Public education serves the state. Indeed, it is chartered to do so. But it is neither the servant nor the slave of the state. Public education serves the state by forming and enlightening its citizens and by directing them in ways to identify and seek the ethical and moral goals they need to conduct their lives. Of course, private education also pursues these ends, but it is comparatively unfettered by the influences of legislative whimsy and funding caprice as it conducts its affairs.
So public education serves the state, but it should be neither merely the servant nor the abject slave of the state. In order to fulfill its mission, however, public education needs to be able to look freely at life-not just at the life of the neighborhood, but at the life of a nation and the world as well. Such intellectual inquiry is unique, and educators respond to a calling which is vastly different from that of business. Yet, if public educational institutions are not truly businesses, it behooves them to conform, within limits, to the modalities of business, to account for the expenditure of public resources, and to attend to such matters as productivity.
Despite mottoes like "Education for Efficiency," for example, education itself has rarely been efficient in the business (i.e., productive) sense of the word. One cannot argue, however, that education is actually inefficient, for often it takes years for the productive effect to become apparent. Although education is often confused with mere training for a particular job or career, it is, in fact, a complex process which prepares students both for moral and responsible citizenship and for a life which has not yet fully revealed itself to either the teacher or the student.
Thus, though education cannot be characterized as a "lean machine," responsible administrators and faculty members should nevertheless exercise a sensitive stewardship of the educational enterprise, of the available resources, and of the intellectual well-being of their students. And therein lie the daunting challenges which today's individual institutions, university systems, and their administrators face.
In early 1994, the Commissioner of Higher Education, on behalf of the Montana Board of Regents, announced Phase I of a three-phase project to achieve system-wide economies, to serve Montana and its students more effectively, and to initiate extensive reforms in the instructional programs. With little advanced consultation and a brutally early completion date, the Commissioner declared by administrative fiat the restructuring of the Montana University System. Some critics of restructuring the system promptly judged that the (then) new Commissioner's experience in public higher education had not adequately prepared him to appreciate the enormity of the demands he was placing on the system. Others suggested, however, that, had the Commissioner put the issue up for "study," it would have been discussed to death, resulting in no action. In general, the faculty members on the two university campuses were unaffected by Phase I of the restructuring of the system, but others on the other unit campuses suddenly found themselves in new alignments they had never imagined. Many faculty members at all the units were bemused by the inability of their respective administrative teams either to thwart or to modify the restructuring initiative. Administrators, we too often forget, are not tenured, nor are they sheltered by the principle of "academic freedom" which enables faculty members to be outspoken, if not reckless, in articulating their views. Instead, administrators must either comply with such directives or, if they take strong exception to changes in policy or the academic environment, let their feet do the talking.
Although a faculty member recently opined that "administration is a growth industry" on our campuses, this critic seems unaware of the assessments of visiting administrators from other systems who routinely express amazement at how thin are the administrative ranks in the Montana University System-from the Commissioner's office, in fact, on down. The Commissioner, however, is in a much better position than the system units to control how much is on his play at any one time. As a consequence of Phase I, these already overburdened unit administrators were immediately confronted with huge additional duties and responsibilities. They spent many hours on the road, on other campuses, and out of their own offices. Certainly, restructuring of the system resulted in the promised sharing of expertise and resources, both the cost, though not immediately evident to the Commissioner or to the Regents, has been considerable. For example, some of the best expertise that was shared in the restructuring process has since fled to more rational and appropriately funded climes.
Emboldened nevertheless by the apparent success of Phase I of restructuring the Montana University System, the Commissioner of Higher Education plunged on in the meadows of reform. It is often uncertain whether the origin of such initiatives is in the Commissioner's Office or among the Regents. However, the tone of "We Adopted a 'No Whining' Philosophy," an article (in the January/February, 1996 issue of Trusteeship, Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges) by Jim Kaze, Chair of the Montana Board of Regents, suggest an enthusiastic convergence of minds on these issues.
Phase II focused on "four elements of the education process, factors of primary concern to students and parents." It is at this point that the academic revolution began to affect the faculty directly, and it is at this point that a new element in the process manifested itself. In "Sophistry and Scholarship: Reflections on the Montana University System," a magisterial analysis of the project and its implications, Professor Jeffrey Gritzner explores the echoes of the ancient Sophist in the current business of the Montana University System. "Under the later Sophist," he reminds us, "education devolved into the development of skills useful for advancing political careers. Education served power...and positive value was attached to the ability to 'make the worst appear the better reason'." So Chairman Kaze, eschewing whining and urging plain speak, explains to the universe that in Montana "the current phase [II] of our system wide restructuring effort [can be summed up] in four plainly worded phrases: getting in, getting through, getting a job, and paying the way [the italics are his]."
