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Educational innovation is a shorthand for the idea of trying to sort of plan a strategic
way to change universities that’s in keeping with their own culture.
One of the defining aspects of particularly comprehensive research universities like UW-Madison
is they’re very connected to the global knowledge economy, not only because of what
we do, but some of the innovations that we make have fired up that global economy.
The imperative to educational innovation is a sort of macroeconomic shift in the nature
of public investment. Not just for higher education, but public investment in general.
Clearly the recession-depression that is ultimately finance-based, credit-based collapse has left
huge structural deficits, and higher education in many ways is at the state level more than
the federal level is a casualty of that issue.
I would argue that really from the end of World War II to the early first decade of
this century, there were certain underlying commonalities to how higher education related
to taxation and the economy, and my worry is that it’s broken right now -- that there’s
a fundamentally different situation.
So I think there is crisis -- a resource crisis that we have to address. It would be easy
to say let’s wait around and assume that things will change like they did over the
last 60 or 70 years. I don’t think they will. I think we’re in a new, quote, “economic
era,” a new political era and it would be bad for us to just assume it will change.
That’s not prudent. We need to try to do something to ourselves that increases revenues
and capacity to allow us to survive this very difficult resource crisis.
I think the best strategic plans, which I believe this is, are enlivened and given legitimacy
by having lots of flowers blooming so that it’s truly experimental and lots of pilots,
but where I think higher education is limited and has been limited in the last 20 years
as it’s tried to create reform movements, is that it’s a thousand blooms, but there’s
no hybridization, and there’s no scaling up, and so we find enormously creative innovation
at small scales, small groups of people, certain programs are very creative. So it's not a
lack of innovation, it is scaling that innovation to a new scale, both at the individual institutional
level, at the interdepartmental level, and even at the inter-institutional level, and
I think that’s where we have to think hardest. We don’t have think hard about innovation
at the small scale. It is finding that and nourishing it and scaling it upwards.
I think most strategic plans in universities that try to be top-down
really fail, because it doesn’t engage not only the legitimacy of the
faculty staff and students, but also it doesn’t tap in to their contribution to the change
itself.
I think the psychology department at UW-Madison, in my view, is quite revolutionary in how
it completely reevaluated its courses, certain areas were now more important to modern psychology,
some graduate courses could be almost cross-fertilized with courses for seniors, and they were able
to deliver the curriculum with many fewer courses that were much more relevant to 21th
century psychology.
What we have to do is engage other faculty in what their colleagues are doing. If I can
broker those relationships as chancellor, that’s my achievement. It’s not to sort
of impose – you know, we’ve all got to do this – but rather generate a dialogue
where the best practices of our best teachers, who are often great researchers, too. In my
view there’s no assumption that just because somebody’s put a lot of time in their course
they're neglecting their research.
So I’m interested in creating a campus-wide dialogue about best practices and then perhaps
look at other institutions as well to see how are they progressing. The reason we need
to do that is five years from now if we don’t keep up we could have a non-competitive, somewhat
obsolete curricula and I would hate to see us in that position where you now have variable
money, but you’re also not that competitive.
I think there are two ways that we can probably enhance our already enormously successful
research mission. One is large-scale research – interdepartmental research like what’s
going on in energy research right now. Perhaps also in areas of public health. A variety
of areas where groups of people may have to get together. The individual grant system
is not where all the money is. And the second one is how to deal with patent revenue, license
revenue, industrial contracts in a way that still preserves our academic freedom, but
lets our knowledge become to the benefit of society. If it’s a pure social benefit we
should be doing it as a public good as part of our outreach, but if it is assimilated
and further developed by the private sector, we would like to share whatever those gains
would be. WARF has been the instrument of doing that, but I think there are ways in
which many faculty don’t fully realize that there is some value in their intellectual
property and having a more organized way of reaping that and having faculty feel they
can get expertise and thoughtful help, legal and otherwise, there is a D to P program – discovery
to product program that will I think help faculty consider that as an option.
We've created a team – one of whom is Jeff Russell, who is very knowledgable in technology
and education as well as being very sensitive to blended delivery; Aaron Brower, who has
been involved in learning innovation long before I came back, and Maury Cotter, who
I think is very astute at planning – a planning process is very communicative, very two-way
-- so we’ve got them to sort of start a viral structure that moves out, and what we’re
interested in is a lot of feedback. For example, we know there are a lot of obstacles to change
that we put in ourselves, so they’re also, in addition to providing positive help, they’re
trying to also say, “If we could remove restraints for you, what would they be? Are
they trying to propose a new course? Is that too cumbersome? The semester system and two
courses a semester means it’s very hard for me to stop, re-equip myself and move forward.
How can we begin to resolve this?” Because you probably do have to pause and rethink
and there may be some time restraints. So we’re looking for help and assistance.
I believe that if we really can scale our changes and make them more visible to students,
legislators and the private sector, I think that provides the ammunition to go after new
public money. And if we define core funding, we’ll have to find some nuanced tuition
policy and new public money.
I don’t think just saying we’re entitled to what we used to have will get us there,
so again I think the dividend will be it will help us restore, if you like, the public in
public higher education. To be a kind of a low change, rather disinterested innovative
culture, I don’t think it’s going to get us to recover the public money we deserve.
So it may be that if we can just, with self-help and the leverage of self-help over a three-
to five-year period, really energize a sort of sense that the public and our legislators
can really recognize middle to large scale change, I think that’s the best way to rearticulate
a public vision for public higher education.