American Council on Education Atwell Lecture
February 8, 2009
Thank you, Andy, and thank you, Molly.
President Gee delivers the American
Council on Education Atwell Lecture
Photo: Lisa Helfert, American Council on Education
You know, Molly's list of accomplishments is wonderfully long, and I do not want us to lose sight of one of the most salient points on that list: She is an Ohio State alumna! Without any shame at all, I proudly claim some measure of responsibility for her good work. Her wisdom, unmatched experience, and steady hand make her exactly the right person to lead advocacy for higher education at the national level.
Let me say what a great honor it is to be here this evening.
Delivering the Atwell Lecture is especially meaningful because of its namesake. As we all know, Bob Atwell is one of the great heroes of American higher education. His thoughtful voice on affordability and equality of access, among other matters of consequence, has guided public policy in myriad positive ways. And so speaking at a forum named in Bob's honor makes this occasion a very special one for me.
I would also like to offer my congratulations to Bob Hemenway. His dedication to nurturing future academic leaders is rivaled only by his accomplishments at the University of Kansas. How fitting that today he receives the Council of Fellows Award.
Some 16 months ago, I returned to The Ohio State University for what is, in our business, a rare reprisal.
After leading Ohio State from 1990 to 1997, I was president of Brown University, then chancellor of Vanderbilt. In fact, I like to say that I have been president of half the universities in this country. (My staff, by the way, tells me that this is only one indicator of my affliction with ADD.)
For many observers, my return to Ohio State was surprising.
Truly, though, I felt called back. And 11 million Ohioans have welcomed me back with incomparable warmth and kindness.
To reconnect with them, I rented a van and traveled 4,100 miles around the state last summer, visiting all 88 counties and talking with alumni and friends-from the manufacturing towns along Lake Erie to the Appalachian counties along the Ohio River.
The trip was exhausting. It was wonderful. It was Homeric in many, many ways. A baby miniature donkey was named in my honor. A cow I was attempting to milk gave me a very personal, messy lesson in bovine body language.
But most importantly, the experience reaffirmed my purpose and the purpose of the institution I lead. It also underscored for me, at the most basic level, the unmatched power of higher education to change lives.
The transformative effect of higher education-to change individual lives and to remedy global problems of all kinds-is without question. And it is shared equally among us. Public or private, two-year, four-year, research, and liberal arts-each of our institutions has a sacred responsibility. Our-profound duty is to educate the next generation of citizens and to meet pressing needs, wherever they arise. We do so in our classrooms, our laboratories, and in communities around the world.
Just as our institutions change lives, so too are we changed. In the nearly 140 years since Ohio State was founded, our mission has surely evolved. And we are not alone in that experience, of course. All of our colleges and universities have evolved with the changing needs of our students and the world into which they graduate.
That world is more vexing, more complex, more nettlesome than ever before. Environmental degradation that is potentially irreversible. Wars and conflicts that show no signs of abating. Food scarcity and security that is spreading East and West, southern hemisphere and northern. Economies-personal, national, and global-that spiral ever-downward, compounding each of the other problems.
So while institutional change is not new, what is required of us has changed dramatically, and nearly overnight.
And so, today I am calling for each of us to rethink the nature of higher education in light of unprecedented needs, and then to act. To act immediately.
We must not dither.
We must not let this moment pass.
We must not allow good ideas to languish in committees.
We must not look to yesterday for the solutions required today.
One of the statements I hear all-too-frequently-and which always spikes my blood pressure-is this: "But we have always done things this way."
Another is, "That is not the way we do things at Ohio State"-as if we might blame our stale processes on Justin Morrill himself.
Is the source of that sentiment fear, or bureaucratic sloth, or a mindless adherence to our Western institutions' Medieval roots?
Whatever the source, those statements-which I am sure you also hear on your campuses-have come to define our institutional insolence, our sluggishness, our routinized insularity.
Strong words, to be sure. But please know that I am not exempting myself or my own institution.
