 My name is Jeff Selingo. I was one of the team members on this project, and I welcome you back after lunch. This panel is going to talk about research faculty and forging partnerships. And I think faculty, we touched on a couple of times this morning, and the role faculty play in informing the next generation university. And joining me for this panel is John Kavanaugh, president and CEO of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington metropolitan area. And previous to this was Chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System, Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, and Luis Perenza, who is president of the University of Akron. So the fact, we could probably talk this entire panel about the faculty. So we might as well start there. And there was a couple of questions that came up this morning about the faculty mindset. And I think that there's this belief in terms of change right now in higher education and how the faculty are kind of holding that back, right? It's kind of the administration versus faculty, which of course has been true for generations, but even more so today. And I think examples in the recent weeks of faculty at some institutions basically saying that injections of technology at their institutions, whether it's in Cal State or whether it's at Amherst or not going to work. So what role does the faculty play in the next generation university? And obviously they're going to play a critical role. But most importantly, how do you as leaders kind of bring them in as partners? What does work in terms of bringing them in as partners? And Michael, I'll start with you and then move back. And I think the faculty are the essential ingredient. They are the knowledge creators, knowledge synthesizers, knowledge analyzers, knowledge transfer agents, the creators of the learning environments. They're the individuals who we ask to be these, in a sense, live interactive repositories of knowledge. And so they are at the center of all things. What's, I think, important going forward at least one way that we've approached things is to not allow the center of all things to become overly egotistical about their role and their purpose. That is, if you have a faculty and it's a fantastic faculty and you want them to be successful and you want to avoid conflicts as you move through periods of change, then you engage for a purpose. We don't engage as managers. We don't manage faculty. That's not the right concept. It's not the right mechanism or tool. What you do is you find these self-guided, highly-driven individuals who are capable of high levels of creativity and you empower them toward an objective. Now, if you give them a generic objective, as is the case in many public universities, just sort of a generic objective, then they can act somewhat as mercenaries moving from school to school. They can lose track of their purpose. They can lose track of their identity. But if you give them a specific focused objective, and that objective is the improvement of our society measured in ways in which you can see it, feel it, smell it, count it, you know, all those things, then people get very excited about that. Our basic approach at ASU has been, you know, heavy, heavy faculty engagement and faculty ownership of where we're headed. What we've tried to do is to create an environment that allows them to be as creative as possible and for, you know, not without exception, but principally we have avoided faculty conflicts. The 70 or so major academic changes that we've made in terms of the structure of the university, of the new institutes, the new programs, the new initiatives, all of those things, the faculty have been partners in designing those things and have ultimately been endorsers of those things. John, you just came from Pennsylvania, which on top of overseeing this large state system also has a unionized faculty as well. So it's not just shared governance, but it's also kind of the unionized portion of this as well. Again, how do you bring faculty in as partners on change? Well, first I want to pick up a little bit on what Michael was saying. If you think about the socialization of individuals who become faculty, you know, we're socialized to be very independent, to be very creative and to be very skeptical. That's how we're trained through graduate school and so on. Particularly, you know, those of us who were steeped in the scientific method, you don't just willy-nilly accept everything that comes down the pike. I mean, you need some evidence to support it and you go through the hypothesis testing and all of that. Knowing that, if what you then do is to say, well, you just have to trust us. You can't manage people who are trained to be skeptics and trained to be independent thinkers. So if you're willing to engage on that level and to remember that perhaps that's the way you were socialized, then it becomes a much easier conversation to have because you know the language and you know the healthy skepticism that people are going to come to the table with. That, you know, the history is full of examples of people just knee-jurking and going down and turning out to be wrong. So the fact that people want to see evidence is actually a good thing. So let's help create the evidence and to create that. Also playing into the creativity and the independence bet, if you give people room to maneuver and there's a lot of conversation about that, people run with ideas and try things out and get back together and share those ideas. That's also part of the culture. And you raised the union issue and I want to separate out faculty and unions because unions are structures, organizations that have their own culture and faculty, even though they may be covered by union rules and so on, may or may not be active members of the union. So to use stereotypic notions that it's the union or the faculty is probably going to do a disservice to both. So I think if you approach it from the perspective of understand the culture, change is not something that's easily done. Although if we jump out of higher ed for a moment, what also crosses my mind is how much our society has changed and how much we've been able to change people's behavior in our lifetime in very fundamental ways. We now have entire societies that take out their own trash, pump their own gas. Just a few years ago, everybody who went to the grocery store, you had a person at the register and somebody putting the stuff in the bag, now you do that all yourself too. So are we going to be teaching ourselves? In a way, we're kind of there with self-paced and we can talk about it. But there are ways that very subtly you can get broad acceptance of deep change in behavior very rapidly if you meet people on their terms. I think the same holds with faculty too. But that's part of the problem. I mean all this discussion of efficiency makes the faculty think you're trying to replace them or reduce their roles, at least in some ways. Well that's certainly one of the frightening experiences that faculty are experiencing. But actually I think faculty roles are changing in and of themselves. We're increasingly attracting faculty, whether it's in the sciences where the change is almost complete but even in the social sciences and humanities you're seeing much more of faculty who want to be engaged who want to be very much connected. So we built, and Michael is right, an approach based on three principles because people want to be relevant, they want to be connected and they want to be productive. They don't want to hear that something is academic meaning that that's irrelevant. They don't want to be hearing that you're an ivory tower and therefore they're both unconnected and irrelevant. They want to be engaged and so what we've done is to really create a series of opportunities of a variety of sorts, typically in partnerships with the primary industrial clusters in northeast Ohio with