It is an honor and a pleasure to have been asked to give this keynote address at the NASULGC conference. An honor because, as America’s public universities, you represent the most impressive achievements of the world’s most powerful university system. A pleasure because, at the risk of seeming to position myself for some reflected glory, I think of you folks in NASULGC as my crowd.
You know the agony and the ecstasy of being in the public sector of higher education, in which I have spent my whole career, even though it has taken me to four countries. You know the trials and the thrills of balancing the tensions in that eternal triangle of cost, access and quality that defines the challenge of being a university president.
You will also know the old joke about the university president who misbehaves in this life – a basketball scandal perhaps – and finds himself being welcomed by the Devil at the gate to Hell.
“I have a task for you for eternity”, says the Devil, “you will be president of the University of Hell”.
“Tell me more”, says the disgraced president, thinking that he’s being let off lightly.
“The University of Hell has two medical schools”, replies the Devil.
I tell that story because I now find myself in the opposite, heavenly situation of heading two universities, neither of which yet has a medical school. These are the Open University of the UK, large and by today’s standards, well-established, and the United States Open University, tiny and only just established. Instead of having the misfortune of working with two medical schools and I have the good fortune to work with two extraordinary chancellors and I bring you greetings from both.
The Chancellor and titular head of the Open University is Betty Boothroyd, Speaker of the House of Commons. Lest you worry that this could be like having Newt Gingrich as your boss I must make two points. First, the Chancellor’s role in UK universities is by tradition ceremonial. Second, although an elected politician, the Speaker of the House of Commons abjures any political affiliation while holding that office. Her role is to be the champion of democracy on behalf of the people, a very vital role when, as now, the government has a large majority and is untrammeled by the separation of powers that seem to make it impossible to get any serious change to happen in Washington.
When I add that Betty Boothroyd herself rose from humble origins to one of the highest offices of state you will see that she is an ideal chancellor for the Open University. She began her career as a political assistant in the Kennedy White House, has great affection for this country, is delighted that I am speaking to you and sends greetings.
In the United States Open University it’s the other way round. I, as President, am the titular head at one remove from day-to-day events and the Chancellor, Dr Richard Jarvis, is the Chief Academic and Administrative Officer who guides the University’s development. Richard will be known to many of you from his time at SUNY and his more recent appointment as Chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada.
We are very proud that he has taken on the exciting challenge of creating the United States Open University. I believe he will prove to be an academic innovator in the same league as Walter Perry, the founding Vice-Chancellor appointed to create the Open University exactly thirty years ago, who then led the most important revolution in higher education this century.
With that triple greeting let me get down to business. My title is Lifelong Learning for an Ignorant World. I want to discuss some of the key issues that face us as university leaders as we review the missions and the methods of our universities at the dawn of a new millennium. Where you stand on these big questions depends on where you sit, so I shall first tell you where I am coming from.
Then I shall lay out and argue three propositions for you to agree or disagree with. Finally, I shall weave all this together in a case study. With the United States Open University we have the unique opportunity to start a new university for a new millennium. How will it articulate the mission and methods for which I shall argue?
First then, who I am to talk?
I am a well-shaken cocktail of three experiences: as university president, as lifelong learner, and as scholar-practitioner. I have spent the last 16 years heading universities in Canada, the UK and now the US - and I had ten years as vice-president or provost in three other Canadian universities before that. I believe I can tick the box of university leadership.
I have also been formally enrolled as a student for most of my career. One of the many nice things about distance learning is that you can study with your own university without having faculty colleagues freak out when you show up in class. Since I went to the Open University in 1990 I have completed a diploma in Theology, and a Master’s in Educational Technology from two of my previous Canadian universities.
This year I took a new 8-credit web-based course from the Open University called You, Your Computer and the Net. There I did feel somewhat exposed because I knew that some staff were following my progress on the student record system. Fortunately I have now completed the course and await my result.
But I’m glad I took that particular course because it has attracted over 12,000 student applications for its next offering in 2000. This is a record even by Open University standards.
Lastly, the Master’s thesis that I completed four years ago revived me as a scholar and led to a book entitled Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education which has done very well here in the USA. I found that surprising, because on my definition of a mega-university there aren’t any in this country. But lots of colleagues, especially in NASULGC institutions, say they have found it very helpful, which is encouraging given my assignment of speaking to you today.
So much for me. What are my three propositions? Let me lay them out upfront, so you can prepare your defenses, and then argue them one by one.
