Please Note:
"In placing presentations from the December 1998 Survive or Thrive conference on this website, Temple University has attempted to accurately transcribe the speaker's statements. Temple is not aware of any errors in transcription and, if any are discovered, asks that they are brought to the attention of rtraore@unix.temple.edu for immediate correction."
Transcription of tape of talk presented by
Alan Guskin, December 2, 1998 at Temple University
Alan Guskin is a distinguished professor and former President of Antioch College, as well as a consultant on change and restructuring in higher education. He has had a distinguished career as a university administrator and has consulted widely on issues of university governance and restructuring and the nature of faculty work. He has written frequently on the role of leadership, power, conflict, and change in educational organization, especially universities. Most recently he has published three widely cited articles in Change magazine on the restructuring of colleges and universities.
Facing the Future:
The Need to Transform Universities
Actually the quality of faculty worklife is a theme that I will spend a lot of time talking about and hopefully you will ask me questions. I'm going to talk today about some of the changes that I see putting pressure on the institution and I will talk along the way, and spend a bit of time talking about what I see are the dangers to faculty worklife.
It's fun being at Temple. I haven't been here for many years. I actually always dreamed about being a basketball player when I was young, so I even feel this may be the first time that I can be performing in a place like this. At any rate, I will use enormous number of overheads mainly because I learned about eight to ten years ago, when I got remarried, that my wife didn't understand a thing I was saying because she is very visual, not auditory. So I learned that maybe I should use overheads. You'll hear me talking a lot, but you'll also be seeing it. So you have a choice, which you prefer. Probably what you see may be better than what I say. Nevertheless, you'll get both.
The whole issue of transforming institutions is a tough one. A lot of people would prefer not to
deal with it. One of the issues that I am seeing as I go around the country, and talking a great deal about this, is a tremendous anxiety about what it is that we will face in the future. I will talk a little bit about one way of conceiving of this. I think the issue for me is to challenge your assumptions about what we are doing - not to give you a script or a program or a model to how you should do it. I think there is enough intelligence in this institution to figure it out, if you begin to challenge the assumptions about what you are doing. The challenging the assumptions is the toughest part.
My own feeling is that throughout the decade, the next ten years, maybe the next 15 years, there's going to be enormous pressure for change in higher education whether we like it or not. And we are seeing it already, but I think that we are going to see it even more and more.
I think the primary issue which everybody talks a lot about, and which is obviously very important, is the whole issue of cost. You can't run away from that because it is real, but it is surely not the only pressure. And the costs are two-fold it seems to me. One of the issues is that people are not willing to pay what we need for them to pay in order to keep our institutions whole as we go out in the next 10 years. You are already suffering some of that already, probably here. Most state universities are beginning to suffer that way already, even in decent or good economic times. The problem basically is, on the one hand you have resources that come into the institution whether it be in the private sector, primarily tuition and fundraising, the public sector a combination of state as well as tuition and fund-raising and in effect you have that kind of resource. The problem is that our expenses are continuing to increase and the ability of our society to pay or the willingness which is more significant in many ways, of the society to pay and individuals to pay is such that you can't continue to increase tuition. You can't continue to expect the state to give you more and more money. Lord only knows, except for maybe about 100 universities and colleges in the country, not everybody is going to raise 500 million or a billion dollars. So that the problem is that we are facing decreasing rates of increases at the same time that there is a continuous increase in the needs, the expenses of our universities. I don't believe we have cooked the books. I, for twenty-two years, was a president and I never cooked the books. The reality is our expenses, given our model for education will continue to increase without a letup over the years to come. That's one major pressure for change.