Our colleges and universities spring from a rich and wonderful past, and traditions are important. But that past cannot serve as our compass for the future. The world's needs, and our students' needs, will not be met by basking in the reflected glory of the great universities in Bologna or Salamanca.
While giving deference to our proud history, our challenge today is radical reformation. Change at the margins will not do.
The choice, it seems to me, is this: Reinvention or extinction.
If we think it cannot happen to us, we ought to recall the fate of the Swiss watchmakers. Fabulous craftsmen, certainly, but the world has moved on, technologies have advanced, habits have shifted.
At this defining moment in our nation's history, we have a mandate-I will even say moral imperative-to hasten our pace exponentially. Evolution is too ponderous. What is called for is a step change. A fundamental departure from business as usual.
Yes. I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge.
To be sure, the onset of the current global economic crisis was sudden, and its scope and impact deepen daily. We are all reeling from sudden funding pressures-both at the institutional level of budgets needing to balance and at the personal level of students struggling to pay tuition.
Like you, I read the daily clippings for higher education and the announcements regarding budget issues. The sum is this: Virtually all of our public institutions are seeing reductions in state support, many in the double-digits. And all of us-though especially private colleges and universities whose budgets depend more heavily on investment earnings-are watching helplessly as endowments diminish.
Without feeling sanguine, I will note that one of our greatest assets in Ohio is the genuinely bipartisan support for higher education. In fact, for the last two years, Ohio was the only state in the nation with no tuition increase at its public colleges and universities. The critical piece is that we received state funding to fully offset increased operating expenses. Last week, our governor announced his budget which, to our great good fortune, holds much of our core funding relatively harmless.
That is good news for Ohio State, certainly. But I assure you that we are all under the same pressures to balance budgets and to ensure that students can afford to attend our institutions.
So here we gather, grappling in real time with an ever-worsening fiscal quagmire that threatens to inhibit our ability to educate the very people who will help pull us out of the muck.
For many in our positions, the first instinct in responding to this sudden economic crisis is to hunker down, hide out, take refuge in the fox hole, and wait for the storm to pass.
That is the instinct, but acting on it is a grave mistake.
Those of us of a certain age have been down this road before. Early in my career, I would have followed that instinct to duck and cover or lost my temper and lashed out. In fact, during my first tenure at Ohio State, I made news not for my measured, statesman-like response to state reductions. Instead, I hit the papers by calling the governor a "damn dummy." Perhaps it goes without saying that the true dummy had raised his own hand thereÉ.
Today, having led universities for nearly 30 years, I have some perspective about managing through budget difficulties. From that experience, I believe that although these are trying times, they also present us with great opportunities-to think differently, to collaborate more fully, to reconfigure ourselves for the long-term benefit of our students and our nation.
We have now the opportunity and the responsibility to make sophisticated choices about our future. And we must do so together.
Let me be clear: That is not some throw-away line in a speech.
This is a defining moment in higher education.
We have in this room precisely the right leaders to build fundamentally new institutions. And in so doing, save us from slouching into irrelevance.
But each and every one of us must have the personal courage, the fortitude that is required.
Vision is not enough. Good intent is not enough. The true leadership that is needed from us today requires the willingness to make hard decisions and to stand firmly behind them.
When times are flush, we are apt to spread the wealth around like marmalade. But when resources are tight, our hand is forced, and we must make real, strategic decisions about academic direction, about programs for investment and disinvestment, and about how we meet today's enormous challenges. We must finally learn to say the word "no," a word rarely used in higher education.
And yet, making the most of this difficult moment is not a choice. It is our duty. Our obligation today is to reinvent ourselves so that we may truly be the catalyzing force for America's future.
Let me say that again: Our duty is to wholly reinvent ourselves. We are America's future-intellectually, socially, culturally.
But what does this mean, exactly? Several things.
First, we must move from thinking vertically to thinking horizontally. An example to illustrate my point.
