Washington, D.C.
October 16-18, 1996

Redefining Higher Education

Program Session I: Question and Answer Session

PRESIDENT CLINE: We have some time for questions. Are there some questions that anyone would like to direct to Ms. Brown or Dr. Chodorow?

MR. SHIPMAN (University of Oregon): This question is for Ms. Brown. Several times you mentioned that Canadian institutions have a great deal of imported scholarly material. What issues for scholarship stem from this?

MS. BROWN: One of the key issues is price, because so much of the material is offshore material and also because the Canadian dollar is so devalued. It is very expensive for us. The second issue is the transformation to and the move towards electronic media, to a point where Canada may decide that all of its journals should become electronic. Because our own journals comprise such a small proportion of the material that we use, the impact of that on us and on our libraries would be minimal.

MS. MOORE: I will add that the statistics indicate that Canada has about three percent of the scientists in the world, and produce about four percent of scientific literature, which, by some standards, is very productive. On the other hand, it does not control very much. It doesn't seem like we can have very much effect, but I think we are coming to the conclusion that we can do things.

MR. BILLINGS (University of Texas): I have been looking at some of our discussions about the digital model. We are talking about a situation that is becoming less and less location-dependent, and a situation in which we have more and more of a continuum of learning. If we look at the spectrum of K-12, college, and life-long learning, perhaps one of the questions we ought to be asking is if we will be looking at a completely different model for the delivery of education. Are we looking at the dissolution of boundaries between universities and high schools, K-12?

DR. CHODOROW: I have given those kind of questions an enormous amount of thought, and they scare me to death.

The form of the university, which is now eight centuries old, is dependent in very large measure on the means of communication. Those means have not changed since the early Middle Ages, but the change that is taking place now will challenge that form. This change will be incomplete for 50 to 100 years, but it threatens a form of communication that I love deeply.

This is a revolution that endangers our fundamental forms of communication. There are so many things in it that are problematic -- the whole structure of our curriculum; the distinctions that we make between elementary, intermediate, and advanced learning; and the distinctions between undergraduate, graduate, and faculty, in terms of participation in the conversation that leads to the making of new knowledge.

This past week, I saw a Latin version of a Medieval Jewish text and commentary. A church censor had gotten to it and had scratched out passages in which the Hebrew author had said that Jesus was not the Messiah. This is a classical piece of censorship. We have other copies of that particular publication, so we can fill in those blanks where ink was used to scratch out the words right through the page. But what happens in the electronic environment when somebody does that? And what if it is an undergraduate who is, essentially, trying to be funny?

This is a real challenge, and we will have to be very quick on our feet. It certainly is not the way it has been in the past.

It is clear from the implications here that the AUCC project in Canada is starting from an assumption that information is a public good. This new environment is rapidly eroding our ability to protect that idea. The universities, and scholarship in general, are absolutely dependent upon it.

We cannot afford to buy everything we need, and so that is what is happening. It is a critically important aspect of what is also happening here in the United States.

MS. BREIVIK (Wayne State University): Both of you commented on the excitement of students being able to get closer to the cutting-edge thinking of scholars in the field. This idea of a guild of knowledge producers runs into conflict with a speaker we will hear later this afternoon. In terms of paying more attention to undergraduates, we must have faculty thinking more about their commitments to their institutions.

Truthfully, other than some doctoral students and perhaps a few master's students, how many students are going to want to be part of that cutting-edge dialogue? I am not sure that what you consider so wonderful for faculty is really good for our institutions, particularly in undergraduate education. I would appreciate some further comments on that.

MS. BROWN: The AUCC had a full day's session on the undergraduate experience, looking at the myths and realities of what is and isn't changing in the Canadian undergraduate experience.

Two of the issues that we discussed are very relevant here. One was the myth of distance education. Is this the future? Although the Canadian system differs from the one in the United States, most scholars now believe that there will not be more students taking university courses at a distance than those taking them on a campus.

Both we and STATS Canada surveyed the attitudes of undergraduates and high school students and their expectations about how they will be taught in the future. It is astounding. They do not expect to have to go somewhere geographically to take a course. They fully expect to be able to take whatever they want whenever they want it.

The public policy implication in Canada is that our education ministers are now taking a hard look at academic mobility and credit transfers. They are saying that what we need, then, is an environment where, at least at the undergraduate level, there is no host institution granting the degree. There is no longer a home for that undergraduate degree. This raises many questions regarding what a series of course offerings is, what a curriculum is, and also what it is that a curriculum offers that a student cannot get by taking only 15 courses. Things are fundamentally changing in ways no one anticipated.

DR. CHODOROW: I spend a tremendous amount of my time thinking about and working on undergraduate education. I also have some direct experience, as I have taught an undergraduate course since I began as an administrator, giving up graduate instruction in favor of undergraduate teaching.

Our model of what we should be doing in regard to undergraduate education is quite old fashioned and probably wrong-headed compared to some of the models that have come out of the AUCC and Pew recently.

Undergraduates need to learn how to use information resources and how to participate in the research process. Most of the time they either go to the laboratory or, more often, go to the library and do a research project. But what is actually much more exciting to undergraduates is when they can get involved directly in your own research and feel that they are really making a contribution in the larger world, not just as an exercise.

The electronic medium will make that much easier. When the students go into the information resource to rummage about and to try to make a contribution to it, they will find me or other faculty there, as well as the faculty members' colleagues, and they will become part of the scholarly community, even if it is at a junior level. This will have a tremendous effect.

I would also like to address something that Sally Brown said about taking courses here, there, and everywhere. Universities had two fundamental functions when they were founded. One was the Guild of Knowledge Makers, making and selling knowledge. That was what they did, just like leather workers made and sold leather goods.

The other function was to make judgments about who would be in the guild and who would not. That is what a degree was: you were either admitted to the guild or you were not. You got a license to teach within the guild or you did not. Most people who left the university after being students for some time did not take degrees because they were not interested in their chosen subject.

Academia is a judgment community. One of the things that this new technology is doing is breaking down the foundations of the judgment community. Who decides who has done the right things well enough to get a degree? That is fundamental, and we must control those entities. Judgment remains very important in some form or other; if its current structure changes, we need to reconstruct it.

PRESIDENT CLINE: Thank you very much.