other agencies for example etc. to create those opportunities that would not have been possible by ourselves and that generates a huge amount of interest on the part of the faculty. They get excited, they want to participate, they don't want to be left out. So I'd say that relevance, connectivity and productivity element is increasingly being manifested in and of itself. Michael, you talked a little bit about the focused objective earlier. A lot of faculty that I meet seem very interested in their discipline and sometimes I wonder if the whole institution kind of fell down around them whether they would care as much as long as their department, as long as their discipline continue to survive. How do you get the faculty interested in kind of serving students, student success and these institutional goals over the goals of their own school, department, discipline? So the approach that we're taking is brutal honesty. And so the brutal honesty is here's the students we have, here's what most models predict they should be able to do. They come from this broad cross-section of families we're underperforming. Here's what your discipline is doing around the country, whatever that happens to be. Here's what you're doing. You're underperforming or overperforming or performing. And so brutal honesty is a powerful tonic for getting people focused on a certain kind of objective. And then when faculty realize that they will be supported to move in the direction of enhancing performance, they move in the direction of enhancing performance. And so these are individuals who, for the most part, you have to understand the psychology of faculty. So the principal motivation for faculty is not money as it is in many sectors of our economy. So you can't just pay them off. It turns out that it's recognition. Recognition is the objective. What did I do? What was I able to achieve? What does my name mean? Was I able to advance fundamental knowledge or fundamental understanding? Or did I create a new methodology for creating conductors that no one else has ever developed before? And if I have done that, then I have achieved something which is why I devoted me, the faculty member, all that time and energy to doing that. And so when we talk about efficiency and effectiveness, we don't have arguments with our faculty because we're talking about that in the context of our performance relative to our students. There are no measurements of performance, effectiveness, or efficiency for single faculty members. There's only performance in terms of the quality of your knowledge product or the impact of your knowledge product, which is not effectiveness or efficiency. So we assign those terms in places where they can be used. We get reaction to that because they want to be for the public good benefit of our goal. They want to be more effective overall in graduating our students. So we're getting that kind of reaction. So what one has to do is de-simplify the standard classic model. Oh, it's a union, so it's this or it's a, we don't have unions, but it's a union and it's this or it's the faculty, so it's that. And you even hear this perpetuated in the DC policy dialogue. There's these assumptive models about what a faculty is or isn't. And those would be mostly things talked about that are not accurate enough. John, you talked earlier about there's this healthy skepticism among the faculty, which is good, right? We want faculty to be healthy skeptics and they want evidence. Do we have enough evidence for them? Or will we ever have enough evidence for them? Well, you know, the sidestep, the philosophical question is, is there ever enough, right? Or do we have enough in terms of, you know, even what we're talking about today? I think I would reframe that into more of, you know, the social science model. Is it sufficient, all right, to draw a reasonable conclusion based on the preponderance of the evidence? Okay. And or to put it in a different way, is it probable that this is the better or good enough solution given where we are right now? And I would say in some areas the answer is clearly yes. Because some of the things that we're talking about as innovative, disruptive, the elements of it and the principles behind it have been around for decades. It's the scalability maybe that's different or it's online now and it wasn't 50 years ago. It was talked about in terms of color courses, self-paced learning. The labels might have been different. The scale wasn't there. But there's a lot of evidence that has been built up over a long period of time in many of these areas that really do provide significant support to deal with the hypothesis thing if you want to look at it that way. So I would say, yeah, in many respects there is. Is there a generational difference among the faculty on these issues? I mean, we thought years ago that we would see this massive wave of retirements in higher education among faculty and we didn't see it probably because of the economy. About the Supreme Court ruling in the 1990s. Right, so we no longer have mandatory retirement. How about that? And as a result, the faculty on many campuses, especially the tenured faculty are aging. Is there a generational divide on campuses around the issues that we're talking about today on the next generation campus? I think by and large it's also a disciplinary divide. As I mentioned earlier, I think the social sciences and humanities are not always up to speed in that area. But let's remember that it's also a generational divide at the level of the administration. We did a big study in Ohio about shared services to support IT. The evidence was incontrovertible that we could say probably a hundred million dollars among our institutions if we did a shared services model. The institutions rejected it. We had to go to a community college to get the first partner. We've yet to get the second one. Why did they reject it? Oh, because that might enter into their turf, right? It might somehow or other give up their trade secrets or it might somehow or other disrupt the efficacy with which they think they do something that, of course, by definition is and of itself inefficient. We talked earlier in one of the earlier panels about the role of universities. Universities have many jobs to do and one of them is training the future faculty. This idea, if you're student-centered, do you give up on that role of training the future faculty? It presumes that we ever taught faculty to be faculty. I mean, it's sort of something that's simply accepted and moved forward. Rarely do we have a university that actually teaches somebody how to teach. They may know how to do a little bit of research because they spent time in a laboratory. But I think the notion that we ever taught our students to be faculty has never been the case. I don't think student-centrism, at least in the way that I use that term. You're mainly talking about undergraduates? No, no. I mean, student-centric means, you know, the purpose of the reason that I use that term is to juxtapose student-centrism from faculty-centrism. So faculty-centrism says that we are basically of the European Middle Ages guild mode. We collect students to pay us money, to pay our faculty so our faculty can do what they want to do. And teaching is one of the means by which they gain assets to do what they really want to do. Not that they... Well, it's true. People in the audience can't hear there's a person laughing. And so it doesn't mean that people don't want to teach. It doesn't mean that it just means they want to do a lot more. Now, if you just switch it and you now say the university is student-centric, it's graduate students, undergraduates, whatever, that means the purpose of the faculty is to assist these students to be empowered as master learners to go forward in their lives in a new kind of way. And it's perhaps overly subtle for folks outside the academy to see, but it's a powerfully