Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education

6. Purpose, Power, and Innovation: Some Pathways to Change

135 Chapter 6 Purpose, Power, and Innovation Some Pathways to Change We believe that the essence of public higher education lies in our ability to serve our students and our communities by providing education that develops thoughtful, tolerant, and creative young people and by engaging in scholarship, research, and creative activities that promote the public good. In light of that belief, our goal in writing this book was to use our experience as both faculty members and administrators to consider how change can occur at our public campuses. We hoped that our history in both roles, along with the insights and experiences of the faculty and administrators whom we interviewed, would help us create a vision for change. But in our enthusiasm to turn insight into action, we could not ignore the harsh realities of public higher education: the endless struggles over money; the cold fact that there would never be enough to fund most good ideas, let alone every good idea; the bitterness and enmity that existed between too many faculty and administrators, on both sides of the divide. We saw these factors wear down many good and caring provosts, deans, department chairs, and faculty members. We saw goodwill dissipate all too quickly—when universities shifted direction repeatedly as new senior administrators came and left, as budgets had to be cut because of midyear rescissions, as administrators neglected to communicate or consult with faculty, or as faculty leapfrogged around department chairs to go straight to the top. The sheer lack of resources ground all of us down on a daily basis, and continues to do so. If there is any hope for change at public colleges and universities, it 136 Divided Conversations must come about because those of us who are involved with them are engaged and passionate about the work we do. Change must occur with a respect for the traditions and histories our institutions have developed. And it must be for the good of our students. But our vision of what a better university might be cannot be defined by a forced march up the prestige ladder, as if getting a better ranking on some national scorecard or more famous faculty or bigger grants or better students would mean that we are any better at our work in the university: moving students from one place, where they began, to another, where we want them to be. If we really want change, we must begin with the fundamental question : What is the role of the public university? As one of our administrators , Vincent, asked: “What distinguishes public universities if you take away the public service function?” Is educating students enough? Must we also certify the employability of our students? And what about the quality of the learning experience? Does a good grade mean that the student has learned something—better yet, has understood or mastered something? Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, who is the university for? Is it for faculty, the stayers of the institution? For students? For employers? For the market? For the region? Without some fundamental agreement about our purposes, real change is unlikely to happen. In our experience, that agreement has been far from reached, and the question of purpose has rarely been asked explicitly by administrators, faculty, students, parents, or our communities. Money Matters When resources are stretched tight, competition breaks out among programs and faculty and departments. Not everything can be funded, and not everyone can be spared cuts. Given the regular cycles of budget tightening in public higher education, it is no surprise that morale is lower in public institutions than in private ones. Decades of declining funding for public universities have left tuition and fees high and infrastructure weak. This is more than simply a crisis in funding, and as the recession deepens, it is clear that budgets for public higher education will not magically be restored to some earlier level when the economy finally picks up. In part, as Christopher Newfield (2008) so ably documents, this decline represents an attack on the middle and working classes that has been playing out in the United States for the last thirty years. By effec- Purpose, Power, and Innovation 137 tively denying affordable access to higher education for the majority and by undermining whatever consensus remains for belief in the value of the public realm, the decline in state funding has been felt not only by young people from modest backgrounds...