 We have a closing keynote by Professor Hunter Rawlings. He is the president of the American Association of Universities. He is a former president at Cornell, at Iowa. He is a classist by training in discipline, and his scholarly work is in that area. He has a wealth of knowledge and experience, and in his role at AAU occupies one of the really key leadership positions in American higher education. And as we continue to survey the changing landscape and the various economic, technological, political, demographic, and other winds that are blowing through that, I think he's in a tremendous position to help us to understand what's happening, to identify trends, and to give us some of his wisdom on the most fruitful way forward. So with that very short and unjust introduction, let me stop wasting time and turn it over to Hunter Rawlings. Welcome. Thank you very much Cliff. It's a little unnerving to look over here and see this other guy speaking simultaneously with me. I've been asked to speak today on the future of higher education, the future roles of IT in libraries, on scholarly communications, and on inter-institutional cooperation and collaboration. This is a rather narrow topic, so I thought I would add in some thoughts on the impending fiscal cliff and restructuring the tax code. Seriously, I want to start with a fundamental question, perhaps the fundamental question in higher education, and that is what is college for? The answer to this question drives educational policy and is now unfortunately up for grabs in dramatic fashion. When I headed off to college 50 years ago, I hate saying that, but it's one of those round numbers you can't resist, and it's unfortunately accurate in my case, I knew why I was going there. I went to college to get an education, a rather quaint notion. My options were A, that I would learn how to learn, and how to read complex literature in history, how to express myself, how to do math and understand science a bit, and B, I would thus be prepared to become a functioning contributing citizen in a democracy. My parents had the same view I did, that those were the fundamental reasons you went to college. Today, these reasons for going to college are subordinated to, or perhaps I should say, buried under another, getting a job. Much of the public seems to feel that this is why they send their daughters and sons to college, and political leaders are fostering this view through new policy initiatives that we are reading now on a weekly basis. The governors of several states, particularly Texas, Florida, and Wisconsin, have recently made this goal plain by pushing new requirements on their state universities. In Texas, the governor wants degrees that will cost no more than $10,000 total, and will lead directly to jobs. In Florida, the governor wants liberal arts majors to pay more for their education than other students, because liberal arts students don't get jobs. The governor of Wisconsin wants the state's universities to prepare students specifically for jobs in Wisconsin. That's the purpose of going to college. Now, I have no quarrel whatsoever with vocational education, with training students for jobs. Our community colleges generally perform this task quite well. They are growing in size and sophistication. They are increasing their impact. They're making a real difference for American workers. And in some cases, they're inspiring students to go on for a full college degree. But to force this vocational model on public universities, including flagship universities, research universities, is to make a category mistake. And to show you where this kind of thinking is leading, note what the Commonwealth of Virginia, my native state, did last year. It passed a new law requiring colleges and universities to report the salaries of recent graduates broken down by major. How recent are these graduates? 18 months. Compiled on a searchable website, these data are meant to allow families to sort majors based on immediate earning power, and the accompanying report ranks universities by the average salary of their graduates. So we're now given a list of universities and majors, and we're now reading a list of the salaries that those graduates earn 18 months after graduation. As Einstein noted, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Treating a university education as vocational training encourages just that kind of simplistic thinking by reducing education to a single number. We're entering an era of increased utilitarianism and corporatization in higher education. Trends that I expect to accelerate in coming months as public concern over the cost of education and rising student debt leads political leaders to seek simplistic reductionist solutions. My concern about this trajectory is that education at universities is being treated as a simple commodity, as a rung in a financial ladder, not as a time for intellectual exploration, for exposure to great works of art and literature, for learning a scientific thought and mathematical reasoning, for developing the ability to think and speak and write critically. Ironically, CEOs of major companies continue to say publicly that these are the qualities they want in job applicants. They want people who can think for themselves, do sophisticated research, express themselves clearly, and deal with uncertainty. Training for good jobs will occur on the job, not before the job. And it's worth noting that many of the good jobs today's students will need to compete for are not yet invented. As many of you very well know, how many IT jobs were there in the world economy 25 years ago? Not very