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

Redefining Higher Education

Lessons from the Pew Campus Roundtables

Gregory R. Wegner, Associate Director
Institute for Research on Higher Education
University of Pennsylvania

The premise of these remarks is that the environment for higher education is changing, and that there is a need for concerted response among institutions to address these changes. As leaders of some of the most distinguished research libraries and higher education institutions in North America, I know that you are well aware of both the fact of change and of the need to address it. My theme is the need for higher education institutions to exhibit a greater willingness to build partnerships both within and among their campuses for redefining higher education. I will describe not just the experience of our Pew Roundtable program but of other programs and initiatives that seek to encourage such partnerships.

The Pew Higher Education Roundtable began in 1986 with funding from The Pew Charitable Trusts to foster an informed national dialogue on the challenges facing higher education. Our Institute for Research on Higher Education at Penn was in charge of the program which brought together some two dozen leaders of colleges and universities from around the country to discuss the challenges they saw confronting higher education institutions of all kinds. This original roundtable group came to identify three basic issues: the cost of higher education; quality teaching and learning; and access. In 1988, we began publication of Policy Perspectives as a means of extending this dialogue to higher education administrators, trustees, faculty, and those who help to shape higher education policy at both the federal and state levels.

In 1993, The Pew Trusts challenged us to take the roundtable model we had developed and begin working directly with individual campuses that sought to bring about change to their operations. We began that year to test this process with 30 pilot institutions, and we convened a national meeting in St. Louis to announce the program and take account of the campus roundtable method as a way to catalyze change in individual institutions. By 1994 we had extended a broad invitation to college and university presidents to convene campus roundtables at their institutions in partnership with the Pew Higher Education Roundtable.

Our program has now facilitated over 130 campus roundtables at research universities, comprehensive institutions, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges throughout the U.S. A campus roundtable brings together about two dozen members of a campus community — faculty, administration, students, and trustees — for two separate day-long discussions of the institution, the issues and challenges it confronts, and the possibilities that exist for fulfilling its missions more effectively. Some of these sessions have helped to advance an institution’s change process in significant ways, providing the impetus to rewrite a mission statement; initiate an academic or a strategic planning process; give renewed energy and focus to an existing change agenda; recast the curriculum for an institution’s freshman program or for its general education requirements; restructure an office of student affairs to foster greater unity between the culture and functions of academic and student life; or transform the teaching of mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology from a stand-up lecture to a problem-based studio format that utilizes technology as a teaching tool.

Other campus roundtables have produced good talk that has yet to bring real change to the culture of the institution at large. As a program, we now have enough experience to identify some lessons that the campus roundtables have taught about how higher education institutions take up — or put off — the imperative of change.

Lessons

1. It is critically important that institutions build a shared understanding among faculty and administration about the mission and identity of the institution, the constituencies it serves, the challenges it faces, and the ways in which those challenges should be addressed.

The foremost challenge in powering a change process within institutions is to encourage members of the institution — faculty and administration in particular — to work together in more concerted and effective ways. The issue of Policy Perspectives included in your meeting materials speaks to the need for faculty and administration to come together and build working partnerships of a sort that many have not known in the past. “Shared Purposes” argues that in an institutional economy that is not characterized by growth, faculty must come to play more active roles in planning and resource decisions. There is a need to focus, to decide among competing institutional objectives, however valuable each may be in itself. If these choices are to reflect the values that are most important to an institution, faculty must be involved in the process of choosing.

Roundtables at their most successful have helped members of a faculty to understand that the external pressures on an institution are real. Such discussions have helped to develop stronger ties of trust and partnership between faculty and administration, and these ties in turn have provided foundations for the particular courses of action an institution chooses. At worst, roundtable sessions have become occasions for venting anger and widening the gap between the faculty and administration. We have learned to read signs of a campus environment that is not ready for a roundtable discussion.

2. There is a critical need to recharge the change process at frequent intervals.

A roundtable often generates considerable enthusiasm among participants as they come to see that they are not alone in their concerns. As it becomes clear to individual participants how many of their colleagues share their own perspectives and goals, the horizon seems to expand, and for a time a roundtable group can entertain a vision of their institution as it might be. But all of these participants subsequently return to their campus roles and identities, where the pressure of Monday morning reasserts itself and the horizon of possibility gives way to quotidian routine. Institutions cannot regard change as a stone that, once dislodged, will continue to roll and gather momentum; the course of change generally leads uphill.

