher education for a variety of motives. So I think that's the first issue. The second was that we could, in effect, create high quality, and at the same time raise the access levels from perhaps where they were in the '20s and '30s, perhaps less than a quarter of the conventional age group going to college, to rising to half the population, maybe even two-thirds. 

And so I think the commitment to low cost/high quality was a very deeply held value that was, whether you think of the GI bill, whether you think of the creation of the National Science Foundation, they're all variety of particularly federal measures that try to help the states, in a sense, position themselves with higher education as a profoundly influential public utility. I think there was also and assumption, institutionally, that might have been flawed. Most people would go to a four-year college and that most people would have a residential experience. I think there was a sort of institutional assumption that that was the model, the four-year degree, probably residential, and that that would be the best framework, and the idea of a 2 + 2 kind of liberal arts general education followed by either professional or disciplinary education. And I think there was a sense that that would be the majority effect at a time when, perhaps, a quarter of the age group likely to go to college was actually going to college. I don't think it was a very rich conception of continuous education in the adult sense. I think that's something that had to come somewhat later. I think most of these assumptions have sort of come unglued but very gradually. What began to happen in the '80s, of course, was tuition came under pressure. The idea of low tuition relaxed as people began to think of either need driven tuition with a discount on the base of need. 

There were a variety of issues with respect to loans substituting for grants. And I think there was a feeling that maybe the increasing tuition could let the physical subsidy, the state subsidy perhaps relax a little bit. So without any real debate about what that ratio should be when I turned up at UW Madison in 1960, I think the ratio was 10 to 90. I paid 10%, the state paid 90%. By the time we get into the '80s, it was changing quite radically, and, of course, today I'm quite sure in some states it's maybe the other way around. Pennsylvania, Michigan, it may be the other way around. This state is still, perhaps, like Iowa, Nebraska, Indiana, prep school 50/50 in these contributions. I don't want to be quoted on the numbers, but I'm thinking approximately. And it may vary how you count fees in relation to tuition. But, clearly, the concept of universal low tuition as an entitlement to everybody, and of course there are those who believe the rich should pay high tuition and those who are not so rich have discounted, need-based tuition as well. 

And there may be some social justice model in the back of that. But, clearly, tuition and where tuition fits has been gradually and slowly transformed, and yet, still, after 40 years, we still feel deeply concerned that tuition continues to rise, there's an inescapable public reaction, including the present, saying it cannot go on, we cannot continue to use tuition as the drive of the quality and capacity in higher education. This needs to stop. That won't go away. That argument is now coherently stated. It should have been coherently state perhaps long ago. If you go to western Europe today, you will realize that the opposite to this gradual policy change is going on. It's a very abrupt change. I was in England when an allegedly left of center gentleman, Tony Blair, created tuition in England for the first time. I happened to be educated there as an undergraduate completely free, my generation. 

But, obviously, in the middle of the last decade, he announced tuition. Didn't say, oh, we'll gradually get to American levels, we'll start at 1,000 pounds, 2,000 pounds. He said, no, we'll start at 5,000 pounds. That, at the time it was introduced, was greater than in-state tuition at Wisconsin, when he introduced it. Just like that by an act of Parliament. Suddenly there was now tuition in the British educational system introduced by a left of center party. So the debate in the Parliament was really about the place of tuition, the proportionate place of private and public contribution to what are public and private benefits with respect to higher education. So that debate was a very abrupt, decisive debate, which in this country we never benefited from because it was like water torture, it just happened very, very slowly. And, in fact, they got to the same place by three readings of an act of parliament and a vote which was overwhelmingly voted for by a left of center party. So I think what happened to tuition policy is now a worldwide phenomena. 

The idea of trying to deal with some private contribution to the cost of higher education, and that may be something we don't need to worry about, but how it would be organized is what we really need to worry about. Should it be need-based? Should there be clearly coherent discounts based on income? Should loans be paid back afterward? Should there be no loans given while you go to school, the Australian system where, in fact, there are some sort of tax remedies downstream? So the whole debate that we need about tuition is now on our table. It's now, finally, a serious discussion. And my judgment is very bad for our higher education to be in a position of continuing to play the game, continuing the water torture, of increasing tuition. We should decide what it should be and what is the social policy behind the tuition policies we really have. It now is a policy matter, it's not a contingent matter, that we need to look at. And those changes began to occur, I think, in the 1980s. Why I think it's now a crisis and why we need to look at it more carefully is the sum of state support and tuition is actually declining. The reason there was a bit of a pendulum for 20 or 30 years is the sum of those two actually caused and aggregate rise in the revenues to universities or it fluctuated up and down. But this institution right now, through what has happened over the last four or five years, is actually receiving net losses in the two anchor payments that make a public university public. 

