Through A Looking Glass Dimly
The Implications of the Globalization of Higher Education

Jim Formosa

Abstract
Introduction
"Isms" That Afflict Higher Education
The Future Role of The Academy
Changing the Role of Governing Boards
The Necessity For Change On The Part Of Institutional Administration
Faculty Roles In The Future
The Learning Organization
Summary and Conclusion
References

Abstract:

Higher education is truly on the verge of globalization. Competition will come from traditional as well as non-traditional providers. For institutions to grow in the future significant change to the status quo will be required. Many lessons can be learned from how industry is coping with the global economy. This paper explores required changes beginning with the academy itself and working down through the organization to faculty. Topics covered include the desirability of building learning organizations, the necessity for leadership, funding, reward structures, the new role of faculty, and the increasing necessity for a new conception of professional development. It is important that the reader understand the purpose of this present effort. It is not to provide a complete prescription for the challenges facing the academy. Rather, it is an attempt to raise awareness and point readers toward some potential answers. To do justice to each topic mentioned in this paper would require a paper on each. This paper is a highly condensed version of a book-length manuscript currently under development.

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Introduction:

Any one with even a passing familiarity with the current literature dealing with higher education is aware of the tremendous change that those of us in the academy face. For most institutions, there is a very real prospect of calls coming from multiple constituencies that we do more with less. Technology continues to progress and expand at a phenomenal rate. As the global society shifts to the information age, competition will become a part of everyday life for our faculty, staff, and administrators. Our institutions must become learning institutions. Harasim (1998) wrote "…it occurred to me that in the United States, the rhetoric of higher education almost never promotes "learning" as the character of the institution. Universities boast of "research," and colleges advertise "teaching"; no one that I know makes claims on learning. The avoidance of the term is more than accidental; it rests on suppositions that have significant ideological and practical consequences" (p. 92).

Higher education continues to come under attack on many fronts. Most of these criticisms can be subsumed under two headings; efficiency and effectiveness. Politicians, motivated by what they perceive to be a bottomless money pit, as well as tightening fiscal constraints, have called for increased efficiency. Guskin (1996) stated the case as follows:

• There is a growing public acceptance that colleges and universities are not cost-effective, that the tuitions are too high, and that the academic institutions must therefore restructure their operations, much as happened in other sectors of American society. Within the higher education community itself, there is a new awareness of our inability to understand how to do more with less, especially in the delivery of education. What we know is how to do more with more or less with less (p. 27).

Higher education has also come under criticism on issues of effectiveness. Ewell (1994), Peters (1994), Dill, Massey, Williams, and Cook (1996), and the Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) have all written about the sad state of institutional effectiveness and/or outcomes assessment. Banta, Lund, Block, and Oblander (1996) analyzed 165 cases representing a variety of institutional sizes and types. Each of these cases purported to be an example of an "exemplary practice". Banta wrote in the conclusion, "I must say that the number of these cases containing concrete evidence that the student learning improved as a result of assessment is very small" (p. 343).

The Pew Higher Education Research Program (1991) decried the fact that much of higher education has turned inward to cope with such criticism. They stated, "Higher education has become remarkably adept at avoiding questions of purpose. Even discussions of the curriculum focus more easily on process than on substance" (p. 1).

As higher education becomes increasingly global, the changes that have been called for may come to pass as many institutions learn the true meaning of competition. Artificially enforced geographic boundaries and sacred cows will come under increasing pressure as institutions struggle to become competitive. Duderstadt (1999), described the impact of these changes on higher education as follows:

• This carefully regulated and controlled enterprise could be eroded by several factors. First, the growing demand for advanced education and training simply cannot be met by such a carefully rationed and controlled paradigm. Second, current cost structures for higher education are simply incapable of responding to the need for high-quality yet affordable education. Third, information technology is releasing higher education from the constraints of space and time (and possibly also reality with virtual universities). All of these factors are driving us toward an open learning environment, in which students will evolve into an active learner and consumer, unleashing strong market forces…. With the emergence of new competitive forces and the weakening influence of traditional constraints, higher education is evolving like other "deregulated" industries (for example, health care, communications, and energy)(p. 10).