many. So we're out of crossroads in my view. State funding for public research universities goes down every year. The universities then raise or at least try to raise tuition to make up for the loss of general fund. Public anger over the tuition increases grows each year, and universities find themselves governed like corporations selling a product. That combination then leads in extreme cases to events like the one that afflicted the University of Virginia this past summer. That public debacle in Virginia caused by a governing board consumed by corporate think highlights the salience and severity of the trends I just outlined. Higher ed policy is, if you will pardon the expression, serious business, and the trend line is not good. So what I think we have seen recently as isolated examples are now going to become much more common. Many states are moving in the same direction. They're moving deliberately in that direction, and they're learning from each other. Fortunately, and I don't want to sound all gloomy here this afternoon, there are bright spots amidst this gloom. One remarkable bright spot is what I regard as the most dramatic, unpredicted development that has occurred during my long career in higher education, and that is the astounding flood of undergraduate students from China and other countries into our colleges and universities in the past 10 years. Let me cite a few statistics. At Michigan State University, a great land grant university, member of AAU, there were 30 undergraduate students from the People's Republic of China on campus in 2002, 30. 10 years later this year, there are 2,845 undergraduate students from the PRC at Michigan State. Nearly 100 times more. In the past two years alone, the total number of undergrads attending American universities from China has doubled. When you combine a few facts, you grasp the reason for this tidal wave. There are 85,000 secondary schools in China. There are 100 million students in those schools, 100 million. Each year, about 8 million students graduate from senior secondary schools in China, serious academic schools, not vocational schools, of which there are plenty more. How many of those 8 million students graduating from those schools speak English? About 100%. How many of those 8 million students are smart, hard-working, and ambitious? You make the call. Of those, how many want to go to an excellent university? Again, you make the call. How many universities in China do those students consider excellent? A handful. A small handful. Most of them can't go to those schools. How closely do Chinese students read international rankings of universities? A lot more closely than you and I do. They know 10 times as much as I do about such rankings. What do they find that most of those great universities are in the United States? Finally, how many of those students' families can afford to send their kids to an American university? The answer is a growing number as the middle class in China increases. So we have what I call a tidal wave of students coming here as 18-year-olds, not as graduate students who continue to flow into American universities, but that's been true for a long time. Now it's 18-year-olds who are coming here to get an undergraduate education. I predict that this tidal wave will alter American universities, and eventually it will alter China. Already, public universities here are recruiting Chinese students aggressively. Many of your universities are recruiting these students aggressively, partly in order to attract good students, partly in order to solve budget problems brought on by state budget cuts. Chinese students, after all, pay full out-of-state tuition, and they're grateful for the opportunity to do so. They major in tough subjects like math and physics and engineering in addition to other subjects in the social sciences and the humanities, and in many cases they major in subjects that American students do not want to major in. And when they graduate, lots of those Chinese students go to graduate school and earn advanced degrees. Let's hope our government is sensible enough to allow many of those students to remain in this country and compete for good jobs. Right now it's almost impossible for them to do so. But there is an upside even to this, and that is that those students who return will ultimately change China. I have no doubt about this. They have lived and studied at universities that enjoy academic freedom, open inquiry, and relentless pursuit of the truth wherever it may lead. It is impossible to believe that as they become adults, they will be content to live under a closed political system and repressive policies in their own country. This may take quite a while, but I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. So we have trends in higher education in the U.S. today, some of them negative, some of them I would say very positive. We continue to have great colleges and universities. We continue to have great public and private universities, but the public's are under a lot of strain, and one of the things they're trying to do is to internationalize, partly in order to deal with the strain, and partly in order simply to be able to teach a lot of great students. Let me shift now and say a few things about the state of scholarly communication, libraries, and IT. I'm no expert on these topics, but we're fortunate at AAU to have a real expert, and that is John Vaughn, who has been at AAU since its founding in 1900. And he knows the history of AAU backwards and forwards. Kidding aside, John is a huge asset to us at AAU, to you here at CNI, and in fact to higher education