Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education

1: Prelude to Reform

Prelude to Reform 1 An invitation from Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings asked me to join her in Denver for a roundtable discussion focusing on American higher education. Nothing seemed right—no list of invited participants, no offer to cover travel costs, no indication, really, of intended purposes or likely outcomes . I had all but decided to decline the invitation by citing family and other responsibilities, when the e-mail from Jim Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, arrived; he hoped I would join him for breakfast in Denver the morning of the secretary’s roundtable. I bought my tickets that afternoon. We all have people in our lives like Jim Duderstadt—mentors, colleagues , friends to whom we have said, “If you ask, I’ll be there!” Since 1998 I have done what he has asked and known that his projects and thrusts, if not always successful, are always interesting. In Denver Duderstadt surprised me again; he suggested we arrive early at the session to meet with Charles Miller, who was helping Spellings organize the roundtable. Miller showed up with a copy of a recent essay I had written for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Miller had read the piece—more than that, he had marked up the essay, highlighting what he liked and just as pointedly what he didn’t like, all the while using the margins to push an imaginary argument with me about the right way to approach the topic. Miller’s copy looked like that of an attentive college student who wanted 7 to make sure he had full control of an argument before launching his critique in class. He need not have worried—he was way ahead of me. What was wrong with higher education, Miller observed, was that no one was really in charge. Rather than the market making American colleges and universities more disciplined, the pursuit of new revenues was making higher education just plain wasteful. “Where’s the accountability?” he asked. “Who are the change agents? Why is the academy taking so long to recognize the need for systemic change?” And that’s how I met Charles Miller—like the secretary of education , a Texan and confidant of the president, an investment banker whom then-Governor Bush had appointed to the University of Texas Board of Regents. From the get-go he was larger than life—smart, driven, funny, engaging—not to mention manipulative, controlling, and inherently argumentative. He was, as I later told Jim Duderstadt, “a real piece of work.” In Denver, Miller’s assignment was to test whether a national commission might successfully launch an extended dialogue on the future of American higher education. Only after the event did I understand that the session Miller chaired was in fact a tryout. Like most other participants, I was being auditioned. In my case Miller wanted to determine whether I was sufficiently independent to judge an enterprise in which I had spent most of my professional life as a prickly and at times just barely tolerated academic gadfly. The Denver session coincided with the announcement that in the latest round of federal testing of educational outcomes, elementary school students, in particular, had made substantial gains in reading and math. More important, the results indicated that African American youngsters had narrowed the gap between their own and the performance of white elementary students on the standardized tests. Spellings was energized; Miller was in charge, and the discussion that followed was about as good as it gets—focused, forward looking, and decidedly collegial. Most participants came away from the Denver session believing a national dialogue on the future of American higher education just might be possible and just might be a good idea. David Ward, the president of the American Council of Education, later told me that an earlier roundtable Spellings and Miller had convened in Washington had the same character. The Spellings Commission In September, the secretary of education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education was officially launched. 8 MAKING REFORM WORK Charles Miller would be its chair. Its task, Spellings told a forum at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, was to develop a “comprehensive national strategy” on higher education’s future. Echoing Miller’s comments in Denver, Spellings claimed, “Now is the time to have a national conversation on our goals for higher education. . . . [and] I’m here to start that discussion.”1 What surprised...