Akron Press Club: Higher Education in a Changing World | Sept. 7, 2023

Good afternoon.  It is a great pleasure and an honor to be here with you today.

I want to thank the Press Club for their sponsorship of these events which have become extremely important to this community.

I am grateful to those attending today, most especially my colleagues from the University of Akron.

Most of all, I want to thank my wife Georgia who is unable to be here today. She and I have lived in many communities in our journey together. I have always admired and continue to admire the energy, determination and creativity she infuses into her work – which is always extensive – in the communities in which we have lived.

Let me begin my comments by telling you that your local university – The University of Akron – is in great shape for the future.

We had a good year last year as we came off COVID.

We are having a great beginning to our 2023 fall semester.

Student excitement is very high.

Here are some quick examples of that from the first several weeks of the fall semester:

• 2,300 students recently attended RooFest, learning how to become involved in more than 250 student organizations.
• Our residence halls are at or near capacity, reaching the pre-COVID levels of 2019.
• More than 500 new students participated in the student employment fair applying for positions in 44 different areas on campus.
• 4,978 students have checked in to the Recreation Center since the beginning of school.
• More than 900 new students participated in the Casino night tradition at E.J. Thomas Hall.
• Hundreds of students participated in the Commuter Welcome event.
• We are very excited about our ROTC program.  This fall we have seen a 50% increase in new cadets with 74 enrolling, 6 of whom are national scholarship recipients.

We continue to see strong upward trends in important indicators of student and institutional success.

This year, the University hit an all-time high freshman-to-sophomore retention rate:  72.5%.

This is one of the highest I have ever seen in a public university. It clearly demonstrates the deep commitment of our faculty and staff to the success of our students.

This is one of the major reasons we are seeing a strong turnaround in our enrollment profile, which had been declining for over a decade primarily because of demographic trends.

During the past two years, we have stopped the decline, leveled out enrollment and are now working to grow the number of students we serve.

A survey of our spring 2022 graduates showed some great career outcomes:

• 86% of our 2022 bachelor’s degree recipients participated in at least one form of experiential learning before graduation.  Such experiences are known to significantly improve a student’s job opportunities after graduation.
• 95% of our spring 2022 undergraduate degree recipients were employed, participating in a volunteer enterprise, in the armed services or in graduate school within 6 months of graduation.
• Those entering the work force with a bachelor’s degree earned an average starting salary of $64,287 annually, an all-time high.

I want to thank our Provost Dr. John Wiencek and our Vice President for Student Affairs Dr. John Messina for their great work with our faculty and staff to achieve these impressive results.

The University does a fantastic job at recruiting, keeping and getting its students into the workplace which is essential to the economic vitality of this region of Ohio.

One of our most important obligations as a public research university is to support the regional workforce and the regional economy.

A recent economic impact study conducted by Lightcast, a global leader in labor market analytics, demonstrates the importance of the University to the regional economy.

• The University added an impressive $3 billion in income to the region’s economy in FY2021-2022.
• The $3 billion impact supported 36,324 regional jobs, with one out of every 48 jobs in the UA service area supported by the activities of the University and its students.
• According to the study results, a UA degree offers students a gain of $6.70 in lifetime earnings for every $1 invested, which means that in return for their educational investment, our students in the aggregate receive a value of $1.7 billion in increased earnings over their career.
• Numerous start-up companies have also formed as a result of programs and knowledge at UA, adding $10.4 million to the local economy.
• Faculty have received 135 invention disclosures, filed 204 new patent applications and produced 18 licenses since FY 2018-2022.
• The study showed that the net impact of UA alumni who remain in the regional workforce was $2.7 billion during the 2021-2022 survey year.

This is a very exciting time in the history of The University of Akron.

I am extremely optimistic about our future as a major university and a major partner to the City of Akron, the region and the world.

But I am very aware that the higher education environment in America is changing, in some ways dramatically.

I have been leading research universities for nearly a dozen years, and I have served as a faculty member and administrator in the Academy for nearly 35 years.

I love the enterprise of higher education and I believe I have one of the most interesting jobs in America.

But, I find myself in the most chaotic and uncertain time I have ever experienced.

This is a difficult time for colleges and universities and those who work in them.

We are quickly understanding that the support public universities once enjoyed is rapidly diminishing.

American’s confidence in higher education is at an all-time low.