Proposition one is that this is an ignorant world and therefore in much need of our help to make lifelong learning a reality.
Proposition two is that lifelong learning does not just mean more of the same for the rest of our lives. It should change our approach to initial higher education.
And finally, just in case anyone has agreed with those two propositions I will give you something to oppose by arguing that today distance learning can be a superior form of education to the classroom lecturing that passes for higher learning today.
Let me take these propositions one by one. We live in an ignorant world - which is perhaps just as well or we might not have our jobs - but what are the indicators of that ignorance?
Take first the domain where we are most proud of chasing away ignorance, the jewel in our crown, our research activity. We all carry on in our speeches about living in a knowledge society and managing the information explosion. But we must have the humility to recognize that there are huge and embarrassing areas of ignorance about the fundamentals.
I shall not even try to enumerate them but simply refer you to John Maddox’s magisterial book: What Remains to be Discovered. The former editor of the journal Nature looks at each area of science: astronomy, physics, biology and so on, to show that humility in the face of what we do not know is the only appropriate stance. And humility in the face of what we do not know that we do not know.
To quote John Maddox: “What stands out is that there is no field of science that is free from glaring ignorance, even contradiction”.
It happens that one of the star research groups at the Open University is in planetary science. We know that we do not know whether there is or was life on Mars so we have an OU team sending a lander there in 2003 to do in situ experiments and analyses to find out. It’s very exciting. But we did not know that we did not know that there may be a tenth planet in our solar system until my colleague John Murray made the claim three weeks ago just ahead of a group at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who had used different methods.
Even more distressing for us as intellectual leaders is the ignorance of those who refuse the evidence for what we do know. Much of the work of your biology and earth sciences departments is based on the premise that the general drift of evolutionary theory and knowledge since Darwin provides powerful explanations of the real world.
You would not hire a faculty member who rejected that knowledge a priori. Yet what are the politicians saying in the present campaign?
Steve Forbes, the second most popular Republican candidate, asserts that:
“a lot of what we thought was true (about evolution) is not true”.
Al Gore, who had previously argued that science has a place in schools, has now changed tack saying:
“localities should be free to teach creationism as well”.
George Bush is clearly sitting on the fence with one ear to the ground on each side; he says:
“I believe (children) should be exposed to different theories about how the world started”.
Whereas Gary Bauer, for the far right simply says:
“I reject the basic tenet of (evolutionary) theory… and so do most Americans”
The polls show that he is correct. Gallup finds that only 10% of Americans say they hold a secular evolutionist view of the world. 40% believe in strict biblical creationism. Four million also believe they have been abducted by aliens. The good news is that so far, at least, none of the candidates is proposing that the schools teach survival courses for those threatened with alien abduction.
But my aim here is not to poke fun. Although they would shudder at the thought, these politicians are victims of the downside of developments in academic thinking like post-modernism and deconstructionism. From the idea that knowledge is a construct that depends on the history and context of the individual it is an easy jump, in a democratic society, to the idea that my views on any subject are just as good as yours or anyone else’s views.
This idea, in turn gives cover to the spin doctors and media manipulators in politics, business and the single issue groups as they try to mislead the public or suppress inconvenient knowledge. In Britain farming has taken a bad knock because politicians tried to reassure the public by eating hamburgers on television rather than addressing the real issues of mad cow disease. American farmers are now about to take their knock because the public elsewhere in the world is deeply suspicious of the genetically modified organisms in the food America exports and simply does not believe the assertions of politicians, agro-business leaders and trade negotiators.
Finally, the most desperate manifestation of our ignorant world, the millions of illiterates, not only in poor countries where one might forgive it, but right here in America. 25 million fellow citizens who cannot read the poison warning on a can of pesticide or a letter from their child’s teacher. 35 million more whose reading ability is less than the full survival needs of our society. We, who live by the rapid mental processing of words, find it almost impossible to think ourselves into the situation of such people. But we can agree that their plight gives special acuity to the title of the fourth report of the Kellogg Commission: Returning to our Roots – A Learning Society.
By this time next year, flush with the feeling of pioneering a new millennium, the achievements of the 20th century will be at a heavy discount. The arbitrary change of numbers in the date will give an air of backwardness and ignorance to everything that preceded it. We shall be expected to deliver on the Learning Society.
