Can universities retool for the 21st century?

At De Lange Conference, academics plan for a global, high-tech future

Universities are in a tough spot. State and federal funding is drying up, which limits research and drives up tuition. Meanwhile, there’s more competition than ever, especially from for-profit and foreign institutions. Technology is transforming the way students learn, think and communicate. And the American public is starting to doubt whether a college education is necessary at all.

At this turning point — a moment some call a crisis — Rice invited a panel of academics and entrepreneurs to talk about “The Future of the Research University in a Global Age.” This week’s De Lange Conference VIII at Rice featured some of the “great thinkers about universities” discussing what that future might hold — and what universities must do to prepare.

“When it comes to higher education, a sense of change and urgency is in the air,” Rice President David Leebron told the audience Monday. It’s time, he said, to “ask fundamental questions about the future of our institutions.”

It’s especially important to have these discussions at Rice, said Professor of Anthropology Susan Keech McIntosh, director of Scientia, the faculty organization responsible for the De Lange Conference, and speaker of the Faculty Senate. After years of planning for a second century, Rice has reached its centennial year.

“The second century has now begun,” McIntosh said, “and we are facing that second century with a rapidly escalating set of challenges.”

Leebron encouraged the panel and the audience “to lay out a path for how we want to achieve a new golden age for the research university and the contributions it can make to the betterment of our world.” And over two days of speeches and discussions, some specific goals began to emerge. The De Lange speakers offered these ways for universities to move forward in the 21^st century:

Teach for the future, not for the present

About 65 percent of today’s 18-year-olds will someday work in an industry that hasn’t yet been invented, said Cathy Davidson, Duke professor of English and interdisciplinary studies and author of several books about education. We must prepare students, Davidson said, for a life of constant learning.

John Seely Brown, the former chief scientist at Xerox, is now a visiting scholar at the University of Southern California (USC) and co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. He called for a shift in focus from “stacks of knowledge” to “a flow of knowledge” and predicted a future without fixed canons of texts or firm boundaries between disciplines.

In fact, technology will change the ways schools operate in ways we can’t even predict yet. James Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan, predicted a time when anyone with an Internet connection can use it access any information in the world. This access will pave the way for a collective human intelligence, he said, that is “no longer constrained by space, time, monopoly or archaic law.”

“Over the next generation,” Duderstadt said, “the university could change so much it may no longer be recognizable.”

Become interdisciplinary

“The biggest issues of the world,” Davidson said, “can’t be dealt with simply by specialization anymore.”

Much of education is so focused on teaching individual subjects, she said, that we have abandoned higher-order learning. Instead of learning how to integrate knowledge, students learn how to answer test questions correctly and move on to the next course.

Panelists agreed that interdisciplinary learning is a must, and several offered examples of how their universities are embracing it. Burton McMurtry ’56 — a former trustee at both Rice and Stanford — talked about Stanford’s Bio-X program, which was designed to foster multidisciplinary research in the biosciences. It opened in 2003 with the requirement that researchers in engineering, medical research, the sciences and the humanities work together for a big-picture approach to solving problems.

And Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, talked about Penn’s courses and dual-degree programs that bridge the divide between liberal arts and professional education — and about faculty members who are hired for interdisciplinary joint appointments.

“If we want to educate students who are going to be both informed citizens and creative innovators,” Gutmann said, “we had better integrate liberal arts and sciences and professional education better than we have done.”

Make learning social, not individual

Learning of the future is social, panelists said — it’s peer-to-peer, not private.

Davidson said that for some of her classes at Duke, she will “flip the classroom” — she’ll distribute her course syllabus, then require two students to teach the material for each class.

And Brown talked about social learning in his classes at USC. His students answer exam questions individually, then consult with one another about the answers. Their test grades go up, Brown said, but so does their comprehension. Students also critique each other’s research papers online, suggesting and making improvements before Brown grades them. It’s crucial, he said, to produce students who can work together and use their creative energy to solve problems.

Focus on teaching, not just research

Hunter Rawlings III, president of the Association of American Universities and former president of Cornell, called for a new focus on teaching.

“The professionalization of the professoriate has been crucially beneficial for research,” he said, but as educators have scrambled to publish and earn tenure, undergraduate education has suffered.

Today, Rawlings said, “many Americans believe that the sole purpose of going to college is to get a job.”

Universities become utilitarian, offering a means to an end. Meanwhile, students “are adrift in a sea of courses,” he said, “many of them having little to do with each other.”

Rawlings believes universities can fix this – can better prepare students and convince the public of their value — by “making undergraduate teaching at least even with research in prestige and economic reward.”

Think globally

“We must be citizens of the world,” said Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus and professor at MIT. He said American universities must work with research universities in other countries and learn to “think globally” in every field.

In engineering, for example, the United States awards nearly 70,000 engineering degrees each year — but China awards more than 700,000 and India more than 500,000. American education can’t remain isolated, he said; we should work with those engineers in other countries to solve problems together.

“We’re moving into a new era of interactions and collaborations,” said Rita Colwell, professor of microbiology and biotechnology at the University of Maryland College Park and Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Colwell, a former director of the National Science Foundation, proposed that American universities set up lab-to-lab collaborations with other countries and allow students and faculty to build relationships with scientists all over the world.

“In my view,” she said, “we shouldn’t view what’s happening as a threat, but we should view it as an opportunity.”

Teach students skills to change the world

On Tuesday, after hours of talk about how research universities can thrive, the conference ended with an afternoon of specific examples. The De Lange Conference joined forces with the Rice-hosted regional meeting of the National Academy of Engineering, offering four speakers who showed how inventive thinking can produce solutions.

David Edwards, a Harvard bioengineering professor and founder of Le Laboratoire and the ArtScience Labs Network, showed how his students have developed inhalable products, personal cell-based water carriers and edible food packaging — all items that could be developed to meet specific needs in the developing world.

And Paul Yock, director of Stanford’s Program in Biodesign, showed how his students are creating more affordable versions of basic medical equipment needed for patients in India.

The first part of the De Lange conference offered “an opportunity to think about ways to help our students live lives of consequence,” said Rice Provost George McLendon, whose remarks concluded the conference. The engineers, he said, showed how future generations can “make extraordinary differences, not only for their own lives but for the lives of others across the globe.”

Other De Lange Conference speakers included Michelle Adler, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adviser who focuses on preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission; Henry T. Yang, chancellor and professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and Robert Zemsky, professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and chairman of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education.

In addition to Leebron and McIntosh, Rice faculty members who presented remarks at the conference or served as moderators were Paula Sanders, vice provost for academic affairs, dean of graduate and postdoctoral studies and professor of history; Neal Lane, senior fellow in science and technology policy at Rice’s Baker Institute and the Malcolm Gillis University Professor and professor of physics and astronomy; Ned Thomas, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of Engineering and professor in mechanical engineering and materials science and in chemical and biomolecular engineering; Rebecca Richards-Kortum, the Stanley C. Moore Professor of Bioengineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering; and George McLendon, the Howard R. Hughes Provost and professor of chemistry.

Videos of presentations made at the De Lange Conference are available online at http://edtech.rice.edu/www/?option=com_iwebcast&action=details&event=2612.

The De Lange Conferences, funded by the De Lange Endowment, were established by C. M. and Demaris Hudspeth in honor of Demaris’ parents, Albert and Demaris De Lange. The conferences are held every other year and have the flexibility to range broadly in subject matter and discipline. All are intended to bring to the Rice University campus top experts and major figures to focus on a topic of great concern to society.