This is significant for all of our institutions. As Rowley, Lujan, and Dolence (1998) stated, "…in the information age there will be winners and losers. Those who try to shape change and its effects on them will likely be winners, and those who resist adapting will likely be among the losers (p. 4)". Duderstadt (1998), placed the warning in concrete terms when he stated:

• Those institutions that can step up to this process of change will thrive. Those that bury their heads in the sand; that rigidly defend the status quo or even worse - some idyllic vision of the past that never existed, are at very great risk. Those institutions that are micromanaged, either from within, by faculty politics or governing boards or their own administrators, or from without, by government or pubic opinion, stand little chance of flourishing during times of great change. The real question is not whether higher education will be transformed but rather how and by whom (p.1)?

O'Banion (1997) echoed the same theme when he wrote:

• American society is in a key stage of transformation from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, and all social institutions are - or will be - affected by the change. Many institutions, especially those of business and industry, have been actively involved in responding to these changes for some time; others, such as educational institutions, have begun to respond only recently and in most cases with a reserved enthusiasm. It appears that considerable benefit will accrue to those educational institutions that can successfully navigate the change while those that do not may atrophy or be consigned to the "rubbish heap of history."

Why does higher education find itself in this situation?

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"Isms" That Afflict Higher Education

While thinking about this paper, I began to think about the various "isms" that afflict most of our institutions to a greater or lesser degree. In these and other "isms" may lie some of the reasons for our current condition. They are listed below, rather poorly paraphrased, and without attribution.

• You can't use the same thought patterns that brought you to your current position in the hope that they will somehow lead you out.
• The fallacy of rewarding A while hoping for B.
• The fallacy of doing the same things in the same way and hoping for different outcomes.
• To face tomorrow with the thought of using the methods of yesterday is to invite standstill.
• If you are headed in the wrong direction, integrating technology into your instruction will simply help you get there faster.
• Doing what you've always done, only faster.
• True transformative change only occurs at funerals.
• In higher education, routine work drives out all non-routine work and smothers to death all creative planning, all fundamental change in the university.
• The current change efforts under way in higher education are closely akin to pruning limbs from a dying tree.
• In times of change, the learners inherit the world while the learned remain beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
• Placing good people in bad systems will ultimately end up creating an organization of under-achieving people.
• Much of what goes on in higher education can best be characterized as form over substance.
• Treating every one in an organization the same is a prescription for mediocrity. The level of mediocrity will trend downward over time without outside intervention.

As with all such sayings, there is a grain of truth in each of these.

If these are valid vis-à-vis higher education, we may have discovered the heart of the problem. Can any organization so afflicted hope to truly change and become competitive? How are we to overcome these anchors and look to the future with anything akin to optimism? What are the implications of the globalization of higher education? This paper will look in-turn at the implications for various areas within the academy, beginning with the role of the academy itself.

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The Future Role of The Academy

With the foregoing as a background, we need to ask ourselves how our institutions will respond to these calls for change. Senge (1997) wrote of what he sees as the most significant problem with today's organizations in the following terms. "We have massive institutional breakdown and massive failure of the centralized nervous systems of hierarchical authoritarian institutions in the face of growing interdependence and accelerating change (pp. 125 - 126).

Connick (1997) wrote about higher education institutions in the following words:

• As a result of changing economic and social conditions in the United States and around the world, America approaches the twenty-first century with more than thirty-six hundred accredited institutions that were built in a different era, for a different student population, with a different set of economic realities. Our educational institutions reflect their industrial-era roots. They are organized around centralized structures (similar to the factory model) by aggregating the workers (faculty and students) at a particular place (the campus) at a particular time (the academic calendar). Education as a public monopoly will cease to exist. The future for most institutions will be determine by the extent to which they have an educational product or products that are provided conveniently for the consumer at a competitive cost (p. 9).

Oblinger and Rush (1997) wrote of three possible scenarios for institutions of higher education as follows:

• One is that the academy does not need to change and won't
• A Second scenario follows the historic model of higher education. A new type of institution will emerge to serve the future needs of learners. Over the past 300 years, much of the growth and innovation of higher education has come about through the addition of new institutions, not through the adaptation of existing institutions. In this scenario they quote Dolence and Norris (1995) as stating that a new design model is essential to meet the needs of the Information Age. This new design would be characterized by 1)open access, to 2) a network of experts, in 3)both traditional and hybridized disciplines using 4) just-in-time learning, providing 5) perpetual learning, facilitated by 6) "fused" learning systems and 7) unbundled learning experiences based on learner needs.
• A third scenario is described by Tate (1996): New production, delivery and certification organizations (PDCs) will invade distribution of higher education courses. These PDCs will operate on a national basis, using the most efficient and effective communications media available. Courses and programs will be designed and produced to commercial standards. These organizations will purchase subject matter expertise from many sources, depending upon the degree of expertise and the quality of content preparation. PDCs will provide competence-based testing and certification services. Students may participate in interactive testing at any time and place of their choosing - and pay a fee to receive certification upon successful completion. At first, PDCs will "flow through" from the institution that provides the content. Later, independent accreditation agencies will assess the process, content, and certification of PDCs. (PPS. 15 - 16)