Another one, I think that is very significant that people don't talk about as much is the whole issue of student learning. It seems to me that what is happening is, you see this in state after state, that the states want to know, people want to know, the accrediting associations want to know, what are the outcomes to what students have learned. In reality as a parent, my daughter goes to college. What I care about is what she's learned. What we have given the society and the society is no longer very happy about it, is a whole notion that what you have to look at are the inputs to education - the number of books in the library, the percentage of faculty who have PhDs, the production of research. What people are saying, particularly at the undergraduate level is, that's all well and good, but what do students learn? What does a baccalaureate degree mean? And the truth of the matter is, we can no longer make the argument, which I made for many years, as a president prior to that as provost, and it said that "we're professionals, trust us; we know." Just like most other professions in society, people are beginning to say that's all well and good, but show me. Accrediting associations are making demands that everybody talk about the assessment of learning and all of us finesse it. I finessed it when I was at Antioch. The reality of life is that assessment in the next five to ten years, the accrediting associations, the state legislatures, and whomever has a demand for accountability on our institutions, is going to demand that we show what students are learning, through some method. And the reality is, from my point of view, we have to stop resisting this. We have resisted it and what is happening is, in state after state, legislatures are saying we are going to give you increases based on your productivity, based upon your retention rates, based upon some other kind of crazy formula that they work out. The reality is that they are struggling to figure out how do we get some handle on what students are learning. What we're doing is saying we are not going to help you legislators, do it on your own, and they're saying okay, we'll do it on our own. It seems to me that we have to get ahead of this game and start using our brainpower to figure out what are student learning outcomes and if we don't, we're going to be forced to do it in ways we don't like.
A third area of major pressure is the whole issue of new technologies. We tend to say educational TV; we know what happened there. Other technologies we know what happened and this is not going to have a real significant impact on the core of what we do. So it's an added expense but we do it. We start to do asynchronous learning a little bit through e-mail or whatever, that's if we are very innovative. The reality of life is that technology is coming on very, very fast. The New York Times yesterday, and I don't believe a lot,
IÔm not a techno-nut but the New York Times had an article about this palm-held computer, it had textbooks put into its memory. It can handle about ten textbooks. They are now talking about putting the textbooks for the students, this is college level, into these little computers so students don't have to carry around a lot of books. They have to figure out how to purchase it and the royalties and all that stuff. But they've already done it. It's already beginning. And if you project out five to ten years, I don't believe people are going to lie in bed with their little computer reading it for a novel, but for textbooks and for a lot of stuff in education, it might make some sense, not for everything. But it might make some sense. It'd be easier for students, easier for publishers, and make it easier for faculty. So here you have technology starting to come on and it's going to push on the whole issue of text. Well, in terms of interaction there's Carnegie Mellon about six to eight months ago reported in the most important publication in all of higher education called USA Today. Carnegie Mellon is developing software where they take an actor who is acting Albert Einstein and the whole snippets of what Einstein would say in terms of his theories and so on. Then, they have software where you ask the computer what Einstein would answer. So the whole notion of interaction between a student individually, and a faculty member or leading scientist, it's conceivable 10-15 years out, not tomorrow, but the interaction between the student and whomever, can actually be very direct - 99 or 90 or 80% of all questions you might want to ask that individual. That has wonderful possibilities for commercial ventures so it's likely to develop. Technology is going to come on pretty hard.
If we look at what is happening, another big pressure is the whole notion of present college students. This is a quote from Change magazine and the first quote is from Ted Marchese who you will hear from later on. It looks at the students and it's from studies that have gone on. The piece by Levine and Curitain is a longitudinal study and they used thousands upon thousands of students at many universities. Marchese says in the introduction, "72% of all undergraduate students work an average of 31 hours per week." Levine and Curitain go on: "Currently, one in six of all undergraduates fit the traditional stereotype of the American college student attending full-time, being 18-22 years of age, and living on campus." Next they say the student focuses on convenience, quality, service and cost. In general, they say, with increasing pressures students' collegiate social life occupies a smaller part of their lives. Going on, students are focused and career-oriented and see college as instrumental and as leading to a lucrative career which is probably true of most of the students who go to Temple. In reality, obtaining a baccalaureate degree, they say, in four years is an anomaly today, particularly at public and less selective institutions. Another academic hurdle for students is the growing gap between how students learn and how faculty teach. In effect, what the article is saying, the data is saying, is that the whole image of who our students are, what our education is structured for has to change because the students are not like that anymore. Now the truth is at Temple University, I would bet they have never been like that in large numbers. But the reality is that how we deal with them is as if they are at a small liberal arts institution. We have a calendar, a cost structure and an educational delivery system, which is the same at the universities where students are working 30 hours a week and an institution where students are not working at all.
