Present, past leaders look to higher education's future

presidents panel
Jason Koski/University Photography
University presidents, past and present, from left, Jeffrey Lehman, David Skorton, Frank Rhodes, Harvard's Drew Gilpin Faust and Hunter Rawlings discussed the future of higher education during Charter Day Weekend.

Nearly four collective decades of the Cornell presidency took the Bailey Hall stage during Charter Day Weekend to offer insights on some of the most pressing issues in the future of higher education – from the sustainability of its cost structure to the role technology might play in changing the residential four-year baccalaureate degree.

Cornell President David Skorton, and past Presidents Hunter Rawlings (1995-2003) and Jeffrey Lehman ’77 (2003-05) offered their views during the April 26 panel discussion, which included Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust. They were joined on stage by Frank H.T. Rhodes (Cornell president, 1977-1995), who moderated the discussion, and later by President-elect Elizabeth Garrett, to whom the current and former presidents proffered advice.

Rhodes posed whether the present funding model for universities is viable over the long term, and whether changes in state, federal and private funding will necessitate a new approach. Rawlings said flat out that “we’ve reached the limit with this approach.”

Over the last several years, states have withdrawn support from public universities, and the idea of higher education as a public good has almost disappeared in those states, Rawlings continued, while the sticker price of universities is extremely high.

Faust added that astronomical rises in tuition over the last several decades is not sustainable, not only due to financial pressures on families, but also due to “tremendous public scrutiny.”

“I think we’re going to see much more moderate tuition increases, and we all have embraced enormous increases in our financial aid,” Faust said.

Rhodes asked whether traditional departments are “arrangements that have lost their value.”

“This is a tough one,” Skorton replied, and like many things, the answer depends on perspective. On one hand, faculty need intellectual and emotional support from like-minded colleagues, and departments provide that. But from the point of view of the learner, departmental divides make less sense.

“Problems that need to be solved do not line up in clean disciplinary areas,” Skorton said. That’s the key idea around the structure of Cornell Tech in New York City, he continued. Instead of traditional departments, the campus is set up around broad areas of study, based on the entrepreneurship needs of New York City. “It’s too soon to know if it works or not – it’s an experiment,” Skorton said. “We’ll know five years from now, and the students will tell us if it makes sense.”

The presidents also pondered future prospects for the liberal arts in an age of specialization.

A broad-based liberal arts education gives students critical capacities, inventiveness, imagination and curiosity for a lifetime, and what Faust called “habits of mind.” Skorton agreed, and admittedly, one might expect these points to be made by university presidents, he said.

But “if one asks employers, even employers in highly specialized tech disciplines, they will cite the same habits of mind Drew was talking about, and the way to acquire them is through a liberal arts education,” Skorton said.

Increasing internationalization of universities was another topic posed. Individual universities’ ambitions on this front vary; some are truly “transnational,” with full degree-granting campuses in different countries, Lehman said. But more commonly, the internationalization of universities is happening on home campuses.

When Lehman was a student at Cornell 30 years ago, “we thought it was great that for the most part, Cornell’s undergraduate student body looked like America.”

“I think we are on course to the moment where maybe in a few decades most universities will say, ‘Our university undergraduate community looks like the Earth,’” Lehman said.

Garrett was invited onstage later in the program, greeted by a standing ovation. The presidents launched into a few nuggets of wisdom for Cornell’s 13th leader.

Skorton told Garrett to gather wisdom from the other Ivy League presidents, and also not to change her “basic approach to academia,” which has carried her through an illustrious career.

Invest time getting to know Cornell’s faculty members, who “love this university,” and don’t hesitate to ask for their help when you need it, Lehman said. Faust urged Garrett to not “let people run away with your calendar.”

“Don’t listen to the trustees,” Rawlings deadpanned, following up with an anecdote of a disagreement he had had with a trustee his first week as president, and what he learned from it. And of the job, Rawlings added, “enjoy the heck out of it.”

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