3. To continue momentum on a given campus, there is a need to build partnerships among institutions themselves.

This is a theme that research libraries exemplify, and the transformation that is occurring within your own facilities as they respond to pressures of increased expectation, changing technology, and constrained resources indicates a trend that needs to occur more broadly within higher education.

One of the best examples from our campus roundtables of drawing together to create improved service and efficiency is the South Dakota Board of Regents Institutions, a set of six institutions that share a common challenge, aptly characterized by one of its Roundtable participants as: “Shaping a system and making it relevant as it emerges into the twenty-first century; a system created in the nineteenth century in a state of large geographical area, sparsely populated; a system that consists of six small institutions, often in economically dependent small communities; a system characterized by duplication of departments, of programs and of institutions, as well as by diminishing funding opportunities; a system that nonetheless is remarkably efficient in serving the needs of the state.”

The South Dakota Board of Regents Institutions have adapted our campus roundtable model to convene several system-wide discussions focusing on how to provide a better, more efficient system of higher education to meet the needs of the state. In addition to faculty and administrators of the six institutions, these roundtables have included state legislators and even the governor. The system is forging a difficult path to move from what has been termed a “silo” mentality — in which each institution’s field of vision is centered primarily on its own resources, faculty, and programs — to a vision that encompasses the strengths of all six institutions in a single approach to providing consistently high quality education in a variety of locations, through a variety of means. Moving from an environment in which individual campuses compete with one another for limited funds to one in which they work in partnership to achieve shared objectives is not an easy task; the challenge of overcoming self-interest is always there. But the system is working hard to create an environment that encourages the strength and creativity of individual campuses to flourish within a framework of overarching goals: what they call ” bottom-up solutions to a top-down parameter.”

To create a higher education system that balances the distinctive strength of individual institutions with the advantages of a system-wide approach, the South Dakota Regents are seeking to establish what they term “discipline councils.” These discipline councils would enable a system-wide approach to the utilization of both academic and financial resources within disciplinary units. This approach could help determine which faculty should teach certain specialized offerings and what campus locations should house particular lines of inquiry within a discipline. Discipline councils would impart a broader perspective to the recruitment of faculty and professional staff by minimizing the duplication of credentials at different campuses and sharpening the focus of search processes on areas of greatest need or opportunity within the system. These inter-campus councils would also make it possible to communicate broadly the opportunities that exist for external funding as well as the successes of particular institutions in securing such support.

There are a number of questions these institutions face as they work to establish discipline councils: How can members of individual departments be encouraged to overcome strictly proprietary feelings toward the curriculum and students they teach? How might the councils be constituted to strike a meaningful balance between individual campus culture and the system-wide approach to the utilization of resources within the discipline? By what means should these system-wide bodies communicate and reach decisions? What should be the relation of discipline councils to campus governance structures?

The South Dakota story is far from over; the discipline councils are still in the planning stages, and it remains to be seen how this set of institutions will resolve the state budgetary pressure for improved efficiency and the pressure of individual institutions and their faculty to maintain individual autonomy. But the theme of their actions is clear: a set of institutions, feeling the pressure of budgetary constraint and accountability to public expectations, takes steps to consolidate resources and direct its strengths to serve its constituents more effectively. Bringing about improvement on this scale requires a commitment to communication and partnership, not just within but among institutions.

The South Dakota institutions exemplify the need for interactions among institutions that help each to identify issues and share in the development of best practices for addressing them. The Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grand Universities that Peter Magrath has described exemplifies another attempt to foster this kind of interaction. The American Council on Education’s Project on Leadership and Institutional Transformation, also funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, is working with a set of institutions to identify common objectives and work toward their realization on individual campuses (a description of that program appears in the Policy Perspectives issue included in your packet [vol. 6, no. 4, Apr. 1996]).

