The Public University in the Twenty-First Century

National Press Club
Washington, DC
June 2, 1999

By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor
University of California, Berkeley

Nearly forty years ago, Clark Kerr, then President of the University of California, described the modern research university as a "multiversity." "The multiversity," he said, "is an inconsistent institution. It is not one community, but several….Its edges are fuzzy….It serves society almost slavishly, a society it also criticizes, sometimes unmercifully….A community, like the medieval communities of masters and students, should have common interests; in the multiversity, they are quite varied, even conflicting. A community should have a soul, a single animating principle; the multiversity has several--some of them quite good, although there is much debate on which souls really deserve salvation."

If that was true of the modern university four decades ago, it has become even more the case today. The edges of the university are today even more fuzzy; the boundaries defining the communities within the university, as well as those defining the university to the world outside of it are more unclear today. Yet, even as some boundaries become blurred, others become more distinct, more difficult to overcome. It is about these changing boundary conditions and their implications for the future of the university that I want to speak to you today.

At the boundary where the university and society intersect, we find the following tensions:

• rising inequality in society, with a corresponding inequality of access to higher education;
• disinvestment in all levels of public education;
• increasing dependence on higher education for social and economic mobility;
• an increasing demand for college credentials, which may not be synonymous with education itself;
• the revolutionary surge of information technology, offered as a solution for educating more people more efficiently, whether or not technology is, in fact, a complete solution;
• private interest in education as a market, viewing students as customers, education as a commodity, and scholarship as having commercial value.

These tensions lie at the core of what I have to say today.

One of the remarkable features of American higher education has been the unique mixture of public and private institutions; a healthy competition for academic excellence among these public and private institutions has served all of higher education well. Although all of them have seen themselves as serving the public good--Woodrow Wilson entitled his inaugural address at Princeton, "Princeton for the Nation's Service"--public universities have held a special place in the development of American democracy. They were created to educate a broad spectrum of the public and, especially with the passage of the Morrill Act creating the federal land-grant universities, their research and education was given a uniquely practical dimension, intended to serve rural agriculture, mining, and the emergent industrial base of the economy. State-based, state-supported, public universities were to be low cost and accessible to the many; private universities, on the other hand, were available to the few who could afford their costs.

These distinctions have, over the last decade and a half, become blurred. Today, private universities receive funds from federal financial aid programs, allowing many of them to admit students on a "need-blind" basis. In addition, their operating budgets are substantially augmented by federal research funds. Public universities, on the other hand, receive a declining portion of their resources from their respective states. At UC Berkeley, for example, only 34% of our operating budget comes from the State of California, down from over 50% slightly more than a decade ago and nearly 70% when Clark Kerr was President. That percentage of state contribution has become typical, if not even on the high side for major public research universities; for institutions like Michigan, with large medical centers, the percentage is only 11%.

This means that public universities now act more like private universities in how they generate operating revenues. Berkeley, for example, is currently engaged in a capital campaign to raise $1.1 billion, a campaign on the scale exceeding that of all but a handful of the most richly endowed private universities. In addition, as state sources of revenue have declined, they have been replaced by the private sources in the form of tuition dollars. Fees at Berkeley are still low, by private school standards, but at roughly $4000 per year, they are significantly higher than a decade ago, and even further removed from the negligible fees of three decades ago, when California considered free public higher education a necessary and worthwhile public investment.

The national data reflect a similar pattern. Between 1980 and 1995, tuition, room, and board at public institutions increased from 11% to 15% of median family income. With the growing income disparity in the United States, this increase was larger for lower income families than for higher income families: it increased from 22% to 32% for families at the 20th percentile of family income, compared with an increase from 7% to 9% for families in the 80th percentile. Institutions have tried to offset some of this impact on poorer students through financial aid, largely by applying some of the increases in tuition into financial assistance. Little of the growth of financial assistance came from public sources. From 1976 to 1996, as college costs increased considerably in excess of family income, adjusted for inflation, Pell Grants from the federal government fell by 23%. Recent vigorous efforts by Congress and the Department of Education have helped to arrest this steep decline.

This general trend, at least in California, represents a general shift in priorities for public spending away from education. Only recently, have those priorities begun to change. In the wake of the passage of Proposition 13, the property-tax limitation measure, California has fallen in its per pupil expenditures for elementary and secondary schools from being one of the top ten states in the 1970s to a ranking of 43rd in 1997. The general decline of the quality of public schools has led many middle-class parents to send their children to private schools. Today, for example, fully 20% of the applicants to UC Berkeley come from private schools, further evidence of the privatization of public education in the state.

