Challenge Worthy Of Top-Notch Team
After weeks of intercollegiate bickering about which taxpayerfunded bureaucracy should deliver higher education service in Spokane, it is time to re-examine the mission for which such bureaucracies exist.
Namely, equipping students and communities with tools to make them stronger for life in the real world.
Earlier this month, Gov. Gary Locke gave academia a hard shove toward that essential mission. He created the 2020 Commission on the Future of Higher Education.
The people he named to this group are as significant as the mission he assigned.
Indeed, the Seattle Times reported that University of Washington faculty felt “apprehensive” upon hearing of Locke’s committee. Here’s why: The governor chose a group bold enough to challenge traditions like tenure and powerful enough to insist that their deliberations lead to real change - rather than to another volume on the state’s long and dusty shelf of educational task force reports.
This is most encouraging.
Consider, first of all, the 22 members. They include: Bob Craves, a senior vice president at Costco, architect of a no-nonsense revolution in retailing; John W. Creighton Jr., retired CEO of Weyerhaeuser Co., a man accustomed to long-term management and a 60-year crop cycle; Daniel J. Evans, who distinguished himself as governor, U.S. senator and president of Evergreen State College; Wendell Satre, retired CEO of Washington Water Power Co. and a key visionary behind the push for a research university campus in Spokane; Chuck Collins, a prominent Seattle businessman and veteran public policy troubleshooter who has agitated for reforms that place students first; Jeannette Hayner of Walla Walla, a conservative who won widespread respect during her 20 years in the Legislature; Phyllis J. Campbell, formerly of Spokane and now president of U.S. Bank, Washington, as well as a WSU regent; and Wallace D. Loh, a top Locke adviser, former dean of the UW law school and an advocate for efficiency in academia.
The last time a group of this firepower took aim at education, Washington embarked on a process, now in its fifth year, that is bringing accountability and instructional reforms to the state’s K-12 classrooms.
Locke’s goals for universities are no less ambitious. He wants this commission to sketch a higher education system capable of meeting needs in 2020. And he wants it done by September.
Locke’s charge to the commission indicates he wants no back-patting affirmation of the status quo. He wants universities to be rocked, rolled and reinvented, just as many of society’s other institutions and businesses have been changed in recent years.
This means a hard look at tenure and faculty workload. It means a better balance between teaching undergraduates and performing useful research. It means asking employers what kind of competencies they will need in the work force of tomorrow. It means changing the significance of a degree from time spent in academia to acquisition of knowledge and skills. It means figuring out how to preserve culture and the humanities in an era focused on technology. It means using the Internet to teach and learn at a distance, and at lower cost. It means ending the outrageous inflation in tuition and making a degree affordable and accessible.
It also should mean shifting academia’s energy away from battles over ideology and turf to roles that will make taxpayers glad they’re still subsidizing universities when 2020 arrives.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board