Last September, I held a day-long retreat with our trustees, a handful of faculty and administrative leaders, and a few students. The session was led by J.F. Rischard, the World Bank's vice president for Europe. As the basis for our discussions, we used his book "High Noon: 20 Global Problems and 20 Years to Solve Them."
The day took unexpected and sudden turns. Our agenda was abandoned before lunch. It was one of those too rare, full-frontal, all-ideas-on-the-table conversations.
Return to my point about thinking horizontally: Any guesses who tossed out the notion of blowing up-completely eradicating-departments? A trustee? A student? No. The suggestion came from the chair of one of Ohio State's largest and strongest academic departments.
The lesson is this: Ask for frank discussion, combine unlike people who care, and be open to what comes of it.
Ohio State is unlikely to eliminate departments in the near future, but we are moving much closer to the notion behind that suggestion. We are shifting resources toward projects and programs that are transinstitutional in nature.
I am not talking about the old notion of interdisciplinary academic work. I am talking about a total re-thinking of the way we organize ourselves and the way faculty approach their research and teaching.
At Ohio State, we have some examples already. Our Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of the most visible. Research is underway on genetic markers and targeted treatments, on the preventive and healing powers of certain foods and behaviors, and on more traditional pharmacological approaches, among other treatments. In all, the Cancer Center draws on the skills of faculty from 14 of the University's colleges, and an even greater number of external partners.
Transinstitutional examples in the humanities abound. They are found at all of our institutions-in such areas as cultural and religious studies, ethics, and narrative studies. By their very nature, these areas are thoroughly integrated intellectually.
Breaking out of the old vertical, silo structures-which have calcified over time-will challenge us in several ways. Cultivating faculty collaboration and innovation requires us to think in new ways about how we acknowledge and recognize faculty scholarship. We will never totally forsake recognition for publishing in the usual academic journals (which are fading and may soon disappear), but we must be brave and wise enough to appreciate and reward other forms of scholarship as well.
Recognition and reward structures must change at the same pace and in line with changing scholarship and teaching. If we continue to reward our faculty in the prosaic vertical model while organizing ourselves horizontally, we will fail.
At an even more basic level, I will say that we must re-think whom we hire to teach our students and to lead our institutions. We must look well past the traditional qualifications and expected career paths. Doing so will reinvigorate our institutions with fresh ideas, new perspectives, and voices that are heard far too infrequently.
At Ohio State, we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of the new dean of our Fisher College of Business. The college is one of our strongest, and we cast a very broad net when conducting the dean search.
Christine Poon joins the University this spring after a 30-year career in the health care industry, most recently as vice chairman and member of the board of Johnson & Johnson and worldwide chair of the Pharmaceuticals Group.
Has she taught a class? No.
Does she have a doctorate? No. Though she has master's degrees in both biochemistry and finance.
Instead, she led Johnson & Johnson's group that generated $24.9 billion, nearly half of the company's total sales revenues in 2007. Clearly, Ms. Poon knows a great deal about business, about leading and motivating others, and about turning ideas and discoveries into products that benefit people around the globe.
Without a doubt, she will enliven an already strong college and inspire faculty and students to even greater levels of excellence and achievement.
For their part, our students are way ahead of us, as always. Their standard operating principle is not just to question old ways of doing things, but also to be fully collaborative in their approach to education.
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke at a student-led event for our Solar Decathlon Team. Many of you likely have students working on this same project. The idea is for students to design, create, and build homes that are net-zero in their carbon footprint. Next fall, 20 student teams from across the country will transport their creations here to the Mall, where they will be re-assembled and judged.
What I especially admire about Ohio State's Solar Decathlon team is its composition: 60 members from 20 different majors. Engineers, artists, architects, accountants, marketing students, and more. That easy, ingrained, Millennial Generation approach to problem-solving is one of my great sources of hope for the future, by the way.
Even as we move away from centuries-old promotion and tenure models, we must retain and build on existing strengths. I believe the signal strengths of American higher education are two-fold: One, the great diversity of our institutions and missions. And two, they are thoroughly American-infused with the qualities of the geniuses who founded this country. Enterprising. Democratic (small "d"). Resourceful. Driven. Spirited. Innovative.
