12:31 p.m., Nov. 13, 2009----Dan Rich, University Professor of Public Policy at the University of Delaware, said he believes that American research universities must restructure their organization of faculty to remain at the forefront of intellectual leadership in an increasingly competitive global marketplace of education.

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Rich made his remarks during a talk on “The Changing Public Role of Universities in the Age of Globalization,” a presentation to alumni and friends of the UD School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy held Thursday, Nov. 11, in Gore Recital Hall of the Roselle Center for the Arts.

“A dramatic transformation is now under way in the global environment of higher education,” Rich said. “The emerging environment is more turbulent, more threatening, and more competitive than only a few decades ago. This environment is changing the landscape of higher education.”

This transformation, Rich noted, is shifting the global distribution of resources, as well as determining what higher education services will be available to whom, and how these services will be funded.

For research institutions, including the University of Delaware, the effect has the potential to be as far-reaching as the changes experienced by U.S. universities in the aftermath of World War II. A key element of that dramatic period was the growth spurred by the G.I. Bill (Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944) that sent hundreds of thousands of returning American military veterans to colleges and universities in the years following the war.

“In the wake of World War II, the G.I. Bill enabled returning service men and women to move into higher education rather than flood the post-war labor force,” Rich said. “The result was a dramatic growth of enrollments at colleges and universities of all types, including research universities and including the University of Delaware.”

Rich noted that prior to World War II, enrollment at UD never topped the 1,000-student mark. Enrollment doubled to about 1,900 postwar, with returning veterans comprising two-thirds of students enrolled during the 1946-47 academic year.

Accompanying the pursuit of higher education by returning veterans was a belief shared by government leaders that university scientists and engineers who had been mobilized to help win the war should also be employed in keeping the peace, a role that included helping America meet the challenges of Cold War brinksmanship, Rich said.

“The concept of the modern research university, energized and subsidized by federal funding of both basic and applied research, began with Vannevar Bush's report, entitled, 'Science: The Endless Frontier,'” Rich said. “From his report (as science adviser to President Harry S Truman) was born the National Science Foundation and also the expectation that federal mission agencies had a major responsibility to support university research -- and the boundaries between basic and applied research began to blur and in some regards vanished.”

The continuing public role of American universities, including UD, was enhanced by government efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to address the challenges of American cities and the war on poverty, Rich said.

Funded by a $500,000 grant by the Ford Foundation in 1961, the University of Delaware's Division of Urban Affairs worked to develop a permanent, ongoing system of education, research and service to address issues of particular concern to the state and the region, Rich said.

“Instead of agricultural extension agents, the division hired urban agents, and instead of crop improvement, the division focused on community problems ranging from housing and child poverty, to race relations and community organization,” Rich said. “By 1976, the faculty, students and programs of the division had grown to a scale that led to the establishment of the College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, which in 1997 joined the then-colleges of Education and Human Resources to become what is now the College of Education and Public Policy.”

While there are currently about 4,300 colleges and universities in American, only about 200 institutions, including UD, qualify as doctoral research institutions, with UD's entry into this select group beginning at a comparatively later date, Rich noted.

“The first Ph.D. at UD was awarded in 1948 at a time when there were fewer than 150 graduate students on campus,” Rich said. “The graduate profile of UD grew significantly through the 1990s, and the total graduate enrollment is now about 3,700, making UD a recognized center of graduate education.”

Although governments and the communities in which they are located have increased their expectations of the role of universities as research centers and engines of economic development, state support has continually lessened while funding from the federal government has increased, Rich said.

Accompanying the shifting support from state to federal sources, the global hegemony enjoyed by the United States has diminished, Rich said, as reflected in a UNESCO report that in 2005, China had twice as many university graduates per annum as the United States.

While American higher education, particularly graduate education, has long been a global magnet, the threat to its leadership in this area is particularly applicable to graduate education and scientific research, Rich said.

“Now it is clear that the long-term dominance of the U.S. higher education industry is under challenge and shows some signs of being eclipsed by other nations,” Rich said. “A 2005 report of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine cautions that unless corrective actions are taken swiftly, U.S. leadership in science and technology may not continue.”

Rich also noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's concept of a technologically flat world, one in which all universities, especially research universities, must now compete more aggressively.

“Friedman points out that this challenge amounts to a 'quiet crisis,' reflecting a steady erosion of America's scientific and engineering base at the same time as other nations are increasing their investments and commitments and strengthening their educational systems, including their higher education systems,” Rich said. “Ironically, the U.S. higher education industry is losing its global market position at the very time when more U.S research universities are seeking to become more global and more attuned to market-demand.”

In response to these challenges, two emerging models have been considered, including the “engaged university” concept advocated by Kellogg Commission on Higher Education, and the “entrepreneurial university,” Rich said.

“The 'engaged university' projects an opening up of the campus to become a more vital part of the fabric of its community,” Rich said. “The 'entrepreneurial university' is an institution that responds to the merging features of the new political economy by becoming more self-reliant and self-directed, and more attuned to the competitive demands and opportunities in the global marketplace of higher education.”

While both approaches have strong and weak points, and some policy planners advocate a combination of the engaged and entrepreneurial models, Rich said he believes the real answer to success in today's competitive global education marketplace lies less in these models or in moving up on the U.S. News and World Report's ranking of universities and more on what he calls the “restructuring of universities and the academic bottom line.”

“For many universities, restructuring the organization of the faculty will be the most important challenge in the decades ahead,” Rich said. “It will also be the greatest opportunity for creative and imaginative leadership.

“The underlying problem is that the prevailing organization of university faculty is becoming less and less supportive of the generation of knowledge in some of the areas of greatest intellectual promise such as energy, the environment, information, cognition, human learning or globalization” Rich said.

Citing the writings of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedman, nearly a century apart, Rich noted that perhaps the most important mission of any university is the creation and nurturing of the imagination.

“Because they are devoted to the stimulation of positive imaginations, the importance of universities in the 21st century is even greater than before,” Rich said. “Recognizing this, President Obama has called for a continuing investment of more than 3 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product in research. Other nations are making similar or greater investments. The global race is on for higher education supremacy.”

The reluctance of many American research universities to accept the new reality of the global educational marketplace is comparable to that of U.S. automakers in the 1970s who focused on competing with each other while automakers in Asia and Europe drove right by them in capturing market share at home and around the world.

Likewise, Rich noted, there is no reason to presume that American universities will remain the world's premier centers of knowledge and imagination for the next century.

“Indeed, at least some of the new universities developing around the world in great numbers have the opportunity to produce faculty and organize them as communities of scholars in ways that are much less encumbered by the inertia of entrenched academic structures and can be much more responsive to the emerging competitive demands of the global marketplace of higher education,” Rich said. “Succeeding in this global competition for leadership in imagination and knowledge generation is likely to be the true test of the public role of U.S. research universities in the 21st century.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photos by Duane Perry