Campus of The Future

By John Elson

If a fourth-grader could gaze into a crystal ball and envision the college world he or she will enter in the year 2000, it would reveal a mixture of the surprising and the familiar. Dormitories would probably have the same kinds of sagging mattresses, desks and bookshelves that have furnished collegiate rooms for generations. School pennants and posters would likely be smeared across the walls. But there might be special TV consoles -- a few colleges have them now -- that could beam up taped lectures by any professor on campus or even let students monitor courses from other schools. Built-in computer terminals, similar to ones in place at Dartmouth, could tap into the card catalogs of half the college libraries in the country, call up encyclopedia articles or scan the daily papers. A glance at the quad outside would show groups of teens in whatever uniform eventually supplants T shirts and blue jeans, but also many older students taking courses to change careers, and even retired couples returning to campus to satisfy their curiosity about everything from art history to zoology.

There is, in fact, no need for a crystal ball to envision the university of the 21st century. Bit by logical bit, it is taking shape already on dozens of U.S. campuses as administrators begin to rethink their goals in light of a cost crunch that, recession or no, promises only to grow worse. From Kansas' Sterling College to Ohio's Youngstown State, from the huge State University of New York system (total enrollment: more than 369,000 on 23 campuses) to tiny Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage (639 students), officials are deciding not only how to do the same with less money but also how to do less with less.

Budget deficits have led to a sharp drop in both state and federal funding; public colleges and universities, which had previously relied on tuition and legislative grants to pay the bills, now compete aggressively with private institutions for corporate and foundation grants. Even heavily endowed Ivy League schools are deferring maintenance and debating whether to lop off entire academic branches. Yale, for example, is considering a plan that would close its linguistics department and merge three branches of engineering into one; Columbia is abandoning its highly regarded library-science program. Still, the Ivies are doing better than the vast California State university system. San Diego State University stirred student anger by dropping 662 of 5,000 class sections and not rehiring 550 part-time instructors last fall.

At the same time, critics of the academic establishment have raised sharp questions about whether U.S. colleges and universities, for all their reputed excellence, are giving good value for money, as tuitions rise faster than the inflation rate. One year at an elite private institution today costs $23,000; by the year 2000, the price could be as high as $40,000. Recent scandals, like the misallocation of federal research funds by Stanford and some other research-minded universities, have undermined academia's credibility with the public.

In some respects, alma mater in Anno Domini 2000 will look pretty much the way she does now. "Madonna reinvents herself every season," is the dry observation of Sheldon Hackney, president of the University of Pennsylvania. "Universities are much more stable." Nonetheless, experts foresee quite a few changes -- good as well as bad -- for America's diverse complex of private and public institutions of higher learning. Items:

-- The small liberal-arts school with a meager endowment and a largely local reputation is an "endangered species," contends Diane Ravitch, an Assistant Secretary of Education. By the year 2000 some of these schools will have closed their doors or merged with larger, more stable schools. Meanwhile, new schools will open. Some will be two-year community colleges emphasizing service-oriented courses. Others may be small, publicly funded schools with innovative liberal-arts programs, like the University of South Florida's New College or Evergreen State College in Washington. And there will be much more intercollege cooperation, as neighboring schools share facilities and courses to avoid expensive and needless overlaps. The message: Cut costs, not throats.

-- Curriculums will show some radical departures from the past. To justify their existence as servants of society, all schools will come under pressure to be less theoretical and more practical in preparing students for careers. There will be more emphasis on ethics as well as on science and technology, particularly in courses aimed not at those who intend to major in chemistry or engineering but at liberal-arts majors who need at least some scientific literacy. Students will be under pressure to take two foreign languages, and there will be a growing emphasis on Chinese, Japanese and Russian. Academia's international horizons will broaden in other ways. Instead of a comfy junior year abroad in Paris or Perugia, many undergraduates will opt for more adventurous and exotic locales -- Eastern Europe, say, or Southeast Asia.

-- Great research-oriented universities like Harvard and Michigan, the pride of higher learning in America, will probably stay at world-class levels. But both the elite giants and less prestigious schools will place a stronger emphasis on the quality of classroom teaching. Professors accustomed to thinking of research as their real work will be under pressure to spend time with first- and second-year undergraduates as institutions adapt to an increasingly diverse academic population -- not just more women and minorities, but older students and part-timers with special needs. Even today, only 20% of the nation's undergraduates are young people between 18 and 22 who are pursuing a parent-financed education. Two-fifths of all students today are part-timers, and more than a third are over 25.

Higher education in the U.S. is big business -- a $100 billion business, to be precise, representing 2.7% of gross national product. No other nation can boast of so many and such different institutions: 156 universities, 1,953 four-year colleges, 1,378 two-year colleges and technical schools. More than half these are defined as private schools (although nearly all get some form of state or federal funding). Collectively, they employ 793,000 faculty members -- not to mention a supernumerary army of deans and other administrative personnel -- and accommodate 14 million students. One sign of the astonishing increase in part-time students: only about 20% of these knowledge seekers annually receive one or more certificates of graduation, from A.A. (Associate of Arts) to Ph.D.

