VOL. 23, NO. 8	OCTOBER 31, 1997

President George Rupp makes a point, as John Goldman of the Los Angeles Times, Nancy Sharkey of The New York Times and Marilyn Thompson of The Washington Post look on at the Media Dinner in Low Library Oct. 21. Record Photo by Joe Pineiro.

By Fred Knubel

  Eight major university presidents and 30 top reporters and editors met last Tuesday to confront these and other questions in a lively and sometimes critical exchange over dinner in the Faculty Room of Low Library.

  The event, organized by the Office of Public Affairs, drew journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, the national news magazines, television networks, National Public Radio and other major media. They met presidents Robert M. Berdahl of U.C.-Berkeley, Gerhard Casper of Stanford, John Casteen of the University of Virginia, Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Iowa, Francis L. Lawrence of Rutgers, Harold Shapiro of Princeton, Mark Wrighton of Washington University at St. Louis and their host, George Rupp. It followed a three-day meeting at Columbia of the Association of American Universities, of which Rupp is executive committee chairman.

  "Do you think your efforts to support affirmative action have failed?" asked Scott Jaschik of The Chronicle of Higher Education, noting apparent growing national opinion against it.

  "Education is always a process of encountering the other—that which we are not, that with which we are not familiar," replied Berkeley's Berdahl. "The media has not served this issue well: those who oppose affirmative action are labeled racist and others, 1960s throwbacks. We must continue to struggle to broaden opportunities to those who have been denied them in the past, and I still believe affirmative action is the most effective way of achieving that."

  Casper of Stanford said: "We have to educate the leaders of tomorrow, a multiracial, multiethnic society. Therefore demographic diversity has to be represented on our campuses. The only thing in life is not SAT scores and undergraduate grade point averages. I hope it never was, and I hope it never will be, the only thing."

Eight presidents from leading research institutions and 30 editors, reporters and columnists met in the Faculty Room of Low Library Oct. 21 to discuss higher education. Record Photo by Joe Pineiro.

  On faculty recruitment, Berdahl said he was worried that the reduction of pressure for affirmative action "will result in a reduction of the pressure to think affirmatively.

  "If we are, as I suspect, entering a post-affirmative action world, we've got to maintain the same sense of self discipline that was imposed by affirmative action," he said. "We made a lot of progress in the last 20 years in the diversification of our faculties and we cannot afford to lose that."

  "Are any of you considering doing away with tenure?" Al Sanoff of U.S. News & World Report asked the presidents. Princeton's Shapiro, who heads an AAU committee on the subject, said tenure had not lost its relevance but needed review in light of changes in the law. Casper said the uncapping of mandatory retirement was the real issue, and Wrighton of Washington University said, "The fundamental problem for us is, Can we sustain the rate of intellectual renewal?"

  Rupp said the academic freedom component of tenure was not as important as it once was because it has de facto been taken over by the courts and that the removal of mandatory retirement causes the most stress.

  "Tenure does require a very serious up or out decision between the sixth and tenth year of an academic career, however," he said. "And at institutions most aggressively committed to quality, the strongest argument for the tenure system is that it does require at a point in time that faculty colleagues take responsibility for making a very hard judgment that otherwise might not be made."

  Lawrence of Rutgers stressed that good teaching is taken into account in tenure decisions at his institution. But when Richard Cohen of The Washington Post asked "At Rutgers, can you lose tenure if you're a bad teacher?" Lawrence answered no, and then added: "But when merit increases are judged, you can pay a price there."

  Steve Stecklow of The Wall Street Journal wanted to know about high tuitions: "Are they just kind of accepted now, and is it just going to get worse?"

  Shapiro said he thought increases in costs will be roughly in line with increases in family income. Rupp said he hoped that was so, but it depended on what state and federal government agencies do, noting a "persistent pattern of transferring costs from the government to individual educational institutions."

  Coleman of Iowa reminded the group that the services that figure in the consumer price index "are not the ones we buy." Not groceries, gasoline and cars, she said, "our major expense is library materials and technology and trying to keep up with student demand."

  Wrighton concluded: "The price of excellence is high."