Now, I am not suggesting that Americans are alone in possessing those qualities. But we are fortunate to have them as a starting place-for the nation and for our colleges and universities.
Another illustration of my point, and some of you likely have had similar experiences. A few years ago, I was in Beijing on the usual mix of business-visiting faculty, students, and alumni and meeting with officials in industry and government. I was asked to meet with the Chinese minister of education and expected it to be a brief photo-op and gift exchange, nothing more. Several hours later, I was still sitting at his table. The conversation was remarkable in many ways, but what I recall most vividly is this: The Chinese education minister most wanted to know how American colleges and universities taught students to think, not just how to know. What he was getting at is how to move well beyond rote knowledge.
Quite frankly, the question left me scrambling.
How to explain the ways our children grow up believing, truly believing, they can be anything they want to be? The way the best of our K-12 schools foster a child's native inquisitiveness and facility for making connections among disparate subjects.
How to explain a mind that is open, a spirit that is free, a college classroom that is exhilarating-and a country that has never known anything else.
Sometimes, understanding is easiest from the outside looking in. I thought about de Tocqueville's assessment of our culture, "Democracy in America," now nearly 200 years old. He was not entirely flattering, of course, but one of his phrases resonates very clearly. He found here a people who had developed what he called "habits of the heart," and in doing so, they did not misuse their democratic freedoms. They created institutions and communities out of concern for the common good.
Being of this country is clearly one of the greatest foundational strengths of our institutions. And we simply cannot lose that creativity, innovation, and daring-our grand inherited legacy-just when we need it the most.
All of this is not to suggest that we turn our focus only to those within this country's borders. Now more than ever, we see the true interconnections among global economies, confidence, people, and plights.
Our global thinking, our partnering around the world, bears fruit for all parties. I know for certain that Ohio State students and faculty-working with Ugandan farmers, with Bolivian craftspeople, with the Ukrainian government-return changed for a lifetime. They are enriched and enlightened beyond measure and in ways that simply are not possible through classroom work alone. Likewise, we hope that visiting students and scholars learn as much from their experiences on our campuses.
Recently, we were pleased to announce an initiative that will increase academic exchanges and cooperation between the United States and Iraq. Seven Iraqi university presidents will soon be meeting with leaders at North Carolina State University, Texas A&M, and Ohio State. This is a wonderful, positive step, and I look forward to welcoming their delegation to Columbus in a few days.
Again, let me say that we must be thinking horizontally, encouraging and rewarding collaboration, reaching out globally, and regaining our national purpose and momentum.
But we cannot stop there.
Now we must focus on changing the basic culture of our institutions. We must be more agile, more responsive, more outward-focused, and less bureaucratic and insular.
The challenges of this moment underscore the need for adaptive change in our culture and thinking. We must fundamentally rethink the nature of the institutions we lead.
Now, some colleges and universities are further along this path than others. Obviously, smaller institutions might seem to have an advantage here.
I will admit that believing these things as fervently as I do-while leading the nation's largest, most complex, most vibrant university-might seem to put me at odds with reality.
I am utterly impatient.
I am a bit odd.
I am somewhat evangelical.
But I am not crazy.
I know that changing the culture at Ohio State requires a full-court press. To mix metaphors unforgivably, the task is akin to changing an elephant into a ballerina.
We are hitting the issue hard. To my good fortune, I have the backing of a dedicated Board of Trustees, wise and creative women and men who believe as I do that our finest days are ahead of us.
With the Board's blessing, we began our culture-enhancing work last summer before the economic crisis took hold. In that, our timing happened to be advantageous.
With the help of talented consultants, we began a series of programs with the University's senior leadership. The aim is to enhance our working relationships and to facilitate a common understanding of how we must change ourselves to optimize our work.
To date, 400 faculty and staff leaders have participated in these work sessions, which are reinforced afterward at different intervals. The effort continues, cascading on through the University's 40,000 faculty and staff members.
