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Alan Gushkin's talk at UC Berkeley - "Dealing with the Future Now: Creating a Vital Campus in a Climate of Restricted Resources"

Alan Guskin from Antioch University spoke today at the UC Berkeley's California Hall (where the Chancellor is based out of). I've written up my notes in an extended entry...

  • Given what we know and the likely fiscal, technological and societal changes, how can we adapt the University to live a restricted resource environment.

  • Some reductions in University financing in times of economic downturn become permanent. This is not conducive to higher education.

  • How do institutions respond? They muddle-through. That is, they try to make as many incremental changes as possible...

    • increase workload,

    • hire inexpensive faculty,

    • cut stuff that isn't essential,

    • increase tuition to the maximum allowed,

    • more forceful presentations to legislature and private sector,

    • refinance debt,

    • cut non-essential academic areas.

    • libraries are cut more than other places

      • because it's there.

      • digital resources make a big difference.

      • lots of savings there.

    • No changes are made to the way students are handled.

    • Technology can make a big difference but should not replace profs/TAs.

  • Problems with muddling-through

    • You cannot muddle-through forever... you can't fund-raise enough to make up for loss.

    • Tuition levels cannot be increased forever.

    • Required increases in technology ad significant costs to budge without any savings.

    • Many budget reduction are one-time only... unfortunately, you can't cut twice. ("You can stop washing windows once, how do you stop washing windows again?")

    • Quality of life of faculty and staff deteriorates.

    • Quality of education starts to degrade.

    • Class sizes go up.

  • We have seen ourselves over the past 40-50 years as successful... but to maintain this, we need a stable economic situation.

  • How to transform from muddling-through to something else?

    • Challenge assumptions about how students can learn (that is, not just in classrooms)

    • Need to refocus on student learning not faculty teaching.

    • Need to refocus on student learning productivity not faculty productivity.

    • To affect this, we need to inject a level of pain or "anticipatory pain" that induces them to realize that there is an urgency to undertake fundamental change. Anticipate the pain and act before it gets so bad that it demoralizes everyone.

  • What are the new educational assumptions?

    • Student learning can occur in many different arenas.

    • Need to develop high-quality teaching and learning strategies.

    • Technology can be effectively utilized in core of educational process.

    • faculty have new roles.

    • libraries have made great leaps and bounds... use them.

    • new organizational structures are needed to deal with this.

  • Don't seek short-term solutions for long-term problems.

  • A vision of the future is very important to keep institutional focus.

  • How do we increase student learning and maintain the quality of faculty work-life with fewer resources?

    • We can solve the problem on the backs of faculty/staff backs or student backs with no problem... but something gives.

    • How do we do them all at once?

  • Organizing principles:

    • Create a clear and coherent vision of the future focused on student learning, quality of faculty work-life and reduced costs.

      • Align and transform all academic and organization programs and structures of an institution around a coherent focus.

      • Without the creation of a clear and coherent institutional vision, serious fundamental reform is not possible.

      • Focusing on student learning yields a much richer set of educational possibilities... it's not so important where students learn but that they've learned it.

        • Outcomes-based assessment: Not how many credits but what they've demonstrated that they've learned.

        • Learning communities: These link taught courses with a common set of students across courses.

        • Technology: interactive learning, transmits information, and is integrated to the core of

        • Out-of-class learning: service learning, practice-based learning...

        • Curricular audits: So much of what we do in higher education is not questioned. We accumulate all kinds of programs/courses/curricula via institutional learning.

    • Transform the organizational systems consistent with vision of the future.

      • Organizational systems are built to maintain the present operations through incremental adjustments.

      • Organizational systems include: how we count, how we reward, how we allocate funds, who and what we support, how we provide services. These systems are built to resist large changes!

      • Annual budgets align an institution's expenditures with the vision of the future:

        • question all institutional functions and service to determine alignment with vision.

        • determine which most accurately reflect campus' vision and fund them

        • involve faculty, staff, and administrators at many levels.

      • Assess essential and non-essential administrative and student services, and reduce or eliminate the non-essential.

        • Redesign essential service around new technologies, thereby reducing costs and improving service.

        • cross-training of staff to deliver effective and efficient services.

      • Transformative actions require investment in new technology and personnel.

        • Build a system of assessment for institution-wide learning outcomes

        • restructure faculty and other campus roles around learning outcomes.

        • create a library of the future.

    • Library of the Future

      • The transformed library of the future will be at the core of teaching, learning and scholarship.

      • Virtual reference librarians: chatting with a librarian in Australia off-hours.

      • We often don't think about the Library as a key player in the transforming of student learning... but it is.

    • Implementation Process

      • The present system's purpose is to maintain the present system.

      • The system will reject experimentation.

      • There is a danger of the whole process of change destroying the old process... this needs to be planned for.

  • Conclusion

    • It does not make sense to follow a path that is likely to lead to a slow and inexorable erosion of the nature of the academic profession s we know it.

    • choosing to follow the path outlined requires and overhaul in our thinking about how the education and organizational systems of almost all colleges and universities are and could be organized.

    • These are tough choices in a difficult time, but they offer a hopeful vision for the future of colleges and universities.

Posted by joebeone at Marzo 30, 2004 01:46 PM