Address delivered to the Duke Faculty of Arts and Sciences Council, January 1995
In order to further the educational purposes of this institution, in December the Duke Trustees approved the recommendations of President Keohane on the reorganization of undergraduate residential life. It is now appropriate for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to address the educational issues associated with the belief, much discussed last Fall, that there should be changes in the ways Duke undergraduate students engage the educational enterprise.
Unlike many others in higher education these days, I am confident that I have a real inability to predict the future. Indeed, I have clear recall of that time in late spring of 1970 when I persuaded myself to buy stock in Penn Central on the grounds that "What is the downside risk with such a low stock price: if it goes bankrupt, the University of Pennsylvania will lose a hefty chunk of its endowment." It did, and they did, and I have never since believed that personally I could, as Keynes once remarked, "outwit the dark forces of time and ignorance." Keynes however observed that, in trying to predict the future, we often fall back on a convention, namely that others are going through the same exercise, so that we often solve our decision problem by trying to do what others are doing. Thus in the present case, we are alert to many discussions at other institutions about CHALLENGES FACING THE FACULTY, discussions based on views of alternative futures of higher education, for there is as well a thriving cottage industry producing descriptions of alternative futures.
I recently participated in a panel discussion, before the Arts and Sciences Faculty Council, on "Issues Associated with Interdisciplinary Programs". To set the stage for my remarks I had circulated a provocative paper by Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania titled "To Dance with Change". That paper, originally distributed by the Pew Foundation Higher Education Roundtable, had been useful to me earlier in speaking with department chairs in a set of meetings on the changing nature of the faculty's role in undergraduate education.
The basis for Zemsky's argument is "simple and to the point: no institution will emerge unscathed from its confrontation with an external environment that is substantially altered and in many ways more hostile to colleges and universities." This external environment is not well understood by colleges and universities. It reflects an increased vocational interest by the consumers of higher education: "Parents now ask institutions with growing bluntness 'what exactly are we paying for?' and they measure the quality of higher education in terms of their children's ability to garner secure and well-paying jobs." Additionally the technological revolution, technically well-understood within the institutions of higher education, has not produced the understanding that "This set of technologies is altering the market for even the most traditional goods and services, creating not only new products but new markets and, just as importantly, new providers. . . . The specter of new, well-financed competition, armed with the means of producing alternative learning programs, looms ever larger in higher education's future." And finally, we now live in a world, and this is a world not just an American phenomenon, in which "there is less inclination to trust government to establish public services or define public priorities." For as "markets supplant institutions as the primary means for serving public needs," public institutions of higher education, as well as private colleges and universities increasingly must face market tests of effectiveness.
Zemsky argues that associated with these external forces there is an anger, and this anger is in large measure directed at the faculties of institutions of higher education. Increasingly those responsible for public policy describe higher education's faculty as a self-perpetuating oligarchy openly disdainful of the opinions of others.
The challenge, in Zemsky's view, and in the view of the hundreds of other Pew Roundtable participants, is that "When changing markets and shifting political attitudes are cast as external threats, most of higher education has responded not with a sense of urgency but with the impulse to resist, to counter the need for change, to stand on the prerogative of process." The point is clear. Colleges and universities resist change. But they must change. And Zemsky concludes: "What is required now is purposeful consideration of the alterations an institution can imagine itself making, as well as a real discussion of the consequences of not changing at all. To convene such a conversation is to dance with change, to enter into relation with a future not yet fully imagined."
In a talk which echoes many of Zemsky's themes, William M. Plater, in "Future Work: Faculty Time in the 21st Century," presented the keynote address to the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education late in 1994. Plater, Dean of the Faculties at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, argued that his own experiences "cover the entire range of the institutions represented [at the conference] from open admissions undergraduate institutions to the most research-intensive, graduate universities in the nation." He began his paper by submitting that such large universities as his own are "mirrors of the expectations and demands being placed on all of American post secondary education. They can be used by the 3500 colleges and universities in this country as a barometer of social change. We have entered a season of change that--in my view--is at least as great as that which swept post-war America in the 1950s and 60s when we accommodated both scientific development through federally sponsored research and unprecedented public access. In truth, I think the coming change will be much greater... and much faster." In an exercise similar to Zemsky's, Plater identifies six major forces pushing universities toward change.
One: Constituent based education requires that "the concept of placing students and their learning needs ahead of faculty preferences will have a profound impact on everything we do now."
Two: New technologies mean that "there is no longer a single or standard way to learn. Hyper-learning opens a vast array of possible interactions between teachers and learners."