and more importantly to federal policy, because he's so experienced and adept in a number of issues, but particularly including these, scholarly communication, libraries, and IT. So let me point to a few features of landscape, and you all know much of this, but I want to try to give you an AAU vantage point. First, extraordinary advances in digital communication capabilities provide the prospect of both increasing the pace and breadth of access to scholarly publications and reducing the cost of their production, particularly through public and open access policies. By public access, I mean procedures whereby free public access is provided to articles published in traditional peer-reviewed journals at the conclusion of some embargo period. In open access or gold open access publishing, the costs of publishing are fully met at the front end of the process through author's fees or some other mechanism, so that when the article is in final form, it is made freely available to all readers. Many scholarly journal publishers are concerned that these rapid developments could cause irreversible harm to their publishing capabilities before they're able to adapt their current business models. If as an example the embargo period between the appearance of articles in a journal and their subsequent free availability in a public access repository is too short, then publishers fear their subscriptions will decline to the point of unsustainability. These differential impacts on the publishers and consumers of scholarly information continue to generate conflicts within the academy and within federal policymaking. In the U.S., public access to the results of research funded by NIH, for example, has been greatly increased through the creation of PubMed Central, a repository of final accepted manuscripts of journal articles reporting on that research. PubMed Central currently provides free public access to more than 2 million articles, editorials, and manuscripts. When PubMed Central was being established, NIH planned to provide a six-month embargo period between an article's publication in a peer-reviewed journal and the appearance of the final accepted manuscript in PubMed Central. After some rather contentious negotiations with journal publishers, the embargo period was extended from six to 12 months. Submission to PubMed Central was initially voluntary, but because of low submission rates, NIH made submission mandatory in 2007. Because submission is still comparatively low, around 70% from what we can learn, NIH recently announced that it will begin enforcing the mandatory submission requirement later this spring by withholding a subsequent grant until the grantee submits the manuscript reporting on the prior research. Overall, PubMed Central is widely viewed as a great success, providing increased public access to NIH-funded research in ways that accommodate the needs of traditional subscription journal publishers. Now, legislation has been introduced for the last several years that would require all federal agencies that provide $100 million or more on research funding. Currently, that's 11 federal agencies to establish public access repositories comparable to NIH's PubMed Central. The Federal Research Public Access Act, FERPA, has broad support among academic and public interest groups, but it's strongly opposed by many publishers, particularly commercial publishers. AAU supports FERPA with one qualification. The legislation calls for a six-month embargo period. We believe it should be increased to 12 months in accord with NIH's policy for PubMed Central. Six months may sound like a small duration of time to you, but in fact, it seems to make a real difference, at least in the current state of play. For more than a decade, Congress has been the battleground for warring factions in the public access debate. In an effort to reduce the fractious lobbying and produce an agreement on ways to exploit digital technology to increase public access, in 2009, Bart Gordon of Tennessee, then chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, convened a scholarly publishing roundtable to develop consensus recommendations for expanding public access to journal articles that arose from funding from federal agencies. The 14-member roundtable was chaired by John Vaughan and included university provosts, librarians, and academic society and commercial publishers. The group's recommendations included a call for all federal research funding agencies to establish repositories providing free public access to the results of research they fund and to establish specific embargo periods between publication and public access. 12 of the 14 roundtable members endorsed the group's recommendation. The reasons for the two dissenters are telling, given the debate that is now taking place. The member from Elsevier, the largest commercial publisher of scholarly journals, believed the report's recommendations called for too much government intrusion into scholarly publishing. And meanwhile, the member from the Public Library of Science, the highly successful non-profit open access journal publishing operation established by former NIH director Harold Varmus, believed the report's recommendations did not call for enough involvement in scholarly publishing. So those are the two ends of the spectrum. 