changed format. And it applies to graduate students as well as to undergraduate students, but there is, in a sense, more sociological and pedagogical flexibility with the undergraduates than with the graduate students because I ask anyone to answer the question, how do you produce a synthetic biologist capable of understanding the mechanisms by which a new previously non-existing life form can be engineered? It's not really a classroom activity. I mean, it's a thing that you learn in the midst of certain individuals working in a way that's very hard to describe. That's the graduate student's life. And so there's a big difference and we haven't really focused on that as much, but it's still student-centric. So I want to transition to research as part of this panel as well. And one of the things I think that surprised the group as we were doing this study is that these institutions as they've become, or as they're becoming next generation universities and really focused on students and focused on teaching, haven't given up on research ambitions. And this kind of false economy that's sometimes set up in higher ed, you could either teach or you could do research, but you can't necessarily do both, at least at a large scale. I think it was proven to be false in our study and that all of these institutions, while they were gaining efficiencies on a number of measures, including on teaching, that they've also gained in research dollars at the same time. And all of them have seemed to use research as a way to attract high quality faculty who are part of the overall university mission. So can you talk a little bit about, and all three of you, talk a little bit about how research can be leveraged to attract faculty and get faculty buy-in for the larger goals of the university? I'll start with you, Michael. I think there's a somewhat of a more fundamental question. A few years ago we had one of our student regents in Arizona was arguing about why we needed to do anything other than buy a generic calculus textbook and just have that available for the next 50 years because he said nothing had changed in calculus for hundreds of years. So while he was sitting there, I went and looked at the last 12 months' advances in calculus, which were dramatic and fundamental. But this particular individual would have had to understand even the simplest thing about calculus to even understand what it meant that the knowledge in calculus, which is driven by research in math and research in calculus, is an ongoing, continuously moving forward thing. And so what we have constructed in the design of the institution that we have and in the design of the institution that we think is essential is that if you're going to be on our faculty, you're going to be advancing knowledge in your subject, or you're not going to be on the faculty. You're going to be advancing the knowledge in that subject so that you can be a better teacher so that you can create a better learning environment for your students. And that doesn't mean that every university has to do that, but our university bearing the name that we have, which is Comprehensive Metropolitan Research University, we're not going to do that. And so it goes through this fundamental thing that a lot of people think, and they're wrong, that we know all there is to know. It's all wrapped up. And now all we have to do is just teach it and you don't need any researchers to be able to do that. There's not a single subject that we have at the university for which that's the case. Not one, including accounting. There are methodological approaches in accounting that are being derived and advanced and modeled and calculated because you want different types of outcomes for our society and accounting is a way to get there. I guess the purpose for the research is that it is considered an essential ingredient to the building of a learning environment capable of producing an adaptive learner. There's other ways to produce learners, but to produce an adaptive learner, we think that the people that are involved in the actual instruction have to be knowledge creators also in the research pathway for us. So we've gone from 100 million a year and funded research in O2, no funded research in 1980, to 410 will be our number this year that will count on June 30th. Without a medical school, that's a huge number, only a handful of schools in the country have ever achieved that. We're on our way to 700 million dollars a year and it's not about the money. It's about the intensity of the faculty and what they do and then the attraction of this broad cross-section of students to a faculty of that caliber, to a learning environment of that type. And so it is the case, as you said, Jeff, that many places think that somehow it's one or the other. It's not one or the other. It's both, but at perhaps different levels of intensity. It's both, but at different levels. Well, and it's also the type of research that you're doing. So, Luis, could you talk a little bit about, I mean, obviously you're in Akron, which is, I don't want to offend Akron, but you know, it's obviously, it's an industrial city. And the capital of the world. Right. So talk a little bit about the research that you're also, there is also this kind of connectiveness to the community and to the region and to the state that's also incredibly important. Very much, Jeff. And so the way we've approached this is to say to our faculty to our community that we want our students to know how both knowledge is created as well as applied. And it works for us because of the long tradition of having grown up alongside what was the rubber industry is now the polymer industry. It's huge. And of course, over the years, in other industrial sectors, we're doing a major project now with industry and the Department of Defense on corrosion, corrosion prevention, mitigation materials, degradation materials, support, et cetera. And what happens as a result of this history and this focus on the major industrial clusters is first that it creates a connectivity both for our faculty and for students. So they have a sense of where they might be employed. They have opportunities for internships and work study and co-ops, et cetera. But it also creates an opportunity for the faculty to engage the students in real-world practical problems. And it's phenomenal because that brings about, it creates an intensity of commitment of the faculty to the success of the students. The American Society of Environmental Engineers, which I think many of you know runs these national competitions in a variety of engineering areas. And the way that our students and faculty have worked together over the years has resulted in our students having more awards than any other single institution and more awards than all other universities in Ohio combined. And it's just phenomenal because, again, they are taking the knowledge that's being developed, exploring how it can be applied to the next generation of solutions in whatever competition and or industry they're working with. It's a very connected, very relevant, and, again, very productive environment. John, how do we ensure, I mean, one of the criticisms is that, you know, a lot of institutions have wanted to become more research-like in terms of their profile. And so how do we make sure that these institutions don't kind of creep into becoming, trying to become major research universities and kind of move beyond what their mission is? Where research is important and obviously connected to the community but that there is not this mission creep that suddenly, 15 years from now, we have twice as many research universities and not the scale of universities we need to educate students. Well, I think that presupposes a number of things. The first is that there are... I'm a journalist as I'm supposed to try. That there are research universities and non-research universities, and I would say there isn't such a