Public Purposes: The Road to Renewal for American Higher

Bruininks/Thorp
6/18/12 3:46 PM
Public Purposes: The Road to
Renewal for American Higher
Education
A commissioned background paper about
Higher Education as it relates to the creation of
public value.
Dr. Robert H. Bruininks, president emeritus,
and Jim Thorp
Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs,
University of Minnesota
June, 2012
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Public Purposes: The Road to Renewal for American Higher Education1
by Dr. Robert H. Bruininks, president emeritus, and Jim Thorp
Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota
I’m concerned that in recent years higher education’s historic
commitment to service seems to have diminished. I’m troubled that many
now view the campus as a place where professors get tenured and students
get credentialed; the overall efforts of the academy are not considered to
be at the vital center of the nation’s work. And what I find most disturbing
is the growing feeling in this country that higher education is a private
benefit, not a public good.
– Ernest Boyer (1994)
Introduction: Higher education’s unique public good
Eighteen years ago, Ernest Boyer warned that U.S. universities were turning a
corner, away from the public purposes defined by a century of visionary policy and
leadership. This shift is, in fact, a retreat to an earlier era, in which the first U.S.
universities catered primarily to young men of wealth and privilege and were considered
inferior to their European predecessors (Cole, 2009). While it is true that leaders of the
nation‘s foremost private institutions began the early work of transforming higher
education in the U.S., the emergence of an explicit public mission, which connected the
creation and distribution of new knowledge with economic development, the cultivation
of human capital, and the solving of real-world problems, created a uniquely American
system of higher education that quickly became the envy of the world (Cole, 2009).
As early as the 17th century, our nation‘s founders saw the value of higher
education beyond the individual. The earliest universities were established so that the
North American colonies would have educated clergy for the guidance and benefit of the
society (Cole, 2009), and in some cases, including that of Minnesota, public universities
were established even before a territory achieved statehood. Beginning with the Morrill
1
The paper was prepared for the conference ―Creating Public Value in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power
World,‖ sponsored by the University of Minnesota‘s Center for Integrative Leadership on Sept. 21 and 22,
2012. Portions of this paper were adapted and delivered as the 23 rd annual Louise McBee Lecture in Higher
Education (Bruininks, 2011b) for the University of Georgia‘s Institute of Higher Education. Many of the
ideas and much of the content expanded upon here have been introduced previously in informal remarks,
speeches, presentations, and reports during Dr. Bruininks‘s tenure as president. References to these are
noted wherever possible. We would like to recognize and thank research assistants Katie Doroschak, Erin
Konkle, Jayne Sommers, and Ben Tilkens for their research support and editorial assistance on this project.
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Act of 1862, U.S. higher education policy began a conscious shift toward more explicit
public purposes, promoting higher education as a means of economic development,
encouraging broader access, and emphasizing research with public application. This
approach was further codified in the legislation and programs including the Servicemen‘s
Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill), the National Defense Education Act of 1958
(NDEA), the establishment of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
strengthening of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the 1950s and 1960s, and the
creation of Pell grants, subsidized loans, and tax benefits for students and their families.
These landmark policies stimulated a unique national partnership between
government, universities, and the private sector that has elevated U.S. universities to
global preeminence. The resulting multiversity was not universally embraced (Cole,
2009), and even today, it is criticized for trying to do too much and doing little of it well.
However, its impact is undeniable: around the world, most efforts to reform higher
education systems take their cues from the U.S. model (Rosovky, 1990).2 According to
the 2011 Academic Ranking of World Universities, known popularly as the Shanghai
Rankings, 17 of the top 20 universities in the world, and 34 of the top 50, are U.S.
institutions—and many of them are public universities (Academic Ranking of World
Universities, 2011). The centrality of such universities to U.S. economic growth and
quality of life led Richard Florida (2002) to assert ―the presence of a major research
university is a basic infrastructure component of the Creative Economy…and a huge
potential source of competitive advantage‖ (p. 291-292).
As a result, the multiversity provides the best lens through which to examine the
creation of public value ―in a multi-sector, shared-power, no-one-wholly-in-charge
world‖ (Center for Integrative Leadership, 2012), across the broad spectrum of activities
and disciplines now encompassed by the term ―higher education.‖ This paper will focus
most closely on public U.S. research and land-grant universities, their unique public
missions, and their most pressing long-term challenges. 3
2
The term multiversity is thought to have been coined by historian Arthur Bestor in ―The American
University: A Historical Interpretation of Current Issues,‖ College and University 32 (1957), 175-88.
3
While the primary focus of the this paper is on U.S. public research and land-grant universities, many of
the concepts and conclusions apply more broadly to all U.S. research universities, public and private, and
have implications for two-year community and technical colleges and for-profit providers, as well.
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Inherent value of public universities
First, we assert that public universities have inherent value: a public university is
a public good and creates public value simply because it exists to preserve, advance,
distribute, and apply knowledge in order to improve the human condition. This type of
public value is encompassed in the words of W.E.B. DuBois (1949): ―Of all the civil
rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is
undoubtedly the most fundamental‖ (p. 230-31). Since public universities served 7.7
million students in 2009 and awarded nearly two-thirds of all bachelor‘s degrees in the
U.S.—significantly more than U.S. private universities and for-profit providers (National
Center for Education Statistics, 2011a).4 As social, intellectual, and cultural creatures, all
of us benefit from the advancement and distribution of knowledge on this scale.
Added value of public universities
The second type of public value attributable to public universities is their added
public value: a university that succeeds in its fundamental mission of preserving,
advancing, distributing, and applying knowledge in order to improve the human
condition will, in fact, change the individual lives and society for the better. For example,
we know that higher education conveys:




