Universities: What Won't Change

I hope in this coming year to share some ideas and insights regarding the manner in which societal change demands intelligent responses from our universities. I believe it is imperative for our nation's citizens to understand the role that our leading universities play -- as founts of new ideas, engines of innovation and agents of widespread prosperity and social mobility -- and how to ensure that they can play such roles most effectively in the coming decade.

The concept of the university is only a millennium old, hardly a sizable portion of history. But once universities were created, they have served as humanities most enduring institutions, as Clark Kerr and others have observed.

Yet societal and technological forces have rearranged our assumptions about much in life: classrooms, libraries, campuses, lifelong learning, even the very nature of literacy itself. Many ask, in 2008, what is an education? And when and where does it happen? Will campuses become obsolete due to online learning and other developments?

Higher education enrollment swelled from three million students to 17 million over the past half-century. Even factoring in the United States' population increase from 170 million to 300 million over that time, the rise is still extraordinary. And whereas 750,000 students annually received master's degrees fifty years ago, that number has increased more than sevenfold. The grand and historic traditions of higher education have undergone shocking change in the span of a heartbeat.

That is why millions of high-school seniors have crossed their fingers and submitted college applications in recent months, while their parents have brooded about whether their children will be accepted by a school that is both reputable and affordable.

Given these pressures, discussions arise regarding whether online education or nontraditional for-profit colleges could make it easier to offer students the access to a college credential that will help them compete in the real world. For-profit institutions, often specializing in online classes or evening commuter classes, have doubled their enrollments since the beginning of this decade alone.

Yet many who think that campuses will become obsolete have lost sight of what is timeless and what is timely within human culture. Bear in mind what will not change in our world: Many of the characteristics and ideals of human nature endure, even as all else changes around them. Humankind's status as social animals can never change; no amount of technology, no amount of virtual reality, can change the fact that humans live in community, and we live for community.

And one of the most important moments of our educational process must always happen within community. This is the period in a young man or woman's life between the ages of 17 and 22 -- in other words, the undergraduate years. During this time, the best educational experience should always involve being transported into a physical space where minds meet; where our minds and spirits can be challenged; and where we can encounter people and be changed by that encounter.

This was so with the academies of Greece, established first by Pythagoras and refined by Plato. You lifted the young person from the comfortable confines of his home -- and placed him where he would be stretched and molded by his encounters of the mind and spirit.

Between the ages of 17 and 22, the windows to the human mind and spirit are open especially wide. The mind is eager to be lit up by the spark of discovery -- and the fire that results is an enduring one. It is a flame that gives a person the ability to see new pathways where they otherwise might see only darkness or uncertainty.

Such a fire cannot be sparked by online education. Nor can it be kindled well if a student is a part-time commuter who spends minimal time with his peers and teachers. For the fire to be kindled to its brightest blaze, we need the richest, most intense experience possible.

This experience must be a broad-based one: During a student's undergraduate career, she should combine broad knowledge with deep understanding. There may be a time for specialization, but it should come later. (That is why a school such as USC has focused on the development of more than 130 minors -- so that every undergraduate can easily take one in a field far removed from her major.)

The best undergraduate education, which equips today's young person for a career that can wind its course over six or seven decades, requires much more than interactions in the classroom. It involves community service opportunities, a broad range of social clubs, study-abroad experiences, faculty-student social events, athletic events that bond the community, shared artistic and cultural experiences, and more.

Each great university must define how to provide such experiences as effectively as possible in a manner that is organic to its character and its mission; and each prospective student must discern for herself or himself which universities can provide the right mix of such experiences. But to procure a diploma without receiving the full transformational experience -- within a physical community -- is to choose to be a little less rich in spirit.

Yet although a lifelong fire of learning must be sparked and kindled on a physical campus, the maintaining of this fire will increasingly be done from a distance, especially as it relates to an increasing need for lifelong education and retraining programs. I will address this in a future post.