In California, some of us spend a good deal of time feeling nostalgia for days past (specifically, 1960) when the California Master Plan for Higher Education was codified, approved, and financed. In the world of higher education, this visionary plan was the greatest organizational idea for public higher education in the 20th century. It connected excellence in research to the mission of near-universal education by defining the roles of its three systems of universities, state colleges, and community colleges.
Today, however, there is a growing belief that higher-education systems modeled after the master plan have run their course; many people in state governments and the public at large not only assume that such a model costs too much in absolute terms, but also increasingly question the value and quality of higher education, particularly of the sort delivered at elite research universities. Indeed, at the root of debates about the cost of higher education, the worth of college, the vocational utility of degrees, and the commitment to teaching among research faculty, there is a widespread suspicion that we cannot have all that the master plan promised. There is a growing belief, in particular, that research can no longer be the primary mission of our great universities.
Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, is proposing a solution.
Clark Kerr, first chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, then president of the university system, who is the architect of the master plan, saw it as the basis for the “second great transformation” of the American university. In Kerr’s structure, the university was “called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities with industry as never before; to adapt to and rechannel new intellectual currents,” he wrote. This was “a truly American university, an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in other parts of the globe.”
In subsequent years, however, Kerr sensed that the American research university had already begun to undergo a third transformation, far more difficult than the one before. Although he never worked out a new model, and concerned himself more with Berkeley’s survival as the flagship university than with the increasingly unsustainable provisions of the master plan, before his death in 2003 he began to write about the acute need to take on the increasing pressures of globalization, technological innovation, and demographic change.
Crow left Columbia University, where he had been executive vice provost, to become president of Arizona State the year before Kerr died (and two years before I joined the senior administration at Columbia). Now, a little more than a decade later, he asserts that his institution has become a model for how a great university can prosper and grow in the new century. His vision is described in a new book, Designing the New American University (Johns Hopkins University Press). He wrote it with a historian, William B. Dabars, who is his colleague in the office of the president).
When Crow moved to Arizona State, it was, he writes in the preface, “a burgeoning but then still largely undifferentiated regional public university.” Not widely known for its research productivity, it was far from being a candidate for inclusion in the A-list of research institutions, the Association of American Universities. It was also not associated with innovative academic proposals of the kind discussed and illustrated in the book. The authors provide a meticulous review of the literature on the history of American higher education and an ambitious account of how Arizona has, in Crow’s words, “deliberately undertaken an exhaustive reconceptualization to emerge as one of the nation’s leading public metropolitan research universities.” By that, he and Dabars mean an institution that combines accessibility to education for a diverse population, representative of the region and the nation, with an academic program grounded in the research and the production of new knowledge.
There is no doubt that Crow has had a transformational effect on the institution he leads. There is also no doubt of the power of his vision, one that deliberately echoes Kerr and the California master plan, updated to confront the challenges of the 21st century in the context of what Kerr himself had begun to see: major state disinvestment, steadily growing demand for student seats, and rapid economic, social, and technological change. Crow and Dabars aspire to a combination of world-class teaching and research with broad accessibility in what they suggest is a hybrid plan, explicitly bringing together the two levels the California plan had kept distinct, the research-intensive campuses and the teaching-intensive campuses.
They see unexpected opportunities in their hybrid approach, arguing that the fact that ASU is not burdened by a history of excellence — in the manner of the “gold standard” they associate with Harvard University and my own Berkeley — is precisely what allows them to be so innovative. As they see it, they don’t have to contend with the “filiopietism” of adherence to tradition. While that argument is reminiscent of Kerr’s adage that he doubted whether the faculty of any great university would ever be able to “agree on more than the preservation of the status quo,” Crow and Dabars mean more. The success of their new model depends on extensive institutional change, new ways to mix and leverage different disciplinary configurations and connections, organize new problem- and project-based collaborations, build new relationships between academic interests and the research needs and imperatives of the private sector, all to create what they call a “complex and adaptive knowledge enterprise.”