A Gallup poll conducted in June of this year showed that whereas:

• In 2015, 57% of people polled responded that they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot,” of confidence in higher education.
• In June 2023, only 36% of respondents had that much confidence.

These results clearly reflect the current political polarization surrounding higher education:

• In 2015, 56% of Republicans and 68% of Democrats responded they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education.
• This past June, 59% of Democrats had such confidence (a 9% decline) but only 19% of Republicans (a 37% decline) said they had a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education.
• There was also a 19% decline in confidence among independent voters.

More disturbingly:

• Confidence among college graduates – arguably a group that would have benefited the most from postsecondary education – dropped from 57% to 47%.
• And, among the group of Americans most likely to benefit in the future from a college degree – folks between 18 and 24 years of age – confidence dropped from 60% to 42%, a decrease of 18%.

This is a lack of confidence in an enterprise that is among the most enduring in human history.

• Five of the 10 oldest human institutions in continuous existence are universities. (Two more are libraries.)

This is a lack of confidence in an enterprise that since well before World War II has led the world in innovation and creativity.

All of the following and many, many more trace all or much of the fundamental research and development to American universities:

• Atomic energy
• Human genome project
• The moon landing
• The development of the internet
• The discovery of the structure of DNA.
• A vast array of medical advancements
• Space exploration
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
• Climate science
• And, thanks to The University of Akron and supported by the rubber tire companies, development of the modern transportation system.

This is a lack of confidence in an enterprise upon which American commerce is inexorably dependent for talent.

• Over 75% of the fastest growing occupations in the country require a four-year college degree.

And there is no reason to believe colleges and universities will become less important to the American economy:

• By one estimate, 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven’t been invented yet.
• There is no enterprise in the world, other than American higher education, that would or could take on the goal of training the workforce to fill these unknown jobs.

Yet, folks don’t seem to see the value of colleges and universities.

The roots of this lack of confidence are very complex and well beyond a full explanation here.

To be sure, we sometimes do not make it easy to like us:

• College costs have increased beyond the cost of living for decades.
• During the time these costs have been climbing, critical metrics of institutional success, such as completion rates and retention rates, have not increased.
• As an institution, we are opaque and difficult to understand. For example, trying to understand a university general education program or which courses transfer and which do not, can be extremely difficult.
• And, many of our customs and practices – such as academic freedom and tenure – are not well understood.

One thing is clear, the enterprise of higher education no longer controls the narrative about the role of colleges and universities in American society.

Over the past two years state legislatures in 23 states, including Ohio, have introduced at least 57 pieces of legislation that seek to fundamentally alter the way in which universities work and university faculty interact with their students and conduct their research.

Some of these bills represent unprecedented, sweeping changes in higher education, some even suggesting what can and cannot be taught.

In Ohio we have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work closely with legislative colleagues on challenges in higher education. We expect that collaboration to continue.

For many like me who believe deeply in the value of a college degree and the role of universities in their communities, becoming more a part of the public discussion about the future of higher education is extremely important.

One way I can do that is to work to explain the enterprise in a way that demonstrates its challenges and opportunities.

That is what I want to try to do now. I want to take the rest of my time with you to discuss one of the most important and misunderstood elements of these complex things called universities and use that discussion to demonstrate the challenges with the public’s perception of us.

Universities are like small cities. We employ people in a wide range of professions. We have a police force, maintenance workers, transportation workers, accountants, custodial workers, counselors, health professionals, communications specialists and virtually every other job you can imagine.

These staff professionals are absolutely essential to student success. I am deeply appreciative of their work at The University of Akron.

Today I want to spend time considering the work of just one of the groups of campus community members.

I want to give you a glimpse of the environment of perhaps the most misunderstood member of the college community: the faculty.

I want to focus on the work of faculty because it encapsulates many of the most important challenge universities face.

Having been a faculty member for many years I can attest to the fact that most folks in the community do not know what faculty do, how they do it or what the environment in which they work is like.

Because university faculty are often at the leading edge of new and unorthodox thinking or research there is also a good deal of suspicion about them.

Indeed, there are some who believe that university faculty are generally unproductive, unjustifiably entitled to lifetime employment and engaged in a program of indoctrination of university students.

Criticism and suspicion of university faculty is not new. It is as old as universities themselves.

There are credible records of public critiques of the faculty at Medieval universities.