Three: Given the importance of multi disciplinary and interdisciplinary problems, "While we may find it convenient to retain departments and disciplines in order to have stability and structure in the academy, we almost certainly do not need a curriculum defined around faculty specializations of interest that have ossified into departments."
Four: We need to be accountable not only for how we (faculty) spend our time, but we "must also demonstrate the results of our time on task as a direct measure of our having met our institution's mission."
Five: As resources become more scarce, "universities and colleges must become more effective managers of resources and redeploy faculty and staff time to meet needs more efficiently at a higher level of quality."
Six: And finally, "We once assumed that high school graduates entered our institutions in an essentially homogeneous group (reinforced by admissions criteria) and that all matriculants fell within a normative range of skills, aptitudes, motivation, and preparation." But since this is no longer the case, as increased access to higher education brings more applicants of varied backgrounds and perspectives, the faculty must learn "wholly new approaches to managing increased individualization in student learning."
The Zemsky and Plater articles represent the thinking of observers of the American higher education scene in the mid 1990s. Though it seems to assert a radical perspective, it has become the conventional wisdom among university administrators. At the risk, then, of identifying myself as a reactionary at worst, or an anachronism at best, I would like to suggest that this discourse makes only limited contact with the experiences, and missions, of the elite private research universities in general, and with the challenges faced by Duke University in particular.
Let me indicate some biases at this point, or prejudices if you prefer: they may help set out why I am profoundly suspicious of arguments like Zemsky's and Plater's. First, I believe that tomorrow will be pretty much like today, in the specific sense that the social/institutional changes about which we can meaningfully forecast and speak are very minor indeed: that there were no social science predictions of the collapse of the communist world should give one at least some pause at educators' predictions of the collapse of the system of higher education as we know it. And second, nearly every action that we take to modify our university to solve one problem we think we understand will have unintended consequences which we probably do not desire: Giving every student an e-mail account has set in motion not only equipment and personnel changes, but changes in how often faculty appear in their offices in "office hours," consequences not even techno-groupies foresaw.
The modern research university has been around for about fifty years, and the distinguished private research universities, and I certainly count Duke among them, have played an important role in 20th Century America. These institutions are wealthy, attractive, and tightly woven into the structures of American society. The rhetoric which constructs the distinguished research university assumes that it is a site for the production of knowledge, and as progress itself has been understood, in this century, to be associated with "an increase in knowledge," the research university is the primary engine of this country's progress. That the research university has a role, indeed a social imperative, to disseminate that new knowledge is not in question--members of a scholarly subcommunity continuously construct that community through discussion, writing, argument, and the sharing of ideas. Nevertheless, its primary function is to produce or construct knowledge. The primary task of higher education is, however, instruction: The dissemination of knowledge to the young is generally believed to be the primary function of American colleges and universities. Let us not be shy to recognize this. Within our state, the role of Guilford College differs from that of Appalachian State University, and both differ from that of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And so, too, do those institutions have a role different from that of Duke University. I submit that the Pew Roundtable/Zemsky discussion of the universe of colleges and universities too little reflects diverse roles and histories of those institutions, and ultimately fails to accept the "differentness" of the private research university.
We can identify this set of confusions a bit better in our recent Duke semester. As part of Duke's recent discussions about residential life, and intellectual life, we heard arguments which suggested that our efforts with residential and co-curricular life should really center on the idea of reforming undergraduate education. Many suggested that we should support this effort by funding the process of forging intellectual relationships, not just by funding individual people or projects, but by funding programs for sharing ideas about pedagogy, as in the Pew Roundtable discussions. It was argued by some that there should be funding for reciprocal initiatives: We heard that students and teachers learn from each other, and we should develop programs especially to understand the ways, aspirations, needs, and deep yearnings of the current generation of learners. And we heard that there should be funding for assessment activities, so that we could have information about our students: Who they really are, what we are presently doing with them, and how well the education they are receiving is actually working. In brief, we heard the call to begin designing a curriculum by understanding our students, who they are, what their expectations are, and what they need to function well in society.