In effect, it seems to me, that we need the courage to ask ourselves a very basic question. If we were creating this university today, given what we know right now, what would it look like? This to me is the most significant question that I will raise, that I can raise, because the reality is that until you can figure this out in some general way, not a specific way, in some general way, it's very difficult to talk about change. "If you don't know where you are going," Yogi Berra said, "you can go anywhere." You have to know what some ideal is, what you would dream of as what you think Temple University should be in order to figure out what kind of changes you are going to make. If you will, the organizational literature, you have to have some kind of vision of the future. You've got to ask the question. If you were creating the university today, given what we know and given the current technology, what would it look like? And I don't know anybody who in their heart of hearts would design an institution like you have today. Maybe you would, I wouldn't.
It's hard to believe that you'd design an undergraduate program dominated by a graduate kind of mentality. It's hard to believe that you would just develop a calendar which was developed at a point in time when we were an agrarian society and keep it a century later the way it is. The notion is if we were creating it today what would it look like? The problem with any kind of change is that the institution is basically a series of interactions between different forces. And it's a system. I think, Ted Marchese in one of his editorials a few years ago, said, "It's a system, stupid." And it's a reality when you are dealing with institutions and you are dealing with change, there aren't any good guys or bad guys. It's not that the administration is the bad guys or the faculty are the bad guys, the students are lazy. The reality of life is that there's collusion between all of us. You have the systemic interdependence. Why do students not study? Because faculty probably don't ask them to study hard. Why do faculty not ask them to study harder? Because students are working so much outside of college. In effect, why do faculty worry a lot about research productivity? Because that's what we expect them to worry about. We have built the system; it is here and when we try to change it we can't say to people who have devoted their life to a certain direction - they have to change and you are the bad guys because you are not changing. There aren't good guys and bad guys in this. There are people doing what we expect of them. And as we start to think about changing we have to start helping people to change and not yelling and screaming at them - you must change; you're not doing it the way you should do it. People are doing what we expect them to do.
What we have is a system that has a number of assumptions. And this is very difficult because the reality of life, when we talk about faculty productivity, which a lot of people do talk about directly or indirectly, we're really saying that what we want is to have faculty work harder. Because the way in which our educational institutions are structured assumes that the only learning that is significant that can occur, occurs between a faculty member and students in a classroom. Therefore, if you want to increase faculty productivity what do you do? You've got to increase either the number of classes faculty teach or the number of students in that class. There is no other alternative under the present model of delivery of educational services. What this model will do over the next 10-15 years is ruin faculty worklives in a very, very significant way. And it happens in an insidious way, unintentional I believe, but it's reality nevertheless.
