University of the Future

I recently gave a talk at SMU about the future of universities. Here are my thoughts.

It’s good to be back on the SMU campus. I am a neighbor. I live a few thousand feet from where we sit today.  I watch you come and go every year, the names change, the faces change , but the goal remains.  Education.

And beat TCU.

I was here a few years ago as a guest lecturer and gave a speech at the end of my time here about the importance of the Liberal Arts education in today’s society. (I understand with the advent of the Bush Library on campus, we can no longer call it Liberal Arts…we must now call it Moderate Arts…)  

I still feel the same way now as I did then. About the arts… about science…about learning. But today I come with an even broader mission. I come as a proponent not of just one school or college, but of university life as a whole.

What is today’s university and college?

It is a question that seems to be making the rounds in our state; especially in this election year and in the just recently ended legislative session in Austin.

There are two main camps facing off about university life. One is that of our governor and his for-profit education forces. They see colleges as places to make money and to prepare students for job placement. Gloried trade schools, if you will, at all levels. Being the father of three college-age kids, I appreciate the thoughts behind these gestures, but I am not so sure that is what is best for education in our state.

That’s why I stand with the other camp.

The other side is made up of people who see the university as a center of learning, enlightenment and research. It takes its cues from ancient Greece, where students sat at the feet of learned scholars and allow their minds to be filled with knowledge, but more importantly were taught to be critical and analytical thinkers, themselves.

To me, that it was a university should be. (And I suppose in Texas, have a good football team, as well.)

When I was in school many centuries ago, my university’s main goal was not so much to teach me the dates of historical events, or the formula of certain algebraic equations, or the proper grammatical syntax of a well-crafted paragraph, although  all of those things were stressed in their own fields, the real goal of my school was to teach us to think.

Think.

Critical thinking versus rote memorization.  Analytical thinking instead of just on-command play back – that was the stated and unstated goal at my school. The idea of how well educated we were, was less about what we could spout off in replay from memory of reading and lectures, but more about how creative our thinking was.

How did we solve problems?

How did we visualize solutions?

How would we apply what we had learned to making this world a better place to live.

That is what education was about.

We never thought of the university as a place for jobs.  Sure, we all expected one as soon as we graduated.  But part of that was on our shoulders to prove to prospective employers that we were bright, energetic and full of knowledge that could help them make better companies…make better products…offer better services.

Education was about creating fertile minds to help America grow.  In all fields.

Today, there is a growing number of people who want to see the university take a step into the free market system.  They want it to compete for funds and to prepare tomorrow’s youth for jobs.  Get them ready to work. Teach them a marketable skill. (And there is noting wrong with that.  But there is so much more to an education than just the surface training that goes with a skill or profession.)

The college of today is supposed to do many things.  The first two years it is to act as a baby sitter to see to it that freshmen and sophomores don’t kill themselves…to live long enough to truly start learning. It is the job of the college to plant a seed of curiosity under their skin and nurture it until it grows into a tree hungry for knowledge’s light.

The college is also a place to look into the mysteries that surround us everyday. Research plays a huge role in higher education. It is from our college and university campuses that we have solved myriads of the world’s problems from food shortages, to water desalination, to space travel, to new textiles, new energy sources, better packaging and on and one and so forth.

Recently the head of one of the major pharmacological giants R&D program said that Pharma could not possibly conduct all the research needed to supply our medications in years to come. The task was too grand for private industry to undertake alone. It needed – rather – it had to have – the assistance of public and private universities and their energy and scale to tackle these problems.

There are those that will try and tell you that America’s R&D comes out of private industry.  And to a certain degree that is true.  But the lion’s share of that is in the form of grants and contracts to universities to conduct the actual research and field studies.  To test, to poke and to retest possible solutions in a thousand fields.

So when the governor says he doesn’t think it is the business of the university to field research, that it should be just a teaching machine, he is missing the historical and practical significance of turning to higher education as a fertile pasture for R&D.

But then again, most of the fertile fields our governor knows about have cows standing on them.

Tomorrow’s colleges and universities are going to have to become launching pads for even greater thinkers.  Population, food, water, energy, space, medicines, technology, law – they all require new minds to carry us into a century that it seeing change by the second – not by the year or even month– but by the second.

I just heard a fact that right now there are more people on Facebook than were alive 200 years ago. Imagine that.  Population in the world has doubled since I was an undergrad.  It will double again before my grand children become undergrads and double again before they graduate.

And we want to tackle the problems, which will arise from that, with glorified trade schools. I think not.

These are serious subjects – serious issues – that will require serious minds to explore serious solutions.

There is nothing…nothing…let me repeat myself…nothing… at all wrong with trade schools.  We need them.  Not everyone should be a university scholar. We need trained, enlightened trades people…technicians and workers. But if we are talking about the place of the university in higher education, then the notion of job prep is not the goal of these institutions. Job prep belongs at the trade school level.  It should be nurtured, endorsed and grown.

But it should not be confused with the job of the university. Not if we, as a society, plan on flourishing.

The real thing we should be demanding out of our universities and colleges is creativity.

The ability to teach creative thinking.

What is the next technological break through in healthcare going to look like?  What will the replacement of the computer be?  What kind of things will replace computer chips? Or potato chips for that matter. And how will we grow it and get it to market? Where is our fuel going to come from? How will we provide housing for two billion more of us? What will we make houses from? And on and on and on it goes.

I remember sitting in a history honors conference class my senior year at the University of Texas at Austin and being challenged by a professor about a paper I had written. He wasn’t getting on to me about my ability to recite facts, figures, dates and times.  He wanted me to go beyond that and to ask why certain events happened and how they affected us even today, hundreds of years later. He wanted us to look for parallel issues in our own day and time that had the same root for change. He wanted us to develop vision, not myopia.

Why was he so fired up about this?  Because he knew if he could get us to think beyond the superficiality of the printed history book page, the lessons we learned wouldn’t be just about the past, but rather the learning would transform the present and the future as well.

That is what critical thinking…creativity…is all about.

Like I said, our entire school was fostering this notion.  High education was about enlightenment.

And enlightenment was about reaching beyond the safe, the comfortable, the expected and pushing ourselves to new heights, to new horizons, to bold new solutions.

I once heard a student in a chemistry class ask a professor; what if the concoction she was mixing was wrong and failed.  Would she fail?  He looked at her and said, “Quit worrying about your grade.  Quit worrying about failure.  Look for possibility. You can’t grow, you can’t achieve, you can’t more forward without risk. And if you fear failure, you can’t face risk. Then you will fail this class.”

That was the most inspiring moment of my college life (well with the exception of my first short story being raised high as an example of the best writing the professor had ever seen.  You can visit my blog at Lost in the Lone Star State and read all about that moment of pride.)

But this professor had just in two or three sentences summed up the university experience. It is not about grades.  It is not about mixing the juice just so. It is about learning and facing risk and overcoming failure with knowledge.

That’s what we need more of in America.

That’s why we need universities.

Not job machines.