All about me

Below is the original of guest column published in the DE, without the mangling courtesy of the DE editorial staff. It was published in the spring of 2002. If you'd like to read the plan the Chancellor came up with, follow the damn link under the icon on the upper left.

Just as our new administrative team is beginning to form their plans for the future of SIUC, our perennially bad fiscal situation has become desperate. In this environment careful planning is more important than ever: decisions made in these difficult times will affect Southern for decades.

Chancellor Wendler recently outlined to the faculty the first stages of his plans for Southern. His presentation was made up largely of quantitative data showing how we measure up to a group of peer institutions. Evaluation of such numbers is clearly an important part of planning our future. But it is only a part. We must also consider the qualitative educational goals which should determine which numbers we choose to count, and why we choose to count them.

Until the question period, Chancellor Wendler did not mention the university core curriculum, or the liberal arts, or directly address just what sort of education Southern ought to provide its students. Instead he spoke, in what he forthrightly admitted was a tentative phrase, of making Southern one of the best "second" universities in the country. To be among the first of second universities, the Chancellor believes, we must above all improve our graduate programs. This is an important goal.

But why should it be our primary one? Because graduate institutions get better state funding? We are all for more funding, but funding is a means, not an end. And the Chancellor is rightfully aware of the danger of comparing us to a "first university" like Urbana-Champaign: we will never match up. Yet how can we speak of second universities without having first universities in mind? And where does the emphasis on graduate programs leave undergraduate education? For to improve some programs, as the Chancellor has frankly told us, others, presumably those which emphasize undergraduate education, must be cut. This emphasis, I believe, puts things precisely backwards.

Southern’s essential mission should be to help a broad range of students, through the guidance of faculty who are both teachers and researchers, scholars, or artists, to become informed, active citizens and thoughtful, free, and humane human beings. Southern’s faculty have an additional educational mission, the discovery of new knowledge, and the creation of new works of art. Southern also has the more narrow, or at least more concrete educational goal of training undergraduate and graduate students for professional careers.

The additional goals are important. But our core curriculum is aptly named. For undergraduate education is the heart and soul of any university. Most of our students will always be undergraduates, and if their time at Southern is to amount to more than job training, if it is to be a university education, it must be built on a substantial foundation in the arts and sciences. The liberal arts are not an optional program. If we continue to cut the liberal arts we will rot at the core.

We should differ from institutions that offer largely vocational training, then, in providing our students with the liberal education that will serve them well in all careers, and through all of their lives. We should differ from schools that do not emphasize research in engaging students with faculty who not only teach the arts and sciences, but practice them. We should differ from more selective and research intensive schools in putting a greater emphasis on effectively teaching students from less privileged backgrounds.

Our essential character is one that puts us squarely in the middle of the educational universe: we aim to provide a wide range of students with a full university experience. Our university can be universal in a way others will not: we offer more students more opportunities. Our goal is the quintessentially American one of broadening horizons and raising expectations. Better to think of ourselves as being at the center of American education than to aim at being among the first of the second-rate.

We will differ about how best to formulate and implement our educational goals. But we ought to be able to agree that educational goals should direct our planning. Chancellor Wendler often speaks of himself as a "campus CEO." Universities can indeed learn from business models. But businesses exist to make a profit. Universities exist to educate. Profits can be counted. Education cannot. A university that plans only by counting is bankrupt. Let us, then, continue the essential process of counting, but do so in light of the educational mission which should determine what counts for our university.