Changing Higher Education

Creativity and the Research University:II

This is a continuation of Creativity and the Research University
II. The creative faculty

The issues are different here from those encountered in looking at student creativity, because we are dealing with a class of accomplished scholars who have already shown capacity for creativity.  Thus the environment in which the faculty work becomes a critical determinant of whether or not they can reach their creative potential.

Amabile describes some of the environmental conditions that help to promote creativity.  Among them are:

• stability of employment - this lowers attention to problems not related to the main tasks of research and teaching
• low bureaucracy - similarly, this enables faculty to keep their attention on the important things
• encourage rational intellectual risk taking, accept failure
• encourage interdisciplinary conversations - this help connections into different networks of knowledge
• expectations high but reasonable
• rewards not controlling - faculty choice in tasks, methods

In many ways, we see that the university is set up relatively well to meet most of these conditions. Tenure, for example, provides the desired stability of employment - for those who have it. Faculty are given broad choice by the university in how they will carry out their tasks.  However, even here there are reality constraints that can lessen creativity. For example, funding for the research component of the employment is increasingly difficult to obtain, and faculty generally find themselves devoting larger fractions of their effort to finding needed research funds. The funding, when found, often is narrowly defined and can squeeze out any significant creative flights of fancy. Worst of all, many universities push their faculty to have the largest possible grants at all times - it helps the rankings. Such controlling pressure probably does not lead to the highest creativity.  As Amabile has pointed out, the external funding can be most useful if it comes after the “aha” moment of creativity, since at that point it is not controlling, but facilitating.  Thus some relatively small internal funds to support research through the necessary first idea steps ultimately could lead to increased creativity of proposals.

In addition, other improvements need to be made in the existing university structure.  Bureaucracy, unfortunately, has grown significantly in universities over the years due to both internal and external pressures. Universities tend to have very intrenched administrative systems and groups, and in many institutions strong leadership will be required to create the kinds of administrative restructuring needed to create organizations that more closely meet tomorrow’s needs. For example, on many campuses I hear very vocal complaints about inefficiencies in the research offices, which seem not well organized to meet new requirements of the Federal Government, alert faculty to new research opportunities, provide timely grant financial data, etc.  Internally, the important principle of shared governance has often led to a profusion of sometimes overlapping faculty committees that both demand considerable time on the part of the participants, and lead to frustration on the part of other faculty who feel that their ideas and innovations are being subjected to unfair or confused scrutiny. 

Finally, many of our leaders do not do as good a job as they should of creating a supportive atmosphere of high expectations in their institutions.  Distinguished senior faculty are the most important players in creating this atmosphere of supportive expectations.  For example, I.I Rabi was a Nobel-prizewinning physicist at Columbia, one of the founders of modern quantum mechanics.  He was legendary in his ability to stimulate his colleagues to “try harder”. One of his colleagues was quoted in Rabi’s obituary as saying “The most spectacular thing about Rabi was that during a 15 year period there were four Nobel Prizes all in different fields of physics at Columbia.  Although Rabi wasn’t involved in the specific work, he was the key motivating person.” According to a widely quoted (and perhaps apocryphal) story, Rabi would roam the halls of the department, dropping into offices to ask about the latest research of individual faculty. When it had been explained to him, he would ask, “ Is this the most important problem in your field? If not, why aren’t you working on the most important problem?” With more senior faculty helping to define expectations like that, we would have a much more creative atmosphere!

One of the areas where universities generally are not really good is in encouraging interdisciplinary conversations.  Many claim to do it well, but when you look at it closely, few are actually good at it.  It is interesting to look at the brand new King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (see my comments here and here), which is organized with the goal of actually being at the forefront of  interdisciplinary knowledge creation: 

KAUST is a modern research university unlike any other.  The University is designed to allow physical and human networks – operating largely without regard for organizational or national boundaries – to flourish, thereby creating a critical vehicle for the exchange of ideas and the development of new knowledge.