I wonder how many members of the Duke faculty would share this notion of intellectual life of Duke students? As I noted in an earlier discussion with the Arts and Sciences Council, over a number of years the increased demands on members of the faculty to sustain themselves in a research university have resulted in increased faculty time spent on research, sponsored research, and graduate education. It is no secret that over the last decade or so the number of graduate students in Arts and Sciences programs has increased dramatically. The increase, on the order of 25 to 50 percent in various disciplines, and the concomitant drain on faculty time as graduate students are tremendously time intensive to educate and mentor, have meant there is simply less time for faculty to spend on undergraduate education. I remind you that I am an economist who in his heart agrees with Adam Smith's (18th-century) observation that progress occurs in association with specialization and the division of labor. I also in my heart accept the idea of comparative advantage, presented to us by the early 19th-century economist David Ricardo. Putting Smith and Ricardo together means that just because I can advise students well, maybe even better than an assistant dean, does not necessarily mean that it is a wise use of my time to do so. And while I may have interesting things to say about how undergraduate residential life might be regulated and developed, it may not be a particularly sensible use of my time to spend the many hours in the dormitories to learn and understand the nuances and intricacies of our idiosyncratic housing program. And if it is true for me, it is true for others on the faculty.
You hear my ambivalence here. On the one hand, I am concerned about the faculty's loss of authority, both moral authority and intellectual authority, over all areas of undergraduate education and undergraduate life. This is the Will Willimon side of me. On the other hand, I am concerned that many of the individuals who, like the Dean of the Chapel, see the faculty's lack of involvement with residential life as avoidable and the result of laziness and lack of interest in education are either uninformed about, or hostile to, the nature of the modern research university. The idea that those of my colleagues in the Department of Economics who are running large numbers of grants, and students, and post docs, and are producing work of the very highest quality in several different areas, can go and hang out at a coffee shop at 10 a.m., or sit around with a group of undergraduates in a dormitory commons room at 9:00 p.m. is unrealistic. These are individuals who struggle to see their own families and who have many other claims on them including claims their classroom students make upon them to grade papers in a timely fashion, to write letters of reference, etc. The good idea that they might go off to Raleigh to see a play with a group of undergraduates meets the reality that they are more likely to be cooking dinner for their working spouse and Rainbow-soccered children.
I insist that the demands on members of the Duke Arts and Sciences faculty are qualitatively and quantitatively different from the demands made on the faculty of small liberal arts colleges. As a graduate of one of those small distinguished liberal arts colleges, I personally felt the faculty's interest in me to be excessive and intrusive, but that may be an idiosyncratic view. Nevertheless, my concerns about the faculty's role in undergraduate life and my profound suspicion of calls for a research faculty to behave more like the faculty of private liberal arts colleges may be rooted in personal history.
In the full stage production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, the opening scene involves the stage manager and his presentation of the salient characteristics of Grover's Corners. After giving some of the current profile of the town and its people, he introduces a professor to give some of the history of the area. The professor immediately begins with a geological history in a very dull monotone, rising to pitches of enthusiasm about points of arcana in the strata. After about 20 seconds of this, the stage manager hustles the professor off stage. You should know that as a high school junior, in a very large suburban high school, there was no question but that I would play, and in fact was chosen to play, the role of that professor.
For I had not realized until I was probably around 7 or 8 years old that not everybody had a Ph.D. My father was a professor. Our family socialized with other faculty members. My father's brother was a professor. My mother had two aunts and two uncles who were professors, one of whom even founded a university and became its first president. I didn't have a chance. I grew up as a "faculty brat" at a major private research university. I know the kind of place that Duke is, for I have lived in such a place for my whole life. I believe that my deep and abiding affection for the American research university is rooted in an understanding of its history and development. I think I have developed a good understanding, a practical understanding, of the nature and role and development of intellectual communities of scholars. And this has shaped my own professional work in recent years. My last three books have all, in one way or another, been concerned with the ways in which a scholarly subcommunity interacts with other such subcommunities, takes in and redescribes ideas, uses language to argue and stabilize knowledge claims, and transforms ideas through use and craft. I don't believe that scholars are better human beings than nonscholars, nor do I believe that the reflective life is better than other lives. But I do believe that a society in which there are no scholars and scholarly communities is a dead society, and that a society which denigrates scholarship, research, thinking new thoughts, and individuals who engage in these tasks is an impoverished one. These are value judgements, and they are judgements I am willing to defend.