thing as the latter. Which I'll agree with, but there are certain types of research universities. In the not for profit segment. But, again, I would argue that it's not as simple as its mission creep because it's an envy of something else. There's also been a fundamental redefinition of the relationship between the rest of the world and universities in research. When I was an undergrad, there were lots of companies out there that had and paid for huge R&D operations, Bell Labs, the DePont Company. Now, that's very different. That relationship is fundamentally different and universities do a lot more basic research, arguably, than they did something when I was 18, 19 years old. If that's what we're talking about at a scale that's at Arizona State, then I think you can build a case that not everybody's going to be able to build the infrastructure to do that kind of work. On the other hand, we also ought to look at the creation of knowledge as such a fundamental building block for students' experience that lets also not overly focus the definition of research on particular disciplines. If we look at it as scholarly activity, research, small R, broad definition that is the creation of new knowledge, then everybody can engage in that. It's not just a wet bench science kind of definition. And the kind of thinking experience and learning experience that opens to students. If we really want to create our critical thinkers who are flexible, who can deal with unforeseen things that happen because not every research project goes as planned. How do you deal with uncertainty? How do you figure out what questions to ask? How do you know when you're only a question when you have enough evidence? All of that goes into that research or scholarship or scholarly endeavor activity. If that's what you mean by research, then every decent institution that you would argue is credible is a research institution at that level. I think it's more of a scale and the kinds of things you do and the infrastructure that that takes and so on that's different. Two of you quickly if we can. One of the things we have to be really careful about here is that a lot of people think and you hear this in a lot of the rhetoric that our job at the university is to produce technically qualified individuals to perform an assigned task upon departure. Our job is to produce a person capable of learning anything and adapting to anything including their first assignment upon departure. That's a very different subjective indicator of what we're trying to do. People want to say you don't need the research because just teach them biology. Pour in the information. It's like making Kool-Aid or something and so that's not it and I'm not trying to make it into some fanciful strange bizarre thing that only faculty members can do. It's that the identity of the university as a university is about being what we use the term knowledge enterprise. We produce knowledge, store knowledge, synthesize knowledge and transfer knowledge. There are institutions that could do any one of those by itself but only for a limited time frame. Universities are supposed to be institutions capable of doing all of them for a sustained time frame. But they don't do all of them well. Well, different ones do them in different ways and there's different ways to do it. At least you had to point that out. Two areas of opportunity for universities where research is concerned. First the R&D expenditures globally are now exceeding a trillion dollars with the U.S. increasingly becoming a smaller percentage. The U.S. is about 450 billion presently. Of that 450 billion universities perform only about 11% of that so a little brutal honesty that we're not the center of the research university. But very importantly of that 11% only about 5% of that is supported by industry. An industry does the most amount of expenditures so the point is twofold. One there's huge opportunity for us to better connect with the international R&D economy but within the U.S. for the benefit of our students for the benefit of really opportunity growth and wealth creation we have to connect better with industry if we're going to succeed in creating the knowledge. It's a great transition to our industry. A discussion which is coming up but I want to go back to a quote that Mark Becker said this morning in the first panel and he said the best researchers are the best faculty. We perpetuate this myth that they're not. Why is that? Why are we... Why does the press perpetuate the myth? It's not always the press. A lot of other people think that too. So why do we perpetuate that myth if it is a myth? Lots of emotions in human beings. Jealousy is one. This notion that somehow the person that can outperform you in teaching and research somehow you have to find some way to tear that person down. There's many many many factors as to why myths are perpetuated. So it is the case, I want to agree with Mark that in our case the number of tremendous researchers that we have that are not great teachers is a handful less than five. Five individuals. It's also been the case at my institution that people that were great researchers that couldn't teach their brother how to tie their shoe. They're not at our institution anymore. They failed on the teaching pathway and so they're gone. It's just interesting, it's often the case that you get these great scholars who are at the edge of their discipline and what they want to do is to express it. At the same time there was a kid that I was talking to him from East Coast University near the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was trying to be recruited by our chemistry department and so our chemistry department wanted me to talk to him so I talked to him and he says well you do a lot of teaching out there and I said you know why we do that we're at a thing called a university and so we actually have all the faculty teach and he said I didn't know if he could teach more than one class per year and keep up his research and I said to him now I was supposed to recruit the guy and said you better look around somewhere else because that isn't how we work. And so where did he go? I don't even care. Because he wanted to do a different thing than we needed done. What we need done at our institution is the way universities used to work. But he obviously believes that you can't do great research and do great teaching at the same time. I don't know if he's a good teacher. I would argue though Jeff that there's a continuum of skill sets some people are better at some things than others and what we what we need are people who can handle both well there are other settings in which if you excel at the research and can't teach a brother how to tie his shoes because that's not what you're expected to do and you're not getting paid to do that. So you know whoever is perpetuating the myth we have to also acknowledge that we in higher ed are much less willing to tolerate bad teaching than we used to be and I think that's a good thing and what that results in I think for all of us is we get the best thinkers and the most creative people doing both and that is the outstanding model and help that we want for our students. The people we post tenure reviewed out of the institution that is they had tenure until they lost the privilege of keeping it it was all over teaching all of it. So I think that's a good thing to do something that we just brought up on partnerships. So as research becomes more important as the federal government likely cuts back on its support of research at least in some areas these partnerships become incredibly more important and in all the institutions that we saw in this study partnerships were kind of a key component partnerships between individual campuses partnerships on research partnerships on student experiences and so forth obviously it's easy to sign an MOU and say we have a partnership with X what in your feeling when