The result of these trends has been to reduce access to higher education to the poorest children in our society, especially those confined to the least effective public schools. It is true that the percentage of high-school graduates enrolling in college has climbed from 52% in 1970 to about 66% today. But it is also the case that children from families in the top 60% of the income distribution account for the entire rise in college enrollment during the past 20 years. In California, the state with the most dramatically changing demographic profile in the country, the declining access is even more alarming; the percentage of high-school students going on to college is the reverse of the national figures, having fallen from 60% in the early 1980s to 55% today. If California is a bellwether state, the sound of that bell is not encouraging.

The legitimacy of the public university's claim as an instrument of progress in a democratic society hangs in balance on the question of access--and not only on access, but quality and purpose. Are we providing the broadest possible cross-section of America's population access to the best possible education? Are we excluding by any means anyone who has the right to be included? Are we serving society--with our research and by teaching people to serve as leaders and citizens? Are we thereby, in answer to all of these questions, meeting our highest obligation, clearly spelled out in our charge to fulfill the public trust?

Our challenge, therefore, is to provide clear answers to these questions. In this world in which access to public universities is more difficult, in which the lines between public and private are blurred, our task is to see to it that selective, strong public universities continue in the future, as they have in the past, to provide opportunities for a broad spectrum of our population. Despite the difficulties I have mentioned, we have had substantial successes. Twenty-five percent of UC Berkeley students come from families with incomes of less than $30,000 per year; 20% of our new students come from immigrant families, and over 30% come from families in which neither parent holds a college degree. In total, fully 44% of our students come from families with at least one of these characteristics: from a family of immigrants, have neither parent with a college degree, or come from families with less than $30,000 annual income.

It is in this context that the struggle over affirmative action and the passage of Proposition 209, ending racially sensitive admissions to California public universities, plays out. The goal of affirmative action was always to increase diversity in the university, as an educational value not only for under-represented minority students, but for all students regardless of color. Proposition 209 has not, by any means, ended diversity at Berkeley. But it has made it more apparent that educational access cannot be guaranteed to the broadest cross-section of society without certain stronger remedies: first, a massive refocusing of investment to correct inequalities in the K-12 public school system, with higher education engaging the problems of public schools and investing more in outreach and remediation; and second, a deep re-evaluation of the standards by which we judge merit, with public universities leading a transition toward judging students as individuals rather than as the sum of their grade point averages and test scores. Berkeley has addressed the reality of the post-Proposition 209 challenge by expanding its outreach efforts to public schools and by altering its admissions process so that applicants are evaluated as individuals in the context of their educational opportunities and life experiences.

But the pressure for access to quality higher education will continue. During the next decade, for example, the campuses of University of California will have to accommodate an additional 60,000 students--the combined current enrollment of Berkeley and UCLA.

A second phenomenon, related as well to the changing relationship of the public and the private in American higher education, is the technological revolution that is overtaking how we do everything that we do. For the world of the university, this revolution is extraordinarily complex. It promises to transform the manner in which education, or perhaps more accurately, the manner in which teaching material is delivered around the world. It has enabled universities to explore and expand the realm of "distance learning", through which teaching materials are delivered to students at remote locations. For many, this represents a new market, a new revenue source, drawing institutions more fully into the sphere of private enterprise. Students can now obtain advanced professional degrees as well as a panoply of courses through on-line offerings from a number of universities and colleges. Duke offers an MBA through a combination of on-line courses, encounters with faculty, and two-week residencies on Duke's campus--all for a price of $85,800. The University of Phoenix is the fastest growing institution in America, with sites all over the country. Recently, Harcourt-Brace announced that it was starting its own accredited university that would also employ electronic materials. The examples are legion; no university that is concerned about its future in the 21st century can afford to overlook these opportunities, despite substantial questions about their implications.

The "virtual university" represents a tremendous opportunity to provide educational opportunities to people who have previously been denied access, either because of cost, location, or age. It is this vision of the future that has caused Peter Drucker to predict that, "thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics," that residential universities will give way to virtual universities. That prediction may be a bit extreme, but one report from Price Waterhouse Coopers predicts a huge shift toward electronic courses as a trend toward lifelong learning increases demand for education. The report suggests that software will serve about 50% of the total student enrollment in community colleges and 35% in the four-year institutions.