My second proposition is that we should not see the trend to lifelong learning as simply an invitation to do more of the same. It must have profound implications for our approach to the whole higher education endeavor, from start to finish. I was surprised that the otherwise excellent fourth report of the Kellogg Commission did not pick up this point.
The phrase lifelong learning is nicely alliterative, slips easily off the tongue, and conjures up the pleasant prospect of people paying us tuition for up to fifty years. It’s not quite that simple.
First, some research that we have just done in the UK suggests that lifelong learning is not a term that appeals much to ordinary people. It conjures up visions of a life sentence in an establishment – school – that they were glad to leave. People do say, however, that they will need to learn at different points in their lives. Lifelong learning is a producer term. People want to live - and learn when they feel a need for it. But if they are engaging regularly in formal learning throughout life it gives us the opportunity to think of university curricula in terms of the whole life cycle, which is a very different thing from packing in as much as we can at around the age of twenty.
I can best illustrate what I mean by using the real example of Open University students. Two years ago the UK conducted a survey of graduates from all universities with the aim of trying to define a concept called graduateness. How is someone changed by doing a university degree?
Not surprisingly, the results did not differ greatly from university to university, except in one case. Graduates from the Open University, much more than graduates from elsewhere, said that university study had changed their lives. At first sight that is odd. The average age of OU students on entry is 34 so you would think their lives had achieved a degree of stability. Conversely, you might think that the young, malleable students who study full-time at university after secondary school would be changed by the experience of university. No doubt they are, but if so they are much less aware of it than our older OU students, perhaps because it is mixed in with the general process of maturation.
How do Open University graduates say that study has changed them? Like all graduates they find that the degree has made them more employable. However, our mature students give greater importance to personal development than to employability. They mention new careers, better job opportunities, more self-confidence, a sense of achievement, more opportunities in life and new friends as the results of their studies.
One Open University graduate reported, with a mixture of satisfaction and exasperation, that ever since doing a degree with the Open University he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question.
I conduct my own informal study each year, at our twenty-five commencement ceremonies, when many thousands of Open University graduates comment to me individually about their studies. A surprising number do second, third and even fourth baccalaureate degrees. I’ve often heard the comment, ‘I’m now studying properly what I only did superficially as a young student doing my first degree’.
My conclusion is that the era of lifelong learning allows us to target our efforts at the right age group. We should not oppose the drift of our younger students to increasingly vocational, professional, utilitarian and instrumental types of programs. We should not try to force liberal arts down their unwilling throats. Let most of them acquire a decent competence in something that will earn them a living. The minority who plan to become academics or the mathematicians who need to fast track in order to do their best research before age thirty will find what they need somewhere. But for the majority, on the evidence I just cited, it is later, as lifelong learners, that they will become mature students in both senses of the term: ready to seek understanding; more alert to the nature of knowledge; open to a discourse about what can be known. That is the time for the inculcation of the academic mode of thinking that makes hypotheses, and the development of the systematic skepticism that examines the evidence.
University education, in its fullest sense, may well be wasted on the young. It is only later, as minds are matured by life experience, that they are ready for real university study. The recommendation in the latest Kellogg Commission report, that we should “equip students with the higher-order reasoning skills they require for lifelong learning” may have got it backwards. Rather, lifelong learning will develop the higher order reasoning skills they require to be mature human beings.
Perhaps we are returning to an older human tradition which valued the wisdom of older people. You could argue that for most of this century we have tried to provide wisdom through the university education of a small elite of very able young people. Now that we are educating many more young people beyond school it is natural that we focus on making them occupationally competent rather than precociously wise. But there is more. There is evidence that university study as a mature person makes a proportion of people more likely to get involved in the life of the wider community.
I expect that Open University data is typical. 46% of our graduates report an enhanced interest in current affairs, reading non-fiction and watching more serious TV programs. 40% said that as a result of their studies they had become more interested in helping people in need. 20% had become more involved in cultural activities. 10% had become more involved in political activities.
Those percentages, applied to an OU graduating class of many thousands each year, are a contribution to a more cohesive society that becomes very significant if you add in similar proportions of the mature graduates from all universities.
This assumes, of course, that engagement with the wider community is a good thing, but I plead guilty to that charge. A future where we simply live and move nervously in and between the electronic security of our separate gated communities, be they smart condominiums, prisons, university campuses or office buildings, is not one that appeals to me.