private economic benefits, including improved employability (U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2012a) and higher earnings (College Board Advocacy and Policy
Center, 2010);
public economic benefits, including an educated workforce, new ideas and
products, and a thriving economy (Florida, 2002; Cole, 2009);
private noneconomic benefits, including a deeper sense of personal satisfaction
(College Board Advocacy and Policy Center, 2010) and
public noneconomic benefits, including improved health (Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier American, 2009; College Board
Advocacy and Policy Center, 2010) and higher rates of volunteerism (Bureau of
Labor Statistics, 2012b).
4
Postsecondary enrollments (for full-time undergraduate students) have grown rapidly over the past three
decades—most of that growth (85 percent from 1980 to 1990; 65 percent from 2000 to 2009) continues to
occur at public universities. However, since 1980, for-profit providers have grown from 23,000 to 1.2
million students and account for 27 percent of the postsecondary enrollment growth between 2000 and
2009 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2011b).
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Indeed, one could argue that some of these benefits—for example, improved
health—ultimately transcend all four categories, benefiting the individual and society in
both economic and non-economic ways. And in the cases of economic gains like
improved employability and earnings and an educated workforce, the public and private
benefits clearly fuel each other.
Barry Bozeman (2007) makes a compelling case that public and private goods are
not mutually exclusive, but that the balance between them has shifted toward the private
side through an over-emphasis among policy-makers on market-driven principles and
measures. Re-balancing and maintaining the diverse public, private, and overlapping
goods U.S. universities provide will be essential to renewing higher education as a
priority for U.S. policymakers and re-establishing a long-term national vision for human
capital and innovation that is broad-based, long-term, cross-sector—and, especially, in
the public interest.
On the Verge: The New Realities and Threats to Public Value
Despite strong demand for higher education among U.S. students and their
families, according to the Pew Research Center (2011), 57 percent of U.S. adults
surveyed believe that college is not a good value for the money spent, and 75 percent
believe that college is too expensive for the average American. Despite strong demand
for job creation, economic development, and educated workers, legislators continue to
reduce public funding for universities. Demands for more accountability and better
results often accompany criticism that greatness is too costly, and that good may have to
be good enough. This growing uncertainty regarding the value of higher education
suggests an erosion of the perceived public good of higher education. The higher
education landscape has changed rapidly in recent years; university and government
leaders must therefore ask the question, ―Are public research and land-grant universities
still meeting public expectations and public needs?‖ and sincerely seek the answer.
The new realities
In 2009, we and our colleague Brianne Keeney wrote an article for the journal Innovative
Higher Education about the challenges facing colleges and universities in the 21st century
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(Bruininks, Keeney, and Thorp, 2010). At that time, the global economic downturn had
accelerated a number of new realities the University of Minnesota had predicted at the
turn of the 20th century, underscoring the truth to Peter Drucker‘s (2003) notion that the
future has already happened. Among those new realities are changes in the external
environment in which universities operate, including:

Changing Demographics. An aging population means workforce shortages and
growing demand for entitlements and services; at the same time, high schools in
Minnesota and surrounding states are graduating fewer students overall (though
that will begin to rebound) and more young people of diverse nationalities and
socioeconomic backgrounds who are often less likely to consider college and less
prepared for higher education (Gillaspy, 2011). These shifts require new
approaches to college readiness, access, recruiting, and admissions; new teaching
strategies; deeper partnerships between the preK-12 education system and
postsecondary education; and stronger academic and student support services.

Declining Public Funding. According to a 2003 study, state appropriations for
higher education in the U.S. should be about 20 percent (or $14 billion) higher
than they currently are if appropriations kept pace with inflation and maintained
the same ratio to personal income as in 1977 (Kane and Orszag, 2003). Despite
the fact that public universities still educate most of the college students in the
U.S., as demand continues to grow for entitlements and other services, the trend
of declining public funding for universities (including both state support and
federal funding) will likely continue.

Increasing Demands for Accountability. As public funding decreases and
tuition rates increase, more is demanded from colleges and universities in terms of
accountability, including efficiency, transparency, results, and value. Regulations
and reporting requirements will grow, as will the staff and budget required to
ensure compliance. Stakeholders and investors will more carefully scrutinize
university spending, particularly on traditional university activities regarded as
non-teaching, non-core, or non-essential, such as athletics or Extension.
Additionally, we face new realities as a result of our own choices and evolution
within higher education—for example:

Fierce Competition and Mission Creep.5 Technological advances and our
inertia have resulted in a proliferation of new higher education providers,
5
Mission creep, in this context, refers to the tendency for higher education providers to aspire to or move
toward the next higher Carnegie or National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) classification, e.g.,
when technical colleges begin to offer baccalaureate degrees, when traditionally undergraduate institutions
expand to offer professional or graduate programs, when Division II institutions seek to move into Division
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especially internationally and in the for-profit realm. These new providers,
coupled with the new realities mentioned above, require universities to
aggressively compete for dollars, students, and faculty ―rainmakers.‖ On one
hand, this will lead to mission creep, as community colleges and regional
universities expand competing programs to attract people and resources. On the
other hand, as more providers award more degrees to more people, it will become
increasingly difficult and important for institutions, graduates, and employers to
be able to distinguish between degrees and degree programs.

Increased Focus on Costs and Productivity. Reduced public funding, growing
reliance on private-sector support, and increased competition necessarily mean
universities are more concerned than ever about their bottom line. As a result, we
are increasingly operating more like businesses, focused on reducing costs and
risk, increasing productivity and efficiency, and treating our students as
consumers. This shift to more business-like language and strategies can erode the
academic culture over time and has resulted in extensive debates about measuring
the immeasurable or difficult-to-measure (such as faculty productivity, student
outcomes, public impact, and total cost of education) and defining the true
purpose and value of higher education (content versus skills, personal
development versus professional credentials, private good versus public good).

Redefining Core Values and Responsibilities. As universities begin to examine
the efficiency and effectiveness of what they do, some will begin to question the
shared values and public responsibilities that contributed to the greatness of U.S.
higher education but that may seem less central or urgent. Academic freedom,
equity and diversity, tenure and shared governance, liberal education, basic
research—all are being described today (in some circles) as outdated,
unproductive, or non-essential.

