The university as conglomerate

James J. Duderstadt

THE GOVERNMENT-UNIVERSITY PARTNERSHIP resulting from Vannevar Bush's famous report has made the United States the world's leading source of fundamental scientific knowledge and has addressed many of the nation's most important challenges, including defense, health care, agriculture, and economic competitiveness. Yet today a sense of crisis touches even our most distinguished campuses. Some in the media and government are skeptical or even hostile toward research in higher education, eroding public trust in the university. The morale of academic researchers has deteriorated amid the need for sponsored funding and the disintegration of a scholarly community. Forces upon and within the universities, such as escalating research costs, are pushing toward a rebalancing of missions away from research and toward teaching and public service.

Although the most visible threat in recent years is a reduction in research support associated with efforts to balance the federal budget in the post-Cold War world, the deeper issue involves a subtle change in the partnership itself. The government is shifting from being a partner with the university -- a patron of basic research -- to becoming a procurer of research, just like other goods and services. In a similar fashion, the research university is becoming a government contractor, regarded no differently than others in the private sector.

Universities in general are facing a period of change. Along with the factors I have cited, our institutions will be affected even more profoundly by social transformations such as increasing ethnic and cultural diversity, the growing interdependence of nations, and the degree to which knowledge itself determines economic prosperity, national security, and social well-being. In such a context, we need to explore new social structures that can sense and comprehend change, then engage in the strategic processes necessary to adapt or control change.

A case in point: For the past half-century, federal patronage of investigator-driven research has determined the nature of the research university. Only about 125 of our 3,600 institutions of higher education are research universities, but these are just the institutions at most risk as the federal science and technology budget shrinks. The anticipated decline in federal support of university-based R&D will inevitably trigger an array of responses. Many faculty will shift from the public to the private sector for support. They will also need to market educational services more aggressively and employ more realistic "pricing structures," i.e., tuition, that accurately reflect costs.

More profound shifts in the character of institutions are likely. To thrive in the more competitive marketplaces of the 21st century, universities must move from faculty-centered research cultures to the student-centered enterprises of land-grant institutions -- in the language of business, from a provider-centered to a customer-centered approach. A subtler modulation may occur in public attitudes toward universities, placing less stress on excellence and more on the provision of cost-competitive, high-quality services -- from prestige-driven to market-driven philosophies. Perhaps, rather than moving ahead to a new paradigm, we may return to the paradigm that dominated the early half of the 20th century, the land-grant university model.

The nature of the contemporary university and the forces that drive its evolution are frequently misunderstood. In many ways, the university has become the most complex institution in modern society. We comprise many activities, some non-profit, some publicly regulated, and some operating in intensely competitive marketplaces. We teach students; we conduct research for clients; we provide health care; we engage in economic development; we stimulate social change; we even provide mass entertainment, under the rubric of athletics. In systems terminology, the modern university is a loosely coupled, adaptive system -- or, better yet, a highly adaptable knowledge conglomerate, given the interests and efforts of our faculty. We have provided our faculty the freedom, encouragement, and incentives to move toward their personal goals in highly flexible ways. This has allowed the American university to respond to the perceived needs -- or opportunities -- of American society.

Today, universities are evolving rapidly, responding once again to faculty perception of the marketplace. And faculty are hearing loud and clear the message that America questions the value of basic research, even the relevance of the research university. While they may not like it, faculty are remarkably sensitive and responsive to the criticisms about too much emphasis on research over teaching, about too many Ph.D.s and not enough jobs, about whether we should shift toward more applied activities.

The American public, its government, and its universities should not surrender the long-term advantage of this research partnership because of a short-term loss of direction or confidence. At a time when many of society's other institutions do not seem to be working well, the research university is a true success story. We must revitalize the remarkably successful partnership that has existed among our government, our society, and our research universities over the past half-century. And we must sound the wake-up call sufficiently loud and clear that our faculty can hear the reverberations, before the American research university has evolved into some new entity, perhaps responding to other societal needs but no longer with the capacity to respond to our intellectual needs.


JAMES J. DUDERSTADT, Ph.D., is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. He also serves as founder and director of the Millennium Project, a research center exploring the changes needed in higher education to meet the needs of the 21st century. This article is based on his address to the "Science: The Endless Frontier" conference at Columbia, Sept. 21, 1996.