The signal feature of Crow’s tenure at Arizona has been a febrile pace of experimentation and innovation. Units have been reorganized to create research and collaboration opportunities for students and faculty, such as the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the School of Earth and Space Exploration. A variety of new schemes to generate revenue have been explored, ranging from doubling down on technology transfer and philanthropy to newfangled ideas like the development of ASU Online, which doesn’t just deliver traditional content via the web but also experiments with ways of fostering online student interactions. Expanding the latter program has entailed new sorts of partnerships with corporations, like Starbucks, to recruit their employees. And the campus has also energetically promoted the expansion of the traditionally enrolled student body, adding more than 20,000 students, with special efforts made to attract more low-income and underrepresented students. Arizona State University, in short, is taking its “mass education” mission as seriously as any university in the country today.
It’s probably too early to evaluate the success of its model, though early signs are promising. Under Crow’s leadership, the percentage of students with Pell Grants (i.e. students from low-income backgrounds) has steadily increased (much higher than at most flagship public universities, though still lower than the top institutions in the University of California system), but graduation rates have stayed frustratingly low. At the same time, while Crow correctly notes that admission to Berkeley (and the University of California at Los Angeles) has steadily become more difficult (now admitting less than 20 percent of applicants), ASU has adopted admissions policies similar to those of Berkeley in the 1950s and 60s, when high-school seniors needed only to graduate with a 3.0 grade-point average to qualify.
Research productivity has also increased: Crow and Dabars report that expenditures on research are up by more than 250 percent since 2002, without significant growth in the faculty. But Arizona State is not (yet?) a member of the Association of American Universities, and many of its more-innovative programs have not been in existence long enough to measure their real contributions or ultimate success. Certainly not all these innovations have always been warmly greeted. Crow’s effort to channel resources into productive new arenas has also involved tough decisions to end programs, decision that have been met with great resistance. Perhaps the best-known case was the attempt to dismantle the Cancer Research Institute, which led to lengthy public controversy and litigation. It remains to be seen if genuinely advanced research can be productively pursued in a great many areas of endeavor, given the challenges of a student body and educational mission that resemble the Cal State system far more than they do UC.
Beyond the excitement generated by many of Crow’s proposals, what is perhaps most heartening is his commitment to the idea that research is a fundamental feature of the university, not one that can be dispensed with on the road to mass delivery of education. In this, Crow is arguing against the premise of most, if not all, for-profit education corporations, both online and off, which implicitly, if not explicitly, assume that educational “content” can be delivered to “customers” absent funding by corporate “suppliers” for the complex (and expensive) process of supporting research.
At a time when many critics question the role of research in education — except, perhaps, at private institutions with huge endowments, where alumni are satisfied that research does not compromise undergraduate education — it is refreshing to see evidence of genuine support not just for research but also for connecting innovation in research to innovation in teaching. Public research universities, in particular, are increasingly asked to justify their research efforts. There are greater doubts about the value of research in the social sciences, not to mention the arts and humanities, although even the sciences are experiencing a loss of confidence in the importance of much basic research.
Insofar as politicians do support research these days, they are talking about applied research, and that in areas where people can point to immediate benefit. Although educators offer example after example of how basic research produces applications that could never have been foreseen, and despite the growing need for advanced research in areas including political analysis (to, for example, document the relationship between money and political outcomes) and the extent to which the use of big data or new biomedical techniques can be analyzed in relation to human agency and the public good, that type of inquiry has been regularly denounced in Washington and widely disparaged in popular media.
The near absence of discussions of research in the spate of publications about college over the past decade is perhaps the most astonishing lacuna in the higher-education literature. The Great American University (PublicAffairs, 2010), an important book by Jonathan R. Cole, a former provost and dean of faculties at Columbia, contains an extraordinarily useful and wide-ranging set of illustrations of the value of research, but stands out almost as an exception. Fortunately, the AAU and the National Research Council have promoted the importance of research, and the association’s president, Hunter R. Rawlings III, was involved in the important 2012 report “Research Universities and the Future of America.”
Those of us leading or working in research universities, especially public ones, face the urgent imperative to articulate and give full-throated explanations of the extent to which university research not only brings economic and social betterment (through new medicines, policies, products, jobs, etc.) but also is crucial to the educational mission. It drives discoveries that can be commercialized to enrich innovators and their backers, and it ensures that those innovations will be deployed to sustain the vitality of our economy, our society, and our human values. Research is also a good in itself across the full set of disciplines and fields that constitute university life; it is an aptitude and skill that students, both undergraduate and graduate, learn in college that can be of lifelong value; and it is a force that generates new knowledge — and new modes of teaching and learning.