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Changing the Role of Governing Boards

It is the belief of this author that the governing board may well hold the keys to the future of the majority of our institutions. Another of the truisms that businesses and institutions of all types face is the fact that people generally pay attention to those things that feel are important to their superiors. Until boards demand leadership and change instead of attempting to manage every institution by the same yardsticks of how good their reports look in relationship to other institutions within the system, the quip by Adam Urbanski (1992), that "If you always do what you've always done you'll always get what you always got", will continue to be true.

In the future, productivity will not be measured in terms of inputs (number of FTE students, numbers of faculty, or seat time). Instead, productivity will be measured in terms of outputs (numbers of students completing courses of study, number of students passing certification tests, numbers of students completing their personal learning goals). Governing boards, are, after all, ultimately responsible for the behavior and performance of senior level administrators at most of our institutions. How does the role of senior administration need to change? We turn next to this question.

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The Necessity For Change On The Part Of Institutional Administration

In many of our institutions, particularly public institutions, administrators can best be described as managers. Even those who may understand that what is required is leadership rather than management are slow to move in that direction. The literature is replete with examples of what happens to senior level administrators who attempt to actively lead their institutions. As long as governing boards reward the upper echelon managers of our institutions for being managers and bureaucrats, that’s exactly what we will get. If governing boards want leadership, they will be forced to deal fairly with the criticisms that come with this change.

Bess (1997) identified the administration of higher education institutions as being one of the primary determinants of good teaching that results in student learning. Green (1990) wrote much the same thing and included a list of principles and strategies that administrators can use to improve the quality of teaching on their campuses:

• Make teaching a leadership priority
• Be a partner in the venture
• Have faculty lead the change
• Put your money where your rhetoric is
• Reward good teaching in ways that matter
• Encourage life outside the department
• Encourage contacts outside the institution
• Define teaching broadly
• Work from an understanding of adult development
• Make good teaching an institutional responsibility
• Make teaching ability a criterion for hiring faculty

The role of Leadership

There is a significant and growing literature, which addresses the issue of leadership, leadership development, and how leadership differs from management. It is the intent of the present effort to address leadership as it impacts change. Brill and Worth (1997) detailed the importance of leadership in change efforts:

• No successful large-scale change effort has gone very far without effective leadership throughout the organization. This often requires two things: First, leaders must be trained, because there may not be enough of them, and second, they must be brought on board in support of the change effort. The leaders will move this effort forward if they know how and if they are committed to it. However, they can just as easily destroy a change initiative if they don’t know how to support it or simply don’t want to go along. (p. 110)

Gregory (1996), in discussing collegiate leadership, stated. "Leadership is about being a leading professional, leading others in a collegiate style, recognizing and encouraging quality, fostering and developing talent, intervening, coaching, and being a role-model for exemplary behavior, taking risks, and acting as a change agent" (p. 48). Heifetz (1994) wrote "Leadership means influencing the community to face its problems (p.14)".

How will the roles of faculty change? The next section of this paper details the changing roles of faculty in a global system of higher education.

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Faculty Roles In The Future

Many people believe that the most significant changes in higher education's future will involve the role of faculty. In an anytime, any place environment, faculty will have to be available to students when students need help. This means answering e-mail and returning phone calls at times that faculty is not used to being available. Faculty shift from being a "sage on the stage" to being a "guide on the side". If faculty is expected to be available in the evening and over the weekend, it is unreasonable to expect that they will be available the same number of hours as usual on campus.

In an environment characterized by intense competition, the basic laws of economics will take over. The new bottom line for faculty will be measured by the amount of learning that takes place on the part of the student. This will result in a shift in emphasis from teaching to learning.

Oblinger and Rush (1997) provide one of many lists of changes currently available in the literature in Table 1.