We have a peculiar moment in American higher educational history. I don't think it's ever occurred before and I don't think it will happen again, namely the number of people retiring is overwhelming - huge percentages of people are retiring mainly because they have reached 65 and they came to higher education's major increase in the 60s. Well if you add 60 plus 2000 - 40 you get in effect - 40 years if somebody started at 25 they are 65 bango! They're retired at this period between 1998 and the year 2005 or 2010 or whatever it is. What administrators have to do, and you are seeing the start of it now already all over the country, is to try to figure out ways - because they have no other way to deal with this, to figure out ways of how can we get management flexibility, financial flexibility at the institution, or if there are real problems financially, how do we deal with the financial problems? It's a very simple solution. What you do is you don't replace everybody that retires with full-time tenured track faculty members. It's a no-brainer. If we don't do anything else. And what happens then is over the years you get in the situation where slowly you get more and more part-time faculty (of course, I'm sure that's happening here like every place else) more and more non-tenured track faculty, two track systems basically and these are in good economic times. These are the glory days. This is going to be the golden era 15 years from now. We are going to look back and say this is pretty good times. What happens when the economy has another down turn? If you had large numbers of adjunct faculty, large numbers of non-tenured track faculty, guess what is going to happen? If you have got to cut, you cut there because your tenured faculty members are secure. What occurs through this model of delivery is a very difficult thing for the quality of faculty worklife. Because as we hit some kind of economic down turn over the next five or ten years, which is gonna' happen one way or another, or we won't get the resources that we need, we just don't hire as many adjuncts and we just don't really rehire the lecturers. In fact we have the same number of students and we have fewer faculty. A painless way in many ways of increasing the workload of faculty inexorably. And that is the biggest danger if we do nothing. The real issue that you all have to face as faculty and everybody else has to face is that if we stay the way we are, we are going to continue down a road in which the quality of faculty worklife 10 - 15 years from now will be a miserable one. And then the question is, what happens? We have seen this in K-12 and we are now seeing this in the medical profession. People are leaving the profession in droves. What we have is a situation that is not so bad right now but which is going to get terrible as we go out. And our younger colleagues, I think, understand that. Maybe as an alternative to all this we could create a learning environment that focuses directly on activities that enhance student learning. Since our business, particularly at the undergraduate level is enhancing student learning. Why don't we develop a system that is built on that? My argument is that we have to think about restructuring the role of faculty to maximize essential faculty/student interactions. What is essential faculty/student interaction? We don't ask those questions. We just do it the way we do it because we assume we're supposed to do it. We have to integrate new technologies fully into the student learning process, not on the edges but in the middle of it. And ask ourselves if technology can do it as well as we can, not better necessarily but as well, why are we spending our time doing some of those things which take away from what is essential to us?
Third we have to enhance student learning from peer interaction and individual learning. If we do this it changes our whole thinking upside down about the nature of our institutions. We stop thinking about, it seems to me, faculty productivity and start worrying about student productivity. So the issue isn't how many hours a week the faculty spend in the classroom but how much the students learn. We stop thinking about faculty disciplinary interests and start thinking about what the students need to learn, not what students want to learn, what faculty think students need to learn, not based upon their disciplinary background, but based upon what students need to learn in order to be effective members of the 21st century. That's a very different question.
While we have to worry about faculty teaching styles we have to be more sensitive to student learning styles so the issue is not classroom teaching as much as student learning. Let's take a look at what this means. And this is a little more extreme than I needed to, just to make the point. If we focus on faculty teaching and compare it to a focus on student learning, what does it mean? A focus on faculty teaching says that courses are for the most part the only means for faculty teaching and student learning. If we take a student learning focus the emphasis is upon blocks of learning which students can learn in many, many different ways, in many, many different venues. The issue is not faculty having to be in contact with students but students learning and there are many ways in which students can learn. If you focus on faculty teaching, you find out that students are taught in 12-16 week semesters. Now what does that have to do with learning? Why is it a big deal that students have to learn it in 12-16 weeks? If we are truly interested in student learning why is time the major issue? In our institutions controlling what students learn is time. Why? What happens if a student learns it in 8 weeks? What happens if a student learns it in 16 weeks? What do we care? What we want as faculty members is for students to learn. If they learn it in a different amount of time based on ability, motivation, and lifestyle whatever, it doesn't make a difference. That's what we are interested in - student learning. If you are interested in student learning then you are focused on mastery learning. A student takes the time necessary to be proficient in the area.