The Transformative Impact of Technology. Higher education has experienced
an unprecedented increase in the use (and as a result, costs) of information
technology in the past three decades, largely as a result of the information
technology revolution, which first put a computer on every desk, and now
requires wireless internet access and application support for multiple mobile
devices. In large part as a result of the IT revolution, between 1978 and 2008,
academic support expenditures at the University of Minnesota increased by 156
percent, while inflation-adjusted state support remained essentially flat (P.
Zetterberg, personal communication, January 2009). Technology will continue to
redefine our cost structures and require creative funding strategies as state funding
declines. Technological research and innovation also will permit the expansion
and distribution of content and experience beyond institutional affiliations, greatly
expanding learning opportunities while also further fueling competition and
mission creep.
I athletics, etc. While the intent may be to better compete for students and resources, too often the result is
duplication of costly programs and confusion in the higher education marketplace.
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Many universities anticipated these developments and have been discussing them
for years; however, most have yet to address them in any strategic or systemic manner.
These new realities have been magnified, as well, by emerging global trends in higher
education, including increased investment in higher education and research abroad, new
funding and student aid models, and increased U.S. regulation of international student
visas, all of which mean U.S. universities are somewhat less attractive than they once
were.
Wrestling with the intangibles
The new realities drive home the fact that both context and continuity are
essential to higher education’s inherent and created public value. The real public value
of higher education will vary based not only on the specific university or system in
question, but also on the education continuum of which it is a part (early childhood
through post-baccalaureate), the strengths and weaknesses of the economy and
community, and the perception of its stakeholders. If, for example, education and
innovation are prized by citizens and the state, higher education will be more likely to be
seen as a public value itself and will be more able to act as a creator of public value. If we
invest in early childhood education to close the achievement gap that persists today in our
increasingly diverse society, and then emphasize post-secondary education and readiness
for all students, universities will be more successful because our incoming students will
be better prepared. In this respect, ―Who is your public?‖ becomes an important precursor
to ―Are we meeting the public‘s expectations and needs?‖
When we attempt to make the case for the value of universities and bolster public
confidence and public funding, we often highlight measures such as graduation rates;
science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) degrees; research awards and
expenditures; royalties from discoveries and patents; and other quantitative measures
related to workforce development, human capital, and economic impact. While these
measures are in keeping with the economic intent of the Morrill Act of 1862, they also
underscore the problem Bozeman (2007) described: today, people have come to
understand and express public value almost exclusively in economic terms.
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We are complicit in this, and as a result, we typically underemphasize or ignore
the deeper and less tangible public impacts of our work, including civic engagement,
contributions to the arts and humanities, and the preservation of culture and historical
knowledge. But traditional higher education functions, such as liberal education, and
principles, such as academic freedom, clearly have public value because they support
higher education‘s inherent value and facilitate its mission and ability to advance
knowledge and understanding in order to benefit our broader society. The exercise of
these values on a case-by-case basis may not always result in public good, but the fact
that they are foundational to the U.S. model of higher education and our very successful
academic culture means that they are of public value and should be preserved. Indeed, we
have seen the effects of the alternative approach: the rise of U.S. universities to global
prominence in the last century stemmed in part from the debilitating effects of Nazi and
communist crackdowns on academic freedom in Germany and Eastern Europe during
World War II and the Cold War period (Cole, 2009).
Preserving those public purposes and principles that transcend or exist outside
economics, then, is critically important. But if universities fail to find compelling and
understandable ways to talk about them, the attention of policymakers and the public will
remain fixed on the bottom line—ours, and theirs.
The potential for public values failure
According Bozeman (2007), ―Public values failure occurs when neither the market nor
public sector provides goods and services required to achieve public values‖ (p. 144), and
he identifies eight public value criteria, which, if unaddressed, may result in such a
failure. Of these, three are particularly relevant to higher education today:

Values articulation. According to Bozeman (2007), ―political processes and
social cohesion should be sufficient to ensure effective communication and
processing of public values‖ (p. 145). Unfortunately, around-the-clock media
coverage; shorter election cycles; and constant fundraising, polling, and
campaigning put a premium on image, sound bites, differentiation, and immediate
results, as opposed to common ground, shared vision and sustained action. In
addition, as illustrated in the Pew survey mentioned above (2011), the public itself
is not clear on the value of higher education. We see disconnects among, and even
within, stakeholder groups as parents, students, faculty and staff, and policy-
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makers perceive the mission and contributions of higher education in very
different lights. The result? Our colleges and universities no longer have an
agreed-upon role to play in today‘s society. And understanding higher education
is becoming more complex, not less—which leads to a second criterion relevant
to identifying and delivering public value.

Public information. Bozeman (2007) goes on to say, ―public values may be
thwarted when transparency is insufficient to permit citizens to make informed
judgments‖ (p. 146). Even if we agreed upon the role of higher education in
today‘s society, many people would still be unable to make informed decisions
about our colleges and universities. Many students and families possess limited
understanding about both the cost of higher education and the various strategies to
address those costs; they are often overwhelmed with the diversity and
complexity of choices they face, and some may not regard higher education as an
option at all. Policy-makers face similar obstacles with regard to discerning how
best to strategically allocate public resources to colleges and universities. As
universities, we can (and should) do more to help all of our stakeholders better
understand the full cost of our mission activities, the net price students actually
pay, and the wide range of savings plans and aid programs available to families
from all socioeconomic backgrounds.

