Office of the Chancellor | Speaking Out
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Returning to Our Rootsby Larry N. Vanderhoef UC Davis and America's other great land-grant and state universities have been providing invaluable research and high-quality, affordable education for over 130 years. By any measure, the contributions we've made to society have been astounding. Nobody questions, for example, the importance of our major role in making higher education more broadly available, or of our fundamental research to the growth of wealth in the U.S. and to our vibrant economy. We have, though, failed in one particular and important way. The Morrill Act of 1862 established a college in each state to increase accessibility to higher education and, equally important, to carry out our teaching/research/service mission with focus on the challenges and problems of the times. In 1862 those problems were feeding ourselves and generating wealth so as to compete with the world economic powers of the day -- agriculture and mining/manufacturing. Our land-grant universities were obligated and amazingly responsive to meeting those needs. Unfortunately, we have lost that strong sense of obligation in the year 2000. Are we there for K-12 like we were there for agriculture? Are we the major source of solutions to the problems of regional planning? Do the answers to environmental degradation originate on our campuses? Generally, I do not like the answers to these questions. What has gone wrong? Why have we lost our passion for intimate engagement in the problems of our times? At least a part of the answer, perhaps all of it, is that we universities have failed to maintain, internally, a common identity and mission in the midst of an ever-changing academic environment and world. Our campus cultures are fragmented from decades of operating in diverse arenas where the academic traditions of the past attempt a peaceful co-existence with a future that pulls us in multiple directions. The "uni-versity" has become a collection of city states -- departments, disciplines, and cultures that, too often, operate in a vacuum with little common direction. Now, as we embark on a new century, it is time we re-examine the cultural core of our institutions and make a commitment to work toward repairing the fragmentation that threatens to impede our ability to effectively serve the public. With this in mind, 23 other university presidents and I have joined forces, with the support of the Kellogg Foundation and under the auspices of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, to develop strategies for pursuing a coherent university culture. Our recent report, Returning to Our Roots: Toward a Coherent Campus Culture, recommends eight steps for reintegrating the various facets of today's complex university culture. This open letter is the fifth in a series of reports to the chief executives of the nation's state and land-grant universities that calls on public institutions to make certain essential changes. Our strategic recommendations recognize that public universities are no longer of a type, i.e., there is no single road map to success. We propose, therefore, a series of general reforms to move toward quelling the conflicting voices and signals that stand in the way of progress. First, we must rediscover our basic values and missions. This means making a renewed commitment to the values of discovery, access, and (especially) engagement of our communities and responding to their needs. Next we must match our current, easily demonstrated commitment to specialized academic areas with an equally strong loyalty to the institution's mission. We must resolve to make our existing systems of governance work better, and we must clarify roles and processes for administrative leadership. One of the recommendations we make in Returning to Our Roots: Toward a Coherent Campus Culture is that institutions must put learning first. In the year 2000, that means much more than just teaching students. It means nurturing learning environments that permeate every department in all its manifestations -- on and off the campus, inside and outside the new technologies. By integrating academic and student services, enhancing career planning, expanding options for student research and service-learning opportunities, and providing the resources students need to complete degrees on time, universities will develop learning communities that can flexibly adapt to new challenges. We also have considerable room to move in making our public constituencies more aware of the benefits that universities bring to society. That these positive effects are not recognized is not society's fault. It is ours. Universities must, as well, make it clear that doing basic research and paying attention to society's needs are not mutually exclusive. This requires effort, more effort than we're giving, to communicating the importance of this to our faculty and staff, and they will hear us only if our behavior in the university rewards system demonstrates our sincerity. We also believe universities must dedicate themselves to changing the public perception of tenure by explaining it inside and outside the academy. Tenure cannot be a safe haven for inadequate professors, but truly a system that protects and nourishes academic freedom. We will be credible in these explanations only if we have very real consequences in our processes for those who are honestly inadequate. Another campus culture that must be addressed is athletics. Fortunately, this is not a UC Davis problem, but, frankly, on too many of our nation's public university campuses the situation is nothing less than shameful. As a group we must adopt a statement of principles that will guide the ethics of our athletic cultures of our universities. Certainly graduation rates and academic standards need special attention. We must better define the role of athletics to the public and the rest of the university society. By adopting an effective statement of principles, we help make real reform likely and assure athletics contribute to our universities in a positive way. Taken, together, these and the other measures we suggest will help win back public trust and make our universities whole again. Rebalancing our fragmented institutions requires hard work, to be sure, but our reward will be new learning communities that will provide a common sense of academic identity and mission for students, staff, faculty, and administrators. Public higher education institutions will emerge that not only are startling research engines, but also formidable student universities that emphasize learning, discovery, and full societal engagement of faculty, students, and staff members at every level. (This article was printed in the Davis Enterprise on Sunday, March 26, 2000.) (A copy of Returning to Our Roots: Toward a Coherent Campus Culture and the commission's other "letters" may be seen at http://www.nasulgc.org.) |
