--- title: Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century | TIME description: Is the modern university able to change? A panel, moderated by Nick Lemann, discusses the transformation our schools in the 21st century at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education canonical: https://time.com/video/GcNopsx2/ og:title: Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century og:description: Is the modern university able to change? A panel, moderated by Nick Lemann, discusses the transformation our schools in the 21st century at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education og:url: https://time.com/video/GcNopsx2/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/GcNopsx2/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century twitter:description: Is the modern university able to change? 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century [Watch (HLS stream): Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GcNopsx2.m3u8) (45:22)  _Published 2013-09-20. Is the modern university able to change? A panel, moderated by Nick Lemann, discusses the transformation our schools in the 21st century at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education_ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:47 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [The Challenges of Basic Research in Higher Education](/video/jhrUlLZX/) ### The Challenges of Basic Research in Higher Education [All Hands on Deck for Higher Education](/video/EOYG5qkm/) ### All Hands on Deck for Higher Education [Why Cities are Key to American Success in the 21st Century](/video/PACsac8Y/) ### Why Cities are Key to American Success in the 21st Century --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ]. Well, hi we're all happy to be here. We are mindful that we have a very short time to go through a lot of material with a very distinguished panel. I wish we could do a 2 hour one on one with each of these people. So I've asked each of them, I will not introduce the panelists because you have their biographies in your book. And I, I'll begIn I've, I've asked each of them not to give an opening statement in the interest of getting through everything, as much as possible as quickly as possible so we can go interactive with you, which I hope we'll do toward the end. So that's the plan but we're gonna do variations on the theme of does everybody agree that in fact, universities need to change in some big significant way? And if so, how? And we'll hear a lot of suggestions. I''ll start with Johnathan Cole, my Columbia colleague whom I've been in a number of meetings with where he alluded teasingly to his forthcoming book, which proposes changes for the American Research University. But in the meetings I've been in, he's never actually revealed what he's going to say. [ LAUGH ] But I'm hoping he'll give us a little more of a hint now. So, Johnathan? Well, it's good to be here. And I, I doubt I'll be able to reveal too much in three minutes, but nonetheless, let me begin with the paradox actually that Henry Rusovski alluded to. And that is that as of 2013, I think we all agree that the United States has the greatest system of higher education in the world. We win the majority of prizes, all the best awards you can imagine, imagine, we dominate the production of scholarship and knowledge in a, in many of the leading fields. So, if we're kings and queens of the mountain as it were, why do anything to change universities until our positions are threatened? And as far as I'm concerned is, as far as I can see, I don't think that threat is imminent from any nation abroad, at this point in time. They all have extraordinary difficulties in mounting a system that would be competitive with the United States. China has problems with the value of free inquiry and the like. so, if anything I go to Pogo my favorite cartoon character and Walt Kelly who said you know, if the enemy is anything, it's the enemy is us. And I think, we have done fantastically well in the last century, but if it's up to me we ought to be changing and we've got to be changing fairly dramatically from top to bottom. These universities, to make them maximize their potential in the twenty- first century. And my book forthcoming book which will deal with question of, what the great American university, not is, and not exactly what it will be because I don't pretend to be a prognosticator. That would be a fool's errand I'm convinced. But what it ought to be 25 years from now. And I would like to suggest this afternoon as quickly as I can, some of the elements that I'll be talking about in this book. And I probably have about 20. I'm just gonna give you the headlines if you will, being with a good journalist who knows how to be terse. Some of the things that I think need to be reinvented as it were, or re- imagined or rethought to make our universities still, still greater. Let's begin with the admissions process. It seems to me that we have extraordinarily brilliant young people in many of our universities. Very, very bright students, but we haven't incorporated the multi- dimensionality of intelligence into our admissions process at all. So we get fantastically able people in one or two dimensions of intelligence. It also seems to me that if there are two elements that are absolutely essential to greatness in a, in a