Research universities are the physical site of these scholarly communities. And unlike undergraduate colleges, whose mission is to educate and instruct 18 to 22 year olds about the ideas, interests and concerns of community of educated men and women, within a research university, the scholarly community can get along without undergraduates. I say that not to be provocative, but simply to point out the obvious. And I do hope I am not misunderstood here. For to say that we "can" get along in this fashion is not to say that we "should" get along in this fashion, a point to which I will return in a moment. Nevertheless the work of the community of scholars in my own subdiscipline, and that of every other subdiscipline of which I am aware, can be carried on independently of the presence of 18 to 22 year olds. This is different from the undergraduate college, for the work of a teacher of 18 to 22 year olds, a member of the faculty of a liberal arts college, cannot occur without 18 to 22 year olds. This is by no means to say that scholars are hostile or contemptuous of undergraduate students, for they are not so. Moreover, as I shall suggest presently, the scholar's enterprise can involve undergraduates in ways we have only begun to understand. In any event, as scholars we have made a bargain with society: we teach society's children, our undergraduates, and thus connect them to our lives. We teach, and we show students, about the work and concerns of groups of scholars, out of our belief that students need, as a member of society, to value individuals who take ideas seriously even if they, themselves, will not necessarily spend their lives in contemplative scholarly pursuit. Our vision of that society is that it is healthier, livelier, and more robust because of the presence of scholars, of human beings who specialize in the creation and construction of new knowledge.
That is the reason why, in listening to student discussions like those last Fall, I was baffled by the phrase "to build community of faculty and student." Community must reflect a concordance of interests. The students form a community, or several communities. The faculty form one or several communities. That students and faculty might be engaged jointly in various enterprises is not what is at issue. The problem is in the idea that students and teachers learn equally from each other. There is in my view a deep asymmetry between what faculty learn from students and what students learn from faculty, and that asymmetry is reflected in our separate words "teacher" and "student." As human beings, we are of course "all in it together," but we are members of a scholarly community, and they are not yet so, even were they to become so. For were they full and mature members of a scholarly community, they would not be undergraduates.
You can see, then, wherein my ambivalence about discussions at Duke University on residential and intellectual life is rooted. There is a real tension between the needs and aspirations and interests of undergraduate students (and often their parents) and the nature of a research university faculty: Student expectations of what they are about to gain by leaving home (while not yet having to take a place in the world of adult work) confront the realities of the interests and strengths and concerns of a community of scholars. And just as the students' questions and concerns can often be reduced to "why can't the faculty be more interested in us?", the concerns of the faculty with respect to undergraduate students can often be reduced to "why can't these students be more like us?"
The tension between instruction, meaning usually undergraduate instruction, and research or scholarly activity associated with knowledge production is a rather old problem. It certainly existed in 14th-century England as the scholars found the unruly, drunken, duel-and-fornication prone young men at Oxford and Cambridge to require tutor-babysitters, whence developed the system of residential colleges. If we go back to the 19th century discussions at Oxford and Cambridge, we see the resistance to the scholarly German university on the part of the colleges, but the rise of laboratories like the Cavendish made such tensions, and the importance of the colleges, abate. Hutchins at Chicago, much earlier this century, tried to develop a college faculty within the research university, as did Butler at Columbia. The problem of college within university was at the heart of William James's recognition of the "Ph.D. octopus" which was, in his view, beginning to strangle Harvard around 1900. We have been having this conversation about the conflict between college and university for over a century now, to not much profit.
What we have at Duke is a particular set of resolutions to the essential tension between the activity of mature scholars engaged in their own scholarly communities and instruction of the young. Our own particular resolution, which like all social arrangements is always being renegotiated more or less enthusiastically, has a number of features which make us, we usually assert, distinctive.
Our 1993 Arts and Sciences planning document, Shaping a New Agenda, had an executive summary which asserted that the actual strength of the undergraduate programs provided by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is based on three fundamental features of the educational environment, which collectively give meaning to the student and alumni call to "Let Duke be Duke." First, with an overall student:faculty ratio of 9:1, classes are often small, usually are taught by senior faculty, and often are responsive to individual student and faculty initiatives: This distinguishes Duke from the great public universities like Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Second, because the instruction is carried out in a research university, students are often taught by the scholars whose work defines the intellectual landscape: This distinguishes Duke from the elite private coeducational liberal arts colleges like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, and Oberlin. Third, undergraduates are a larger fraction of the total student population than is true at most private research universities, thus their instruction is a larger concern within the university community: This distinguishes Duke from Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Stanford. We are unlike Dartmouth in that we have a full array of doctoral programs, and we differ from Princeton because we have distinguished professional schools of medicine, divinity, law, and business. Those schools define Duke University as a comprehensive educational entity in which the boundaries between professional school, graduate school, and undergraduate school can be blurred to the mutual enhancement of each and all.
Zemksy came to Duke in November to give a talk and presentation on the basis of the Pew Roundtable's continuing discussions on the changing role of faculty members. His talk at the luncheon began as he looked around the room at the collection of provosts and vice provosts and vice presidents and deans and associate deans and assistant deans. His opening was "Where are the faculty? Why aren't the faculty involved in these discussions?"