So I think those issues have really redefined the whole tuition debate. And finally, of course if you add loans to this, the fact that loan burdens with respect to people finding jobs which no longer have sort of scenarios of annual increments to salaries that existed in the '80s or '90s create a burden now that needs to be redeemed in some serious way. This is a serious issue about loans. And there are people speculating about loan bubbles in relation to education bubbles as well as housing bubbles. I'm not sure I see the parallel there, but certainly I read journalist who explore those two things. They other thing, of course, that I think changed is the willingness to have every university be, if you like, a comprehensive research university. The other big transformation is the aspiration that may have been there in '45-'55, or even when I arrived here in 1960, that most institutions would look like this. It's pretty clear that mission variability, the idea that some institutions may be exclusively undergraduate, the critical role of two-year community colleges, the idea that may be predominately master's institutions, some overwhelmingly professional schools, in other words, what defines American higher education now is its variability rather than its uniformity. And to some degree what defines the uniqueness of American higher education is highly varied. When the absence of any central ministry of education, what is clear contrast between Europe, Japan, perhaps not so much China, but certainly many advanced nations is the degree of variability of options here. 

And, of course, this will only work if transfer works. And so one of our other deepest problems right now is if we accept the reality of variability of mission and different kinds of access, then it's going to be pretty critical we have a transfer system that genuinely works. That, now, is also a policy issue which is just lying around there but not really seriously confronted. So in some ways there is a new social compact. Not everybody goes to the same place. One hopes that people can move from one kind to another and that tuition is variable and that that variability, hopefully, has some need redemptive structure, but, nevertheless, we all know that sticker price has powerful, psychological effects on whether people feel that college is accessible. But, moreover, is the continued growth of tuition plausible and is it plausible that you can go to the state and say this is it, we cannot put tuition a penny more, this has really reached a social point where it's no longer valued as something which ought to be public, and, yet, we also know that, in fact, tuition is not only a nationally fiscal policy, it's an aspect of tax reduction. It really has nothing to do with any concept of what the public nature of higher education is. So, I think we have a different debate going on. It's a remarkably different debate, and the Wisconsin Idea, therefore, needs to figure out what do we mean by the idea, what do we mean by the policies, and what kind of practices will come out of it. 

We can substitute very different ideas into that, but in it, I think, the stress if you put tuition in there, what ideas do we have about tuition, what ideas do we have about mission and mission variability, if we put those in there and we move to policy, move to practice, we have not really made a lot of progress. We've got to really confront those issues. I think, at the present time, the problem in higher education is what to do. If we have the self-caution to believe that pushing tuition, which we could in a place like this, we could push it, the marketplace out there would accept it. The question is, is it socially redemptive to do that? How far are we prepared to do that? We could probably do it in secondary ways by what we call selective tuition. Maybe there are programs in which you can charge different levels of tuition. Maybe there are continuous education professional programs, which have a more market-driven concept. But when we look at an 18-year-old entering the University of Wisconsin system or this institution, we simply have to pause to evaluate what is the tuition that's appropriate for that cohort. And are we, in fact, prepared to say we believe in demographic injustice. That my granddaughter will not be treated, in any way, remotely like I was treated a generation and a half or two generations ago. 

So I think there is a very interesting set of issues around tuition. And if, therefore, we try to create public values which would suggest that tuition be at least moderate, if we are involved, what then do we do about a public policy which, in fact, treats tuition as an aspect of fiscal policy, and, therefore, the state subsidy cannot offset the restraint with tuition. That is the great crisis that every major public higher education system is now facing. My answer to that is maybe we have to look at ourselves. We may be the source of those public values. They may not be out there in the political ether on either side of the aisle. And, therefore, the question we might have to ask is, what do we want to do to our own institution that can, in fact, reconstruct what might be called some sort of public set of values? I think we are at the limit of what we might call the fiscal and quality capacities of mass higher education. Both of them are being stressed. Mass higher education in terms of what you might call standardized quality measures. And, in terms of the fiscal quality, I don't see any way to put together tuition and state support that can sustain the capacity and quality that we've been used to. 