One can scarcely quarrel with such recommendations in the Phase II announcement as the call for better student advising where improvement is indicated or for incentives to recognize and support outstanding teaching. However, having already declared all academic credits earned in the system equal and therefore acceptable at any unit as the equivalent of its own, the Commissioner's Office continued its invasion of academic governance and standards by calling for the "[re-]designing of all undergraduate degrees within 120 semester hours and the elimination of state support after 135 undergraduate credit hours." Although these proposals are offered as needed in the "knowledge age" (an interesting turn on the more common wording "information age"), the proposers fail to see the correlation between curricular growth and the exponential growth of information in many academic disciplines.
Had the faculty members of the system actually dozed and unwittingly permitted these preemptions of faculty prerogatives? Not exactly, but they were sorely distracted (to the advantage of the Commissioner) by distressing concerns about salary increases and productivity that arose with the University Teachers Union pay plan proposed on the University of Montana campus. The precise origin of the UTU contract, which tightly yokes increases in salary with increases in "productivity," remains puzzlingly unclear. (There is a reliable report that the leaders of the University of Montana's Faculty Senate received the details of the contract after hey were handed out to the representatives of other units at a meeting of the Board of Regents). The complex UTU contract promised salary increases for increases in productivity, but was meant by increases in productivity? Faculty members, long underpaid and with little or no recent salary increases, rushed into discussions with powerful personal needs as well as grave concerns about what was happening to them. For example, what increases in productivity, whatever that meant, would they need to identify in order to receive future salary increases? Certainly, such bargaining invited faculty members onto a slippery slope. Instead of advocates for quality higher education among the Commissioner and the Board of Regents, the system's faculty members believed they found, instead, antagonists who urged them not to whine.
Although it is not a unionized campus, Montana State University-Bozeman quickly recognized that, in order to position itself vis a vis the University of Montana with respect to salary increases, it needed a document (if not a contract) comparable to that developed in Missoula. Both the Governor and the Commissioner applauded this display of perspicacity. At Montana State University, a committee of administrators and faculty members produced a draft document which stressed shared governance and proposed genuine improvements in undergraduate education in such areas as student advising, reduced class size to facilitate student/teacher interaction, and greater opportunities for undergraduate research. Titled "Productivity, Quality, and Outcomes," the document focused on enhancing the quality of undergraduate education and studiously tried to avoid the trap offered by the Commissioner, i.e., more hours in the classroom = greater productivity = improved undergraduate education! All but indifferent to the many positive initiatives included in the "Productivity, Quality, and Outcomes" document, the Commissioner, who had exacted his conception of productivity from the University of Montana, eventually won the same from Montana State University. Once again, faculty members and administrators at various units had tried to enact substantive enhancements of undergraduate education for the citizens of the state, but the only factor of real interest off the campuses was the politically expedient formulaic increase in time spent in the classroom which conflicts with the widely understood multi-faceted missions of universities.
Montana is not alone in the effort to politicize public higher education. Because education represents a huge chunk of any state's budget, governors and legislatures search for ways to reduce or to keep in check expenditures for public education, and typically they find fault with the way educational institutions do business and educate their citizens. In spite of public education's many achievements and successes, there are critics everywhere who fault education for not doing its job "right." Undoubtedly, at the base of much of this criticism, are the issues identified and analyzed in Richard Hofstader's landmark study Anti-intellectuals in American Life, which is not to say, of course, that education is beyond constructive critics. But the business person who is exasperated because he/she must train new college graduate to do entry-level jobs in industry and who, therefore, complains that colleges and universities are not doing their jobs is not, in fact, talking about education or life-long learning. Nor should academic institutions revise their curricula to focus on these jobs alone or on competencies identified by employers. What is at the issue here is the insistence on taking the short view instead of the long view of education.
There should be continuing discussion of what constitutes a contemporary undergraduate education in various disciplines, as certainly there is on campuses, and employers should surely be included in the dialogue. They should ask themselves: how can new needs, new information, new technologies, and new methodologies be addressed in curricular reform with integrity, free from the pressures of short-term agendas and political expediency? Instead, we wee that emergence of the Western Governors' University (often described as a "virtual university" because it will utilize the Internet) which may have something to offer in states such as California where the trade-off seems to be the cost of distance learning versus the cost of new buildings on campus. Most of the western governors have jumped on the WGU bandwagon. They have either paid or are preparing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to maintain their memberships in the WGU. It is important to note, however, that not all western states have joined the WGU and that, in some instances, state educational institutions have seized on the project in order to prevent ambitious governors from taking possession of it first. The WGU is a politician's dream come true, if it works, but general critical assessment of the project focuses on the naiveté of its promoters. However, Montana, less well off than the other members of the WGU and facing different kinds of problems, has rushed with amazing alacrity to embrace the concept of the virtual university and to pronounce it the salvation of Montana's public undergraduate education.