Interestingly, because faculty and their work are so mysterious to most people outside the university, they are sometimes simultaneously targets of criticism from opposing sides of public opinion.

• You may remember that in the turbulent 1960s, university faculty were often criticized for failing to remain politically neutral about  issues of war and peace and civil rights.
• During that time, those same faculty were also accused – particularly by activist students – of being too conservative and not understanding of the younger generation.

I want to begin my remarks about faculty by making three comments about students.

• There is a general perception that the typical university student is a recent high school graduate living on campus. While this is true for many public universities, it is certainly not true for an urban university like The University of Akron. Most universities like Akron serve a student body having a wide range of ages, experiences, abilities and access to important support like technology, health care, transportation and, in some cases, housing. This range of circumstances is reflected in nearly every classroom. Every faculty member must understand and adapt to this diversity.
• The college student’s obligation in the process of higher education is often misunderstood. Higher learning is a collaboration not a transaction. The very best faculty teachers cannot “give” a student an education in return for her tuition. In order to obtain a higher education, the student must participate.
• One final point about students. There is a belief among some that university undergraduates arrive at the university with empty minds ripe for filling with all kinds of subversive ideas. I can assure you modern college students are not like this. They are smart, skeptical, widely knowledgeable about the world around them and, in some cases, quite strongly formed in what they believe.

Let me turn now to faculty.

When I was an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary, the main source of knowledge about any subject was the faculty member teaching that subject.

That faculty member – like those today – had spent years in deep study of the discipline they were teaching.

That faculty member was the person in society that afforded themselves of the knowledge of the subject.

None of my classmates back them would have had much interaction with the material they were given in their college classrooms – beyond that received in high school.

Today, the world of information in which university faculty and their students work is much, much different.

Today, everyone – including the students in the faculty member’s classroom – has access to a vast amount of knowledge. The faculty member is no longer the chief holder of information.

Not only does everyone have access to information, everyone can publish what they think about that information.

This is what one contemporary author has called the great modern Gutenberg moment.

Consider a few things about the world of information:

• Each second about 100,000 Google searches are issued. That is about 8.5 billion searches per day. And that is increasing. Each one of these searches is a question of some kind; a search for information (if not understanding).
• Each year, about 22 million new books are published.  Yes, people do seem to still read books! Many of these books are self-published.
• The revolution in artificial intelligence gives everyone not only access to raw information but access to explanations of that information as well.
• Given this explosion in knowledge and information, it is not surprising that the half-life of most academic disciplines is declining. The half-life of my own field of biology, for example, is estimated to be less than five years. That means that by the time most undergraduate biology majors graduate, half of the stuff they learned will be obsolete. [There has never been a more convincing argument for life-long learning.]
• An insidious consequence of all this information access is that selected parts of it get sequestered and channelized into belief systems. These are the Echo Chambers we are all familiar with.

How does this affect what goes on in the university classroom?

I mentioned earlier that the faculty member and her students have access to the same base of information, something that was not true when I was a college student.

That does not mean the faculty member and the student have the same level of understanding of that information.

What the faculty member has that the student does not have is a lifetime of study and experience with the information in her discipline. This lifetime of study and experience gives her a unique understanding of the connections and meaning in the information – the same information the student can access.

It also gives her the ability – and, I would argue, the obligation – to provide her students with a fair summary of the consensus of thinking in the discipline.

A fair representation of the current state of a discipline is not a list of all the ideas associated with that discipline. It is a curated discussion of the important disciplinary themes that are supported by evidence derived from experimentation, comparative studies, or structured observations.

Let me give you a very contrived example. There are people who believe the world is flat (check it out on the internet). I am not talking about Thomas Freidman. Any fair summary of the state of earth science would exclude mention of that belief because there is no evidence for it.

In other words, in the university all ideas don’t get equal time. The emphasis is on those ideas supported by evidence.

This can create a challenge for university faculty.

The challenge in the global knowledge economy is belief often clashes with understanding.

To see how this might be, let’s look at the challenge a faculty member might have in teaching climate science or climate change.

First it is very important to appreciate that faculty members in a broad range of disciplines have the obligation to teach their students about contemporary thinking regarding climate change.  Among these would be members of the faculties of biology, engineering, sociology, history, political science, to name just a few. The reason is that climate change affects nearly every part of human existence.

In order to teach students the contemporary view of global climate change, the faculty member will have to teach about the current research regarding the effects of human activity on climate change.