university, it's a great faculty and a great set of students. We allow the faculty to have an extreme role a definitive a role, almost, in the selection of faculty and the, and the promotion of faculty, as well as the selection of graduate students. But we don't have any role virtually in undergraduates. And one of the things that I'll be talking about in the book is to bring the faculty back into undergraduate admissions so that we can truly shape a class. Poets, great poets like Allen Ginsberg today probably couldn't get into Columbia College the way he did 50 years ago because he probably would have gotten a C in chemistry or something like that. And his counselor would have told them oh, you're not Ivy material, or whatever it might be. That should change, and we should rethink the way in which we shape a class. We should the way financial aid is is done at these universities as well. And I would suggest that we move more to what the British are trying to do, what the state of Oregon is trying to do. That is to try to support the financial needs of the students who go to these universities, whether they're state universities or privates. By a full- need policy, which, in which case the loans get repaid after people have graduated on, on the basis of how much they earn subsequently in their in their occupations. I think its not a bad idea to try to consider what Elizabeth Warren has put before congress. Although it has absolutely no chance whatsoever at this point of being fulfilled, and that is to try to get student loan debt payments and repayments at a percentage which is equal to what the banks pay for getting money. I think we have to change the balance between competition and cooperation in our universities. And I would like to see that done because we have new technology, which enables us to do it. Which can lower costs I believe, and actually improve quality. Competition served American universities extraordinarily well in the past century. But what I think we now can create is de facto mergers, rather than de jure merges, but de facto merges on a whole variety of levels. We can do them on the program level, programs of sustainability. We can do it on department levels, we can do them on undergraduate levels, at graduate levels as well. In other words, is there any reason why we can't in effect, merge the Princeton history department with the Columbia history department for graduate students? Can we conceive of the University of Chicago and Columbia, and maybe ten other universities, forming academic leagues rather than athletic leagues? And the way in which we can facilitate this is through new technology and the way in which people can actually learn and move around the country as well, if they're graduate students. At the undergraduate level, I think MOOCs and other kinds of technologies will enable us to have great professors teaching at multiple universities at the same, at the same time. I think there's a need to reevaluate and reassess professional schools. I think we need seven [ UNKNOWN ] reports, seven, eight, maybe six. I'm not quite sure. But even, even in, in those areas like medicine and law, we have to reassess what the value- added is that we get from what we are charging for, as it were. So in medical schools, if you take pre- meds, if you ask clinicians I'm not talking about researchers, but if you ask clinicians, whether or not they have ever used organic chemistry in their practices, the answer is zero. At least the ones that I've talked to. If you asked them whether they've used physics, no. If you ask them whether they use statistics they'll say, well, if I ever took statistics, it would've been really very helpful for me to read the journals. So, I know that a reassessment basically of what is premedical education and what ought to be done in medical schools, including allowing humanists as they do at Mount Sinai into medical schools. It's true they more often go into psychiatry but given what the nature of Congress is today, who's to say we don't need more psychiatrists? [ LAUGH ] But nonetheless, we ought to be reassessing that. We ought to be seeing, thinking whether or not social work schools for example, are providing value added above and beyond what 3 years would working in a social work agency would give us. We have to think as President Obama has suggested, whether or not we really need the 3rd year of law school, which has been problematic for law schools for many, many, many years. So in short, I think the professional schools have got to be assessed in terms of the quality that they provide and the outputs that they provide. On a completely different plane, I think we have to re- imagine the campus. We haven't really thought about how campuses ought to look like for the purposes of growing knowledge and the interaction of students. Since the day, early days of the Oxbridge campuses and the formation of quadrangles, Jefferson's campus at the University of Virginia. The Harvard and Yale colleges, and the dormitory or, or house systems. And in fact, the whole notion that we only can have horizontal campuses. And in cities which are densely populated, why can't we break the height barrier and have buildings that are more than 13 stores high? The second tallest building in the world Academic building is 38 stories, the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. Why