Summarized by James T. P. Yao, 7/25/99

"… I heard a television commentator remark that there are three things foreigners truly admire about the United States. One is our popular culture. The second is our military technology … The third thing universally admired abroad is our universities. … It occurred to me that to be so admired in other parts of the world while being so roundly criticized at home was a singular achievement for our institutions of higher learning."

"The sources of this criticism were largely external. … If we simply respond, however, diligently, to all the complaints, we most likely will find that there are more complaints. There are so many universities, and we have so little control over what professors say and do, that the media can always pick up new misadventures, if that is what they are trying to do. So, rather than react, we need to understand more deeply what is bothering the public. … Why do books that criticize us turn up on the bestseller list? … And why should all of this be happening now, when we are told that our universities are among the few American institutions still considered the best in the world?"

"… I simply do not see evidence of any decline in the performance of our colleges and universities. … The fact is that universities are deeply irritating to many groups – as they always have been. … let me try to articulate a deeper sense of what is bothering people and how we might try to go about putting matters right. … Notwithstanding the improvements that may have taken place in the quality of undergraduate education in this country, the public has finally come to believe quite strongly that our institutions – particularly our leading universities – are not making the education a top priority. … As we all know, the prizes, the media recognition, the extra income do not come from working with students or engaging in exemplary teaching. And it is not just the professors’ incentives that are out of whack, but also those of administrators. … When we go to recruit a star professor, the bargaining chip is always a reduced teaching load – never a reduced research load."

"Among our inattentions to undergraduate quality is the lack of effort to examine the effectiveness of our educational programs – to really try to find out which methods of teaching work well and which do not, why our students have difficulty understanding different kinds of material, and whether computers and other new technologies are actually helping them to learn. … Curiously, universities are very eager to do research on every institution in society except themselves. We know a lot about how smart our students are when they arrive, but we know very little about how much they have learned by the time they leave. …"

"With the passage of time, the public is beginning to catch on to our shortcomings. They may not have it quite right … but they are right about our priorities, and they do not like what they see. All across the country they hear about enterprises of every kind facing competitive challenges and having to pay much closer attention to the quality of everything they do. That is the revolution that is sweeping this country; the public naturally expects us to participate. And a lot of us are not. … And we are not doing a lot to change our underlying priorities – at least in our leading universities, which, for better or worse, set the standards by which all of higher education gets judged."

"So I think we do have a problem. Until we convince the public, by our actions, that we indeed make education our top priority – that we are committed to the highest quality of undergraduate education – we will continue to be vulnerable to attacks on our curricula, our faculty, our tuitions and on all the different issues for which we have been taking punishment the last few years."

"Today, universities need new ways to serve the public, and they do not have them. … If we would have it differently, we must associate ourselves prominently once again with efforts to solve problems that really concern the people of this country. …"

"To reclaim the public trust, higher education’s leaders must discuss those possibilities. … Let me provide three concrete examples … One obvious possibility is the improvement of our public schools. … Very few institutions have given much encouragement to faculty interested in improving public schools. … Clearly the time has come for academic leaders to make stronger efforts to engage people all across the university in the struggle for better schools. A second opportunity lies in improving our health care system. … We give our medical students no training in the economics of health care and rarely teach them how doctors contribute to spiraling medical costs. … My last example involves our efforts in the field of business. … But in these last 10 years of great competitive challenge, American managers have learned a great deal more from their Japanese competitors than they have from our business schools. …"

"… American higher education, by universal acclaim, remains the finest of its kind in the world. … What we clearly have to do is turn adversity to advantage by using the stimulus of public criticism to facilitate changes most of us agree are overdue anyway. Within our colleges and our faculties of arts and sciences, we need to persuade the public – but most of all ourselves – that we do make the quality of education a priority second to none. We may not yet know all the reforms that need to be instituted, but we know enough of them to keep us busy for some time. …"

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