It would be impossible to responsibly teach this subject if the faculty member ignored recent studies that show there appear to be no non-human natural processes that can explain the vast increases in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. (It is also obvious that the teacher will have to teach that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is directly related to warming temperatures.)

Indeed, the faculty member may ask her students to read scientific papers regarding such findings.

Now consider the students in the class.

It is entirely possible – indeed likely – that one or more of them will, prior to the time they signed up for the course, have developed a very strong belief that trends in global climate change have nothing to do with human activity.

This belief will have been developed through their own engagement with an almost universally accessible global network of information about not only the science of climate change but opinions about it as well.

The validity of the student’s belief is not for the faculty member to question. Nor is it the role of the faculty member to actively disabuse someone of their beliefs.

However, it is the obligation of the teacher to give a fair summary of the consensus among climate scientists that human activities are largely responsible for the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Given this, depending on how strongly the student feels about her belief, it is very easy to see in this example that the student might feel as if she is being indoctrinated. The faculty member’s summary of the view of the scientific community about climate change does not square with the student’s beliefs.

This clash of preformed belief and discipline consensus is a common challenge in the modern university classroom.

The difficult situation is repeated every day where evidence-based material is overlaid on issues that, for one reason, or another have become highly controversial.

• It is impossible to give a fair representation of biology (and agriculture) without talking about evolution by natural selection, including human evolution.
• It is difficult to teach an introductory class in sociology without introducing students to some of the writings of Karl Marx.
• It is impossible to teach an introductory course in political science without talking about electoral politics.
• It is impossible to teach a course in polymers, chemistry or manufacturing without discussing sustainability.
• And it is impossible to give a fair representation of the thinking in many fields of history, psychology, counseling, marketing, sports analytics, or literature, to name just a few, without discussions of race, gender and social justice.

This kind of challenge extends to faculty research.

University faculty research is not a method of generating opinion.

It is a structured and methodical way of asking questions about the unknown and evaluating through experiment, comparative methodology or careful observation the likelihood of various answers to those questions.

When I was a research scientist, I asked lots of questions about why certain ecosystems were more diverse than others. I had some ideas (opinions) about why this might be, but I used experiments and observations to determine which idea was most likely to be true.

What I learned was what I discovered from the experiments. What I reported was what the data told me to report. What I taught was information based on evidence.

Academic researchers abide by a central tenant:  Let the data from the experiment or the observation or the interviews or the comparative studies tell you what is happening or has happened.

We call this – the right to say what the research reveals – Academic Freedom.

It has always been the case, and still is today, that research findings sometimes run counter to public or political views.

This can create an uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous situation for university faculty researchers which sometimes results in personal threats or job insecurity.

It is this danger to individual teachers and to truth that universities mitigate with the institution of tenure.

So, how do university faculty navigate this environment?

The great opportunity in this is not to change beliefs.  Rather it is to broaden a student’s understanding of the world. The very best university faculty provide opportunities in the classroom for open discussion of evidence, the way evidence is obtained and the nature of variation in that evidence. 

This must be done carefully and with great respect to the student. 

But it must also be done without compromising the consensus of thinking about a particular phenomenon.

Only faculty members can do this because they are the only ones with a full understanding of the discipline and the relationship of certain beliefs to that discipline.

The majority of students I have encountered understand this dynamic and use it broaden their understanding.

Before I close, I want to emphasize that university faculty do a lot more than teach classes and conduct research.

Faculty members are productive and economically impactful citizens in their communities.

One of the most important things they do as part of their employment with the university is to provide service to the community by sharing their expertise. I am extremely proud of the thousands of hours the UA faculty provide each year to boards, non-profits organizations, education and other important social endeavors.

Let me conclude with a pledge and a plea to this community.

We are a public research university. Our job is to provide a world class education in an affordable way and to seek the truth in all endeavors.

We also have an obligation to work with this community – particularly with the City of Akron – to support our neighborhoods and our citizens even if those citizens are not our students.

Our faculty and staff take these obligations seriously.

The optimism I have for this university, its students and this community is not born solely of cold analysis of our finances or our enrollment projections. It is born also from the great pride I have in watching the members of our faculty and our university staff interact with students, visitors and each other. 

For the great commitment these colleagues make every day in a difficult environment I ask you as members of the community to join us in working together to regain the public’s trust in this most important institution:  The University of Akron.

Thank you.