With a faculty teaching focus the assessment is by grades at the end of the course. Maybe because I am ignorant, but I have not seen a whole lot of research that shows that grades have an impact on student learning. In reality we do it that way because we are supposed to do it that way because of some past. But it has no relationship to student learning that I know of. If you focus on student learning you are interested in assessment or proof of competency independent of the course and the teacher. In fact it would be freeing for faculty not to have to worry about grading but just to worry about enhancing students' learning. And then have assessment of students' learning and the student doesn't even have to interact with the faculty member to show/demonstrate that they have learned.
Fourth, in focus on faculty teaching the emphasis is upon lecture and discussion teaching method very limited faculty student contact outside of class. The most humbling data that I have seen in years is that student remember one week after they have heard a lecture 20% of the lecture. One week. Imagine if it's six months. So the method that we use is not very helpful in terms of student learning. It seems to me that probably students would learn much more in much more intense discussions and mentoring and one on one, in places where they are highly motivated we can get really intense learning. Obviously a lecture every now and then is a good thing if somebody has something to say that can't be learned any other way. I believe that there is nothing wrong with faculty who really want to say something and have something to say that is very special - lecturing and people coming to that lecture. The reality of life is that very few of us can lecture, really burn to lecture three times a week for 16 weeks. Maybe some of you are like that, not many.
Fifth, the emphasis on faculty teaching environment is on faculty ways of knowing. And that's why it's focused on the academic disciplines. In a student learning environment the emphasis is on students' ways of knowing - multiple focus to learning academic material, interdisciplinary problem focus, skill competency whatever. But it's students' ways of knowing. Faculty member and faculty teaching environment is a primary agent responsible for student learning. We know that the active student learning is by far and away the best way for students to learn. Students should be responsible for their learning.
In a faculty teaching environment, graduation is an accumulation of course credits. Most institutions have integrated senior papers. In a student learning focus it's a graduation based on a demonstration that the student has learned the required competency and can demonstrate that. In fact, the summary conclusions that I have are that there are key elements of the student learning process that can only, only be learned effectively through the good contact between faculty and students. I am not a believer that distance learning is the only way that everything is going to happen - solely. There are some subject matters that lend themselves to that and there are some people who can handle that. But there is critical learning that for me at least, I believe occurs only through interaction between human beings, faculty and student. We have to figure out what that is, not just assume it, not just assert - because that's that way we learned it, that's the way we will teach it. There are key elements of student learning process that can be accomplished effectively utilizing electronic technology, especially new information technologies. There are key elements of student learning process that can be accomplished effectively through peer interaction without the presence of faculty members and by students learning by themselves inside and outside the institution.
The fact is that what we are faced with here is not just an American problem. One of the most interesting things at the World Conference on Higher Education which took place in October, the first week in October, in Paris. I got on the Internet to try to look at what they were talking about. It was fantastic. A lot of the stuff they were talking about looked very familiar. One quote is: "In a world undergoing rapid changes there is a perceived need for a new vision and paradigm of higher education calling for radical renewal and change its policies of access so as to cater for an evermore diversified categories of people in its contents, methods, practices and means of delivery based on new types of links and partnerships with the community and with the broader sectors of society. To achieve these goals, it is necessary, they say, to recast curricula using new and appropriate methods so as to go beyond cognitive mastery of disciplines and to use new pedagogical and didactic approaches." And one of my favorite editors of all times, Ted Marchese writes (in a recent Change magazine), "We should be ready to fashion new designs for undergraduate education robust enough for the next century. The design elements of choice involve much higher expectations, close faculty work with student cohort, seamless curricula, problem-driven assignments, rich uses of technology, the major as apprenticeship and throughout, ample mixes of active classrooms with community laboratory and the workplace." We are asking for an overhauling of what we know as undergraduate education.
I'll break this out so you can see it better but basically I am going to talk about three, very briefly, three different types of student learning. There are other types of student learning but there are three here - accumulation of knowledge, skill development and conceptual development. Then look at the faculty role, peer group role and individual learning and technology.
