The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads (review)

Written by two experienced public research university leaders, this volume is a diagnosis of the difficulties public research universities face in addressing challenges of new demands for learning, eroded or redirected public funding, rising costs of instruction and research, and new accountability. The authors, in this first-person account "from the helm" of a leading public research university (the University of Michigan), reflect on their experiences with these challenges at the same time they look forward to a new position and functioning of the public research university. Through this volume, Duderstadt and Womack contribute to a continuing discourse on the changing roles, structure, governance, financing, and functioning of universities at a time when advanced-level learning comes very high on the policy agendas of federal, state, and local governments in the United States and around the world.

Duderstadt and Womack take the view that we are "beyond the crossroads" of debate about whether change is needed. The present challenge is to "develop effective strategies to shape the evolution of public universities so that they will play key, albeit different, roles" (p. 3). They argue that what is needed is not "richer and more selective universities, but more institutions capable of providing quality educational opportunities for our citizens. We need to increase our flow of human capital, not refine it" (p. 44). They locate that growth as part of a natural, longer-term evolution of the U.S. public research university, as it has provided for widening outreach and expanded participation over the past 150 years. The authors argue that the public research university should continue to develop in ways that cater to new demands for learning and relearning over adult life (evaporating the distinction between student and alumni) and forge new partnerships and alliances with all manner of entities for delivering content and providing appropriate field-based learning experiences.

Where others have called for a sharpening of profiles by type of institution, Duderstadt and Womack raise as one possible future an application of "the extraordinary intellectual resources of the public research university to assist the broader higher education enterprise in its evolution into forms better capable of serving the changing educational needs of a knowledge-driven society. . . . [by entering] into alliances with other types of educational institutions, or even newly emerging forms such as for-profit or cyberspace universities" (p. 194). This proposal opens up a much more nuanced and strategic view of the public university's future role, one that embraces a very wide range of partnerships, networks, and arrangements—public and private, domestic and cross-border—to best exploit and nourish the unique combinations of expertise and activity available at the public research university.

Such a future already exists in some measure, and not just in the United States. Examples from elsewhere include the French pôle universitaire, a regional network of universities, government and firms; the Swiss Lemanic project, leading to the coordination and profiling of three, separately governed and financed university-level institutions in the Lake Geneva region (Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, and the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Lausanne); Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology's offering of programs within Australia's Technical and Further Education (TAFE) system alongside RMIT university degree courses; and the ambitious vision of "Network Norway," giving students and institutions access to educational resources throughout the country.

Prescriptions for reforms in university administration, governance, funding, and policy appear in many chapters, accompanied by first- person accounts of experiences with initiatives at the University of Michigan, among which are efforts to advance Michigan's "diversity and excellence" strategy, including elements of admissions practices at the heart of the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action. The prescriptions aim to sustain—indeed, encourage—greater staff initiatives in their primary activities of teaching and research. On this point, Duderstadt and Womack observe that "the most vibrant universities will...