In contrast to most other industrialized nations, the U.S. has no central government ministry imposing lockstep conditions on an untidy educational conglomerate. That is why so many schools are attempting to seize the future in strikingly independent ways. Take computers, for instance. At the University of California, Los Angeles, Egyptian-born senior professor Maha Ashour-Abdalla is using the smart machines to teach physics to 140 students. The computers can simulate experiments, from sound waves being measured in a pool of water to a 3-D, multicolored representation of molecules colliding.

Abdalla's course is part of a broader effort by UCLA administrators to perk up flagging student interest in the sciences. "We cannot afford to train everyone as a scientist," says Clarence Hall, dean of physical sciences. "But there are hardly any students to teach. Science and engineering are the engine of economic progress, and without some changes, we are bound to lose the fuel for that engine."

Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., has found a broader use for computers. Some 200 classrooms and laboratories have been wired with a fiber- optics video information system, complete with color monitors, that allows professors to tap into the school's library of films, videos and laser discs. Tony Edmonds, chairman of the history department, uses the system to teach a course on the Vietnam War. "Now I can discuss the My Lai massacre, press a button and show a two-minute segment on it," he says. "I discuss the antiwar movement and pull up a segment on Abbie Hoffman." His undergraduates, children of the sound-bite era, take to the course like, well, MTV. "Of 105 students only 10 got below a B," Edmonds says. "That's never happened before."

Next year Edmonds' Vietnam course will be transmitted to 20 off-campus sites around the state. And what about the guest lecturer who was grounded in Chicago by a snowstorm? No problem: out-of-town speakers can visit an interactive TV studio and get beamed directly into a Ball State classroom.

Just as more and more computer-wise workers will earn their keep from home offices, a growing number of students can expect to get their degrees without ever setting foot on campus. Susan Lerner, 40, of Burnt Ranch, Calif., is doing so now. An elementary school teacher at a remote Hupa Indian reservation, she has enrolled in a new M.A. program in educational technology offered by George Washington University in Washington, 2,500 miles away. Lerner takes two four-hour courses a week, beamed to her via the satellite dish in her yard, and keeps in touch with her professors through her computer's electronic bulletin board. "I want to integrate the use of technology in rural areas," says Lerner, who expects to get her degree in two years. "With a modem we can be connected to the rest of the world. With interactive video, we can offer opportunities that people in these areas don't ordinarily have."

Anticipating a surge in "distance learning," cable entrepreneur Glenn Jones in 1987 founded the Mind Extension University. Based in Englewood, Colo., it beams college-credit courses to 36,000 students across the country, under the aegis of such established institutions as the University of Minnesota and Penn State. Last fall a branch of the University of Maryland began offering the nation's first four-year bachelor of arts program via Mind Extension; 60 students are enrolled. "Today's students are often working," explains Paul Hamlin, the Maryland dean in charge of the program. "They need to be able to compete, and they want a flexible format. Because of time constraints -- children, jobs, commutes -- they can't go to the typical campus."

It's not only the students who have changing needs. So do the various communities that colleges and universities are trying to serve. Inside what was once the ivory tower, there is a growing interest in new kinds of alliances with business. In St. Louis, Washington University and Monsanto Co. have linked up in biomedical research projects involving proteins and peptides, as part of a search for more sophisticated drugs. On the campus of the University of California, Irvine, Hitachi has built a high-tech research lab, which it shares with U.C.'s top-flight biochemistry department. Critics worry about the ethics of this cozy arrangement, despite strict conflict-of- interest rules drawn up by the university. "What forms of industrial cohabitation should a state-funded university permit?" asks Michael Schrage, a research affiliate at M.I.T. "It's one thing for a campus to encourage private industry to participate in research. It is quite another to have facilities that blur the line between private and proprietary."

Similar questions have been asked about the efforts of some publicly funded schools to justify their existence by trying to fulfill immediate community needs. The University of New Hampshire has been able to squeeze additional funds from New Hampshire's traditionally tight-fisted legislature by polishing its public image with projects like developing a non-toxic bacterium that virtually eliminated black flies, which plagued some of the state's tourist resorts. But the university's president, Dale Nitzschke, allows that catering to the lawmakers' whims is a high-risk proposition. "We don't enjoy a separation anymore between the university and the political system," he says. "It is critical that we don't become pawns of the government, the legislature or business and industry. If we lose our autonomy, we've lost the ball game."

During the great expansion that took place after World War II, American colleges and universities sought to be all things to all people. In the new age of austerity, schools are being forced to rethink their missions, decide what they can do best and -- in a form of academic triage -- abandon certain fields of learning to others. Rice University in Houston has often been called "the Harvard of the South" (although these days the motto should be reversed, claims its president, George Rupp). Rice has flourished by trying to recruit National Merit scholars, who constitute 40% of the class of 1995, and by developing a national reputation for superb teaching in the sciences and social sciences.