In terms of the accumulation of knowledge and information, it seems to me that here we are talking about the place where faculty role will change the most. And where actually, the librarian will become a very critical player, namely as a place where the accumulation of knowledge and information, as a place where technology actually will be very, very powerful. By the way, if you really want to know what the future is going to be in terms of technology, get a little bit of peek inside the window, go to a librarian's conference. They are way, way ahead of the rest of us. They are talking about things that will come on line for the rest of us in the years ahead. The librarians, good librarians, are extraordinarily sophisticated in the areas of technology and delivery of information and knowledge. I think they will play a much more significant role in the future than they have in the past. Faculty will still be presenters but for the most part they will be, along with librarians, guides to resources. Faculty will play a key role in this model, which is only one model and it's meant to stimulate not to give answers. Faculty will play a key role in the assessment of learning. My proposal is not that faculty give up the basic kind of control, if you will, if you want to talk in that language of what students need to learn. It's just that we're talking about doing it a different way, which will save the quality of faculty worklife ultimately.
There's a lot more that students can do in terms of individual learning. They will use the guides to access new technology or to help them with independent learning. Technology it seems to me will be a very powerful force in terms of accumulation of knowledge and information in many different ways that keeps on changing and enhancing. One way is through the interactive technologies, simulations, and all kinds of things.
A second major kind of learning is skill development. Here I am not just talking about basic skills. I am talking about scientific method, basic communication skills, languages, you name it, writing, obviously, math. A lot of right now what is done is faculty teaching. Languages are the most significant thing that I know of as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I went to the Peace Corps in 1961 and learned a Thai language in 13 weeks. It wasn't even total immersion. We recommended that they get involved in total immersion. We've been doing this for 50 years. We know how to teach people how to speak a foreign language. And it's not one hour at a time, three times a week, sixteen weeks. You don't learn a foreign language - children don't learn to communicate in a foreign language - one hour a day, three hours per week. They learn by speaking. What we do is we don't follow what is a very natural way in which people learn languages. It is also very costly for us because we take faculty members who are very, very creative, and put them doing things that don't use their skills very well. Faculty could coach native speakers, which is what the Peace Corps and the Foreign Service have done for many, many years. The foreign or native or fluent speakers actually get involved in communicating with people in a foreign language and the faculty member then is in effect the teacher of teachers - a very different role. It's very, very efficient - you can double and triple the number of languages that you offer through this method. Not the literature, but in communication which ultimately is what we want people to do at the undergraduate level along with those that are particularly interested in literature, some more advance methods. Older, more experienced peers teach younger peers. The literature is overwhelming on this in K-12. It's been there for 30 years probably. I used to know it 25-30 years ago that if you have somebody teach another person, an older student teach a younger student, the older student learns much more and the younger student learns much more; it's a win-win situation for everybody and there's not a faculty member present. One of the problems is that we ask faculty members who have never had problems learning. It's one of the reasons why we're faculty members because we love learning. Not all of our students are in the same boat or have the same love of learning. It's much more difficult for us to teach people who have problems in learning than it would be for older students, who themselves have overcome problems, teaching younger students. It would also save a lot of money. There are computer simulations that can be used for skill development.
Finally the area of conceptual development, for
me this is an area which faculty members play the key role. Faculty have to spend much more time and do not spend that much time compared to purveyors of information and purveyors of knowledge. This is the place where students learn to think new ways about old things. This is the area where the faculty have the most impact upon students. It's also the area where faculty love to work more than any other thing. But it requires a very different kind of model of education, a much more mentoring role - small group discussion leader, faculty as convenor of cooperative learning groups, one-on-one advising, faculty-student interaction and so on. And the peer group is somewhat powerful in this. And technology is modestly powerful but human interaction is key and the faculty is key to that.
What are the implications for the faculty? First, I believe in this kind of model there would be less disciplinary and less class time, more intense interaction with students over short periods of time. The subject matter would be more integrated and more interdisciplinary. Faculty role would be much more technology focused, and God only knows, we will have an immense need for faculty development. None of this is what we were ever taught. And so the whole notion of faculty being the small discussion group leaders, faculty mentoring students, faculty using technology in the ways in which they are going to have to - that is not something that we find easy. So there will have to be a lot of resources devoted to faculty development.