we talk about the next generation university in the future what qualities of a partnership equal success I'll start with you. That it goes beyond just saying we have a partnership with X. We have a partnership between and mutual investment much as we talk this morning about scale enabling some things partnerships collaborations enable to do something that one may not be able to do you leverage each other's resources you have to two things going forward it's not easy there's partnering paranoia relationship fatigue and all of these things but where there is synergy and this is very vital there is that wonderful opportunity that becomes an intense relationship and again being connected to the major industrial clusters facilitates that you have the expertise that can make a partnership work you have the problems that enables the expertise to be expressed for example let me give you just one example of a truly president setting partnership that we just created a major company in our area had a technology that was stranded within the company in other words it was proprietary to themselves they weren't letting anybody even see it etc but they realized that as long as they kept it only to themselves it could never gain economically the value that it could have in other fields of use thus they could retain the proprietary rights for their field of use but in a partnership begin to build other field of use opportunities so they literally took that technology brought it over to the university jointly now we are continuing to develop it but through an agreement and a for-profit company we are now taking that technology and moving it into new fields of use and it's anticipated that it may have 200 or 300 million dollars of value within five years my point there is that a stranded technology creates an opportunity for a partnership we've also done a lot of work with companies where patents that they have on their shelf again stranded in a different ways they're not going to even use it for their own right we've created as many companies from other people's technologies as we have from our own technology that's been a fascinating set of opportunities Michael does location matter on this it's interesting that several of the universities in our study are very dynamic metropolitan areas right now you know Phoenix, Atlanta, Southern California you know Dallas area I mean what does that say about the future of institutions like in Ohio or Pennsylvania does location how much is location going to matter in terms of these partnerships in the future location always matters I mean every institution exists within both a local ecosystem for innovation and development as well as a regional ecosystem as well so does that mean we're going to see a geographic divide here then among the institutions that are located no the way that I look at it is that we could rattle off for the rest of the day if you want all the unsolved things that we don't yet have solutions for in social systems, economic systems physical systems, biological systems healthcare whatever the list is that is the number of things which require new knowledge still exceeds the availability of that knowledge and so what that means then is what we don't yet have is is that we have not yet figured out how to work and all the levels and all the ways that we should and so I don't see location as being anything other than important but not exclusive that is you can be in Akron, Ohio and develop techniques and mechanisms and tools that can affect the whole world while at the same time helping Akron, Ohio to be successful one of the things that we said that I think is really important this trillion dollar number is really important that's a massive knowledge producing enterprise called research and technology development if you look only at the people necessary to drive that enterprise forward on a global basis of which American research universities are principal one of the main if not the main producer for that enterprise it's a remarkable feat to produce fresh new capable thinkers into a research enterprise on a global scale large enough just to meet the demands of the problems that we're trying to solve and those problems again they go way beyond if anything we're pikers we're tiny we're actually under built globally to actually solve our problems so that's a question for any of all three of you are the expectations now too high on colleges universities in terms of in terms of research especially when we see the public disinvestment at the state level coming probably at the federal level especially around research you talked a lot about how companies don't do the amount of R&D that they used to do now kind of is everyone turning to the university at a time when your resources are more constrained than ever before I want to come at this from a couple ways one yeah the expectations on universities are greater than they used to be are they too high probably not if we say we're in the business of knowledge creation is one of the things that we're doing then we put the expectation on ourselves to some degree but back to the to the issue of knowing where you are and what kind of research for example really fits there you know the geography of Pennsylvania as well as anybody and there's some pretty rural places where there are universities in Pennsylvania a lot of them center county yeah it's in the middle of the state but again just one example East Trousberg University not exactly a big metropolitan area but it had one of the most successful outcomes of research in Pennsylvania including that institution in center county or Pittsburgh or wherever we're talking about Penn State Penn State University of Pittsburgh and the outcome of that research was it was a technique to identify whether or not a tick that bit you has Lyme's disease before you were sure symptoms why does that matter because East Trousberg is right near the Delaware water gap is very outdoors rural area Lyme's disease is a very big problem in that part of the world they're doing research on an issue that confronts that location connecting to the local didn't take a lot of big infrastructure big cash infusion huge positive outcome so yes the expectations are high but if you look at where you are and what are the needs of that area what resources can you bring to bear on the issue that's only one of hundreds of thousands of examples around the country of incredibly positive outcomes that takes all of that into account that deeply involved the student because in fact it was a graduate student who fell upon and discovered this so it all comes together at the scale or in the way that's appropriate for that institution at that place looking at the resources that are available to it and you can build that research infrastructure without impacting your push on student success you can do both at the same time I would argue you build that on as part of the focus on because you're integrating with the undergraduate research absolutely what you have and John is alluding to this there's different ways to do this so Bowdoin College I was a trustee I was on the academic affairs committee there's no graduate students there and essentially very little if any funded research and these were fantastic scholars these people were working on problems that they could advance as a way of creating knowledge at the scale of an undergraduate institution and they're using their undergraduate students to do it yeah and so it's fantastic now preparing them to become graduates or whatever yes and so it really is the case that if you're a fully functioning knowledge enterprise not a purveyor of information but a fully functioning knowledge enterprise you're going to be involved in producing new knowledge at some level and scaling that into your teaching learning and discovery environment now a few of those institutions are also asked well could you at Penn State they were asked