I doubt that the contemporary university will disappear, as Drucker predicts, but it will be changed in how and to whom it delivers its education. But the electronic university raises several profound questions as well. One is, again, the question of access to live teaching and real minds. It may very well be that the public will see the virtual university as the "cheap solution," replacing the relatively labor-intensive current system of higher education, thus allowing even further disinvestment in public universities where scholars, teachers and students, gather and interact in a direct, face-to-face manner. As Peter Applebome wrote in last month's New York Times education supplement, "Education Life," the rise of the electronic university "raises the specter of a tiered educational system--green quads, small classes and Gothic touches for the privileged few--and software for the many."

A view of the future as dominated by the virtual university obscures even further the multiple roles of the modern university, or multiversity, to return to Kerr's language. For a central feature of the modern research university is that of creator of knowledge as well as a conveyor of knowledge. If the virtual university diminishes further the public's belief in the need to support traditional universities, where will the new knowledge transmitted electronically be generated? In an age in which national wealth is to be measured as much in its capacity to create new ideas and new marketable products from those ideas, the American research university has contributed enormously to the wealth and productivity of the nation. Nowhere is that more evident than in California, where the relationship between universities and burgeoning new industry is closely knit. Silicon Valley has fed on the transfer of ideas and people from California research universities. It is no accident that 30% of the biotechnology companies in the world are located within 30 miles of a campus of the University of California and that 6 out of the 10 most utilized drugs they have produced have come from the laboratories of University of California scientists. Far from being an anachronism, universities in the future will play an even more central role, if properly supported, as places where scholars and scientists will gather with students for the vital exchange that develops new understanding and new ideas.

This brings us to the third major tension in the disappearing boundaries between the public and the private sphere. As the ideas developed in research universities, from software to genetic maps, have valuable commercial applications, the lines separating "public good" research and "proprietary" research become very fuzzy. Modern scientific research is extremely expensive. While federal investment in research has increased substantially during the past eight years, as a percentage of the whole R & D investment, it has slipped steadily since 1978, from over 50% in 1977 to 42.6% in 1988 to 30.2% in 1998. This means that universities, where the lion's share of basic research is conducted, have turned increasingly to private industry for support. And, increasingly, concerns are raised about the proprietary nature of privately-supported research and about the impact of such support on the free exchange of ideas.

This past year, Berkeley negotiated an agreement between the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. Novartis will provide long-term monetary support for basic research and, in exchange, receive first rights to license some of the discoveries made. But the agreement itself is an experiment and will be subjected to careful scrutiny to determine what, if any, may be the unintended consequences of this new mixture of public and private interests.

The awesome frontiers opened up by genomic research, of course, raise even larger questions about the relationship of the public and the private spheres. Whether anyone can lay claim to "owning," for commercial purposes, sequences of the DNA codes is itself a much larger philosophical and policy consideration. But since universities are at the center of the quest, we are also at the center of the question. And boundaries between public and private interests become ever more fuzzy.

I have no doubt that universities, public and private, will, in the course of the 21st century, be increasingly hybrids involved in both the public and private realms. But for public universities, the sorting out of the relationship between the two realms is vital. Public universities educate over three-fourths of American students. Public universities have always played, and will continue to play, a central role in educating citizens for responsibility in a democratic society, for participation in the public realm. Becoming more "private" does not preclude preparing young people to inherit the common world, but the educational values we espouse are reflections of the society and values in which our institutions develop. Commitment to the public good, which must be the bedrock commitment of public universities, cannot be separated from investment in the public good. We cannot be institutions committed to serving the greatest good for the greatest number if we are serving the private interests of the privileged few. We cannot lay claim to greater public investment--to which we must lay claim if we are to serve our function in a knowledge-intensive society that also subscribes to democratic values--unless we are seen to serve the public good.

In the 19th century, Great Britain had the most advanced technology in the world. But it grew complacent, certain that its standard of living, its leadership would prevail. It allowed its technological infrastructure to age without renewal.

Today, America's technological advantage rests on an infrastructure whose foundation is its educational system. It must be renewed and strengthened; we must assure that we give the best educational opportunity to all American children, from kindergarten through graduate school. Second, our research must address issues of public interest, from decaying cities to new technology. The land-grant model of public universities should be employed in the service of urban America. Third, we must continue to lead the information revolution, integrating its benefits into all levels of education, neither standing in awe nor fear of its impact, to strengthen learning, not dilute it. And finally, we must assure that public universities continue to fulfill their public trust, as weavers of the social fabric, educating individuals for citizenship and leadership, comprehending the ethical dimensions of human life.