Thomas Jefferson, who is arguably the greatest public figure that the modern world has produced - despite recently revealed sexual peccadilloes that seem to go with the presidential territory - said that humanity divides into two groups. There are those who fear and distrust the people and those who identify with the people and have confidence in them. It makes me proud that one product of Open University study is numbers of graduates who identify with the people and do something about it in the Jeffersonian tradition.
Those who have confidence in the people have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition. However, our power structures often see the consciousness of the citizenry as a danger which must be lulled and channeled towards the inoffensive and superficial. We each have our views on where to raise the consciousness of our fellow citizens. The point of producing graduates who engage with the community is not to channel its concerns in a particular direction but to encourage the general civic consciousness that is the foundation for decent democracy.
Assuming that you are with me so far I move to the third proposition. If it is through study later in life that people will really come to adopt the academic mode of thinking, higher level reasoning and a stance of systematic skepticism then distance learning becomes much more important. That’s because the convenience of distance learning makes it the most practical option for busy adults with full-time jobs and families. But is distance learning as good as classroom learning?
My third proposition is that it can easily be better. Indeed to be better than much classroom learning is not particularly difficult. Let me start by clearing the ground somewhat. What is distance learning? The US Congress Office for Technology Assessment defines distance learning as: "linking of a teacher and students in several geographic locations via technology that allows for interaction."
That definition says nothing about the organization that is arranging such linking. Yet the discussion of distance learning has got thoroughly confused by mixing it up with discussion of new organizational forms such as corporate universities, for-profit universities and virtual universities, whatever they are. A word about them first.
Corporate universities span a range. Some are the old company training department with a fancy new name. Some really are trying to adopt some of the habits of academe. Most teach face-to-face on a facility called a campus and all carry a more or less heavy freight of propaganda for the company. Distance learning is not usually a major activity.
The same is true of for-profit universities. The most famous, Phoenix, only has 10% of its students at a distance – less than in many of your own institutions. What Phoenix has done very successfully is to commoditize campus teaching.
Virtual universities tend to be a will of the wisp. The Western Virtual University pretty quickly became the Western Governors University and the California Virtual University is no more. I think people prefer real universities. So I’m going to argue for the superiority of distance learning through the case of a very real university, the Open University. To do so I go back to the eternal triangle that does so much to define all our work. The success of the Open University is that it has enhanced access, improved quality and cut costs all at the same time. I start with access.
The Open University was set up thirty years ago to expand access to higher education, which was very limited in the UK of the 1960s. It has done that. Today there are 160,000 students taking degree credit courses from the OU: 1,500 Ph.D. students; 40,000 in taught master’s and graduate programs; and 120,000 at undergraduate level. Even though there are 30,000 students taking OU courses outside the UK, there are more UK students in the OU this year than there were in all UK universities combined when the creation of the Open University was announced a generation ago.
Furthermore current OU students are more representative of the population at large than those in universities generally. Ethnically we match the UK population. We have 6,000 students with disabilities. Where we do not match the population is in the proportion of economically disadvantaged students – but we do better than the rest of the system.
The Open University set out to be open as to people and it has delivered.
What about costs? Economists have a field day comparing the costs of higher education. A study done by the UK government earlier this decade showed that the total cost of a undergraduate degree at the Open University was between 60% and 80% of the average of a range of other universities. Comparisons on a cost-per-credit or cost-per-course basis are even more favorable since many students do not actually seek to complete a full degree.
The low cost of the Open University has a lot to do with its scale. Distance learning is not intrinsically inexpensive. What is different is that it lends itself to economies of scale in ways that classroom teaching doesn’t. It is also unusual in that quality also increases with scale, which is definitely not the case on campus.
What about quality? As part of the drive for accountability British universities have been subject, for most of this decade to a state organized quality assessment system that uses teams of academics from a range of institutions to assess the quality of research and teaching in each university by discipline.
For research this is done every four years with activity broken down into seventy discipline areas. In 1994 the Open University came 33rd out of the 100 UK universities and in 1998 we rose a few places to 29th. We have research of international excellence going on in each school and some, like the planetary science I mentioned earlier is world leading.