Distance learning using telecommunication works. It does improve access, but it works best with special groups of highly motivated students such as those in graduate or professional courses. Units of the Montana University System have been offering such courses successfully for some time. Distance learning is the central theme of the Commissioner's The Montana Learner Imperative," a document which describes what was meant to be Phase III, and it presents at least four alarming aspects: the reductive rhetoric and cliché-laden language in which the proposal is couched, the unconscionable trashing of the past achievements of public undergraduate education to date, the radical redefinition of instructional staffing, and the utter absence of faculty member participation in formulating the proposal. The Commissioner's trivialization of undergraduate education is embarrassingly ill-informed and insensitive to the fact that Montana students in some of the units have repeatedly won Rhodes and Phi Kappa Phi Scholarships and led the nation in garnering Goldwater Scholarships, Danforth Scholarships, and USA Today awards. In a gravely under-funded environment, Montana's faculty members and students have continued to demonstrate academic excellence, ingenuity, integrity, and pride. Surely, the faculty members who are familiar with "The Montana Learner Imperative" must have found its message a stinging affront to their outstanding performance.
Admittedly, "The Montana Learner Imperative" was initially presented as a "discussion" paper to the Board of Regents, but long-time observers of Montana higher education have seen other discussion papers suddenly become policy with very little discussion. In any event, what was essentially Phase III of the Commissioner's revision of the system has not been formalized. Perhaps there were too many loose ends; perhaps it became evident how expensive the proposal would be (where will the infusion of needed additional funding come from or what kinds of drastic internal reallocations will be called for?); perhaps there was a dawning sense of how aggrieved the faculty members felt as a result of this latest unilateral invasion of their curricular domain. If "The Montana Learner Imperative" went down in flames, it arose again, phoenix-like, as the Montana Academic Forum under the auspices of the new Deputy Commissioner with the apparent promise now of representative faculty/administrative participation in formulating and implementing the revised plan.
The Commissioner's three-phase project to change Montana's public higher education is instructive because it illustrates dramatically how easily public higher education can politicize itself. The process has been offensive to the units of the system, has submitted them to sophistical manipulation of language and ideas, and has trivialized their hard-won achievements. However, the politicization of the system would certainly be even more profound and devastating, if the Montana University System were bereft of its Commissioner's Office and the Board of Regents as the passage of CA-30 will do. Curiously enough, the Commissioner's Office and the Board of Regents, who are feverishly campaigning for the defeat of CA-30, have also been busy recently alienating the only constituency they can hope to depend on to help fight passage of CA-30. Despite what the units have suffered in the last few years, faculty members have independently banded together to defeat CA-30 by arranging public forums on their campuses and by gathering donations from their ranks to fund the anti-CA-30 campaign.
What, these faculty members ask, are the advantages of making the Montana University System equal to the Department of Highways or the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks or any other department? The arguments offered by the proponents of CA-30 are transparently self-serving and unconvincing. Faculty members, in particular, view the presumed advantages of being able to deal directly with the Governor or vice versa as negligible or worse, when placed against the faculty members' loss of autonomy, the threat to academic freedom, and their subservience to new masters who promise to be even less their advocates than the Commissioner and the Board of Regents have been. (Of course, individual members of the Board of Regents have, in fact, tried to be the advocates of public higher education).
The Montana University System needs a Commissioner and Board of Regents who are willing to work collaboratively in common cause with their faculty members and administrators. The Commissioner needs the experience and vision required for the job, and the regents, as long as they are political appointees, need ongoing professional preparation to meet the responsibilities off the positions they hold. Regents, in particular, need to attend national and regional conferences where they can learn firsthand what other regents do and where they can communicate openly with their peers. It should certainly be remembered that the members of the Montana University System Boar of Regents already do an enormous amount of work, but somehow more is required. Their counterparts in most other states are meeting the job requirements suggested here.
Even if the units of the system are coming to support the Commissioner and the Board of Regents, they do so in the spirit of "The devil you know is better than the one you don't." The units understand the necessity of working with the Commissioner and the Board of Regents, but the roughshod presentation of Phases I and II and especially what was to be Phase III seriously threatened that relationship. "The Montana Learning Imperative," in particular, is outrageous in its naive assumptions and it defaming of past academic attainments. Furthermore, its naiveté about implementation is astonishing, and its failure to spell out how it would be funded is extremely worrisome to budget-frayed units. Although "The Montana Learning Imperative" and its abuse of faculty members' prerogative may have only been re-named "The Montana Academic Forum," the glimmer of good news now id the apparent commitment to collaborative, shared governance between the system units and the Commissioner and the Board of Regents, which, let us hope, signals a renewed, healthy, and mutually respectful relationship between all parties concerned and which will permit Montana public higher education to serve the citizens of Montana and the nation as it should.