12 of the members agreed on the report. Several of the report's key recommendations were incorporated into the reauthorization of the America Compete's Act, and that was a very good thing. Taken together, the legislation minus the six-month embargo and the public access provisions of the Compete's Act to reauthorization provide an excellent basis for the development of public policy in this very contentious arena. So here we have then a set of issues that is highly contentious given the rapid changes taking place within this industry. Not surprising. While new business models for journal publishing continue to appear in the U.S., Europe and Elsevier, the digital revolution also has great implications for books. Scholarly monographs and textbooks. And our research universities, libraries meanwhile, are struggling to keep up with the increased volume and cost of material that faculty and students need. One especially pernicious impact of the soaring costs of scientific and medical journals has been the decline in library purchases of scholarly monographs, affecting fields like mine and classics. Many presses have begun making publishing decisions not based so much on the judged narrative books alone but on their prospective sales. That is a great change. To try to sort through this swirl of change and challenge, AAU has joined with the Association of Research Libraries to form a task force of provosts and library deans and directors to try to chart a path forward. The group has met once and agreed to focus on three domains. University presses, scholarly journals and institutional repositories. Task force will hold its next meeting on December 20th, coming right up. And it seems to me these are exactly the topics that the task force should be taking up. And we think that there may be some new ways forward, given this coalition of members from ARL and AAU universities to try to find some novel means of solving this dilemma. University information technology operations will play an increasingly critical role in these developments, especially interoperable institutional repositories, digital production and dissemination of content, and in the critical still unsolved problem of digital preservation. And I heard that you've heard just at your meeting today or yesterday about the advances that are now being made in this domain, and they're quite important. And I'm heartened by what I hear. IT, of course, also plays an essential role in online education. And I want to finish my remarks by saying a few things about online education. Almost daily, announcements appear about coalitions of major universities designed to offer online education, and in particular MOOCs, the massive open online courses, which I understand you've also been discussing at this meeting. Some of these courses have signed up over 100,000 students. Newspapers are delighted with this development. They write front page articles all the time. The question is, does the development of online education and MOOCs represent a precipitous paradigm shift in the delivery of higher education? Does it mean the solution to our cost problem is at hand? That seems to be the view of some political leaders and some members of the public. But so far, this is mostly hype. We've seen lots of university investment in online education. So far, very little revenue. No course credit, except in a few isolated examples. No degrees, except again in some isolated examples. Extremely low rates of course completion, around 15% on average for MOOCs. And remarkably for courses where little is at stake, lots of student cheating. So while I am happy that our best universities are experimenting with this new medium, because I think eventually it will find some very good applications, I'm not ready to declare victory in the war on costs and in the search for better instructional methods. In fact, everything we've been discovering about the way students learn best is the opposite of what MOOCs offer. Students learn best when they are directly engaged in their education, when they have to perform in class, when they have to make arguments, defend those arguments, put what they've learned into practice, and so on. Unengaged students learn little and they learn passively. Thus far, the dropout rate is not a good harbinger, certainly for MOOCs. Now, this all reminds me, I am a classicist after all, of what happened a long time ago during another major paradigm shift in intellectual communication. The arrival of the book in ancient Greece. Prior to 400 BC, Greeks had an almost entirely oral culture in which myth, poetry, history, philosophy, and every other means of thought was conveyed orally, not in writing. So you had Homer and Hesiod singing their poems, choruses singing and dancing to music, dramatists writing choral odes and poetic dialogue, pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Heraclitus writing their thoughts in verse. This was a performance culture in ancient Greece and just about all forms of literature, which is a bit of a misnomer in such a culture, were in verse because it was rhythmic and more easily remembered by the listener. The Greeks were fantastic listeners and they were fantastic remembers. There were very, very few books and there was no reading public. In fact, the way you published a book then was to recite it orally to an audience. The book and prose as opposed to poetry made their first serious appearance shortly before 400 BC and primarily in the city of Athens. Living in Athens among numerous other great minds was the philosopher Plato, who had learned at the feet of Socrates a great oral philosopher who never wrote a word. Plato saw the advent of the book as it began to appear in Athens in the late, late 5th century and as usual, Plato gave this phenomenon some deep thought. What would be the consequences of the book for the future of human knowledge, above all for philosophy? Plato issued the following