Thinking about Annual Meetings

For the past 30 years I have been attending the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities Annual Meeting which is held each year about this time. I was struck this year by a couple of things.

#1 - New Members of Congress should learn how to answer questions. Dave Loebsack spoke to us. He is the guy who beat Jim Leach. I do not have an opinion on the new member - he seems like a nice enough guy - a former college professor. But his answers to questions from a friendly audience, were long (too long). I always liked the response I once saw Bill Buckley give to a question - which started with Do you believe and then went into several paragraphs of qualifications. Buckley looked at the questioner who had tried her best to try and hook the pundit and simply answered "No, next question."

#2 - Congress has forgotten some basics. Several members of congress complained about how busy they were in various ways. I would argue that is their own fault. When I worked on the hill there were three house buildings and two senate ones. Now there are tons more. I am not sure we get anything more for all those extra people except complexity.

#3 - Old buddies matter. I was supposed to go to a lunch yesterday to see a friend from California get an award he deserved. Alexander Astin, who is a retired professor of higher education at UCLA, was given the Henry Paley Award - which is the highest honor the association conveys on someone who has made a consistent contribution to higher education. Astin pioneered the student attitudes survey which gives us a profile of new students each year. He is a conscientious researcher who with his wife Lena (a co-conspirator of the first rank) has contributed immensely to our understanding of what students believe and think. But after I had said hello, I got pulled away with two other friends and we went out an had a grand lunch. The two friends were the former VP for Governmental Relations at Johns Hopkins and the former General Counsel of the umbrella organization for higher education. We had a good time talking about earlier times - the guy from Hopkins once worked for Daniel Brewster - the senator and the counsel is now with a big law firm doing what he has always done - bringing people together to think about higher education issues. I was reminded of a Steve Muller quote which I have used (Steve was a founder of the National Association and also president of Hopkins). Steve said "We have two tasks to accomplish today, I have been asked to speak and you have been asked to listen. If you finish before I do, please do not tell me." We talked about the founding of the organization (which the guy from Hopkins had a big hand in and which Muller was the first chair) and about some of the early battles where Muller's leadership was so crucial.

#4 - We had two speakers of national reputation. Francis Fukuyama (who I like a lot in print) who was pretty flat. His speech, mostly about the US role in the world, was not as vibrant as his writing. The other presidential historian Michael Beschloss(who I also like as a writer but have not been as impressed with as a PBS commentator - on the very rare occasions I watch PBS). Beschloss was interesting and amusing. I am not sure what to make of it.

#5 - The best speech of the time was from Richard Broadhead, president of Duke University. His speech was well crafted but a clear response to many of higher education's critics. He described some recent travels in Asia where leaders of higher education there are admiring of our system which produces such independent thinkers. Broadhead did not try to gloss over higher education's problems but he did suggest that the strength of the American system is based on its diversity - one size does not fit all and we seem, at least until some of the critics like Secretary Spellings, seem to have figured that key organizing principle out. Among other things that the Duke president said were "the forms of rigor that Americans tend to look to as overwhelming strengths of foreign education are viewed as a more mixed blessing by the leaders of those systems. Like us, other countries look to higher education to create the mysterious ingredient that will guarantee success for their society. But they worry that we, not they, have the recipe for that secret sauce.
One lesson I’ve learned is that cross-cultural education anxiety is endemic to the globalizing world, a burden we all assume when we enter the arena of modern international competition. It’s the nature of worry to persuade one that oneself has much to worry about, while others, lucky stiffs, do not. But the worry we think our peculiar possession is the very thing we share with potential rivals: in the opportunity-rich but rapidly metamorphosing world we inhabit, we must all wonder how to go about preparing today’s talent for tomorrow’s tasks, and whether the training we’re giving is the one that will make the right difference over time. "

And he also said "American higher education is a crazy quilt of institutions: public and private, liberal arts colleges and research universities, secular and faith-based institutions, historically black colleges and universities, women’s colleges, arts schools, community colleges, technical colleges: you name it, we’ve got it. And not only do schools have very different missions and different audiences. They live and work independently, rather than parts of a coordinated whole.
The relatively uncoordinated nature of this system may have costs. It does mean that we lack a centralized means of planning how to meet our country’s higher education needs. But our autonomy and heterogeneity have been essential to our strength, and so to the strength of our social contribution. Collectively, we offer a universe of complementary opportunities and a level of vitality that you do not find in places with lots of central oversight and control."

The speech, if it is available on the Duke website, should be widely read - it is a rich commentary on the strengths and needs to improve for this important economic driver of the American economy.