right at the beginning of World War II American torpedoes were failing and they weren't sinking the enemy targets they were hitting they would hit the target and wouldn't explode so there was a lab set up at Penn State today 70 years later called the Applied Research Laboratory that among other things created a whole new torpedo technology now who do you go to to do that when we wanted to split the atom in 1942 they were there with scientists from universities all over the United States and all over the world under the stadium at the University of Chicago so that they could split that item atom who do you go to because some geeks somewhere in some academic institutions said you know what I think I can split these atoms and I can make this stuff happen and there's only that class of institution in all of western civilization has ever been able to do that kind of thing so some schools are going to be asked to do that kind of stuff and some are going to and the others are going to be asked to keep knowledge alive as an active knowledge creation alive as an active way of producing a better next generation adaptive thinker it's not either or it's scale and I want to talk about other types of partnerships but I want to open it up to the audience in about two minutes so if you have a question raise your hand and we'll get a microphone to you partnerships are not all about research though because it's also about partnerships to do some of the things that we were talking about this morning personalized learning using technology in terms of building student success models we're training engineering faculty members in Vietnam for our American corporate partner called Intel because they asked us to do it we're training the next generation of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia how about that questions from the audience silence yes in the back thanks Jeff my name is Tom talk I'm with the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching and we've been talking in this session largely about the research function of universities and the role of faculty in that work but much of the focus at New America and elsewhere now is on how to provide an economically affordable undergraduate education to a broad range of students through vehicles technology and others that substantially reduce the cost there seems thus some tension between that goal and our conversation and the sort of assumptions underlying our conversation this afternoon that is how do you reconcile the infrastructure needs that you alluded to the full-time faculty costs and alike to provide a research function on the one hand and create an economical efficient time effective undergraduate education for many for the many people who can increasingly not afford higher education than the other yeah so it's a good hypothesis and so the way that we've attacked it and it does manifest itself in the way that you suggest I think in some schools is to look into the past and what we saw at great research universities 40 years ago was very substantial teaching loads for the faculty as well as very high research expectations for the same faculty and so we've decided at least in our particular case that work then it can work again and so what we've decided is to use technology to enhance the projectiveness of our faculty to enable our faculty to do research to empower our faculty to do research and not reduce their teaching and so we have basically a mechanism where all faculty involved in the institution have to earn 100 points of effort outcome either they've done a certain amount of research and have a certain number of graduate students or a certain number of online students or a certain number of face-to-face undergraduate students and so if research is going up they might teach slightly less but not much less if their research is going down their teaching will go up dramatically and we operate on this sort of scale on an ongoing basis so that all the faculty are pulling the oars of the boat evenly now that's not true at a lot of institutions but it is true at the particular way that we've designed our institution to avoid the problem that you're talking about at the same time we don't want to say that nor is it the case that the research activity is driving up the cost of the institution it's not driving up the cost of the institution if you can get maximum creativity and maximum effort out of your faculty and the teams that support the faculty Michael isn't it driving up the cost of the institution if institutions are using tuition dollars to kind of push their their research agenda because they're not getting it from other entities now remember there's a fundamental premise and so the I don't want anybody teaching biology that doesn't know how to create new knowledge in biology I just don't even want it I mean it's that person would be outmoded so rapidly it's the scale of the research and so there's lots of ways to stay fresh and stay constant and advance knowledge in biology and a few people can go off into whole new areas and have research groups of a hundred people and so forth those research groups that's nature takes its course either you get that funding or you don't and if you don't at least in our institution then you're going to teach more than you would be teaching otherwise and that's not true at some places and again the question kind of presupposes a bifurcation between teaching and research but as we've talked this afternoon the two can be far more integrated than people sometimes want to give credit and that's the scale that Michael was talking about you know the high-end stuff it's if you get the money you get it if you don't but the rest of it needs to be to be integrated and thought of as two sides of the same coin. If you design the institution correctly you can do massive amounts of research and not make any investment beyond just the faculty member themselves and the generic tools that support the faculty member and you can get a lot done just in that. I think the point being made is that really by bringing all of these elements together of a comprehensive research university you are able to do more things more effectively than you could if you tried to do them only alone or obviously try to do everything so the other point that may be worth remembering and you asked a policy question earlier Jeff is two fold number one few people realize that research is itself an industry that brings significant wealth to a community that creates additional wealth and creates jobs in the process and that would be an opportunity to really link the university better to policy the second piece is that within most public research universities 85% of the students were thereabouts stay within a 35 to 55 mile radius and thus the better that you are at connecting those students and faculty with the dominant industrial clusters of the area the more effective that you will be ultimately in succeeding in that economy so part of it is a state of mind I just want to follow on John's point so recently everybody's heard about the fact that you've got 100 times the individual microorganisms living in your body then you have cells there are 100 times the number of cells of organisms living in and on your body now that's a fundamental research discovery that's come over many many years that can alter your entire view of what is a human what are we where are we what are we biologically how do we evolve what are these species there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small learning creative research projects that faculty members at every college that's a knowledge enterprise every university that's a knowledge enterprise will put to that new conceptualization that 10 years ago did not exist that's an example of how that works with the new Copernicus other questions from the audience yes right here in the front Steve Dubb democracy collaborative University of Maryland one topic