What are the implications for the calendar? You can probably imagine - I'm not a great lover of the present calendar. I think it's an albatross around the neck of higher education. It makes it almost impossible for us to have any significant change. And why do we have the present calendar? It's something you have to talk about. If one makes some changes, maybe some subject matter will be offered in short blocks rather than as courses over a semester, less rigid time sequences, more flexible time, greater utilization of facilities. Probably one of the most significant changes in this kind of model is the changing role of students. The student would have to be more responsible for their own learning. The students would be more independent learners. Learning would occur beyond the interaction with the faculty. We know that students could spend much more time learning than they do. In fact, full-time students at most colleges and universities in this country probably don't study more than ten hours per week, full-time students, ten hours a week. They are working and doing other things, but that's not the issue. The issue is, there is collusion right now, students can be passive and faculty can lecture, and it's okay. They both agree. Therefore the system works on. Except that it's going to ruin the quality of faculty worklife over the long run. That is a key issue I think we all have to think about.
My proposals are brief. Students will spend more time learning by themselves and with their peers and much more time engaged with powerful interactive technologies. The student will spend less actual time, but more intensive, creative, and focused time with faculty members. Faculty will work with greater numbers of students, but teach much less. The basic question for me to come back to is something that I asked before that I will ask in a slightly different way. Given the likely future economic realities and what we know, how would we create a university in which the following three elements are present:
I'm not naïve, though and there are a number of short-term obstacles to accomplishing this or any significant change. The first is that the future is not painful yet. By the very nature of the definition the future difficulties are not here. What we have to do as faculty and administrative leaders is create anticipatory pain. Sounds strange! But if we are so devoted to the present and we do not change, we will wait until the pain gets so great and then we will begin to think about changing, and it will be very late in the process. Right now, people are anxious; they know something has got to change; they are not quite sure what it is but their anxiousness has not reached the level of pain, which leads to action. Second, there is a lack of understanding between the difference between being concerned with students and student learning. I don't know many faculty who are not concerned with students and student learning. But that's not the issue. The issue is not one of concern. The issue is developing the structures and processes that are focused on student learning. It's a very different issue. Third, technology is viewed as an add-on. To some extent that makes sense because given the state of the present technology, that is probably all that can be done. But the future is going to be very different, I think, and we see, gazing 10-15 years out; we can see it almost on a daily basis. Technology has to be viewed eventually as integrated totally into the core of the educational process. Fourth, big issue as to why people are not changing is - they do not understand how to produce significant institutional change. They do understand how to produce incremental change. We're good at changing. People say higher education is always changing. It is always changing. We develop a new curriculum. And so we move slightly the disciplinary requirements. We develop a new calendar. We move from 16 weeks to 12 weeks, 12 weeks to 16 weeks, we get an ingenious month for external work. The reality of life is we know how to do incremental change, we do not know how to do significant or transformational change, although I think we have the capability to do it. And very often we are involved in some of those activities in our private lives. And most importantly, probably, is faculty and administrators have difficulty conceiving of alternatives to the present teaching/learning process. And if you don't have any alternatives, it's very difficult to think about change.
Two quotes to end it. One is from Marjorie Kelly in a short article on "Taming the Demons of Change." She writes: "Transformation, of any sort whether human, chemical or corporate, is a perilous passage at best calling for a radical letting go and an openness to the unknown. It's hard to imagine anything more frightening. And it's hard to find a more likely route to progress for letting go of the old form we create the space for a new form that will work even better. It comes down simply to this - that we can't advance as long as we are holding tight to what no longer works and we have to break the mold before new form can emerge."
Finally, a wonderful quote from my favorite social scientist, Margaret Mead. She says, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Thank you very much!