It is fairly common these days for neighboring colleges to share talents and facilities, particularly in arcane specialties. For example, one-third of the graduate students in a cognitive-psychology class at Carnegie-Mellon University are actually enrolled at the nearby University of Pittsburgh. Many experts believe that much more can be done to eliminate overlap. "Worcester County in Massachusetts has at least five colleges," says Arnold Hiatt, chairman of the Stride Rite Corp. and a member of that state's Higher Education Coordinating Council. "If one has an outstanding physics department, it would make sense for the other four to phase out physics and build their own strengths."

What if three schools in Maine decided to offer more courses on Eastern Europe? Harvard sociologist David Riesman has a proposal: "I can imagine Colby, Bates and Bowdoin, for example, deciding that one would concentrate on Romania, one on Bulgaria and one on Czechoslovakia. They could have interchangeable programs that all students could use for semesters abroad."

But institutions need not always be neighbors to collaborate fruitfully. Last month American University signed an agreement with Japan's Ritseumeikan University to offer a joint master's degree in international relations from both schools. "Students would spend one year in Washington, D.C., and one year in Kyoto," explains A.U. president Joseph Duffey, who wants to set up a similar program in business administration.

Many colleges, in the era of permanent retrenchment, will have to offer a narrower range of courses than in the past. But this does not necessarily mean intellectual deprivation. John Silber, the acerbic and outspoken president of Boston University, complains that he has seen "an increasing number of too small classes and too many courses. We have about 150 courses that study the human mind. But all that we know about the human mind could be taught in 30. A course on the effect of Anna on Sigmund Freud is fine. But it's part of the waste that is commonplace at big research universities. Small colleges cannot afford that kind of narcissism."

So what is the alternative? One answer is offered by Adelphi University, on New York's Long Island, which was on the verge of bankruptcy when Peter Diamandopoulos was named president seven years ago. His strategy: trim fat by linking Adelphi's professional schools, notably in business, social work and nursing, with its undergraduate studies and by introducing an imaginative core curriculum that encompasses ethics as well as arts and sciences. One part of the curriculum deals with "the nature of modernity" and ranges from war and / economic development to breakthroughs in technology.

For better or worse, many experts believe that the battle over what is commonly called multiculturalism is winding down. That is, there is an emerging consensus that every curriculum needs broadening to encompass the cultural experience of women and minorities -- but not at the denigration of D.W.M.s (Dead White Males). Robert Wood, who is Henry Luce professor of Democratic Institutions and the Social Order at Wesleyan University, argues for balance. "In the past five years, we have generally had two counsels on curriculum, and they're both wrong. Allan Bloom ((The Closing of the American Mind)) and others basically say, 'Don't read anything after the Age of the Enlightenment.' Then we have our present multicultural movement saying every culture should be explored. We need some consensus on this. What we should do is concentrate on how to train competent Americans."

And how should colleges do that? Wood has a three-part program. "We've got to teach economics to every student. It conveys a rigor and quantitative skill that all students should understand before they look at political or social institutions. We should require the study of communications, especially visual ones, and not just with some tired old journalist teaching students how the front page is put together. And third, we need to offer real science courses to the non-science student. Most hard scientists tend to belittle non-majors, assuming them to be cognitively inferior. The teachers keep on doing what they're trained to do, expecting the non-majors to sink or swim."

Wood is also concerned, as are many other educators, about the problem of attracting -- and keeping -- minority students. According to the Congressional Budget Office, blacks and Hispanics were only half as likely as whites to have completed four or more years of college in 1990. Probably no school has given more thought to the problem than Occidental College of Los Angeles, where 44% of this year's first-year class is nonwhite. President John B. Slaughter, who is black, believes many nonwhites need a kind of social and cultural head start to prepare them for college life. He strongly supports a program begun by his predecessor that invites about 50 "students of color" to spend five weeks of the summer on campus, prior to their enrollment. There is some course work but also reassurance that they are not alone in a potentially threatening, predominantly white environment. "I would have felt very alienated without the summer program," recalls senior Diana Hong, who is Hispanic. "You start school with 49 friends."

Academia's code word for the future, in the view of some, is "accountability" -- both to the students it hopes to serve and the public that pays the bills, either by taxes, tuition or gifts. In Hiatt's view, "too many higher education institutions have been run like government, and that means they have been run badly." One inevitable consequence of imitating or emulating government has been bureaucratic bloat: a self-perpetuating nomenklatura of assistant deans, development officers and other office-bound personnel. "Harvard doesn't have a financial problem, it has a management problem," contends B.U.'s Silber.

Some innovative schools -- Rice among them -- have chosen to dismantle their bureaucracies to devote more resources to labs, libraries and classrooms. "Higher education has to see itself as having an enhanced obligation to society and the community," says Arthur Hauptman, a Washington-based educational consultant. Ernest Boyer, head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, is even blunter. "Universities and colleges," he warns, "will be either engaged or judged irrelevant." To measure by its noble past and present accomplishments -- even amid fiscal agony -- odds are strong that higher learning in America will find a way to compete and survive. Like Fortune's annual list of the 500 top U.S. industrial corporations, the pecking order of academic excellence is bound to see eventual changes. But too much is at stake, in pride and passion, for the entire empire of academia to fall ignobly into mediocrity, somnolence and sloth.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington, Jeanne Reid/Boston and James Willwerth/Los Angeles