The KAUST approach is obviously not the only one for increasing interdisciplinary activities and conversations.  However, it does give some feeling for the elements to be considered, and the significant organizational changes that might be required to maximize interdisciplinary exchange of ideas.

Are we approaching a tipping point in the globalization of higher education?

The unsettling financial events of the past few weeks have undoubtedly pushed the cost/price model of American higher education much closer to the breaking point.  In an earlier post, I argued that any significant limitations on price increases could cause fundamental problems for our basic business model.  We now are in a much more complex situation than I discussed in the earlier posts. The state of the economy certainly will lead to greater pressure from parents and government to halt increases in the real price of higher education, so we can expect more intrusive legislative actions, and much stronger push-back from parents.  Loans to parents and students, which have provided the undergirding support of our large price increases, will not be so easy to get in the future for a multitude of reasons including large drops in home values.   In addition, we face a situation in which philanthropy will be quite uncertain for some period, and endowments and their returns have been greatly battered.   For public institutions, there is the reality that states are seeing greatly reduced tax returns, and furious budget cutting is evident everywhere.   And on the cost side, the cost of borrowing (when it can be obtained) will certainly go up significantly. This will impact higher education directly in many ways, as in  our facilities programs where we usually use considerable long term debt.  In addition, many  higher education institutions have significant short term debt that is used to pay bills in between the huge inflows of income that occur at the beginning of each semester (trimester or quarter).

In my view, all of this pushes American higher education much closer to a globalization tipping-point, similar to the one  that occurred in Great Britain and Australia a decade ago.  In both cases, governments told public higher ed institutions that state funding would not be sufficient in the future to maintain their growth and quality, and that other sources of funding would have to be found - without passing the burden to domestic students.  The solution was to bring international students in at high tuition, and to open campuses and programs around the world.

Update on KAUST

The King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is moving along on its development plans (see King Abdulla University of Science and Technology - a paradigm for the 21st century? June 5, 2007).  In January, KAUST got off to an excellent start with the appointment of Shih Choon Fong as its first President.  Dr Shih is currently the very highly regarded President of the National University of Singapore, and will assume the presidency of KAUST next December.

KAUST is not waiting for its president to arrive, however, before implementing its plans to build by creating partnerships with the leading educational institutions in the world.  Although some of the agreements took some time to actually finalize, previously announced partnerships and dates are:
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institutite (June 15, 2007)
Institute Francais de Petrole ( June 22, 2007)
National University of Singapore (June 27, 2007)
IIT Bombay (July 16, 2007)
American University in Cairo (September 5, 2007)
Technische Universitat Munchen (January 24, 2008).
Each of these agreements describes partnerships in specific areas of research and education, with financial arrangements that vary to meet the circumstances.

In the last two days, three very significant new partnership arrangement with American universities have been announced.  On March 4, agreements with the University of California at Berkeley (UCB) and Stanford University were announced, and on March 5, an agreement with the University of Texas at Austin was announced.  It is reported that Stanford and UCB will each receive almost $30M over 5 years as part of this partnership.  Of that, $10 will be for participating departments, $10M will be for joint research at the institutions involving new KAUST faculty, $5M will be for joint research at KAUST, and $3M-$4M will be for administrative costs.  Stanford and UCB will each have responsibilities in identifying and helping to recruit faculty for KAUST, and in hosting KAUST faculty until the KAUST campus opens.  The conditions at UT are more or less the same.

All in all, a very impressive list of partner institutions.  The quality and the international visibility of each of them helps to assure that KAUST will indeed begin to develop following international norms for access and freedom of inquiry.

The breakdown of the price-productivity-cost model of private research universities

I have learned a lot recently  participating in a project on Global Higher Education led by Paul Jansen and Debby Bielak of McKinsey &Co.  The project is sponsored by the Forum for the Future of Higher Education. Paul and Debby have collected a group of university CFO’s, a college president, and an old provost (me) together to apply a McKinsey sector-wide analysis to higher education. It is fascinating to see what such an analysis tells us about our world.