judgment. The book had some clear advantages, particularly as a mnemonic device, a way of fixing thoughts for a long time. But the book had two disadvantages. The first was, he predicted, Greeks would begin to lose their memory and he was correct. As the book began slowly to take over from oral culture Greeks stopped learning how to memorize and their memories became closer to our memories. The second disadvantage was much more serious from Plato's point of view in thinking about the book. The book presented ideas alright, but when you wanted to query or challenge those ideas the book could not talk back. It was a one-way street. No conversation with the book, no dialogue, no dialectic to use Plato's term for serious philosophical discussion that leads to education. So in Plato's mind, when conversation ended, so did learning. Learning depends upon intellectual engagement in which your assumptions are challenged, you have to offer and defend your ideas and you have to perform actively, not content yourself with the passive absorption of someone else's ideas. So what did Plato do when confronted with the rise of a book culture? He wrote books, but a special kind of book, dialogues, books that mimicked real philosophical conversation, the dialectic that he believed was the only real way to learn. Plato's books were then dialogues. There's intriguing evidence, in fact, that Plato considered his books as playthings, light-hearted exercises in artistic composition compared to the serious philosophy he pursued in his academy. Viewed this way, Plato's dialogues are meant to entertain us and to show us the way toward real learning by demonstrating how Socrates and his interlocutors pursued the truth. Plato thus saw the advantages and the disadvantages, inherent in a new communication paradigm, and he used it intelligently in an effort to maximize its benefits and minimize its weaknesses, which he saw as very substantial. Perhaps we should think of mooks in a similar way. They are demonstrations by very fine teachers and scholars of the fun of learning, introductions to the life of the mind, hence no cost, no credit, no degree. They're free and they're enticing. They're even fun, if you don't take them too seriously, as the solution to all our problems. They are certainly not the answer to deep educational issues or an avenue to corporate-style profit-making, at least yet. But if they provide 1% of the benefit to humankind of Plato's dialogues, they will have proven themselves a worthy successor. Thank you. I'll be happy to take a couple of questions if we have time. We do. Good. There's a microphone here if folks have questions. Come on now. Plato liked a little dialogue. A little action. Here we go. I was struck by your early comments about foreign students. In Gary Shapiro's book, The Comeback, he makes the case, or he states, that we should offer every U.S.-mented Ph.D. citizenship if they don't have it already. I wonder if you have any ideas about how that might work by backfire or anything like that. That's a good question. Fortunately, I think this is the kind of suggestion and idea that Congress is actually beginning to take seriously because it's being pressured, particularly by IT employers, in fact, who are not finding enough people for their jobs. They're asking, in fact, they're urging their congressional members to look differently at immigration laws, and this is certainly one of them. I, myself, am quite positively disposed towards this idea. Obviously, this will require a lot of careful thought, and the legislation will have to be probably fairly complex, but to me, bringing talent here and keeping it here for a while is a great thing if we have, in fact, great uses for it, and I know that in a lot of disciplines we do. It's also true, unfortunately, that in a number of disciplines today there aren't enough American students pursuing advanced degrees, and this is getting to be a real problem. I was at a press conference yesterday announcing the findings of a commission of the American Chemical Society, and I was the only nonchemist on the commission, but the commission recommended strongly that chemistry graduate programs begin to take a really hard look at themselves and to ask the question, do they have American students pursuing advanced work, and if they don't, and in some cases, apparently, they don't have any, why not, and what does that mean? So, they have international students, some of them rather good, but it's becoming now a very vexed issue, even in a field like chemistry. Yes? I can't help asking the inevitable follow on question to your play-doh analogy. Just as Walter Rung and other scholars trace the transition from an oral culture to a literate culture, would you care to speculate in this moment of MOOCs if someday that would evolve into something more mature as a form of thinking and expression in the same way that oral culture inevitably evolved into literate culture? Yes, I think that's a fair question and a difficult one, especially for an old fossil like me who is totally committed to the book culture and sort of a text guy in all of my education and pre-delection. But as I tried to say briefly, I think it's great that our universities are experimenting with online education and even with MOOCs because I think some good is going to come out of this. No question about it. The flipped classroom is already turning out to be in many cases at least a very positive development where faculty members, especially in the sciences, say to their students, don't come to class to listen to me lecture because I'm not going to do that any longer. Watch