overlooking the Hudson in, in a place like, like New York can't we have a 50- story research building? This of course, deals with many complex issues of boundary problems about what is the nature and idea of the university. And how do we indicate that? But how do we achieve flexibility in the way in which we build buildings in campuses that will be more in tune with the way in which knowledge is going to be growing. And adapting to the way knowledge will grow in the future rather than putting up buildings which we'll never do again, which says chemistry emblazoned on the outside or physics on the outside. Much more flexible structures in short Call time on you. Okay, let me let me just say one one more, one more thing and then I'll, I'll, I'll let go until when we have an open conversation. I am not talking about technology here because its been talked about elsewhere, but I just do wanna say one thing. We need to create the equivalent of a Vandever Bush, Science the Endless Frontier for the humanities. We have to bring the humanities back in. They are at the very foundation of our universities. And there is great rationale for having more students take humanities courses, whether or not they take them as majors. But, and it's not only for the intrinsic value of them, but in the nation's interest that we have students taking humanities. And humanists interacting with scientists on a whole set of questions that scientists at the moment cannot really be asked to answer. So let me leave it there, I could give you ten more examples of things that we ought to be doing, but we have a very distinguished panel and limited amount of time. Thanks Jonathan. Let me now go to Michael Crow. So, I, I wanna give you a hypothetical question that may have even crossed your mind in real life. Let's say A, there were no outside stakeholder groups demanding that you do things that you had to keep reasonably happy. And let's say there were no internal groups in the university that, that, would stand in your way. You were absolute dictator of the university. [ LAUGH ] What would you change if you could just do anything? There's a few that already think that's the case. [ LAUGH ] Well yeah, but that's so unfair The you know, I think, I think that, from my perspective, first change is inevitable. Change will occur, all of us having these conversations about change not occurring or occurring too slowly, we're, we're taking too short of a time frame of analysis. Change is occurring, it's occurring rapidly, and it will occur even more rapidly. But I think the focus that I would say that's most important at least for the public universities in particular, is the change that's associated with the change of culture. So most analysts of, of things that are improved say that culture trumps strategy every single day of the week. And the thing that needs to be changed the most, that's the most difficult, from both an internal and an external stakeholder perspective is changing the institution from being faculty- centric to being student- centric and I don't mean throwing the faculty overboard. What I mean is changing the total focus of the institution to the student and the student's success. Now to get there, you need faculty members who are great researchers or great scholars or great humanists or great writers or theater experts, or whatever they happen to be. You need all of that. But what we haven't been able to effectively do is to take institutions, particularly public institutions, and put them into a position where the total energy of everything that they do. Every decision, every structure. Every, every, every building, every design of the library, every faculty hiring is a function, not so much of how do we build a political science department that can move up four positions in the rankings. But how do we make certain that the political science unit that we have is able to instill in young students minds, or in older students coming to the University online or whatever an unbelievably exciting learning environment for understanding the study of politics which is the study of the allocation of power and how to, how do we do that. We have to do that by, looking everyone squarely in the eye and saying, this is about the students and nothing else. Now, you can achieve all levels of greatness for the faculty by having that focus. But and perhaps this will be too subtle for many people in the audience, maybe most. This isn't the case. Most institutions are faculty centric. The discussions are about how to improve the faculty. How to improve the dynamics of the faculty. How to get a better faculty member to drive this forward or that forward. If we measured student outputs, if we measured student success, if we measured critical thinking, if we evaluated universities based on did they just polish the diamonds that they collected or did they actually find, shape and cut these diamonds into these highest performing learners possible. So if you think student centrism that's what I would focus on if I had the opportunity to move with higher degrees of freedom. I have lots of follow ups on that if we have the time. But I, we should go through everybody's, we just get a taste of everybody's views. Mark Hamlet, I wanna turn to you. A lot of the discussion around these issues tends to be about research, but I really wanna ask you about teaching. what, it's