It is research that compels scholars and administrators to create institutes, centers, and programs that bring disciplines together. While we know that professional recognition and rewards for research often militate against interdisciplinarity in the short term, that kind of work is responsible for many of the most important breakthroughs in fundamental understandings, in methodology, theory, and even the data we use. We can cite examples in every field: the importance of information theory in the limits and possibilities of quantifying information for biology, of social psychology in behavioral economics, of historical or anthropological work in literary study. Research skills and experience are likely to be of as much importance as critical reading, writing, and numeracy for any sustained career in rapidly expanding knowledge industries.
The preoccupation with research may compete with time for teaching, or direct teaching toward narrow specialized fields, but research is also needed for many innovative reforms in pedagogy. And that is true well beyond the current enthusiasm for “maker” culture and its emphasis on do-it-yourself innovation and the integral role of design thinking in courses in many fields, from the arts to engineering.
Even the most traditional pedagogy is animated by a passion for new ideas, new interpretations, new contextual frameworks, and new evidence. Indeed, the bottom line is that teaching and research genuinely benefit from each other. The relationship is not simply the result of an accidental compromise in the history of American higher education, but a recognition of the importance of both activities for all our universities and colleges, even those that cannot support research at the highest levels. That is the basis for the pre-eminence of our global model; and that may be most at risk — both in funding and in popular attitudes — in the current crisis in university life
At Berkeley we are developing a model different from Crow’s for reimagining the American university. As I announced last fall, we intend to build a “global campus” in nearby Richmond Bay. Instead of planting the Berkeley flag abroad, we want to create a new form of international hub, where an exclusive group of some of the world’s leading universities and high-tech companies will work side by side with us in a campus setting. We envision a collaboration not just among disciplines but across global institutions on topics like climate science, energy policy, data science, artificial intelligence, medicine, global health and inequality, urban studies, museum studies, and more. We have decided, however, that even in a context in which global research will be at its most innovative, we will have at the core of our institutional design an educational mission, beginning with graduate programs. Our first degrees will be in global studies, with a curriculum that will train a new cohort of world leaders to tackle today’s problems. We hope that teaching, research, practical engagement, and a public mission will combine to create an innovative next phase in the evolution of higher education as initially hypothesized by Clark Kerr.
Columbia’s new Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute takes advantage of the excellence of the medical school and the rich resources of basic-science departments; Stanford’s pathbreaking efforts in the field of design are signs of the vitality of their deep connections with the technology sector, while enabling broad interdisciplinary collaboration across top colleges and departments; the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., links and builds on the strengths in bioscience and medicine at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Berkeley’s programs in the field of computing and data science (AmpLab, the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, the Berkeley Institute for Data Science) catalyze its unique expertise not just in computer science but also in social, statistical, and behavioral science, as well as, for that matter, in physics and cosmology. Those examples serve as reminders of the extent to which cutting-edge research can propel institutional change, even in places where traditions might seem most resistant.
As various universities compete with one another to establish their own new models for higher education, however, it is important to point out that most proposals are not designed to displace or endanger the highest-level research universities, whether private or public, which have successfully linked the undergraduate liberal arts with top-quality research and the production of knowledge. Crow and Dabars acknowledge that some leading universities are well positioned to advance knowledge in ways that will both transform some of our most basic understandings and radiate to other institutions (and not just through their Ph.D.’s who move on to teach and conduct research in these institutions).
And we must remember that the connection of excellence and access is not just a slogan but a necessity for all of us in higher education. That was the special genius of California’s master plan: attempting to forge and maintain connections at every level between teaching and research. The plan requires updating, with more emphasis on serving diverse populations of students, and continued expansion and innovation.
Crow and Dabars may not have reinvented the master plan, but they have made an important intervention in the debate about which models work best, for which purposes and constituencies, and how we can support those models at the scale they require, all while maintaining academic rigor and autonomy. As we carry the debate ahead, it is crucial that our commitment to research in the research university be unwavering, and that our advocacy for the many reasons that research matters be argued and advanced far beyond the university itself.
Nicholas B. Dirks is chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.