my lecture online and then come to class and we're going to do things together. You're going to work, you're going to be in teams, you're going to perform. That to me is a wonderful use of online education and seems to me to encourage student engagement, which is my test for good education rather than to discourage student engagement. So for me, anything that will increase student engagement is a plus. And my guess is we're starting to find ways and we're going to find a lot more in which online education can enhance student engagement. I think that's going to be a great development. So I'm not at all urging that we not investigate this, experiment with it. I think some really good things are going to come from it. But I'm just worried about a lot of the hype and the over-promising that's going on and the idea that it's going to somehow solve the cost problem in higher education seems to me so far at any rate to be folly. Todd Carpenter with the National Information Standards Organization. My question is kind of a step outside of scholarly communications and it goes to the economic question. Specifically, speaking on behalf of my 5-year-old son, if collegiate education is going to increase at an annual rate of roughly 7 to 8% per year, it's going to cost him about $125,000 a year to attend college per year. So what is the scholarly community going to do to restrict the rate of that growth? I mean, it gets to this question of well, the economic need to walk out and get a job, a high-paying job, is directly tied to the fact that many students are walking out with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. So what can AAU scholarly community generally do to restrain the growth of collegiate education? Yeah, that's another very good question and it's probably the question we're facing today in the public and it's quite fair, especially from the point of view of families that are seeing this just get beyond them in spite of the great efforts colleges and universities make to provide support and the federal government as well. I think there, there's a huge issue as Harold Shapiro, the former president of Princeton recently said we could lower costs immediately. We know how we could lower costs starting tomorrow. It would be really simple. You just start teaching far more students per class per section than you do now and you can drop costs by 50%, 60%, 80%, 90% immediately. So that's open to colleges pursuing this avenue which I think is a big mistake because while you can cut costs easily obviously you cut into value when you do that and we wouldn't, most of us at any rate like to see such a trade off. So to me the real question is not how do you cut costs or keep them low. How do you keep costs down while maintaining quality? And I never want to talk about the left-hand side of that equation without also talking about the right-hand side of that equation because to me it's silly to try to answer one without the other. So getting to that broader question how do you keep costs lower or restrain the rate of growth as you put it and still keep quality fairly high or quite high if you can. I think this is the big issue that presidents and provosts are now confronting in a serious way. And the reason they're confronting it historically is in spite of all of our answers to the question why do costs go up in spite of all the research that's done and there are pretty good answers to that the public's tired of hearing the same old answers and the more complex they are and they are complex the less the public wants to sit still and listen to them. I mean there's Baumol's cost disease whereby service sector economies such as higher education always go up higher than the section sector it's just absolutely true across the board all the time because I mean it gets down to the symphony orchestra you know it still takes the same number of people to produce Beethoven's fifth that it did a hundred years ago and you just can't drive down the cost much to produce Beethoven's fifth and in higher education we're a little bit like that or actually a lot like that if we want to maintain the quality. So first of all I think universities have to control all of their non-educational costs much better than they have I mean there are bells and whistles let's be honest in higher ed we're a competitive business we've been competing partly on bells and whistles and we ought to stop doing that just can't do that any longer I think we ought to push students very very hard to finish degrees in four years or three years or three and a half years the recommendation yesterday made by the American Chemical Society Commission was that a Ph.D. in chemistry should take four years maximum five support should be cut off absolutely after five and in many cases after four so some of these additional costs have come frankly from students taking their time now I don't want to that's the fact that many students take their time because they're also working at time consuming jobs and they don't have much choice so that's a factor so I think we have to try every possible thing we can to restrain the rate of growth and I've just suggested a couple of ways of doing it but there are going to have to be others as well I think it's very fair very fair point I was wondering if I could jingle those bells or tweet a little bit as one of those whistles as a non-teaching humanist in a humanities oriented university it's disturbing to me to hear your response to the we can't call it decline I think we have to call sort of cataclysmic collapse of humanities education in higher education with an appeal to a tsunami