Time horizon. Finally, Bozeman (2007) says, ―When actions are calculated on
the basis of an inappropriate short-term time horizon, there may be a failure of
public values‖ (p. 146). Unfortunately, when we are stressed, we tend to simplify
and compress our problems to make them manageable. In the face of poor public
information and disagreement regarding the purposes of higher education,
solutions to these over-simplified, short-term questions will be over-simplified,
short-term alternatives—and short-term planning and budgeting cannot provide
the sustained action and investment required for our great American universities
to address our new realities and resume their role of shaping the future.
While public universities historically have made incredible contributions to
benefit both individuals and society, we can see that the competitive, economic, and
political pressures of the day demand that we review our commitment to, and our
strengths and successes in, creating public value. Our approach must be intentional,
disciplined, long-term, and strategic; it must also clarify our role and purpose,
demonstrate a commitment to productivity and impact, and communicate these
characteristics clearly so that our stakeholders understand who we are and what we do.
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Road to Renewal: The essential importance of long-term strategic planning
While it is anathema to say in certain academic circles, to meet the challenges of
the new realities we face and to address a potential erosion of public trust, public
universities must embrace a culture of planned change and performance management
that is long-term, analytical, self-critical, principled, sustainable, and above all, strategic.
Why? Because continuous renewal is essential to discern the public good and preserve
and strengthen public value. Emerging opportunities and challenges provide new context
for our historical mission and responsibilities as established in our charters, the Morrill
Act, and other foundational documents and policies. The needs and circumstances of
society are constantly changing, and higher education must evolve, too.
Fortunately, methods to facilitate change exist, even for organizations as vast,
diverse, and complex as our public research and land-grant universities. Our University
of Minnesota colleague John Bryson (2011) defines strategic planning as a ―deliberative,
disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and
guide what organization (or other entity) is, what it does, and why it does it‖ (p. xii), with
the fundamental goal of promoting strategic thinking, acting, and learning. This basic
goal leads to other outcomes that directly contribute to a university‘s ability to create
public value, including improved, experience-based decision making; enhanced
organizational effectiveness, responsiveness, and resilience; enhanced organizational
legitimacy; enhanced effectiveness of broader societal systems with which the university
interacts; and direct and indirect benefits accrued to the people involved (Bryson, 2011).
In addition, organizations with strong strategic plans weather economic storms better than
those without (Fain, 2009).
The work of Bryson (2011) and his colleagues was foundational to the early
stages of Transforming the U, an ambitious strategic positioning effort undertaken by the
University of Minnesota beginning in 2003-04. His Strategy Change Cycle provides is
iterative approach to strategic change that enables an organization to begin anywhere in
the cycle and is flexible enough to recognize and incorporate organizational and political
complexities (Bryson, 2011). Although the stages of the cycle are not necessarily
sequential for every organization, they are numbered, and the early steps are particularly
important to the potential for the potential public values failures (Bozeman, 2007)
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outlined above. These steps require a painstaking review of values, purposes, and
expectations that balances internal aspirations and external demands; different notions
and measures of success; and competing priorities and responsibilities. Later steps
address strategies, measures, and timeframe.
Bryson‘s Strategy Change Cycle (2011) places great emphasis on the groundwork
for change; it is not until Step 9 (of 10) that we see implementation, followed by step 10,
which reassesses all that has come before. That single word—implementation—appears
deceptively simple, but as E. F. Schumacher (1973) reminds us: ―It is the thinking that
has to be changed and also the method of operating. It is not enough merely to have a
new policy: new methods of organization are required, because, the policy is in the
implementation‖ (p. 213, emphasis added). A number of implementation frameworks
exist in the literature on planned change; at the University of Minnesota, we used John
Kotter‘s (1996) well-known eight-step model:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Create urgency.
Form a powerful coalition.
Create a vision for change.
Communicate the vision.
Remove obstacles.
Create short-term wins.
Build on the change.
Anchor the changes in the culture.
During the period of 2003 through 2011, the University of Minnesota leveraged
Bryson‘s and Kotter‘s models together. In fall 2004 with a series of Board of Regents
work sessions affirmed the case for change, as well as our foundational theories related to
the framework and process, while at the same time reaffirming the University‘s unique
public mission in Minnesota. In 2005, the board endorsed the aspirational goal of making
the University one of the top public research universities in the world within a decade,
solidifying the scope of the University‘s mission and centering subsequent discussions
around issues of delivery and prioritization.
Long-term strategic planning and leadership is foundational to the sustained and
intentional creation of public value, but the best planning is only as good as the strategic
thought and action that results. At the University of Minnesota, we sought to establish
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long-term priorities and create a more responsive academic culture in order to better
deliver on our mission, build public trust, and stabilize (or even increase) public and
private support, resulting in sustained momentum; improved productivity and impact; and
clear, measurable public value. By nearly every measure, we advanced substantially
toward these strategic objectives and our aspirational goal (Bruininks, 2011a and 2011c).
Many of our peer institutions undertook similar strategic planning efforts in the
middle of the last decade, thereby advancing their own academic goals and public value
while also magnifying the intense competition for students and resources that was already
emerging at the turn of the 21st century. Of course, not every public research university
can win in every area, but neither can regional economies, states, or the nation afford to
lose the competitive edge their universities provide. To build on the unique and inherent
strengths of U.S. higher education as a whole, we must renew our long-term vision for
public college and universities, using coordinated approaches developed through
comprehensive strategic planning and management to balance competing ideals and
objectives and maximize both the public and private value of higher education across
institutions, systems, states, and the nation. In the remainder of this paper, we will
examine four key issues in which careful strategic planning and implementation built
upon the University‘s historic mission and comparative strengths to generate and
communicate public value: 1) policy and leadership, 2) access and affordability 3)
interdisciplinary collaboration, and 4) performance assessment.
Policy and leadership
Public research universities must be steadfast in our commitment to public
engagement as a core responsibility. This is made more difficult in challenging economic
times, when budgetary and political pressures constrain discretionary resources and
sometimes encourage or force universities to reexamine activities that yield public value
but are viewed as less essential or less economically valuable. Unless the creation of
public value is a key strategic priority of institutions of higher education, the engagement
and outreach agenda is often ad hoc and episodic, and public value, public perception,
and public understanding are all diminished.
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Like many other universities, the University of Minnesota has taken deliberate
action to formulate develop leadership strategies and policies that promote public value.
This includes the appointment of a senior vice president for system academic
administration, who is responsible for academic oversight of our regional campuses,
overall leadership for public engagement and outreach mission of the University, and
coordination of system-wide academic initiatives that span the five campuses of the
Minnesota system. We then created the position of associate vice president for public
engagement, which reports to the senior vice president for system academic
administration and works to encourage and institutionalize various forms of public and
community engagement into the University‘s research, teaching, and outreach activities.
Both positions have generated new revenues and have provided greater strategic focus on
the University‘s public mission and value.
During the same period, we formed the Council on Public Engagement, a council
of academic leaders across disciplines who meet regularly to develop policies and address
opportunities to create and preserve pubic value. As president, Dr. Bruininks actively
participated in forming the Itasca Project, a group of business, public, and nonprofit
leaders in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area dedicated to advancing the region‘s
economy and quality of life. He also made a deliberate effort to connect the University to
the Minnesota Business Partnership (MBP)—an organization of more than 100 leading
corporations in Minnesota—and was later asked to join the Partnership and its executive
committee. Today, the president of the University of Minnesota and the chancellor of the
Minnesota State Colleges and Universities have permanent seats on the Partnership.
Our engagement with Itasca and MBP not only improved coordination and
collaboration between the University and the public, private, and non-profit sectors, but
also led to the creation of the Office of Business Relations—the University‘s front door
for Minnesota business and industry leaders to find the expertise, resources, and talented
workers that meet their needs. Ultimately, these relationships helped inform the
University‘s efforts to reform technology commercialization policies and provide greater
incentives for public-private research partnerships (Bruininks, 2007). These connections
also enabled the University to deepen our relationships with Minnesota businesses and
industry in support of education, research, and financial aid for students, resulting in the
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success of the Promise for Tomorrow Scholarship Drive and the legislative advocacy
effort that led to the creation of the Biomedical Discovery District (Bruininks, 2011c).
Finally, we developed specific policies and incentives to create a culture of public
value and a deeper commitment to service and outreach within the University itself.
University of Minnesota Extension is a point of pride for our institution and has
traditionally kept our urban flagship campus connected with rural communities in greater
Minnesota, our natural-resource economy, and our agricultural roots. However, as more
people move into metropolitan areas and our population becomes more ethnically and
socioeconomically diverse, it has become increasingly important that the University
reach out into its neighborhoods with a strong and relevant urban agenda. This requires
new strategies that engage diverse populations for clear purposes, encouraging
partnership and an exchange of knowledge, and leverage the strengths of both the
University and the community.
For example, the University‘s new Urban Research and Outreach Center (UROC)
in North Minneapolis—perhaps the most economically challenged area of Minnesota—is
actively conducting research and offering education and other services with regard to
health care, nutrition, and youth and economic development, and leveraging partnerships
to reduce the achievement gap. We are pursuing these initiatives from within the
neighborhood itself, where we are a recognized daily presence and a known resource. In
fact, when a devastating tornado tore through this already challenged area of our city in
Spring 2011, UROC became an operational center for the clean-up effort. Faculty and
staff quickly mobilized a three-day outreach/assessment operation as part of the
coordinated emergency response, training and deploying more than 500 volunteers to
assess residents‘ needs, drop off emergency food, and provide information about relief
and recovery resources, and in many cases, professional assistance or treatment for those
in need (Academic Administration, University of Minnesota System, 2011).
Authentic and ongoing engagement in the community made this relief effort
possible, and such engagement on the part of our faculty, staff, and students, should be
encouraged, recognized, and rewarded. Since 1999, the University of Minnesota
Outstanding Community Service Award has been presented to faculty and staff who go
beyond the call of duty to serve the external community and society; other awards that
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specifically recognize service and leadership include the Scholarly Excellence in Equity
and Diversity (SEED) Awards, the Josie R. Johnson Human Rights and Social Justice
Award, the Award for Global Engagement, and President's Student Leadership and
Service Award. Awards like these support, celebrate, and encourage the University‘s
public value and mission.
Access and affordability
For more than 150 years, U.S. public universities have provided exceptionally
broad access to higher education for students from all socioeconomic backgrounds,
becoming one the nation‘s most productive assets for the development of human capital
and the creation of public value. Like other higher education institutions, as state funding
for public universities has diminished, the University of Minnesota has begun to rely
more than ever on tuition revenue, shifting to a higher-tuition, higher-aid financial model
that depends more heavily on the availability of state and federal financial aid as well as
institutional grants and scholarships. The tension between the need to grow tuition as a
university‘s most predictable and flexible source of revenue and the need to provide
affordable access to higher numbers of more socioeconomically diverse students requires
creative resolution. Charging higher tuition not only requires higher aid for students with
financial need, but also requires universities to demonstrate higher value to students and
their families. This can be accomplished by improving the quality of education and
student support, raising completion rates, reducing time to degree, and managing the total
cost of education for students. These efforts, in turn, require a careful reexamination of
college preparation and admission standards, academic advising and intervention, student
service, and more. A special emphasis must be placed on critical-path issues—those key
issues that must be addressed early and decisively to clear the way for sustained progress
on this or other major priorities.6 With these principles in mind, the University of
Minnesota adopted a comprehensive and integrated approach to access and affordability
involving three main steps.
6
―Critical path method‖ is a project-management tool, based on an algorithm, developed in mid-20th
century by James E. Kelley, Jr., and Morgan R. Walker and described in the article ―Critical-Path Planning
and Scheduling‖ in the 1959 Proceedings of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference.
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Step one was to adopt recommended academic reforms that restructured college
and programs in order to recruit, retain, support, and graduate well-prepared students at a
much higher rate. These often painful actions increased the academic quality,
productivity, and value of our undergraduate educational programs while also helping to
clarify and strengthen the University‘s role and responsibilities in Minnesota‘s system of
higher education. As a result, the academic profile of incoming students has improved,
first-year retention rates are above 90 percent, and four-year graduation rates for the Twin
Cities campus have more than doubled since 2000 (Bruininks, 2011c).
Step two was a bit more complex; in order to tackle the financial obstacles more
directly, we knew we needed to grow scholarship support overall, create a stronger needbased aid strategy, and provide additional financial incentives for students to take a full
course load and graduate on time.

