Open Letter To Land-Grant Universities On The Future

4-2-97

University Park, Pa. -- The Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities released a report and an open letter to the leaders of the nation's state and land-grant colleges and universities today (April 2) on a bold framework for reforming higher education into the next century.

Penn State President Graham B. Spanier is one of the 25 current and former university presidents serving on the Kellogg Commission who developed the report. Below is an executive summary. The full text is available on-line at the National Association for State University and Land Grant Colleges Web site at http://www.nasulgc.nche.edu

"RETURNING TO OUR ROOTS: THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE"
We write as 25 of your colleagues, each of us a current or former president of a state or land-grant institution, to express our sense of urgency about the challenges and opportunities before us. Like each of you, all of us believe in the value of American higher education. We do not buy the idea that because the challenges before us are nearly unprecedented we should scale back our ambitions. But, unless public colleges and universities become the architects or change, they will be its victims. Our key challenge is two-fold. We must maintain our legacy of world-class teaching, research, and public service. At the same time, in a rapidly changing world, we must build on our legacy of responsiveness and relevance.

All of us know that public higher education is beset by challenges. They include an emerging enrollment boom, new competitors on the horizon, constrained public funding and growing resistance to price hikes, eroding public trust, and limited institutional flexibility. Each of us is struggling with these issues in our own way on our own campuses. We have run out of the easy solutions. Adding a section here capping enrollment there, shaving expenditures elsewhere, finding additional funds somewhere else, and working around the marginally productive--these and other strategies no longer work as well as they once did.

Our challenges are no longer technical issues of how to allocate rising revenue, but difficult adaptive problems of how to lead when conditions are constantly changing, resources are tight, expectations are high, and options are limited. We live in an age of transformational, not technical, change. Our leadership, like our institutions, must become transformational as well.

In the past when this society has called on us, we have always responded. Undoubtedly, we will continue to do so. But if we are to respond with the effectiveness and power required to address the great domestic issues facing the United States--the economy, the environment, education, and technological and demographic change--we must first confront the internal and external stresses bearing on our institutions.

We start with students and invite you to join us. State and land-grant universities were established to put students first. In responding to change, we begin by returning to our roots, because too many of us have lost touch with much that was best in our past.

Learning Communities: We can invent quite different institutions if we reaffirm three broad ideals and adhere to them tenaciously, following their implications faithfully wherever they lead: (1) Our institutions must become genuine learning communities, supporting and inspiring faculty, staff, and learners of all kinds. (2) Our learning communities should be student centered, committed to excellence in teaching and to meeting the legitimate needs of learners, wherever they are, whatever they need, whenever they need it. (3) Our learning communities should emphasize the importance of a healthy learning environment that provides students, faculty, and staff with the facilities, support, and resources they need to make this vision a reality.

Far from serving as lofty, unattainable goals, these ideals represent our firm expectations. As the examples throughout our letter indicate, many institutions are already making them real. Whether we fall short of these ambitious aims is beside the point. The point is to pursue them relentlessly. Our reach should exceed our grasp. What matters is not so much the destination but an unflinching commitment to excellence in meeting learners' needs.

Values deserve special attention in this effort. We dare not ignore this obligation in a society that sometimes gives the impression that character, and virtues such as tolerance, civility, and personal and social responsibility are discretionary. These should be standard equipment, not options, in our graduates.

Finally, we note that learning is not a spectator sport. Independent learners are active, not passive. We must insist that students take responsibility for their own learning and introduce many more of them to research, as collaborators with faculty and graduate students and as seekers and inventors of new knowledge in their own right. And we must introduce all students--and, in particular, first-year students--to classroom experiences that stretch their intellectual horizons and force them to exercise analytical muscles most of them never knew they had.

In the next century, a new kind of university will be in place. Most of us are already in the process of inventing it. A university without walls, it will retain the best of our heritage. But it will also be open, accessible, and flexible in ways that can barely be imagined today. In this new university, the emphasis will be on delivering instruction anywhere, anytime, and to practically anyone who seeks it.

Our report is a sort of architect's rendering of what this university might look like. It sketches out the dimensions of the new university in broad brush-strokes. The details remain to be developed.

We offer two parts to begin laying the foundation of this new university: a statement of principles defining the kind of learning communities we consider essential to America in the 21st century (see page viii), and a number of action commitments to implement these principles.

We urge you to make the statement of principles on page viii a vehicle for organizing in-depth discussions at your institution about the nature of higher education in your community, state, and region. We also offer seven action commitments around which we hope all of us can rally. We ask you to join us in turning them into reality.

These action commitments call on all of us to:
-- revitalize our partnerships with elementary and secondary schools;

-- reinforce our commitment to undergraduate instruction, particularly in the first two years;

-- address the academic and personal development of students in a holistic way;

-- strengthen the link between education and career;

-- improve teaching and educational quality while keeping college affordable and accessible;

-- define our educational objectives more clearly and improve our assessment of our success in meeting them; and

-- strengthen the link between discovery and learning by providing more opportunities for hands-on learning, including undergraduate research.

To advance these principles and commitments, our Commission plans to initiate a "national conversation" through dialogs around the country to evaluate, discuss, and if necessary, modify our statements of principles and action. We will also make models of best practice available in print and on the information superhighway.

As academic presidents, all of us must ask ourselves how our stewardship will be remembered. Will ours be the generation of leaders recalled because, on our watch, higher education ceded control of its destiny? Or will be remembered as the presidents who put forward a new definition of what higher education could be in America, helped our allies coalesce around that new field of vision, and worked in concert to make it real?

The new university we defined became a different kind of learning community, one that protected scholarship and free inquiry by relating them to learning. It put learning at the top of its agenda. It took advantage of the latest technologies and restructured itself to do what it had to do with the resources it had available. Above all, it strengthened its roots by putting students first.

The choice is ours.

A Statement Of Principles To Guide Academic Reform Preamble.This institution is committed to higher education as a public trust. It supports the state and land-grant ethic of service to students, communities, and states through teaching, research, and public service as a statement of that trust. In support of that commitment, this university and its stakeholders--students, faculty, staff, administrators, board members, and friends--consider the following principles to be major statements of the values guiding us as we enter the 21st century.

A Learning Community.This University Defines Itself As A Learning community, one that supports and inspires academic growth and learning among faculty, staff, students, and learners of all kinds, on-campus and off. Learning serves all of them; and all of them serve learning. Oriented around learners' needs, this university is committed to maintaining a first-rate environment for learning.

Access And Opportunity. As one of the public colleges and universities responsible for granting two-thirds of all the bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States, this institution is dedicated to maintaining the widest possible access to the benefits of a college education.

An Education Of Value. This University Will Provide Graduates With an education that fits them with the skills, attitudes, and values required for success in life, citizenship, and work or further education.

Containing Costs. This institution is dedicated to containing its costs.

Accountability. This institution is prudent steward of public resources, conscious of the need to maintain and improve quality while containing costs. It will also investigate a variety of emerging mechanisms to assess the outcomes of student experience.

Meeting New Needs. As telecommunications and other technologies revolutionize American life and many non-traditional students seek access to this learning community, this university is committed to developing distance-learning techniques and extended evening and weekend offerings to meet the widest variety of student needs.

Flexibility And Responsiveness. This institution is committed to developing new partnerships and collaborations and improving governance structures so that it can meet its teaching, research, and service obligations more effectively, work with its many stakeholders more efficiently, and respond to change and emerging needs more flexibly.

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