Yes, this is a new line in our budget at a time when we are searching for areas to trim. But I am determined that we cannot allow any more time to pass without fundamentally reinventing the institution for the better, without focusing anew on the twin issues of talent and culture.
An essential part of that reinvention is a new approach to partnerships, an aggressive reaching out to our communities, which need us now as never before. Our colleges and universities must seek out ways to apply knowledge to real-world problems, to enhance our neighborhoods and schools, to conduct research for the public good, and to fuel our nation's economic prosperity.
Those ideas are firmly imbedded in our land-grant institutions, of course, and surely in our community colleges. They were affirmed in the Kellogg Commission report of a decade ago, in which I was honored to participate. The report called on our institutions to broaden efforts to help solve community, state, national, and international problems. Surely, the need to do so is much greater today.
But as a leader of a land-grant and research university, I will say that we can-and must-do more.
Amid the press of our daily tasks, it is useful to remember that the Morrill Act, which established our land-grant colleges, was passed during the Civil War, arguably the nation's most trying time.
In the middle of those darkest of days, President Lincoln had the wisdom and foresight to invest in young people, in communities. As you will recall, each eligible state received federal land to be used for the purpose of establishing new colleges dedicated to practical education for the so-called industrial classes.
Lincoln said that the new colleges were "built on behalf of the people, who have invested in these public institutions their hopes, their support, and their confidence."
Ladies and gentlemen, our task is to dare to be as bold and innovative today as Lincoln was nearly 150 years ago.
We must reach out, as never before, to others of good will and common intent. We must initiate wholly new kinds of collaborations that extend our missions more completely and effectively to every corner of our nation and beyond.
And we must aggressively search for partners-with business and industry; public schools; preschools; senior citizens' groups; federal, state, and local governments; advocacy groups of all kinds. And, perhaps most importantly, we must establish much richer partnerships with one another.
We must see one another as allies, not opponents. Sharp elbows and zero-sum thinking are utterly useless in the work to fuel our country's resurgence. There is infinite room in American higher education for improvement, expansion, and collaboration. And always room for greater effectiveness.
It is no secret that the institutions feeling the most financial pressure at this moment are community colleges-the same ones being asked to accommodate more students, expand services, and increase offerings. They are the institutions most often called on to be first-respondersÉto retrain laid-off workers, to create new programs in green-energy technology, and to do so much more-with so much less.
Truly, the drivers of our future will be this nation's community colleges.
I have been honored to lead many different types of universities, but I have never led a community college. In fact, I believe that one of the greatest privileges and challenges in this country is to lead a community college.
It is time now to move beyond the usual arrangements between two- and four-year colleges. Articulation agreements are productive and helpful, but they are not enough.
Just today, Ohio State announced the new Pipeline to Medical College program. Through this program, we are partnering with Columbus State Community College to enroll greater numbers of traditionally underrepresented students in medical school. Students of great promise and an interest in practicing general medicine are identified early. The initiative involves not just rigorous and easily transferrable coursework, but also early mentoring and extensive support for academic achievement.
It is important to note that the Pipeline to Medical College program is a collaboration not only with Val Moeller at Columbus State, but also with Ron Williams and others at the College Board.
That is one example. Likely you have some of your own.
I am proud that Ohio State is the first major university in the country to develop that type of program, but this is no time for self-congratulation.
One such program. That is simply not enough. Fully integrated programs with community colleges must move from the periphery to the core of our activities.
Finally, in this admittedly bleak season, we must tell our stories. It is incumbent upon us to communicate both the aggregate and the personal value of higher education.
We know it. We live it. We assume it is well understood.
But to ensure that our institutions thrive through these tough times and fulfill our compact with students, we cannot assume anything.
We need to marshal all possible resources to describe in concrete terms how higher education changes lives, improves communities, feeds the world, sustains art and culture, cures diseases, and develops the technologies that will one day free us from dependency on fossil fuels.