First, in order to provide stronger financial support for students, the University of
Minnesota made scholarships our top private fundraising priority with an
aggressive internal matching strategy and strong support from the Board of
Regents. The Promise of Tomorrow campaign matched the payout of all
endowment gifts of $25,000 or more. The opportunity to leverage their private
contributions alongside University dollars on behalf of students undeniably
appealed to donors; as a result, from 2003 to 2011 the Promise of Tomorrow
Scholarship Drive raised more than $340 million for scholarship endowments
(Bruininks, 2011a). We even leveraged our football stadium campaign to grow
student support—going against fundraising best practices and adding an academic
support request to nearly every stadium ask. This unusual approach garnered an
additional $70 million in support for scholarships and other academic priorities
(Bruininks, 2011c).

Next, we implemented a strong need-based aid program, the University of
Minnesota Promise Scholarship, or UPromise, which provides a four-year
scholarship to all low- and middle-income Minnesota undergraduates from
families earning up to $100,000 a year. This scholarship—a guaranteed annual
amount for four years based on Expected Family Contribution—was specially
designed to complement state and federal programs and leverage growing private
scholarship funds to help students and their families address unmet financial
needs. Transfer students receive a similar two-year scholarship.

Finally, we restructured tuition so that credits above 13 each semester are free.7
This provides an incentive for students to take a full schedule each semester. A
7
On the Twin Cities campus, this change to the University‘s tuition structure was proposed by the late Dr.
Peter Zetterberg and adopted under the leadership of then President Mark Yudof. It was adopted and
implemented systemwide in Fall 2007.
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fifth year of college adds another year of tuition, fees, and expenses to the total
cost of education; in addition, many scholarships are only available for four years,
which means students who take longer than four years are more likely to need to
borrow money or to borrow in higher amounts. These actions, combined with
policy and curricular changes, increased substantially the credit loads of our
students, contributed to the dramatic increase in the four-year graduation rate for
the Twin Cities campus (Bruininks, 2011c), and reduced time to degree and total
cost of education for these students.
Step three was to take a careful, long-term look at the ―P-16 pipeline‖—the
education pipeline leading from early childhood through postsecondary preparation and
beyond. We know there is no better investment than high-quality early childhood
education programs in terms of bridging the achievement gap and improving the longterm prospects of our most ―at-risk‖ (or ―high-return‖) citizens—not to mention our
economy and our state and federal budgets (Rolnick and Grunewald, 2003). By 2018, 70
percent of Minnesota jobs will require some level of post-secondary education
(Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl, 2010). Harvard economists Larry Katz and Claudia Goldin
(2007) have suggested that universal access to postsecondary education will be key to
keeping us competitive in the global economy of the 21st century; at the same time, our
population of prospective college students is shifting to cultural and socioeconomic
groups who have traditionally been less prepared for the rigors of higher education
(Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson, 2009). To address these important issues:

Beginning in 2006, the University of Minnesota formed the College Readiness
Consortium (CRC) to work actively at the state and school level to increase the
number and diversity of Minnesota students who graduate with the knowledge
and skills to succeed in higher education, the workforce, and civic leadership. In
addition to creating programs for students and parents, the CRC helped to lead
efforts to revise our state‘s K-12 standards in math and science and has engaged
hundreds of school principals and charter-school directors across our state in a
leadership development program that helps them create and sustain schools in
which every student is on the path to postsecondary readiness.