So we have a very serious problem. So we're creating capacity limits, we're creating access restraint, and we have base resources that probably threaten the leverage impact of those resources. On this campus for every one dollar we get from tuition in state support, two dollars come from the federal government or philanthropy. And so if you squeeze the core base resources of tuition and state support, I can assure you there will be effects on the leverage effect. The capacity to get the federal grants, the capacity to persuade philanthropy that they are really paying for the margin of excellence, not the core budget, will, in fact, be impaired. So that public/private or that state/federal balance is also being unpacked as well. So we have a third problem. That is this private/public federal/state balance. The fact that without Pell Grants it's inconceivable we would have access levels. So the federal government, in the end, has been the underpinning of any concept of public higher education, much more so than have the states. 

So the question is, what can we do to try to extricate ourselves from here? And this is what I have to confess. I'm not a scholar of higher education. I'm a practitioner. So, in a way, I try to give a few seminars and workshops about my reflections after being president of ACE and participating in the federal policy environment, which in some sense is so much more favorable than the state policy environment. But as I gave these talks and suggested that only by the overt reform of ourselves, only by reforming ourselves will we, in effect, be able to regain public investment or any degree of confidence that tuition is worth it, that that's the key. When I start raising those issues, I got a lot of questions from the audience, usually faculty, occasionally students. They would say, well, David, you did once run a university and you're now telling us that universities need to change quite radically because the two other anchors are now so vulnerable, why didn't you do it then? Well, I never knew I was going to be back able to run. So you've got to put up with me now. I feel morally compromised by most of the things that I did in the last eight years, and I really do have to kind of crimp myself and the community with what I have in mind here. So I think it's ourselves, and I think without a major reform of ourselves in the broadest possible way, can we, I think, reengage a public policy dialogue. 

Without that occurring first, the public policy dialogue, the role of families, parents, and students with respect to tuition, we have to think about do we look like what we should look like, are we providing the value we should be providing, and do we look like we, ourselves, have public values that matter to those who are client, students, and whatever. So I believe that's why I started the dialogue about educational innovation. We are, in fact, not a change-driven culture. Individually, we're change-driven, but, collectively, organically, we're not a change-driven culture. When you think of the technological sophistication in terms of intellect, in terms of practice that comes out of a university, the application to ourselves is still very modest. It seems to me that we have enough empirical research on how we can change ourselves, both with respect to outcomes and capacity, that is we could take more students and do a better job if we would could conceive of, I think, different ways of coping rather than what I would describe as a face-to-face classroom of about 25 people. Once a classroom is more than 30 people, it strikes me, we can do things so differently and preserve the face-to-face in some other way than through the classroom. So I think that the possibilities I say sound ugly because we all like to believe we're so humanistically centered sensitive that technology is just ugly. I want to assure you, I think there are human components and potentiality of technology that we have simply not explored. So that's why we started, I think, the idea that unless we look like we are changing ourselves for the purposes not just of effectiveness but really of capacity, understanding how we can handle more students, and also, I think, having better outcomes. 

And the better outcomes, of course, are designed not for the best students. Where the great breakthroughs of blending learning come, do not come with A students. Precocious students, you can stand on your head, you can ignore them, they're still going to get an A. The real issue is what happens to the C and D students, and how do they make gains. And that's the problem with all the STEM dilemma. The STEM dilemma is trying to resolve it assuming everybody is in the top 10% of the class. We already have them. The question is, how do we get better outcomes of those who are in the top half of the class? That's the challenge. And I don't know that we have a pedagogy in the sciences that is really superbly designed to deal with that, and I believe technology with imagination can do something about that. The second area is transdisciplinarity. 

We're organized as if, really, we're created about 1905. We've added computer science, linguistics, a few other things, but we look like a combination of 18th and 19th century subjects, with little progressivism thrown in. I'm a geographer. It's an 18th century discipline of perspective. Botany and zoology, they're wonderful 19th century subjects. So I think the 20th century was the kind of subdisciplinary century. It took already well-defined disciplines and defined it further. I think the challenge of the 21st century is how to rearticulate larger arenas of intellectual discourse. We do that in research, I think, superbly. But does our curriculum, do our departments in any way resemble the ontology of a 21st century world? No. 

Why is it so hard to do? I don't know. Now, we do have things, environmental studies, international studies, women's studies. I'm not sure that's what it is. The great breakthroughs may be media studies, may be genetics. There are all sorts of areas beyond those what are often thought of as sexy interdisciplinarity. Transdisciplinarity is everything, not just certain areas that were underrepresented in the old disciplines. It's the old disciplines being reconfigured. So that's the second area. A third area would be the issue of customization of the learning experience. One of the challenges is, two of them are a challenge. 