I am not suggesting slick new public relations brochures, advertisements, and web sites. What I am suggesting is this: Gather tangible evidence and enlist the help of alumni, current students, parents, and certainly faculty and staff. They are our best and most compelling advocates.
A week ago, I began a new effort to communicate the University's economic-development impact. Instead of the usual economic-multiplier figures-which are either ridiculously low or ludicrously high, depending on whom you ask-we sought examples, anecdotes.
We created one-page fact sheets that describe projects and specifically how they have improved Ohio's economy. These stories tell about companies founded and attracted, external funds leveraged, and numbers of jobs created.
I e-mailed the link to three of these one-page stories to the governor and our elected officials. We then forwarded them on to alumni, donors and friends, the press, and others who might be interested. And I will follow up with additional stories in another month or so and for the foreseeable future.
The basic idea is twofold: We need to communicate hope, and people will want to invest in us if we give them reason to do so.
The cost is negligible. The potential payoff is beyond calculation.
While we are redoubling efforts to help fuel the economic resurgence of our states and our nation, we must never lose sight of our critical role in preserving, creating, sustaining, and teaching the humanities and the arts.
Quantifying the value of art and culture is impossible, of course. They make our lives richer, more compassionate, more fulfilled. They are, in fact, what make us uniquely human.
The subtle strokes and colors of 30,000-year-old cave paintings in France and Spain were surely more than factual reporting. Their exquisite rendering of the natural environment tells us much more-something foundational in the recognition of beauty and the human need to explore and express it.
The arts ennoble us and nourish our spirits, and we must never forget that our universities are cauldrons of artistic endeavors.
Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot remain who we are. Nor can we turn away from the facts of these challenging days.
We must act now.
We know that the American legend of boundless opportunity is more than a wink and a promise, and higher education is the linchpin that enables dreams to be realized. Yet, to continue to make good on that promise, we must now remake our colleges and universities to meet the unprecedented demands of this new age.
Our challenge is to align our energy so that we can capitalize on that noble opportunity. We must embrace the notion that change is an absolute necessity. Working together, we must assume good faith and find the confluence of common sense and common will.
Simply put, we must be the architects of change or we will be its victim.
The coming century is ours for the making. This is our time to step up, to set a new course, to find a new way forward, and to put our shoulders squarely to it.
We must find in ourselves-and inspire in those we lead-the vision to see through a gloomy present and the confidence to construct a bright future.
I will tell you that one of my own sources of inspiration is Senator John Glenn. Ohio State is blessed beyond measure to have his wisdom, guidance, and active participation on campus.
The themes of his life story-prototypically American in the very finest sense-center around small-town Ohio roots, selflessly answering when his country called, daring to do the impossible in unchartered territory, remaining unswervingly devoted to his wife and children, and stepping up again to serve in the United States Senate.
John Glenn never said, "No." He never said, "I would rather not."
That great spirit resonates with our students, I assure you.
Last fall, I watched as Senator Glenn spoke to 10,000 freshmen and transfer students. The day was hot, the arena was crowded, and the program was overly long. Senator Glenn's part came at the end. He spoke for five minutes, and he had those students in the palm of his hand. They were pin-drop quiet, mesmerized by this giant in our nation's history who stood before them, urging them to reach for the stars.
Every one of us in this room is privileged in so many ways. Our own education has conferred upon us enormous personal and professional opportunities.
What is required of us at this moment is this: We must extend the privileges we enjoy to every person of willing heart. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.
This is our time, as never before. We cannot let this moment slip through our grasp.
This will be the century of the American college and university, if we but have the courage to make it so.
I will close by saying that I am deeply honored to speak with you tonight, particularly at this defining moment.
All of us have much to do on our campuses, but I firmly believe that we have now an act-or-lose opportunity. We should all approach each day with an urgency of purpose-one we all share as keepers of this remarkable legacy. As for me, in nearly 30 years of leading universities, there is no time I would rather be engaged in this work.
Thank you.
Copyright 2009, The Ohio State University
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