To assess teaching the Quality Assurance Agency chooses a number of disciplines each year. This year, of the disciplines the OU teaches, they chose General Engineering, Psychology, Biology and Physics. The teams have to assess the quality of teaching in the discipline in each university on six dimensions: Curriculum design, content and organization; Teaching, learning and assessment; Student progression and achievement; Student support and guidance; Learning resources; and Quality assurance and enhancement. The university’s teaching is rated on a scale of four on each of these six dimensions, so the maximum score you can get for the teaching of a particular discipline is 24/24. By convention the press regards 22/24 and above as ‘Excellent’
After that build up I guess I should give you the Open University’s results for the year. They were General Engineering 24/24; Psychology 22/24; Biology 23/24; and Physics 23/24. In other words our teaching in all of these disciplines, none of which would appear to lend themselves easily to distance learning, was rated as excellent. I took particular pleasure in the result for General Engineering because we were the only university to get full marks; Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College, who have very respectable schools of Engineering, had to be content with 23/24.
Now that this process has been operating for some time you can construct meaningful league tables from the results. The most common approach is to take the proportion of disciplines in which a university’s teaching has been rated as excellent. This is a list of the top twenty out of the UK’s hundred universities. Last year the Open University placed eleventh in that list. Given the recent results I have shown to you I expect that next year we shall rank about 8th out of the UK’s hundred universities, with nearly two-thirds of our teaching programs excellent rated. Unlike the Carnegie classification, which is a classification abused as a ranking system, this table is unabashedly a ranking of universities by the quality of their teaching.
Among the other subjects where OU teaching has been rated excellent are Chemistry, Geology, Music, Business, and Social Policy and Administration. If I dwell on these quality rankings it’s not just because I’m proud of our performance, although I am. It’s because the idea that distance learning is inherently inferior dies hard, especially here in the United States.
So I want you to understand that the Open University has combined top quality with large scale. If you combine our student numbers with our quality rankings you find that in Engineering, in Music, in Geology, in Chemistry and in Social Policy a majority of all university students in England studying in excellent-rated programs are at the Open University.
Why has this happened? What is it about the Open University’s approach that has caused such a paradigm shift? In the last few minutes I shall try to answer that by looking at the aspirations we have for our new sister university, the United States Open University.
It too will be based on what we consider to be the four pillars that hold up the OU’s success. The first pillar is excellent study materials, using a variety of media, developed by academics and other professionals working in teams. We hope that the USOU will make appropriate use of the huge bank of OU course materials, adapting them for American use. We expect that it will also work with other North American universities to adopt or co-develop particular programs. It will also develop its own courses as its faculty grows and we hope that before long the OU will be able to use some of those for its students in the UK, Europe and Asia.
The second pillar is the close personal academic support to each student provided by the associate faculty. The USOU intends to operate, like the OU, with one tutor per 20 students. The task of the tutors is to be on hand to help with queries, to teach by commenting extensively on the student’s assignment when marking it, to run computer conferences with their group, and to hold optional face-to-face sessions where numbers and geography permit.
In the UK most of our 7,000 associate faculty hold permanent full-time faculty positions at other universities and colleges. The results of the USOU’s first recruitment drive suggest the same will be true here. We have had an impressive set of applications from established faculty who are interested in developing their skills by tutoring part-time in this new environment.
The third pillar supporting the system is effective administration and logistics. Here the USOU will have a major commitment to using online technology from the start, whereas in the UK, with only 60,000 of our 160,000 students yet on-line from home, so we are exploiting the web at a more deliberate pace.
The final and crucial pillar is that this enterprise is founded on faculty who are active in research and who play a key role in the governance of the University. This, at the end of the day, is what will distinguish the USOU from the corporate, the virtual, and the for-profit universities. And this is not just a difference of lifestyle. The quality of Open University courses, across the range of disciplines, is based on robust intellectual exchange, within the course team, between faculty and other professionals beholden only to the truth and to good practice.
I hope you will agree that launching the United States Open University, at the dawn of a new millennium, is a very exciting venture. I said at the beginning that I feel that NASULGC is my crowd. I hope that you will see the USOU as consistent with your values and, in sum, part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The Open University has already developed partnerships with Florida State University and California State University. It has had dialogue with the Western Governors University. With the creation of the USOU the opportunities for partnership are even greater. I can promise you that you will enjoy working with Richard Jarvis. Together we have a great future providing illumination for an ignorant world through opportunities for lifelong learning.
Distance learning and lifelong learning go naturally together. Indeed, I would argue that we cannot deliver on the Kellogg Commission’s aim of putting lifelong learning in the academic mainstream without extensive distance learning. That’s partly for convenience of study but also, as I’m sure I’ve now convinced you, because distance learning can best provide the training in the academic mode of thinking and the example of intellectual robustness and systematic skepticism that mature people deserve.
Those mature people are the future of the academy.
Thank you.