striking to probably all of us in this room, certainly to me that when you begin teaching university. Somebody says this is your classroom. These are your students, go for it. [ LAUGH ]. And that's kinda it. What do we, what are we able to do? What could we do? What should we do as far as teaching and learning that habit has kept us from doing? So let me talk a little bit in the context of undergraduate teaching. So we've heard a lot about the conservativeness of universities and there's an old adage that it took 40 years for the overhead projectors to get from the bowling alley into the classroom. But I think that we now are. [ LAUGH ] We now, we now really are in, facing some extraordinary opportunities, in terms of the impact of technology. I just wanna talk a little bit about a couple of the difference strands. They're really quite complimentary. But then talk about ways in which the Universities may react in the context of the undergraduate teaching mission. Mark Udolf in an earlier panel said we're going to absorb all this, and in a lot of ways I have sympathy towards that. But on the other hand I think either, there's several ways universities may go, none of them right or wrong, just different ways. And, and, and I think any of the paths are likely to be a little bit more disruptive than he suggests. So uh, in terms of the things that we're all hearing about, obviously there are MOOCs and MOOCs focus on really a very, in some ways old technology but one that's been invigorated by the internet in the approach that's been taken. There's a very different approach that sorta starts from the proposition that lectures are often a very ineffective way to teach things. And that active learning and learning by doing is generally a much better way. And there's a, there's a whole long tradition, and my institution Carnegie Mellon has been very active in sort of cognitive tutors which deals with cognitive science principles and artificial intelligence. And it's just a very, it's an alternative, a very different way to use technology in, in in, in, in classes. There are some fascinating things that are taking place in what might be called serious gaming. There's some very interesting things in edutainment, and there's a tremendous movement in sort of, social networking across all of these, these different kinds of technologies. And we could talk a long time about the pros and the cons, and which ones are gonna be best in which context. But let's just say, these, these are all out there, they're, they're very important I think, as we look ahead. And I think that universities, even research universities, such as represented here, are gonna go in one of two ways. I think that the Baumol disease, the cost issue that we've heard about, it, it's a real thing. I think it has real under- pinnings. I think it's not only because we compete for the best dorms, or the best climbing walls. I, I, I think there's a real underlying economic dilemma that faces an industry that doesn't have a lot of productivity increases over time. And we see a lot of institutions particularly in, in public institutions that are facing tremendous pressures. And they are going to respond, I think, at least they will have to think hard, about taking these technologies and having them be methods of decreasing costs while providing a good solid educational product. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's going to be extremely disruptive to the way faculty are organized. And in fact to the very notion of what faculty do in the context of undergraduate education, in terms of cutting costs and so forth. There's another path that I think we'd all wish to be on, but it's, it's challenging from a research point of view. But that path is one in which the, the, the, the focus is that technology- enhanced learning is something that's going to enable ironically, a greater focus on the residential experience that undergraduate students have. That, that's the key to what they get in college in large part. That technology- enhanced learning will take care of a whole variety of courses. That will free students up from drudgery courses, it will free some faculty up from having to teach those courses. But it will hopefully allow for attention to be placed on greater mentoring of first year seminars, senior capstone experiences, small team work with faculty and other students, exposure and research labs you name it. And that becomes the, the real opportunity in that direction. In a way, the technology and the technology house learning is a minor part. It's like the theme might be technology and its place. And its place in this path is to make the residential experience. That's going to be very disruptive in its own ways. I think the structure of faculty is likely to change. You're not going to have the model of this one faculty member who's the great undergraduate adviser, the great undergraduate mentor, the great undergraduate lecturer, the person who's getting the grants, the person who's doing the research, that's organizing large research labs. I don't know which is, which path the universities are going to face, but I think those are the choices where I think a lot of the technology is going to lead us over the next 10 or 15 years. And I think both will be fairly disruptive. Let me just pick up on that and, and sort of spin the followup on that to