Precipice or Crossroads?: Where America's Great Public Universities Stand and Where They Are Going Midway through Their Second Century

Introduction

Introduction Daniel Mark Fogel This volume poses a question of pressing importance to the american people. Today, 150 years after the Morrill Land-grant act generated the reigning paradigm of public higher education in the United states—a model combining accessible and inexpensive undergraduate, graduate, and professional education; research, discovery, and innovation; a commitment to the practical application of knowledge to address economic and social challenges; and a mission of service for the public good—our great public universities are under threat, and some would say they are facing their hour of maximum peril. They are among the finest centers of education and knowledge creation anywhere. seven of the top twenty research institutions in the world according to a recent ranking are american land-grant universities (see, in this volume, Yudof and callaghan, n. 3), and as such they strongly support , with their private peers, Fareed Zakaria’s observation that “Higher education is america’s best industry” (190). america’s public universities greatly exceed their private peers in scale and in the importance of their contribution to national prosperity, competitiveness, and security. They perform more than 60 percent of the academic research and development in the nation. They educate some 85 percent of the students who receive bachelor’s degrees at all american research universities, and 70 percent of all graduate students. They award more than 50 percent of the doctorates granted in the United states in eleven of thirteen national needs categories —including between 60 to 80 percent of the doctorates in computer and information sciences, engineering, foreign languages and linguistics, xix xx daNieL MarK FoGeL mathematics and statistics, physical sciences, and security. Without the expansive capacity they provided after World War ii to receive returning veterans and, later, the children and grandchildren of the veterans’ generation , america’s postwar prosperity and power would have been unthinkable and unattainable. But today the nation’s public research universities are looking down a dark vista of decline, with few discernible paths forward that would effectively sustain, let alone enhance, the public mission forged when abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-grant act on July 2, 1862. it is a vista defined by steeply declining state appropriations, by wavering, at-risk federal investment in research, and by aging physical plants that are less and less adequate to meet the educational needs of a growing population and national needs for research-based problem solving. reduced public funding , moreover, drives relentless upward pressure on tuition, undermining the historical commitment to a low-cost college education for all and putting public higher education on a collision course with a growing body of feeling and commentary that college may simply not be worth it. and thus the question posed in the title Precipice or Crossroads? comes into focus : our public research universities are the nation’s most productive centers of education and talent development, not just of physicists, engineers, biologists, and computer scientists, but also of the practitioners of virtually all of the professions and callings that together weave the fabric of our society , from nurses, social workers, accountants, and physical therapists to designers, artists, dancers, and writers; they are our most prolific sources of research, discovery, and innovation, not just in science and technology but also in philosophy and ethics, in public policy, in education itself, indeed in almost everything; can the nation, then, remain prosperous, strong, and healthy if these critical institutions have been sent careening toward a cliff edge, and can that hair-raising course be changed? of course, we have not yet reached the verge of the precipice, and in many respects our great public universities have never been stronger and more effective. But here is the paradox: we know that these powerful institutions, their missions of accessible education, knowledge creation, and service, and their world-leading quality are at risk when we look at the unsustainable trend lines in public funding and tuition pricing. as i was writing this introduction, i paused to read a just-published news story on public higher education reporting that nationwide “[s]tate appropriations per full-time equivalent student dropped by 4 percent in constant Introduction xxi dollars in 2010–11, after dropping 6 percent in 2009–10 and 9 percent in 2008–9” while in-state tuitions rose an average of 8.3 percent (paced by a 21 percent increase in california), and, moreover, that “in 2010, average american income in every quintile...