The team recently made a presentation entitled Higher Education Trends and Risks: Implications for Leading Institutions and Sector Performance  at the annual Aspen Symposium of the Forum.  My assignment was to talk about trends and risks for private research universities - in 15 minutes.  I approached this impossible task by first apologizing to the audience for the egregious simplifications that I would have to make in order to describe the situation in 15 minutes, and then introduced my simple one-parameter model to describe the problems facing the research university.  Since this model met with some approval at the Symposium, I thought it might be worth repeating here.

I began by describing what I called our Mission Box. Excellence - as defined by us in a very self-referential way - has become the visible driver of our mission.  Our mission, in a very general way, focuses on traditional undergraduate education, graduate and professional education, and research.  Focusing on excellence means that if it is worth doing (i.e. one of our mission foci), it is worth doing better.  Doing it better costs more money, so at some point the customer can’t, or won’t pay for it, so we lose money.  As a consequence, over time, losing money has become our very visible surrogate for excellence (my one parameter model). (Clayton Christensen, who also spoke at the symposium, has pointed out the often catastrophic outcomes of making your product better than the customer wants or needs. See also Disruptive Technologies:when great universities fail? March 3, 2006)

Changing US output in science and technology

The NSF just released two interesting reports. Changing US Output of Scientific Articles:1988-2003 is a detailed analysis of publications in refereed journals over that time period.  The companion publication, Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities, is based on interviews with scientists in 9 leading US research universities.

The first report extends and quantifies the well known result that the American share of international research publications has been dropping over time as other countries build their scientific and engineering capabilities.  More importantly, it also shows the very surprising result that the absolute number of US scientific publications in peer reviewed journals has plateaued or dropped since the early 1990s. The second report seeks to understand that flattening  of US research output.

Outsourcing research

InnoCentive has an intriguing business model.  As described on their website:
"InnoCentive® is an exciting web-based community matching top scientists to relevant R&D challenges facing leading companies from around the globe. We provide a powerful online forum enabling major companies to reward scientific innovation through financial incentives."
If your company cannot solve an important technical problem, you register as a seeker; if you are a scientist, engineer, etc  with a bit of free time and an itch to solve some interesting problems, you register as a solver. InnoCentive gets the seekers and solvers together, with financial prizes from the seekers to the solver or solvers who produce the useful solutions.  The Rockefeller Foundation has recently partnered with InnoCentive to apply the same platform to global development problems.  In this case, the seekers will be non-profit entities chosen by the Foundation that serve poor or vulnerable peoples.

One might be tempted to think that this “dating service” approach to problem solving could be useful only to small start-ups that cannot afford their own research.  Turns out, if you think that, you are really wrong.  A recent Harvard Business School working paper by K.R. Lakhani, L.B.Jeppesen, P.A.Lohse and J.A.Panetta has analyzed InnoCentive results for 166 scientific problems that the research laboratories of “large and well-known R&D-intensive firms had been unsuccessful in solving internally.” Several of the problems reflected several years of unsuccessful effort in the company’s research labs.  The results are fascinating.

The UC Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute - a link in the knowledge supply chain?

There has been a lot of conversation and concern over the proposed Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley.  The UC description of EBI puts it directly into Pasteur’s quadrant of research that is both fundamental and applied to problems of importance to society:   

The Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI)  is a new research and development organization that will bring advanced knowledge in biology, physical sciences, engineering, and environmental and social sciences to bear on problems related to global energy production, particularly the development of next-generation, carbon-neutral transportation fuels.

However, the controversy stems not so much from the nature of the research, but the partnership behind the project, which involves an unusually close university-corporate relationship:

EBI represents a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and BP, which will support the Institute with a 10-year $500 million grant. EBI's multidisciplinary teams will collectively explore total-system approaches to problems that include the sustainable production of cellulosic biofuels, enhanced biological carbon sequestration, bioprocessing of fossil fuels and biologically-enhanced petroleum recovery.