you Steven Mitts. So, the, the architects of the American Research University, most of them really envisioned a very limited number of research universities, knowing that it was very expensive. Sort of the classic example is Clark Curtis master plan, where he said, you know, eight universities in California get to do research and nobody else is even allowed to do research. They can't confer PhD's, etc. So, you have a situation where consumers of higher education, particularly undergraduates. They don't even know what a research university is and they don't know that their professors do research in many cases. They wanna get taught, and how if that's what legislatures want, if that's what students and their parents want, how do you get those folks to bear the enormous additional cost of the research mission across a wide range or research universities? Cuz out of this you feel a temptation to say well let's go back to you know, a really brutal class system where a few folks get to be research universities and everybody else teaches. As we know all across the country, universities are the driving force of local economies. Some serve larger constituencies, some serve regions, but these institutions are the combustion engine. And cities that don't have them are suffering greatly right now. But our model has some flaws, and they're serious flaws. One is a very leaky pipeline. In Texas, 20 % of the eighth graders will eventually get any kind of degree or certificate. Pretty bad, right? Another problem is that our current system is reinforcing class lines way more than we want to, right? The University of Texas at Austin has more Pell Grant recipients than the entire Ivy League put together. Pretty disturbing to me. And then we have a business model that doesn't look so reliable right now. It relies very heavily on cross subsidies of large lecture classes paying for small seminars. And what's increasingly happening in Texas and elsewhere, is early college dual degree courses, where students are taking college branded courses in high school. They're just re- branded high school courses. I know, they're not well aligned to the college curriculum, but they are devastating the lower division in many of our public universities. And so the answers are gonna be twofold. We've gotta teach more effectively with greater emphasis on student success. And we've gotta figure out how to deliver education more cost efficiently. And so let me just very, very briefly mention some ways technology can help us do that. Number one, we're gonna have to change pedagogies in different ways in different kinds of courses. On the one hand, we're gonna use more machine learning with embedded remediation and very powerful analytics to build students' skills. At the same time we're gonna redeploy faculty members in high impact practices, like freshman research experiences. Or mentored internships because these make a huge difference. Second, we're gonna develop new delivery modes. The overwhelming majority of students in America, undergraduates, are non- traditional students. They're working students, they're commuter students, they're older students. They're not our traditional 18 to 22 years olds working full time on a campus. And we've gotta meet those students' need and we're gonna do it with accelerated courses, with competency- based modules, with low- residency models. A whole host of different approaches. Third, we need new certification models. Right now you either get an associates degree or you get an undergraduate degree and that's it. In practice that means lots of students, nearly half of all students, get nothing. We can't live with that. We've gotta find ways to certify students' progress. And whether that's gonna be called a certificate for whether it's gonna be called a specialization or a badge, we've gotta do it. It has to happen. Fourth, we need more shared services. One area that I'm pushing is for shared, less commonly taught foreign languages. Why shouldn't a student in San Antonio be able to take Arabic? Why shouldn't a student across the state of Texas be able to take Sanskrit? This way we can get more students for the specialists and everyone can have access. The final development is of course the most controversial but the most necessary and that is new sources of revenue. Right now this year, about 125 of universities are seriously trying to seek non matriculated students for their continuing ed programs and degree programs. In three years, it'll be 500 institutions. All competing for pretty much the same student body. Institutions are really desperate for these new markets and new audiences. We need to regard our students as our life long partners. We need to provide them with the training and education that they need at every stage of their career. That means we don't just treat our alumni as a source of donations, but we treat them as ongoing students. And I think remember the main way we fund our institutions is with tuition. We can hope for more government aid, we can hope for more grant money, we can hope for more corporate support, but in the end it's tuition that drives our venture. And one of the best ways to get that tuition is with these students, these working professionals, these adult learners, who we need to connect to our campuses. Scott Stern. Let me pick up on some of the things that Steven said. If one of