A deliberate strategy to leverage our unique position as an urban land-grant
university and actively recruit and support transfer students from surrounding
colleges (including the establishment of a new Transfer Office, a guaranteed
admission program, and UPromise scholarships for transfers) further enabled the
University to increase access and capacity in a time of flat to declining state
support. In fact, the University has significantly increased its productivity in terms
of enrollment and degree production in recent years (Bruininks, 2011a). As a
result of this integrated approach to affordability—focusing on financial aid
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strategies, tuition banding and other incentives for timely graduation, and
managing the total cost of education—the average net price that Minnesota
undergraduates paid to attend the Twin Cities campus increased less than 3.5
percent per year during the past decade.
For several decades the practice of enrollment management has been applied to
undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota. A highly controlled admissions
process has enabled colleges to offer the courses students need in patterns that are both
cost effective and consistent with the goal of four-year graduation, resulted in higher
retention and graduation rates. Helping students graduate in four years (or even less)
increases institutional capacity, enabling us to serve a higher volume of students over
time with the same faculty, staff, and space. By addressing issues of developmental
disparities, the achievement gap, and college readiness; issues of P-16 articulation and
progression; and issues of affordability, student debt, and time to degree, we seek to
create a high-capacity P-20 pipeline producing a well-educated, highly-skilled, diverse
and employable workforce that will attract job creators and investment.
Of course, if nearly all students emerge from high school prepared to complete
some type of post-secondary program, financial access becomes even more critically
important than it is today. Institutions, states, and the nation must commit to keeping
higher education affordable for students with financial need, while keeping careful eye on
fraud, loan defaults, and student indebtedness—especially debt resulting from
questionable admissions practices, unreasonable degree requirements, or other policies
that effectively prevent students from completing their studies in a timely manner. We
must be more vigilant, discourage waste, and encourage affordability and timely degree
completion, not only because of the economic impact, but also because of the ethical and
opportunity costs.
Moreover, to ensure and improve the public values of U.S. higher education, it
may be time for the United States to connect tuition, financial aid, and loan repayment
more closely to long-term earnings or the specific field or career a student pursues. We
may be able to take cues from our colleagues around the world in this effort. In Australia,
for example, students repay loans via a supplementary tax calculated from their level of
taxable income and only when the student has adequate income to do so (Jones, 2011)
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Programs like these would not only reduce indebtedness and default rates, but could also
be modified to provide incentives for students to pursue degrees and careers in highdemand fields with less regard to expected income. A more coordinated and collaborative
approach to identifying and meeting the workforce needs of the future, such as that
proposed by MnSCU chancellor Steven Rosenstone (Sturdevant, 2012) would also help
to match talented students with the workforce needs of the future, improving
employability and economic growth and productivity.
None of these initiatives or reforms is a‖ no-brainer‖—in fact, most will raise new
dilemmas. The way we balance merit- and need-based aid, for example, is seen as an
indicator of our commitment to academic excellence versus broad public access, and the
UPromise program has sparked a debate about whether it is fair to assess students with
financial means a higher tuition rate, then commit University funds to reduce the net
price for low- and middle-income students. Opponents say this approach amounts to
subsidizing some students at the expense of others and is unfair; supporters argue that
students who can afford to pay full tuition receive an education that is worth every dime,
and that students across that state have greater access to their flagship university. On
average, the full cost of instruction at the University of Minnesota is still significantly
higher than even the undiscounted tuition rate (Pfutzenreuter, Kallsen, and Tonneson,
2012). If state support continues to decline, tuition revenue will continue to be our most
important source of operating revenue, and internal and private financial support for lowand middle-income students will become increasingly necessary. As a result, the practice
of using University funds to provide need-based aid, we believe, is not only morally
defensible, but in keeping with the spirit and purpose of the Morrill Act and the historical
responsibilities of U.S. higher education.
Promoting interdisciplinary collaboration8
In his 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer claims, ―[T]he work of
the professoriate might be thought of as having four separate, yet overlapping, functions.
These are: the scholarship of discovery; the scholarship of integration; the scholarship of
8
Much of the content of this section is taken or adapted from Dr. Bruininks‘s final State of the University
address, ―The Bright Horizon: Why High Aspirations Matter,‖ delivered March 3, 2011.
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application; and the scholarship of teaching‖ (pg. 16). Public research universities have
the depth and breadth of expertise to tackle the complex problems of our time and
disseminate new knowledge, even when they transcend traditional borders between
disciplines, cultures, and nations. Like many of our peer institutions, the University of
Minnesota made a strong push at the turn of the 21st century to facilitate and strengthen
interdisciplinary collaboration. In many cases, our strategies and results are not unique,
however, we do believe that they are illustrative of the potential gains in public value that
can be achieved by breaking down long-standing barriers between disciplines.
For example, as part of the University‘s strategic positioning efforts, six colleges
were closed on the Twin Cities campus and reorganized into three interdisciplinary
colleges, creating broader collaborative learning communities of faculty and students
with complementary interests and diverse perspectives. We also expanded research and
international experiences offered to undergraduates, implemented a new university-wide
Honors Program on the Twin Cities campus, and greatly expanded our investment in
initiatives and facilities to transform teaching and learning and to reward outstanding
teachers. In 2010, the University of Minnesota opened a landmark new building, the
Science Teaching and Student Services building, which provides a single location for
undergraduate student services and, most importantly, high-tech, flexible-use, interactive
and experiential classrooms. The building has literally transformed the way many
professors teach and many students learn. In the past year, more than 10,300 unique
undergraduate students—nearly 34 percent of the undergraduate student body—took
courses in active learning classrooms in STSS, which is home to 225 courses in both
STEM and non-STEM fields (Langley and McMaster, 2011). The state-of-the-art
classrooms in STSS present a living laboratory in which students and faculty learn
together how best to share and advance knowledge, sparking the curiosity of students and
creating a sense of scholarly community absent in large lecture halls. As a result, our
students should learn more, retain more, and more frequently persist in high-demand
STEM fields (Langley & McMaster, 2011), adding to the expertise and skills we will
need to compete in the 21st century. Similarly innovative models have been implemented
at other venues and campuses (especially University of Minnesota Rochester), and we
expect similar results (Carey, 2010).
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This more collaborative and interdisciplinary approach to our mission has also
profoundly affected our research enterprise. Increasingly, the most pressing problems of
the day lie at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines. As a result, the focus of
a 21st century vision for our research mission must be cross-boundary collaboration.
Strong interdisciplinary work requires strong disciplines, but in order to respond to a
rapidly changing world, we must improve the means by which we place our strategic bets
and decide which academic areas to strengthen, which to maintain, which to reduce or
consolidate, and which to discontinue altogether, in order to better leverage the
resources—people, facilities, and funding—we have at our disposal.
Already, federal funding agencies have begun to reward interdisciplinary,
interinstitutional, and public-private efforts to tackle national and global problems such as
infectious disease and food safety. For example, in 2003, the University of Minnesota
announced Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives as one of several stated interdisciplinary
priorities, based upon our academic breadth and strong comparative advantages, both on
the Twin Cities campus and across the state. In July 2004—due to our strengths in
medicine, public health, veterinary medicine, biological sciences, and agriculture and
food production—the University received the first of multiple Department of Homeland
Security grants to establish and sustain the National Center for Food Protection and
Defense, which involved nearly 50 universities (and nearly 90 total organizations)
worldwide partnering in an effort to secure and protect the world‘s food supply.
Investment in the Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives initiative also helped to spark the