that hasn't come up too much on this panel is the role of universities in community economic development obviously related to research and of course it's the university park alliance NACRIN but I was wondering if the panelists wanted to address sort of how they see the university being connected to efforts in terms of improving community economic outcomes let me start economic development today is a much broader discipline if you wish than most people think of it in fact I would argue that most chambers of commerce are obsolete because they practice only one mode of economic development that's trying to steal something from California or Arizona or Pennsylvania or whatever so the opportunity to really see the university as a broad based and very robust platform for engaging with the community and creating economic opportunity is an entirely new model and if that is embraced you all of a sudden begin to have an array of tools at your disposal that is simply not being expressed in many parts around the country so focusing on that opportunity of engaging every discipline if you wish taking an end grant model and applying it not just to agriculture and engineering but to every fundamental discipline interdisciplinary and focused obviously on the opportunities it gives you an array of tools from simply realigning the assets in the community in more productive ways to of course the traditional licensing and commercialization to strategic partnerships to investment funds partnerships with other colleges universities creating women based entrepreneurial groups, student based entrepreneurial groups, international partnerships such as Michael and I mentioned earlier in short all of a sudden you have a true economic development ecosystem that is embracing all of the best practices that have come from various regions of the country as well as from various parts of the world so part of the design of the institution as a knowledge enterprise particularly a heavy duty knowledge enterprise that is you're producing knowledge at many levels including large scale or very impactful probable discoveries inventions or what have you our principal our product index is our number one product is people 18,400 graduates last year which has an unbelievable impact in Arizona and Southern California where most of our graduates go but even more broadly than that our second most significant product is ideas and we're engaged with right now we estimate slightly more than a thousand corporate entities in formal idea exchanges that have meaning and impact and the last thing that we produce are gizmos you like think of them like phasers or ray guns or whatever whatever anybody can think up and so we've got a lot of that going on also we've organized ourselves we've even done away with the vice president for research we have a senior vice president for knowledge enterprise development his associate vice presidents one is for economic affairs that office is engaged in every corporate retention and attraction activity of any scale in central phoenix which is a we live in the third most populated county in the united states four million people in maricopa county alone that's a lot of things that are going on we have another officer who's responsible for innovation and entrepreneurship we have an innovation entrepreneurship campus we have a learning by doing engineering campus and I'll just top it off with this last thing that we're building which is a thing being paid for by the city of chandler which is one of the suburbs of phoenix which happens also to have big intel plants and orbital sciences and a range of other companies that are there we're building a twenty four by seven three hundred sixty five day a year innovation center where any citizen can come in and build whatever it is that they need to build to start their company co-populated with students that are building tools devices and outcomes that are related to the starting of their companies so this is an innovation center at scale in this particular community that's going to have a huge impact on that community and I'm just giving you because of time constraints five examples of five hundred let's go to the other end of the spectrum for just a minute and then we'll get to two other questions let's suppose you have a university of about five thousand students biggest employer in a five or six county area you're in the middle of nowhere how does that play out suppose further that the second and third biggest employers manufacturing plants close you now can play an enormous role in that community by working on job training opening an incubator which we did in clarion in Pennsylvania it's right down I-80 from louis because all of those communities need small business so the campus then becomes the center for small business development centers or whatever they go by in your state so even at the more micro level you can have enormous role on the economy of the region even by helping you know sort of the classic mom and pop set up a business plan for a grocery store, oil change business something to support them ourselves gas industry whatever happens to be so even at the small level you don't have to be in Maricopa County but by taking an active role in helping people develop business plans get loans, how do you apply for loans how do you get a credit rating all that other kind of thing that help people get a start can have a big ripple effect on a community question over here all of your excitement for your partnerships your corporate partnerships I've had the fortune to read hundreds of grant applications to the Department of Education mostly for low income programs to help low income first generation students they're not well written there's not a vision, there's not excitement there's a lot of discussion of need they're coming from a lot of the same institutions that have these exciting partnerships in these wonderful offices why are the kind of projects that we're hearing about not getting the same kind of attention and having the same kind of vision I don't know the answer to that specifically I know that we and this is not meant to be defensive it sort of depends who submits them and sort of how they evolve and so it might be the case that a group from the community comes to the University and they identify a single faculty member the single faculty member then looks like the University but that single faculty member doesn't even speak to the University and the proposal is on the way out and so for us just to put that into perspective that's 3,000 proposals a year so you can get some sense of the complexity of it so one of the things that I've said to Secretary Duncan on two occasions is that the Department of Education would be better off attempting to work at the institutional level with the leadership of the institutions and maybe they do in some cases but as opposed to working with individual centers, institutes faculty members and so forth what happens in some of these things the Intel Corporation we have an institutional relationship with and we have individual faculty relationships with the Intel Corporation the same with the Boeing Corporation and the General Dynamics Corporation and so forth and so with the Department of Education we have no institutional relationship none. What we have are proposals that are going in some of which we know about, some of which we don't know about so there might be a way to upscale those to the quality that you're looking for if we could figure out how to build institutional relationships now I might be overgeneralizing but I know in our case that would be helpful to us. I think that's right I couldn't agree more in terms of if an announcement comes out to individual faculty members they throw stuff over to transom and sometimes it doesn't even go through the Sponsor Research Office before we find out about it we never hear about it until word of mouth comes back the letter of