EBI will educate a new generation of students in all areas of bioenergy, and will serve as a model for large-scale academic-industry collaborations. By partnering with a major energy company, EBI will facilitate and accelerate the translation of basic science and engineering research to improved products and processes for meeting the world's energy needs in the 21st century.

This relationship will involve both the presence of 50 or so resident BP scientists on the campuses of UC and the University of Illinois, and a shared governance (and funding) process involving both BP and the academic institutions.  Details are still being worked out, but faculty, understandably and appropriately, have raised numerous issues relating to commercial influence on research and academic freedom, and the impact of this new entity on university internal issues of shared governance.

From my perspective, this partnership is another step for Berkeley towards a leadership role in what I earlier described (What business are we in? March 1, 2006) as management of the knowledge supply chain. In that earlier post, I suggested that one of the roles for universities in the future could be to both create new knowledge, and to see that that knowledge moves swiftly and effectively to the end users.  This would involve new types of close partnerships -process networks (see What has offshoring got to do with research universities? Feb.22, 2006) - between knowledge producers and users working towards a common goal.  Such partnerships need not be either exclusive or permanent, but would focus on an area where the partnership could bring mutual benefit. Of course, many partnerships already exist between academe and industry, but this EBI arrangement, through its scale and aspirations (including creation of the new discipline of Energy Biosciences), would seem to move to the next plane.

Modularity in university higher education: Research

(Continuing the discussion begun in Modularity in university higher education, June 16, 2006)

Research is, of course, what defines the reputation of most university faculty.  In turn, the reputation of the faculty builds the reputation of the university.   Thus the connecting input characteristics of the research module must be defined in a way that it supports the efforts of the faculty in this domain.  In addition, there are very close ties between research and Ph.D. education, and so one of the outputs that one would have to maintain for a research module is that it be appropriate for graduate training and, increasingly, undergraduate research experiences. However, in many if not most of our major research universities, there are research centers- often quite large - whose primary mission is not training, but production of focused sponsored research for, typically, government, sometimes industry.  Indeed, at one limit, many such centers do classified research, which is inappropriate for the training of students.   Much of the research in these centers generally is not carried out by regular faculty, but by a staff of professional researchers.  Thus, even in some cases when the research itself may  be quite appropriate for graduate training, lack of involved faculty mentors may give these centers marginal value for graduate training. The rational for having such centers will vary from university to university, but for those centers most removed from the academic center, the rational is often tied up in the larger service role of the university.  Such centers can contribute significantly to the reputation of the university, thus bringing value in a different dimension. 

Thus we see within a typical large university at least two different types of research module.  One of these is closely aligned with aspirations of regular faculty and with graduate training, and therefore has rather well defined input and output characteristics that allow it to work synergistically with other modules (e.g. education) in the university.  The other is more divorced from the educational component of the university, and tied in perhaps with the service component. Its output requirements are primarily that it satisfy its funding sources, input requirement that it do so in a way that enhances the reputation of the university e.g. through service, or perceived excellence.  Of course, the reality is that there is a continuum of possibilities that lies between these two types of modules.  However, these two extreme cases will let us investigate how the opportunities of globalization might lead to improvements in both.

And the leader in R&D is...

As described in my Feb. 17, 2006 post, the World in 2020, a recent report of the National Intelligence Council suggested that only 14 years from now, the engine of the world economy might have shifted from the US to China and other countries in Asia, and that leadership in science and technology might have moved from the US to the same Asian countries.   In a May 16, 2006 post entitled Where is the engine of the world economy?, I called attention to a recent LA Times article that seems to show that China is moving along a path that would enable it to achieve the economic status predicted by the NIC.  The recently released 2006 Science and Education Indicators from the National Science Board would seem to indicate that China is also on track to realizing the NIC predictions in the science and technology area.

Excess Intellectual Capacity

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to Globalization II. As I thought about Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research - in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated, context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create “scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people, and supporting high level research. Most interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated and driven. Bush defined this goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use in an as-yet unknown circumstance.