Innovator Vol. 37 No. 1 - Fall 06: Legacy of Leadership
Return to contents Higher Education Center Tells Story of Democratization
It’s not always easy to see the connection between what happens in the academy and the fortunes of the larger society it serves, but the University of Michigan Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education was founded in 1957 as an explicit part of that connection. It has a compelling story to tell, and it plans to spend much of its 50th anniversary year telling it.
The celebration’s official theme — “Understanding and Strengthening the Contributions of Higher Education to a Changing Society” — sets the stage for the narrative.
“We frame it by looking at the American public’s love-hate relationship with higher education,” says Patricia King, former Center director. “While the public is understanding of its value, it has a lot of questions about higher education’s structure, processes and priorities.”
New Visions of Leadership
For example, she says, “higher education provides paths to career success, and it’s certainly an important training ground for professionals in our society. It’s sometimes, but not always, valued for providing critiques of society. And then you have the ‘on the other hand.’ Not all graduates get good jobs. Employers are sometimes dissatisfied with the skill level of the graduates. The cost is prohibitive for large portions of the population. There are questions about what is a relevant curriculum, the quality of teaching, research integrity, and the perceived discrepancy of values between the academy and society.”
All these questions and criticisms are voiced in an environment vastly more complicated than that of half a century ago, in part because of such concerns. Just as the Center’s founding charge was to prepare administrators to manage the post-World War II population explosion in higher education, it now is called to respond to new demands placed on colleges and universities arising from changes both inside and outside the academy.
“We want to build on our legacy of addressing pressing social and national problems by really making some progress in addressing those issues,” says King, “and using the occasion of our anniversary to provide a springboard for bringing serious national attention to them.”
The three subthemes that have been identi- fied as a focus for the National Conference — contributions to economic development, preparing students for an increasingly diverse society, and advancing knowledge and improving its application — also reflect both the urgency of the challenges and the breadth of the work that is done through the Center.
“The School of Education prepares people to take on a variety of roles in educational settings,” King says. “Teacher education is a very important role, but it’s only one role. There are many kinds of educational problems we aspire to address. Higher education has a broader context, and you can see it through those three conference strands.”
These strands are discrete but complementary. While each merits separate study and attention, none can be fully understood without considering its relationship to the others. And the overall relationship of higher education to society is the core concern of the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, which is housed in the Center.
The Role of Higher Education in Democracy
“It’s really about what higher education needs to be if it’s to maintain its transforming relationships within society,” says Clinical Professor John Burkhardt, the Forum’s Director. “A lot of things that are part of the higher education environment are critically important for democracy to continue to function, including social mobility and the opportunity for diverse people to come together and learn together.”
One of the Forum’s key initiatives is the Access to Democracy project, designed to engage students, civic leaders, and community members throughout the state of Michigan in dialogues on the issues of access and quality in higher education.
“We’re organizing discussions in neighborhoods, in churches, in schools, in nonprofit settings,” says Burkhardt. “That kind of activism is inherent to the new kind of leadership that’s going to be important if higher education is going to maintain its influence in our society. It won’t be enough to simply operate institutions effectively or to claim resources from public sources.”
He believes defining the nature of leadership is just as important as defining the purpose of the institutions that are led. “The Center has traditionally been about developing leaders for higher education,” he says, “and the work of the National Forum in some ways challenges a prevailing sense of what constitutes good leadership within the academy. What we’re demonstrating is a different kind of leadership, one that’s engaged with the public in many different ways.”
The Access to Democracy project is directed toward the grass-tops as well as the grassroots, resulting in a productive cross-fertilization. Much of the information gleaned from the community dialogues has been provided to Michigan Lt. Gov. John Cherry’s Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth to inform policy decisions throughout the state.
On a national scale, research conducted by Center faculty played a key role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action ruling in 2003. In upholding the University of Michigan Law School’s use of race as a factor in admissions, the Court cited evidence from a study directed by Associate Professor Eric Dey and Sylvia Hurtado, then the Director of the Center, that diverse educational environments led to improved outcomes for all students, not just the traditionally excluded.
Dey and his colleagues are continually expanding their scope. “We’re doing work on how diversity affects people in terms of their life choices,” he says. “Our research shows how people end up in different kinds of neighborhoods and have different friendships and different types of jobs if they go to a more diverse college. We’re also doing some research with colleges to figure out how we can do more than just open our doors to be more inclusive. How do we structure educational programs so students really learn from one another? How do we actually make some progress in a couple of decades so we have a more positively functioning system, instead of needing these compensatory sorts of things?”
Globally Engaged Scholarship and Service
Along with diversity, and in many ways its
corollary, a growing international involvement
has been one of the Center’s recent hallmarks. For the last five years, more than
70 senior administrators from colleges and
universities in China have taken workshop
s
conducted by Center faculty as part of a
program coordinated by Associate Professor
Janet Lawrence. The initiative grew out
of a U.S. State Department project Lawrence
led to help scholars and administrators from
universities in Kyrgyzstan, one of China’s
neighbors, deal with major organizational
transformations in their higher education
system.
“During my tenure, we started to move toward more of an international dimension in our work,” says Lawrence, the Center’s director from 1996 to 2000. “All of us had been doing consulting work overseas, but we began to think more systematically about what was going on globally in higher education. In addition to hiring faculty in new areas and running professional development programs for higher education administrators from other countries, we started growing student and faculty participation in conferences and research having to do with international issues.”
The professional development program, in particular, has spawned opportunities for cross-fertilization. “It became a hotbed of a lot of different ideas that are just taking off now,” Lawrence says.
“The administrators that came here are asking if some of our doctoral students would like to come over and work with them on some of the changes under way on their campuses, and our doctoral students are fascinated with it.”
Ultimately, the most telling barometer of
the Center’s utility is how its work affects
the quality and value of students’ experiences,
and what sort of citizens those
student
s become.
“A primary purpose of CSHPE’s 50th anniversary celebration is to strengthen the contributions of higher education to a changing society,” says Patricia King. “One way to do this is to improve educational practices on college campuses in ways that improve student learning, so that college graduates are better able to contribute to society as professionals, as leaders, and as citizens.”
Toward that end, King heads the Michigan portion of the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, funded by the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College. “This is one of the most comprehensive national studies of the effects of American higher education on student learning and development ever conducted,” she says. “We are examining and interpreting students’ learning experiences with an eye to understanding the kinds that enable students to best serve in these roles.”
The eight-year longitudinal phase of the national
study, which begins this fall, will follow
approximately 5,500 st
udents through
their undergraduate careers and into their
early post-college years. Researchers will
examine a broad range of both students and
institutions, including liberal arts colleges,
regional universities, research universities,
and community colleges. The fundamental
goals are nothing less than to identify the
teaching practices, programs, and institutional
structures that support liberal arts
education, and to develop faculty-friendly
and institutionally-useful methods of assessing
it.
That the Center is still around for its 50th anniversary is a tribute both to its adaptability and its consistency. “It really does go back to the values that were implicit in our founding as a center,” says John Burkhardt. “It came at a time when higher education was not only growing dramatically in terms of the number of people involved, but also making a transition from an institution that was largely reserved for the wealthy to a far more democratic model.”
“We’re still at it.”