Healthy Eating Research program in 2005, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation; and in 2010, the University received a $7 million National Institutes of
Health (NIH) grant with the HealthPartners Research Foundation to work with local
stores to promote fresh and healthful foods, and with 530 families to create family
education classes in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools. The School of Nursing then
received another $3.2 million to study the effectiveness of such family-oriented,
community-based programs—and the University is also now home to an interdisciplinary
Obesity Prevention Center.
Similarly, in 2009, University of Minnesota faculty in veterinary medicine; public
health; nursing; medicine; education and human development; and food, agricultural and
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natural resource sciences; were chosen by the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) to join the $185 million RESPOND project—a five-year, multidisciplinary effort to examine and improve global responses to zoonotic disease
outbreaks. The University has made other conscious commitments to encourage
collaboration across academic disciplines, improving promotion and tenure policies in
order to expand the definitions of academic impact, and investing in flexible research
space, clinical research faculty, and new interdisciplinary centers including the Institute
on the Environment; the Institute for Engineering in Medicine; the Consortium on Law
and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences; and the Institute for
Translational Neuroscience. Interdisciplinary centers like these are increasing sponsored
funding and private support for research and leading to thriving external partnerships, all
of which increase public value both in economic and qualitative terms.
Clearly, the breadth and depth of University expertise, coupled with strategic
investment in areas of emerging challenges or opportunities, can snowball into
multidisciplinary centers of excellence with the financial resources to truly make a
difference. Since universities—through programs in the arts and humanities, museums
and collections, and more—are often centers of historical knowledge and cultural
preservation, as well as centers of new knowledge, these investments must not be limited
to scientific research or health and medicine. Universities must also continually look for
new ways to support research and discovery in the social sciences, arts, and humanities,
which are essential to co-existing and communicating across boundaries and preserving
civil society and culture. In 2009, University of Minnesota provost Tom Sullivan
announced the creation of the Imagine Fund, a $1.3 million system-wide initiative
specifically to support scholarly work in the humanities, arts, and design. In addition, the
Research Infrastructure Investment Initiative, or I3, was developed by Vice President for
Research Tim Mulcahy to meet the University‘s most pressing research infrastructure
needs. It combines $15 million derived from commercialization of University technology
with $5M of matching funds from academic reallocations to provide $20 million for
major equipment purchases and support for highly trained technical personnel. Funding
from the I3 initiative addresses critical infrastructure needs across the broad spectrum of
academic disciplines, including the arts, humanities, and social sciences, as well as the
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natural sciences.
Of course, new knowledge or new modes of expression are only of limited public
value unless and until they are developed and applied. The University of Minnesota, like
its peer institutions, has also streamlined and improved technology commercialization,
reformed its approaches to intellectual property and risk management, and strengthened
central support for researchers and grant writers. The Minnesota Innovation Partnerships
(MN-IP), for example, enables a company sponsoring research at the university to prepay a fee and receive an exclusive worldwide license to the technology, with royalties
effective only in cases of significant commercial success, eliminating the need for
protracted negotiations (Business @ the U of M, 2011).
The discussion of public value in higher education has real implications for how
universities set strategic priorities and address issues of academic culture. The University
of Minnesota pursued new approaches to emerging problems by creating new colleges,
centers, and initiatives, like those mentioned previously, as well as the Center for
Integrative Leadership and the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, that are
interdisciplinary and agile, responsive to real-world demands in real time. Initiatives and
centers like these have effectively mobilized University people and resources across
boundaries to achieve unprecedented results on behalf of the state, its citizens, and
beyond. Again, these results are not unique to the University of Minnesota, but are
illustrative of a widespread shift toward interdisciplinary scholarship across U.S. research
universities.
As always, new opportunities, new needs, and even new solutions nearly always
pose new dilemmas. So with the public good as the context for our public mission, our
research must be ongoing, adaptive, and applied—invariably put to good use to meet
honest goals and real public needs. Our particular challenge as comprehensive public
research universities is to preserve strong academic departments and basic research
within disciplines, remove obstacles and create new structures and approaches to
encourage interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration, and then find creative
ways to bring this new knowledge into the classroom and to apply it to real-world
problems in meaningful, scalable, and sustainable ways. Demonstrating, documenting,
and communicating those results in a way that conveys real public value, however, is
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difficult, which leads to a final challenge in making the case for the public value of
higher education: assessing performance.
Performance assessment
The final step in Bryson‘s (2011) Strategic Change Cycle is focused on
reassessment and is essential to continuous improvement. Successful organizations
measure what they value, and asserting public value without a relevant standard or metric
is meaningless. Furthermore, if Bozeman‘s (2007) public values criteria hold true, the
complexity of public universities, the abundance of (often conflicting) data available to
higher education‘s stakeholders universities, and rise of multiple alternative providers
mean we cannot ignore calls for increased transparency and accountability. To maintain
the public trust and earn public investment, we must clearly demonstrate that we are
delivering on our public mission and communicate our public value in ways our
stakeholders can easily understand.
For example, in annual public perception surveys, the University of Minnesota
gets high marks for delivering on its mission, but every year, our citizens remain
unconvinced that we are well-managed (Padilla Speer Beardsley, 2011). To regain the
public trust and ―earn‖ their continued investment, we must demonstrate that we are, in
fact, delivering on our mission and our commitment to be good stewards of our
resources—from managing major cost drivers to growing new revenues, leveraging
existing resources to be more productive over the long-term. This has meant proactive
and voluntary approaches to reducing the size of our workforce, helping us to manage our
number-one cost driver and strategically redeploy our human resources to achieve new
priorities while minimizing layoffs. It has meant a strategic shift in our capital planning
and funding strategies, emphasizing renovation and maintenance of existing facilities—
and even demolition of buildings—over new construction. It has meant shifting away
from large-scale, generalized, private fundraising campaigns in favor of smaller, more
targeted efforts that match donors to particular shared priorities.
It has also meant the development of a consistent, comprehensive performance
framework that tracks not only the measures that show how we rank compared to our
peer institutions, but how efficient, effective, and productive we are. Universities must
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take responsibility for measuring such essential aspects of their mission as student
outcomes, faculty productivity, and public impact. To address these shortcomings, we
must begin at the institutional level, establishing, with the consent of our governing
boards, a performance framework that includes key measures not limited to inputs or end
results, but including those leading indicators that warn us of concerns before they
become problems. Our metrics strategies must be aligned with institutional goals and
resources; they must be coherent and relevant to policy-makers and the public; they must
be comparable to our peers in meaningful ways; and they must incorporate long-term
planning processes, continuous feedback mechanisms, and regular internal and external
reporting.
In the mid-1990s, the University of Minnesota was frequently asked by state
officials to provide narrowly focused reports on various accountability measures similar
to those imposed on other state public institutions. To more effectively address the
various requirements of several disconnected reports, the University administration,
under President Mark G. Yudof, proposed a consolidated evaluation strategy that merged
these separate initiatives into a single system-wide accountability report. During the last
several years, the University‘s performance framework, reporting, and analysis has been
further refined. Now in its tenth edition, the University Plan, Performance, and
Accountability Report (Office of the Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and
Provost, 2011) reports our progress on 20 essential strategies—tracking approximately
100 separate measures across five broad goals that encompass the University‘s mission
and capacity. These goals are:




Extraordinary Education: Recruit, educate, challenge, and graduate
outstanding students in a timely manner who become highly motivated
lifelong learners, leaders, and global citizens
Breakthrough Research: Stimulate, support, and pursue path-breaking
discovery and inquiry that has a profound impact on the critical problems and
needs of the people, state, nation, and world
Dynamic Outreach and Service: Connect the University‘s academic
research and teaching as an engine of positive change for addressing society‘s
most complex challenges
World-Class Faculty and Staff: Engage exceptional faculty and staff who
are innovative, energetic, and dedicated to the highest standards of excellence
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
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Outstanding Organization: Be responsible stewards of resources, focused on
service, driven by performance, and known as the best among peers
In addition, improved methods of data collection and analysis led the University
of Minnesota, like many other universities, to undertake an ambitious study in 2010-11 to
measure its economic impact and return on public investment. The results were dramatic:
for every $1 of state funding invested in the University, more than $13 are returned to the
state of Minnesota, and in fact, University of Minnesota research alone generates $1.5
billion in statewide economic impact and supports nearly 16,000 jobs (Tripp Umbach,
2011).
Of course, these are almost entirely quantitative and economic measures and do
not provide a complete picture of the public value created by the University.
Additionally, many in academia are offended by the notion of ―beancounters‖ reducing
their work to a few key measures. But as academics, we are called to find ways to
measure the unmeasured or immeasurable every day. At the University of Minnesota, our
faculty adopted specific learning and developmental outcomes that all students should
attain by the time they earn their degree—most of which are qualitative in nature and
difficult to measure. If we are committed to developing ways of incorporating these
outcomes into curricula and assessing our students, resistance to gauging our own
effectiveness and productivity is unreasonable.
Comprehensive evaluation strategies and systems are essential to making the case
for the public value of higher education and strengthening public trust. They may also
serve as an antidote to narrowly focused reports or inquiries that question the stewardship
of resources and the ultimate value of public investment in higher education. In short, we
can do it, and in the long term, it is in our best interests—not only because demonstrating
our value should help restore our covenant with the state and nation, but because by
knowing our own strengths and weaknesses more intimately, we sow the seeds of internal
renewal.
Conclusion: Sustaining Higher Education as a ‘Public Good’
In his management classic, Good to Great, Jim Collins (2001) makes the case that
there are no shortcuts to developing greatness—but it‘s important to recognize that the
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process is iterative, and while the length of each lap doesn‘t change, we can (to an extent)
control our speed. In the case of U.S. higher education, we cannot wait any longer. New
economic, technological, and demographic realities are eroding the perceived public
value of higher education today, to the point that the inherent value and essential role of
public universities is being questioned, emerging providers and intense competition has
muddied the waters and confused the marketplace, and most policy and funding decisions
are being made without reference to long-term principles, priorities, objectives, or
implications. We have led the world for decades now, but we are in desperate need of a
quantum leap—a transformative, strategic advance in which we jump clear of our current
obstacles and regain the higher ground. We must work now to renew higher education‘s
essential role in advancing the nation‘s human capital and innovation to compete in the
global economy.
On some level, the public still understands that higher education matters, and we
can take action to proactively restore and strengthen public confidence in higher
education and its public value. Long-term strategic planning and careful implementation
can (and must) be employed to effectively address the new realities and key issues facing
U.S. universities and achieve cultural change and renewal. With our history and essential
public nature as context, we can begin to conceive of a new long-term vision that
addresses the nation‘s real, unmet needs in terms of education and innovation. Effective
and efficient universities deserve and require sustained support from state legislators and
federal funding agencies. Ideally, long-term funding agreements tied to specific, agreed
upon priorities and results, would give all parties what they want—great American
universities that deliver on their public mission in measurable ways without sacrificing
the values and creativity that made them great in the first place.
To be successful and sustainable, our institutional goals and policies should
ideally be aligned with a long-term national vision for human capital, innovation, and
civic responsibility, and coordinated across economic sectors and educational systems.
As institutions, as states, and as a nation, we must be willing to set priorities and invest in
them—we simply cannot cut our way to the future—but we must also be mindful of Peter
Drucker‘s (1974) doctrine of planned abandonment and make conscious decision about
what we will no longer do. While it may be tempting to take a Darwinist approach and
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allow competition to reshape the higher education marketplace, clearly this approach
would require things to get much worse before they get better. As a result, it is imperative
that higher education institutions and systems work cooperatively to sharpen our
distinctive missions, avoid mission creep and redundancy, improve productivity, and
better complement each other‘s respective strengths and weaknesses. Dr. Bruininks has
advocated for a ―covenant‖ approach, which he describes as a long-term commitment
between the state and its university on a sustained and reasonable level of state
investment as well as specific, measurable, and agreed-upon goals and priorities,
supported by a defined performance framework.9 Such a covenant would go a long way
toward overcoming the erosion of public trust that higher education is beginning to
experience today and would address directly the issues of values articulation, public
information and transparency, and a long-term planning horizon articulated in Bozeman‘s
(2007) public values criteria.
During the depths of the Great Depression, University of Minnesota president
Lotus Coffman (1934) wrote in the Journal of Higher Education:
It is my opinion that the universities of America never had such a unique
opportunity as they now possess to serve the society of which they are a
part … Surely they cannot ignore the sweeping changes that are going on
all about them; they cannot set themselves apart from the life that sustains
them (p. 6).
Coffman goes on to argue that scholarship should inform good governance and public
policy and that public universities should pursue specific research projects on issues from
early childhood development to public health to equitable and adequate taxation in order
to aid in economic and societal recovery. Nearly 60 years later, Boyer (1994) restated that
call to public purpose:
What I‘m describing might be called the ‗New American College,‘ an
institution that celebrates teaching and selectively supports research, while
also taking special pride in its capacity to connect thought to action, theory
to practice…The New American College, as a connected institution,
9
Dr. Bruininks used this terminology throughout his tenure as president, but defined it most clearly in his
2009 State of the University address, ―New Realities, Renewed Urgency,‖ delivered March 5, 2009.
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would be committed to improving, in a very intentional way, the human
condition.
This is the future of our nation‘s public research and land-grant universities. If we
act with urgency—if we make honest answers to the tough questions about our public
purposes a top priority and pursue them with vigor—we believe we can outpace the
gathering storm, overtake our destinies, and begin again to set the standard for public
higher education, as universities, as states, and as a nation.
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