the keys to the financial and otherwise survivability of research universities is to kind of make the sale to the place where they're located, say, you need us to develop economically. How do you manage that process? In particular, how do you avoid the pitfall of, essentially the local community saying great, so stop teaching English classes, because we don't get how that's gonna help the economic development, you know, because they haven't read Richard Florida's book yet, or something. Right. [ LAUGH ] and, and they wanna swing the university in an overwhelmingly sort of practical- skills direction. Right, so, so, let me just kinda right build, build on these prior comments. I mean in some sense, I think the most important thing we can communicate is what is the alternative? Right, so if you look at different communities around the United States alright, so, the story of regional economic growth over the last few years. [ COUGH ] Forget, forget what the average is. It's a story about variation across regions and those regional areas that have had strong research based universities, that nonetheless engage pipelines of students that then contribute to local economy. Often alongside the commercialization of innovation that's coming from those universities has been a sort of, centerpiece of high economic performance. With that said, I think, and here I might even, where this has been a very friendly crowd all day, but I might push a little bit back on Michael's discussion of, me, of having an extreme student- centric approach to university governance in the following sense. Universities are among, perhaps the last remaining legitimate stake, legitimate hub for discussions of civil engagement in economic and political systems. They have convening power. They have reasonable amounts of authority. They have reasonable amounts of loyalty, because of those alumni who want to be actually engaged more than the level of money, of actually giving back. We have an, at right, so at MIT for example, we have so many people who wanna give back to the university, not with money, but with their time and effort, to help students in practical ways. And also then what we do is, we design that alongside having academic faculty work with those practitioners. That's true, not just in, sorta hardcore sciences, but it's true in design, in areas of language, linguistics, in cognitive, cognitive science, so on and so forth. So, just to kinda go back to your earlier question, I would think the heart of that is that universities should be unapologetic about the role that they have been able to play so far. Actually ask the community, business, civic government, local government to become even more engaged with them in their mission. To see students, not as I think consumers, but instead to see them as part, we're playing an incredibly important role in shaping the lives of those students at every level, and asking them to engage. And then finally with the faculty, I think that means faculty have a much more engaged role to play in understanding not just what their research is or what book they wrote last year. But actually being engaged in university governance and being part of the ecosystem around that university. So let me pick up on that and just sort of shape a question to throw back to Michael Crowe cuz, there's a sort of a light motif in all these comments, which is as I hear almost everything everybody's saying, I'm thinking, but the faculty will never stand for that. So I'd like you to address this a little bit. You know, as a journalist who wandered into universities, what's very striking to me is, it's not tenure. It's the, the, the power of the discipline over the institution. In other words, if you have a, person who works at Time, who, is part of the education writers of America. And you know they, you call them into your office and say I wanna do this. And they say, I don't answer to you. I answer to EWA. [ LAUGH ] They control my 85 % of my fate. Time Magazine only controls 15 % of my fate, and that's kinda the way it is, in research universities. So, so, how do you, as a political matter, create these kind of changes when faculty members are not naturally incented to care about a lot of the issues that we're talking about. And I'll start out with. [ CROSSTALK ] So, so, two comments and I have to preface one with counting on the student thing. We don't have a lot of time to sort of go into the depth of what the definition of a student is, but in our case we have three types. We have fully immersive students who live with us. We have distance students who are not with us, but are fully able to capture everything that we do. And then we have the citizenry as students also. So our conceptualization is a little bit broader than just the student. Now if you imagine student- centrism across all three of those dimensions, then it goes exactly where you were talking about. Now to your point Nick. You know, the obsession with isomorphic replication by colleges and universities is what you're talking about the, the power of what the literature refers to as the invisible colleges. Right. And what's happened there is that partly the sociology of the relationship between and among universities has made them try to replicate each other and then compete against each other in these narrow bands. Right, that's the point Johnathan. Right, and so