of foreign students coming to the US I would ask you what the analysis of what those students are majoring in might be and how that message differs from the vocational one because those students I would guess are overwhelmingly majoring in sciences they're most likely not engaging in the accept osmosically in the humanities disciplines those that teach subtle attention to language, argument philosophy, the functions of the humanities so although we may still be filling our campuses with students they're not going to be doing the things that we we claim to value we don't know how that fits into this picture that's a good point to raise as well I don't think I suggested that we're going to solve the humanities issue with international students or students from China but I see why you would raise that point given what I did have to say let me say a couple of things one of the top three students I ever taught in classics was a Chinese student absolutely first rate she was pursuing a PhD in classical Chinese studies and she was a first rate student of Greek and Latin so I learned something there and that is that it's something of a stereotype to say all these students are going to be majoring in science and engineering secondly I consider a major in science to be a liberal arts major because it is a major in physics is in a liberal arts college part of the liberal arts very important part just as classics is or English or history so many of these Chinese students are indeed taking scientific subjects or majors but those are in liberal arts and I think that's great by the way there are very few American physics majors these days I mean the number is getting vanishingly small at some universities including some large universities I don't want to confuse the humanities with the liberal arts because I think there are two different things so there are a lot of issues surrounding the humanities just this past week there were very strong concerns expressed by a member of humanities faculty a really leading member about the future of PhD programs in the humanities that's a serious problem I wish it weren't but in fact it is unfortunately many students pursuing PhDs in the humanities are taking 8, 9, 10 years I've seen it personally just in the last few years while I was teaching at Cornell so that's a problem and so is the job market which is obviously really tough for those students on the other hand let me say something positive it's true that the number of majors in the humanities isn't especially large the number of students taking humanities courses is very large very, very large and those students are predominantly very happy with their courses that's demonstrated in university after university so I don't like to refer to this as a crisis in the humanities unless you want to call it a crisis in the humanities since I was 18 years old because I've been hearing it described that way for all these years but it is true that the number of majors has clearly gone down very good question David Carlson from Texas A&M and now with the state where the governor is calling for the $10,000 degree and that is indeed the nature of my question I mean we would all agree I think that you know I think if it were up to us in this room we'd make education free I mean you know open the doors and let them in and so $10,000 is a nice goal but we know the challenges of making that happen how do you think that institutions of higher education and the leaders of those institutions should respond to that kind of call in the political sphere, the public sphere? Yes the first response I think is to say why don't you do a better job of providing state funds for your public universities than you've been doing these last five or six or seven years is sort of ground zero for this discussion and what we've seen unfortunately is persistent decline in state funding for public universities persistent and we all know that a one year cut of 10% is hard but what's really hard is six consecutive years of cuts even if some of those years it's 5% because it's just killing to morale and that's what's happening in a lot of our really great public research universities and I talk with our provosts and our presidents and our deans all the time about this and this is growing into a really serious national problem in my view unfortunately governors learn from each other and they're pursuing a common strategy here in some cases so I feel very strongly that we've got to do what we can so that would be my first answer is providing state funding on the other hand the legislatures and governors have a ready argument which is look our costs are going up inexorably we have to cut somewhere we can't cut Medicaid we can't literally and so we have to take our cuts elsewhere and I understand these are budgets that are under pressure but on the other hand I would say that universities have to do a really really strong to say why this is a public good and I think that's what's getting lost in these new developments in public higher education we've just lost the idea that this is a public good it's just a private interest from the standpoint of these leaders and you should pay for your education and get a job as a result and I just reject that as a philosophy of education so that would be my second answer I'm very concerned with the culture of the United States we want to pay nothing for our education and we want to pay people practically nothing to work with an advanced degree with all these very expensive student loans and so we keep saying we want masters degree people and PhDs and we want a double masters but we're paying them 