One is, I think, the idea that there is an age relationship to performance. I still remember being 17 years old in England and being expected to read "Paradise Lost" and understand it. It was very challenging for me. I thought I was pretty dumb. I could use the calculus example too, but I'm using the English one instead. And at 24 I went to an adult education class because I thought I was getting too boring as a demographer and social scientist. We read "Paradise Lost" and I understood it. Was I dumb at 17 and smart at 24? In other words, we're assuming that everybody the same age is at the same point. And it seems to me that when you have mass higher education rather than meritocratic narrowly defined education, you're dealing with variable cognition, variable brain development, and in fact it might be this, some sort of customized learning might be important, the self-paced learning. Everybody argues that if you teach calculus with self-paces learning, 5% of the class will finish in one week, and you tell them to buzz off. 

Most of the class, because it's the exercising, it's like piano playing, it's the exercising that's the key, not just the communication of the ideas. Self-paced learning allows that to happen. I think we can do a lot better with customized education, and, in fact, make a lot of progress. Also, it means just in time. Maybe what you do is you have a --. It's over here, isn't it? It's where you go any time and you have your assistants or your professors wander around for three hours tapping people on the shoulders while they're in fact doing this. Most of the content doesn't get delivered this way. It gets delivered remotely or digitally. The other issue is our high reliance on process to control quality. If you try to do change in a university, I assure you the legal fabric is so elaborately designed to preserve quality you can't get anything done to change it. 

We have a regulatory structure that makes actually makes the state look like freedom incarnate. We, ourselves, have regulatory structures that are staggering. When you try to change them, it's quite difficult because you're immediately attack as undermining quality because they're apparently where the quality comes from. It didn't come from me. I'm a professor who has an illusion I might have a little quality, but if I want a new course, it's actually quite difficult, particularly if it's an experimental new course. But that will dilute quality. So we use the argument of quality to, in effect, make it quite difficult to do change, particularly change which does not have credit hours, does not have you taking the class twice a week at 11:00, and which has a conventional face-to-audience look. That's what all our regulations are about. They're not about some alternative pedagogy. These are virtues and limitations that we have. 

And, finally, we may be the last outlier of the independent contractor or petty bourgeoisie culture. Here we are, we have lots of sociologists describing other parts of the world, but we are, in effect, ourselves a parody of minimal individualism. Much of what we do is very driven by and individual relationship to the institution. I do two courses and two courses, provide the art book, that's my obligation. Now, I know most of us are richer than that. I'm sure all of you are. That's not the limit of what you do. But what's the broader ownership of the mission of the institution? You probably own, your disciplinary society probably more important to you than the mission of the institution. So I think that we, ourselves, are structured with not a strong sense of teamship or with a strong sense of what I would call curricular ownership in a group sense. I think there are many great exceptions to this on this campus, but if you look at it as a whole, if you wanted to change a curriculum, it would be change-driven either in small groups or as individuals. 

It would be very hard to conceive of changing it in a more organic way. So, those are just a few examples of where I think we have the imagination to rethink what we're about culturally, technically, pedagogically, and I think just in terms of some of our own values. So if we to be public higher education and we want it to be public, we, ourselves, have to decide in what way are we public first because I assure you, the current state of politics will not declare what's public, and I assure you the debate about tuition will continue to be a debate about substituting tuition for public investment. So unless we take the triangle, I understand the triangle, that's the way we have to go. And that's why I, you know, only have two years, but people can be really angry at me, and maybe there's a need of this, because in my view, I'm not sure this is the only answer. It's one I'm just putting on the table because I think unless we reform ourselves and are more reflective about who we are, we're hypocritical in complaining that there is something out there that is public that the public's not doing. So I think it's up to us, and that's the message of my two years, you'll get fed up with hearing it, is that if we can reinvent ourselves and define what we believe to be our public values, I think we can start addressing tuition, we can start even pleading for public reinvestment, but it seems to me we will have to look different as an institution before we renegotiate with the "public" for renewed public investment. So, my exhortation is I understand public higher education in 1945 was a brilliant, wonderful idea. I think the nexus that drove that has become unpacked. I think that using the framework of the Wisconsin Idea or even the framework of "the public" or the commons, I think if that's where we are right now and we want to do something, we reverse it. 

We go to practice first, and we go from practice to policy, and from policy I think we can then start, without any piety, saying we have rediscovered what the public is, and here is what it is, because what public means right now cannot be put into practice. It's too vulnerable, it's too impoverished, and it's too 1945. I want to declare this is the year of 2012. Thanks very much. [APPLAUSE]    across this campus about the