what we have to do is we have to break that as the method in which they compete. How do you do it other than just say, this is a good idea and everybody says, oh, you're right. In other words how, how would you do it sort of structurally? So well we've, we, we've eliminated 69 academic units and created 15 new trans- disciplinary departments and got the faculty to be a part of and endorse all of those changes. In fact, lead those changes. Once we created an environment in which that was considered a safe thing to do. And we did that by saying, surely you're not happy with arguing against this department or that department or that department, so why don't you actually step back and take every aspirational thought you've ever had about what you wish your discipline, or your field, or your department, or your school could have been that you've never been able to achieve. Any why don't you actually say for a short period of time that, that it's okay to design something that you really think that you need and we did that, and in a number of cases, in many cases it has been successful. But the key was to say to them, really, we don't care what the other colleges and universities are doing in the sense of replicating them. What we care about is how can we create the most exciting learning environment, possible for our students. So in engineering, we eliminated all 11 of our engineering departments. We have 10, 000 students in an engineering school now that's made up of theme- based oriented grand challenge engineering problems. Something the National Academy asked for as a reform. It's attracted more minorities to the, to those programs. More women to those programs. More activity, more energy, more solutions. Just by breaking up the notion that everything's just replicant of something that someone else is doing. We did another program in where we eliminated geology, astronomy, astrophysics and astrobiology and combined those into a school for earth and space exploration. The theme exploration then is powerfully attracted. A tripling of the number of students that we have. Unbelievable change in the kinds of students that are attracted to these programs. And so, what we've tried to do is basically make it allowable, make it free. So we break this, this notion of isomorphism. And we move away from something that a lot of public universities suffer from. What I call the GSU syndrome. Generic state university. And you say to each and every individual university, you must have some kind of identity. And you rally people around that identity. And you use that identity as a mechanism to build interest and drive and excitement for students and faculty. Jonathan and then after you speak, I'm gonna go to audience participation. No I, I, I think that it's extraordinarily important to link this to the governance issues that have been talked about. And the strength of leadership, and the very clear demarcations of the authority in a shared governance operation. It's certainly true that, that a good leader of an academic institution is gonna bring the faculty in for advice, consultation. But they have to be, if they're gonna really move this tanker at all, there are gonna have to be certain times when the authority's gonna have to vested in the leaders. And if they are consulted, I think the faculty will, will allow for those kinds of changes. Michael whom I, is my dear friend and who I, I think has done a phenomenal job at, at ASU I think does himself actually a little bit of discredit in, some of your remarks. That is to say you have built up a research enterprise that didn't exist. You have $ 580 million of research, not in medical schools. And you know, it may be our first calling to be teachers and the transmitters of knowledge, but what has differentiated the American system and made it the greatest in the world has been the way in which this research engine has functioned to produce discoveries, inventions, etc. that have changed the lives of the people of this country, the economy of the people of this country, and people all around the world, in terms of disease, health, other kinds of stuff. And you're contributing to it through the way in which you're doing the research on your, on your campus. Bringing the students into that research operation is of course critical. And I think your doing that as well. So let me now go to audience. Now, I wanna just say I know many of you, but very bright lights are shining in my eyes so I will see that your hand is u But if I don't greet you by name, it's cuz I can't really see you. So, who would like to ask a question or offer an observation or anything like that. If nobody wants to, shy group, please. Yeah. [ INAUDIBLE ] Of the public university motivated and perhaps some of the faculty buy in because of state funding and it seems like you buck the trend that we see in many other states in terms of actually getting buy in, in your state in terms of [ INAUDIBLE ]. Well it's a, it's a complex question. So most of the changes that we initiated were well before the recession, 80 % of them, in terms of the stylistic way that we have engaged. Our actual funding reduction from the State of Arizona was 40 % of our base support from them that they have been giving us in 51 % on a per- student basis, that's one of the largest reductions in the country. We took that as a moment of opportunity to