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outdated and desperately in need of an updating.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]