30 to 40 thousand dollars I know very well respected people who get invited to speak all the time and go to all these things but they're making 20 to 30 thousand dollars a year and yes they're doing cutting-edge stuff and yes they're making a difference but they're never going to be able to retire if they get sick I knew one person who had to ask everybody online for help because they could not pay their child's medical bills because they're not employed in a typical fashion and it's not just in the humanities this is in the hard physical sciences these are people with PhDs in chemistry in physics and biological sciences and it's very concerning to me you know I think on the one hand people should be willing to pay something for their education but when your debts are so big that you're going to be paying off your student loans all the way until you get to retirement how are you going to be able to retire how will you ever be able to enjoy what you are doing before then yeah I sympathize very strongly with what you say and some of what you're asking about is being debated right here in this town today in the budget discussions that are going on and I don't in spite of what I said at the beginning I really don't want to talk about the fiscal cliff I get to do that the other four days of the week and it's not much fun but I think you put your finger on the really big problem here and that is that we're just not valuing these things that all of us I think in this room agree on enough and a society that puts such a low value on these things I think is one that's not headed in a good direction so I think we need to raise our voices about this we need to talk about education as a public good and we need to talk about the value to the individual citizen who is going to come out of these institutions able to contribute better to democracy in a complex world than the citizen who does not get such an education now it is true and I'll admit this very candidly it's the first time in human history that any society has attempted to send so many millions of people to college I mean this is a huge democratic experiment when this country was founded there was no idea that a high proportion of its citizens would go to college college was restricted to a tiny percentage of Americans and we've grown it over the years and now we've reached the point where almost everyone expects to get a college degree the way when I was growing up everyone expected to get a high school degree so today it takes a college degree to be eligible even for the jobs that you're describing and it is hard for a society to do that on such a vast basis I do think we have to acknowledge that and not act as if it's somehow a right for everyone to have a college degree that's a tough thing to pull off I might indulge in a final question here and take us in a slightly different direction the world of higher education is very strange in the sense that institutions compete intensely with each other for institutions for the best faculty for research funds yet they also collaborate with each other and certainly libraries for example of a long history of working collaboratively to support our great research institutions how do you do you see the collaboration competition balance changing and if so how and where that's a very good question and it's fitting that Cliff should ask that because that's one of the topics he asked me to discuss and I didn't get to it with all the other things I was trying to take on but it's a very interesting question I don't think I've got a great answer to it frankly but let me give a brief try first of all you're right we're very competitive we compete for faculty we compete for research grants it's such a myth in the wider world that academics aren't competitive they're incredibly competitive and we just see that all the time the way Stanford competes with Berkeley just one example that's cutthroat so let's all acknowledge that point and we do so across many many domains on the other hand we do cooperate as you said I think of the CIC the Big Ten institutions plus the University of Chicago that have a phenomenally powerful cooperative venture that deals with all subjects except intercollegiate athletics which are competitive they even cooperate there too these new TV contracts are unbelievable so libraries have been one of the best arenas for cooperation I'm a graduate of Haverford College I've been on the board for a number of years Haverford Swarthmore and Bryn Maw have a phenomenal cooperation among their three libraries it's almost as if they're one library that wasn't true when I was going to school so we have a fair amount of cooperation my guess is given the cost strains that we're under we're going to have to learn how to cooperate much more than we have been whether we like it or not I think we're going to have to cooperate much much more and some cases that will be hard because institutions that have traditionally not trusted each other very much are going to need to start doing so in my view it will be one means at least of trying to hold down costs so I offered that as a somewhat positive view of of that question thanks again thank you so much for that that was very wide ranging gives us an awful lot to think about as we leave this meeting and I greatly appreciate you making time out of a horrendous schedule to share your thinking with us on this and to field quite a range of questions and this brings our fall 2012 membership meeting to a close I thank you all for joining us I wish you a happy holiday season I wish you safe travels and I will see you in the new year thank you