rejection or acceptance or whatever comes back so that institutional relationship is really critical question right here on the on Jim Snyder, former New America fellow and currently a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at that institution across from the Charles River I didn't mention which one but my question concerns that it downsides downside of these research partnerships we primarily here just looked at the positive side of such relationships I was last week at the Third World International Conference on Research Integrity in Montreal had more than 500 academics there only a small fraction from the United States and one of the prime concerns there of the downsides of these external relationships a large fraction of them are medical researchers because pharmaceuticals are problematic yeah but there were a lot of people from engineering departments and other scientific departments and there was a feeling that this goal of enhancing knowledge moving it forward was often in conflict with these external relationships a tremendous number of unreported conflicts of interest maybe like think tanks here in Washington D.C. that have all these all this research and this often hidden agendas you don't know about and that's come to universities so there's a lot of concern with this and there's an argument that it's actually becoming an increasing problem and maybe related to the fact that there are more of these relationships that are sanctioned so my question is what are you doing to deal with the downsides of these relationships and do you think there's a significant numbers of faculty that now have their priorities distorted in some fundamental way as a result of these incentives one I think you're bringing up a very important problem and I agree that there's a problem particularly in biometically oriented research where the not only there but it's highly concentrated in that particular sector when I was the senior research officer at Columbia University for 12 years we were facing a number of these issues over and over and our conflict of interest committee was meeting repeatedly over and over and over but I don't think that we've gotten to deal with the issue but I don't think we've gotten a grasp on it yet I also think that universities are sufficiently punitive to people that violate the common trust that you're supposed to be an objective researcher and I think that transparency and everything at the 100% level is required for these things to work and we do not we do not have that yet people are afraid of being punished I don't know if it's because they're afraid of being punished it's like I'll read that somebody cheated on all their data and they got fired I'm like they got fired how about fined or imprisoned because they took public money and cheated on these things and so and so yeah I'm in agreement and we're not where we need to be and we do have to be alert to that in our particular case we don't have a medical school so we have fewer issues but we have very strict rules of engagement relative to our work with with industry and we probably should be ever vigilant to make certain that we don't compromise our own identity we're running a go ahead right there and then we'll go to the last question very quickly important points disclosure makes it possible to manage conflicts but let me take briefly a very contrarian position I think we've sort of defined ourselves into a corner of conflicts of interest instead of thinking about possibilities of synergies of interest a former colleague of mine once said no conflict, no interest, no interest no commitment, no commitment, no results question in the back James saying we've been talking about partnerships and I have a question about the rules that ILOs for state universities work on in particular how do they choose between the best local home for technology and the best home period for technology in terms of transferring a technology out yeah basically transferring it to well as you know as you guys all know I'm sure there are some people who want free agency from the point of view of licensing and one argument I've heard against it is the argument that it would kill you guys because the technology would no longer be localized most of our technologies are commercialized locally not all but most and we strive for that it doesn't always work it's an objective yes we're very fortunate in that a lot of our technology applies to about 1800 companies in our region so we have a natural regional localized opportunity but it ultimately depends on where the opportunity is and it may or may not reside locally depending on what the nature of the technology is you always we always try to create the if you wish to benefit as close to home as possible but that may not be possible in some technologies so I want to end on a question that kind of ties all the three of these areas together a couple weeks ago I was out at the Arizona innovation summit which used to be on SkySong but it's gotten too big so educational technology right and you know there's a lot of companies now in this space of trying to help both K through 12 and higher ad on student learning many of them obviously for profit companies Michael you talked in the earlier session about eAdvisor which you guys created internally obviously then you work with Newton which is a for profit company and a partnership why we have all this research capacity at colleges and universities and everything from data to pedagogy to student learning why do we see all these external companies trying to help solve your problems in terms of student learning, student success whether it's advising, financial aid, personalized learning why are we not seeing universities kind of trying to figure this out themselves why aren't we seeing more eAdvisor types of things? It all depends when you take the snapshot so if you took the snapshot pre internet you'd see it operating inside a bunch of universities and now you see it and you think that you know Apple and all these guys are all geniuses that just created this stuff out of whole cloth or from heaven or whatever and so it turns out that there's these processes so it just it's when you take the snapshot so adaptive learning technologies like that from Newton Newton didn't create that all by themselves there were inputs from universities inputs from ideas, literature, ideas software, code and then they shaped it materialized it, marketed it, built relationships with us we have tools that we're developing in our institute for learning sciences that someday will be commercialized we have some that we're integrating back into other programs and so there's not enough happening right now within universities in terms of I'm generally a believer that there's never enough and you can always do better but is there a lot going on? Absolutely. And a lot of collaborations between university based researchers and companies and so what you're going to see as Michael says it's a process that evolves all of these relationships some companies that will win some universities that will begin to integrate all of this and bring it home to their students in a much more bigger way. I was going to flip it over and say because if we did it that way the question instead of the one that was asked would be why are you duplicating all the effort and why aren't you doing the sort of commercialization or transfer of the tech transfer? Right. Well I mean part of the problem though now is people think there's a quick buck to be made on K through 12 and higher ad and so you see all these now companies entering into the field. But is that always the case? Right. More so now probably than ever before though. Like there are educational purveyors that are making 50 and 70% profits. It's unbelievable. Well with that we're going to wrap up this session and take about a 5-10 minute break to 5 of for our next session. Join me in thanking the panel.