I would like to suggest that while Duke faculty have been involved in such discussions, the Arts and Sciences faculty discussions have not dealt with these issues. It is not generally known among us that the Fuqua School of Business has reworked its curriculum and is engaged in redesigning the way it thinks of teaching and learning. Dean Gann and the Duke Law School are taking internationalization seriously in a way that is reshaping their sense of what a law school education must be. And the Medical School is caught up in a process of change in which the nature of health care itself is open for redefinition. I submit that though we may recognize the changes that press upon our university, we operate under the assumption that that external press can be domesticated and reshaped by the essential goodness of our enterprise: When Godzilla meets the rhetoric of academic excellence, the ape will emerge with a sheepskin.
Thus while as a research university we are indeed facing the challenges that our changed external environment has created, as an undergraduate instructional enterprise we have not been so responsive. As scholars and teacher/mentors of graduate students, many of us have embraced change: we literally work differently, and spend our time differently from times past. As teachers of undergraduates we have tried to improve our old courses, and have sought new courses to teach. But we have not changed our idea that we teach, by ourselves, something we call a course to a fixed set of students for a fixed period of time.
Presently, the Dean of Trinity College and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences work cooperatively to sustain a first-year curriculum, a general education curriculum, a major curriculum and a graduate curriculum. Within the research university, the imperatives of the research enterprise help define the graduate curriculum, which has increasingly defined the major curriculum. The general education curriculum has likewise increasingly been shaped by the competing needs of major curricula. Finding faculty willing to commit to the college curriculum of first-year seminars, Focus Program courses, etc. represents a challenge. Though we would not wish to create an identifiable Trinity College faculty distinct from the graduate faculty of Arts and Sciences, we have some individuals on the faculty who clearly specialize in undergraduate instruction. Some of these faculty argue that they have been penalized in their careers for spending so much time with undergraduates relative to graduate students and research. Whether or not that is true we can, however, suggest that these faculty members have themselves revealed a preference, through their choices, for one activity over the other. We need not inquire into the basis of the preference, but simply note its presence.
The Arts and Sciences faculty likes to teach undergraduates. One of the most interesting experiences one can have at this university is to read straight through the Teacher-Course Evaluation book. In it, you will find comment after comment about how a class with "Professor X changed my life" or that "No Duke student should miss the opportunity to take a class with Professor Y." You read comment after comment with the words "energy", "enthusiasm", "joy of teaching," "loved to relate everything to her subject," "always eager to let the discussion carry over after class," etc. The enthusiasm of adults, passionate about their scholarly life-work, is what we scholars can offer here at Duke.
Nevertheless the framework we have accepted for thinking about, and talking about, undergraduate teaching at Duke is modeled on successful educational processes at the small liberal arts colleges. I agree that those processes can be adopted at Duke with excellent results, but such an undergraduate education is not distinguishable from what others can do just as well elsewhere. I submit that we should not spend as much time as we do rethinking undergraduate matters along these lines. In my view, the answer is not only, or simply, more FOCUS Programs, more First Year Seminars, and more coffeehouses but rather more connection to the research activities of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. By extension, our undergraduates should be more fully connected to the extraordinarily talented faculty in Duke University's professional schools. Those scholars and teachers should be involved in our instructional programs, just as we seek more connection between our scholarly lives and our undergraduates' programs. It also suggests that more resources should be devoted to involve professional school faculty in Trinity College programs, for this too takes real advantage of the distinctive nature of Duke as a research site. Undergraduates may not be full members of the scholar's community. But as apprentices to the craft, they should be important to us even if they should choose not to practice the craft. This point of view suggests we move to more independent study, more honors theses, more laboratory internships, more undergraduates serving as teaching assistants, more writing, fewer examinations, more cooperative work in classes, and more peer-evaluation.
This is not to say that we should provide undergraduate programs in which all students must "resemble" the research faculty. Rather, this model suggests that when undergraduate programmatic support is sought, or when resources are needed for undergraduate programs, our first thought should be to encourage those programs in which the faculty can legitimately participate out of their interests and competencies.
Thus put one way, my argument suggests that in reconstructing undergraduate education at Duke, we should not start with the student, and develop a faculty to meet the needs of those identifiable students. Instead we should begin with the exemplary Arts and Sciences faculty, and the other faculties of this university, and construct programs and opportunities for undergraduates to take advantage of what we do best. Put another way, I suggest that the Arts and Sciences faculty move away from measuring our undergraduate programs on collegiate rulers.
In short, our goal should be a Trinity College undergraduate program which is as coherent and as intelligent and as lively as our Arts and Sciences faculty. It is now an auspicious time to begin thinking, and talking, about how to do it.