go back to our faculty and say, listen, you know we're not sure why these, why these folks don't think we're a priority anymore, they got a lot of, of the other things to worry about. We still have the kids. We still have the students, they're not going anywhere, we better figure this out. So what we did was we took an already rapid rate of innovation and we basically took every ounce of energy that we had, from the faculty to the staff, everyone, and accelerated our innovative activities. So what that has meant for us for instance is, we have doubled the number of graduates from 9, 000 to 18, 000 in ten years, quadrupled the level of research as Johnathan has suggested. We didn't increase the size of the faculty, and we have 2, 000 fewer staff supporting those faculty. Now how were we able to do those things while also enhancing quality and so forth? It was through this commitment to the student and their success in having some understanding of who they are and the families that they come from and the sacrifices that the families had made to get them to us. And this ability to alter, as I said at the outset, culture. The culture of change was something that we've come, came to accept. When you do that, you begin becoming this perpetually, innovating enterprise. And so what we were able to do is to use all of these opportunities to find a way to accelerate those kinds of changes. Yes. Hi. This is a question for Mark Hamlett of Carnegie Mellon. Sorry. You've said something to the extent when we were discussing MOOCs about how they could replace drudgery courses, or courses that were filled with drudgery. Shouldn't we be trying to eliminate those courses? The drudgery ones. Yeah, we certainly want to eliminate them from being drudgery. I think that, that the large lecture course that forms the basis of what a lot of courses are in the first and the second year are not particularly effective ways to to teach. And through, through any of the kinds of tools that I mention you could imagine a much better, less expensive more efficient way to teach that would allow students to take advantage of any time anywhere. Which is sort of liberating thing. They can try to learn at their own pace that there, there's almost no strong argument that I've heard as to why staying with the status quo for most of these courses is a, is a compelling way to go. I, I, I think however that's going to be quite a bit of change to a system that's very conservative. And so the question is gonna be how are we going to do this, if those same faculty are told, you're not gonna lose your job. You're gonna actually get to move into this other set of activities and that activity is going to help strengthen the vibrancy of what we're doing for undergraduates. Or, or your research, or what have you. That, that's one path to go. And there are more disruptive paths as well. But, but I have no doubt, I don't know if, if there's counter views, but I've not heard them. That trying to do things more effectively with an entire set of courses which hasn't been our shining moment. Its just we teach them, as somebody said earlier, the same way Aristotle did or the same way. They've been done for, forever and ever, and it. Very quickly we have 48 seconds left. So I, you had a question sir. I don't know if this is a 48, 46 sentence response, but there's substantial data that students are in fact studying less. Even if you normalize for the number of hours they work, or normalize for their level of preparation. And I wonder what, the things we're talking about seems to me that has to you, something we do that we handle, and I wonder what Michael, you and others think about that. Yeah, somebody, only one person can answer, and you win Steven so, but quickly, and then we're done. A new way to think about students is as creators of knowledge. Not simply people who engage in active learning, but who develop projects and can now use web- based technologies to make those projects public and who can collaborate in new ways with their classmates. And this can be everything from constructing collaborative websites, or annotating texts, or doing audio tours, or making mini movies called digital stories. I mean this transforms the student experience in ways that I have found as a teacher. Actively engage even students who, you know, you wouldn't have thought it. I think we've gotta stop. All I can say is that John Dooey must be smiling somewhere. Yes. [ LAUGH ] I mean, all I can say is what you just described since like, Columbia Journalism School, but that's just me giving a plug. [ LAUGH ] Thanks to all of you, very much. I wish we had more time, but as very. [ INAUDIBLE ] [ NOISE ] ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Reinventing Our Universities in the 21st Century","description":"Is the modern university able to change? A panel, moderated by Nick Lemann, discusses the transformation our schools in the 21st century at the 2013 TIME Summit on Higher Education","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/GcNopsx2/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2013-09-20T19:26:36.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/GcNopsx2.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/GcNopsx2/","duration":"PT45M22S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/GcNopsx2/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```