Another program that holds the promise of fostering stronger ties among institutions is the Pew Leadership Award for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education, established last year by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by our Institute for Research on Higher Education at Penn. The Leadership Award provides recognition and support for colleges and universities that have taken substantial steps to revitalize their operations and improve the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning. Last week the Leadership Award conferred recognition on the first of what we hope will be several institutions to demonstrate noteworthy courses of change: Alverno College of Milwaukee, Portland State University, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. In part, this award is an attempt to disseminate best practices in higher education reform and restructuring and offer models that may be of use to a variety of institutions. In addition, the Award provides resources that will enable institutions to build communication networks and mentor other colleges and universities that seek renewal along similar lines.

Another program that seeks to foster better ties of interaction is the Knight Collaborative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Through this program, our Institute seeks to address what many colleges and universities have identified as the need for additional steps beyond the fact of their campus roundtables. The premise of the Collaborative is the need for institutions to establish and sustain communication with one another as a way of advancing the change process in their own settings. As a pilot test of this program, our group will convene a follow-up meeting in St. Louis next month, bringing together representatives from nearly all of those institutions that have held campus roundtables over the past three years. The Collaborative will provide opportunities to share what we have learned in the time since these campus roundtables have occurred. One component of the St. Louis meeting will analyze the concept of bringing institutions together in the presence of expert providers to focus on a well-defined problem that the institutions have in common. One such experiment involves a set of our roundtable institutions working in conjunction with the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) in Houston to benchmark the academic budgeting process. Another test project, based at Penn, is a collaboration between our Institute for Research on Higher Education and the Wharton School to offer an executive education program in higher education. Its goal is to bring together teams of higher education faculty and administrators from several roundtable institutions, helping them to address and overcome the cultural barriers within higher education that often impede effective decision-making. The hope in both of these pilot projects is to create empowered teams — groups of both faculty and administrators that can return to their institutions and become advocates of change from the knowledge that other institutions are working on the same issues, bringing to bear some of the same ideas for redefining their institutions.

Questions

As leaders of research libraries or of academic institutions with a strong research mission, what steps should you take to build a greater commitment within your communities to necessary change? We have found that it is very hard to give general answers to this question. Each institution consists of particular elements that make it difficult to apply a template for change. In our role as facilitators of campus conversations, we often begin by asking the simplest, most basic questions of our roundtable institutions. Here are three sets of questions that might help to identify an appropriate course of change within your own settings:

1. To what extent is there a shared understanding within the campus community of the challenges facing the institution? Do members of the faculty, in particular, understand who the constituencies of the institution are? Are they well informed about the nature of the decisions facing the institution or the tradeoffs involved in different courses of action?

2. What specific changes in the organization or the culture of the institution would enable it to fulfill its mission more effectively than it does at present? What factors impede the realization of these changes, and what courses of action could help to remove these impediments?

3. Of the obstacles the institution faces, which ones does it seem to be capable of overcoming on its own? What are the issues that it would be useful to share with other institutions to gain the benefit of their experience? What opportunities exist for developing partnerships that pool resources and eliminate unnecessary duplication while preserving the individual character and strengths of different institutions?

In the most general terms, the redefining of higher education — both the ” what” and the “how” of change — derive from answers that an institution, or a set of institutions, gives to these questions.

One of our Policy Perspectives essays, entitled “Twice Imagined,” posits two different scenarios for higher education in coming years: one in which institutions compete fiercely for particular segments of the higher education market, each trying to look more nearly alike along the dimensions charted by the annual rankings of colleges and universities that appear in U.S. News and World Report and other periodicals. Our essay also describes a second, more hopeful scenario, in which institutions come increasingly to build partnerships for shared objectives while pursuing missions and serving constituencies that are more clearly defined and distinctive. We argue that “Colleges and universities must simultaneously become more nearly interchangeable nodes on an expanding educational network, and, as individual institutions, they must become more distinctive and discernible from one another.” It is obviously this second scenario that we seek to foster through the Pew Roundtable, the Pew Leadership Award, and the Knight Collaborative. I believe that the research libraries that you oversee are uniquely positioned to show leadership in redefining higher education along these lines.

Copyright � 1998 by Gregory B. Wegner