On Mission and Accountability

In the monograph Choosing Quality: Reducing the Conflict Between The State and The University, Frank Newman of the Education Commission of the States spoke of the evolving relationship between public institutions of higher education and the society that supports these institutions. Newman described what are appropriate and inappropriate actions of the state as well as the need for the universities to understand better and respond to the needs of our modern society. There will likely always be some tension between the body politic and our institutions of higher education. We must commit ourselves, those of us in the political arena and those who serve as leaders of our universities, to assure that this tension remains creative. I seek in this brief article to continue this dialogue begun by Newman with institutions of higher education. I do not intend this article as a scholarly discourse but as a statement of the opinions of a governor who, like all governors, must address the diversity of needs of the people of a state. Through the years our institutions of higher education have sought to serve society as they have understood the needs of that society. In the years following World War, II the nation and the states sent a strong signal that we needed to build the higher education infrastructure in order to educate returning veterans and the increasing number of high school graduates. The states provided funds to expand the number of institutions of higher education. The higher education community responded. Over the next several decades we substantially expanded existing universities and built new institutions, many located in the rapidly growing population centers. We very significantly expanded the two-year college sector over a two-decade period to address work-force training and to serve as an additional entry level into the four-year institutions. During the period of the late sixties and into the eighties, the nation and to a lesser extent the states called upon our universities to expand basic and applied research programs, principally those that focused on technological developments that would fuel economic development. Various national agencies and incentive programs operated by the states rewarded the universities for expanding graduate and research programs. Along the way, universities expanded the role of scholarship for all faculty in all disciplines. We created, in the second half of the twentieth century, a remarkable higher education infrastructure dedicated to educating the majority of our people and structured for providing basic and applied research. We matched this growth in higher education institutions with student aid programs intended to assure that all could aspire to education beyond the high school level. The state placed expectations on higher education and the institutions, and the faculty in these institutions, and the faculty in these institutions responded. Fortuitously, the needs of the state matched well the natural instinct of the academy. Subtle and not so subtle shifts occurred in the basic fabric of our public universities during this period. The societal expectations coupled with the Carnegie ranking (Carnegie Foundation) of universities played a role in establishing an almost linear scale by which many of the faculty and the public have come to judge the status of universities. Although Clark Kerr intended for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching classification scheme to cluster similar institutions for the purpose of meaningful research in higher education, the reality is that the academy accepts the Carnegie rankings as establishing a hierarchy. The comprehensive, research universities sit at the apex of this ranking while the smaller four-year institutions dedicated primarily to teaching and the two-year institutions associated more with work-force training reside at the other end of this linear scale. Faculty have taken earlier societal expectations and the Carnegie rankings to form a pecking order. …