Alternative Educational Model

Current Model	Future Model	Technological Implications
Classroom lectures	Individual exploration	Networked PCs with access to information
Passive absorption	Apprenticeship	Requires skill development and simulations
Individual work	Team learning	Benefits from collaborative learning and e-mail
Omniscient teacher	Teacher as guide	Relies on access to experts over the network
Stable content	Fast-changing content	Requires networks and publishing skills
Homogeneity	Diversity	Requires a variety of access tools and methods

Table 1

Modified from table found on page 15

A thoughtful review of table 1, will indicate the skill set for the faculty of the future will be significantly different from that of the past. In a meta-analysis of four surveys, Cyrs (1997), listed the following competencies as desirable for instructors who teach at a distance:

• Course Planning and organization
• Verbal and nonverbal presentation skills
• Collaborative teamwork
• Questioning strategies
• Subject matter expertise
• Basic learning theory
• Knowledge of the distance learning field
• Design of study guides coordinated with instruction
• Graphic design and visual thinking (pp. 16 - 17)

When the distance education is moved to the World Wide Web, additional skills will be necessary as follows:

• Collaborative learning
• Cooperative learning
• A wide range of technical skills
• Active learning strategies

One of the big questions is how will faculty acquire the requisite skills? Baiocco and DeWaters (1998) cite the results of several studies that conclude that traditional faculty development efforts are simply not effective. They wrote:

• We have concluded that higher education institutions must increase efforts and offer a radically different faculty development program to ensure that faculty will understand the changing nature of the student population, education, and their respective disciplines. We believe that higher education faculty need major retraining and ongoing support in learning theory, cultural sensitivity, teaching effectiveness, multimedia and technology use, evaluation. And assessment, field supervision, and classroom research. Moreover, that support must include administrative backing, which, as Eble and McKeachie reported, is predictive of program success (1985, p.5) (pp. 40 -41).

If the foregoing conclusions about possible implications are true and if the "isms" outlined above contain even a shred of truth, how do we get from where we are to where we need to be? Industry has begun to turn to the concept of the learning organization to address similar problems in the private sector. This paper turns now to the exploration of the learning organization.

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The Learning Organization

After trying many fads and programs of the month, industry is beginning to find merit in the concept of the learning organization. The learning organization is paradoxical in that it appears so simple in theory yet it is so difficult to achieve in actual practice. Senge (1990), in his classic work, defined five disciplines that characterize a learning organization as follows:

• Systems Thinking…. Business and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead, we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved. Systems thinking is a conceptual framework, a body of knowledge and tools that has been developed over the past fifty years, to make full patterns clearer, and help us to see how to change them effectively.

• Personal Mastery…. Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization - the learning organization's spiritual foundation. An organization's commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.

• Mental Models "Mental models" are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior….Mental models of what can or cannot be done in different management settings are no less deeply entrenched. Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models.

• Building Shared Vision. If any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, it's the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create. When there is a genuine vision (as opposed to the all-too-familiar "vision statement"), people excel and learn, not because they are told to do so, but also because they want to. What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into a shared vision-not a "cookbook" but a set of guiding principles.
  The practice of shared vision involves the skills of unearthing shared "pictures of the future" that foster genuine commitment and enrollment rather than compliance. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.

• Team Learning….The discipline of team learning starts with "dialog." The capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together."…The discipline of dialog also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning. The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply ingrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning. If recognized and surfaced creatively, they can actually accelerate learning…. Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. (pp. 8 - 10).

Given the "isms" that afflict higher education, what can be done to insure that the disciplines of a learning organization can take root in this less than fertile soil? Thompson (1995) outlined organizational conditions for building a learning organization as follows:

• Senior management committed to making learning capability part of its ongoing competitive advantage
• A compelling vision of the desired learning organization that people feel part of and are excited by
• A clear blueprint for change
• Milestones - identified, achieved, and celebrated
• Committed leadership willing to model desired changes and drive fear out of the organization
• Immediate corrective action with leaders who resist change
• Senior management committed to significant investment of time and resources
• A performance management system that links compensation to achievement of the desired vision
• Encouragement and acknowledgement of experimentation, collaboration, innovation, and new paradigm thinking
• Urgency - but no quick fixes
• Multiple feedback structures
• Multiple learning channels

If a learning organization has potential for bringing about the necessary change in the academy, how do we begin the process? Beer (1999) argued persuasively that the type of learning processes that are required in today's turbulent marketplace would have to be powerful in order to overcome the inertia common in most organizations. He wrote:

• The powers can, I will argue, be obtained from an organizational conversation - a dialog between the top team (also referred to later as the leadership team) and lower-level people from all parts of the organization concerned with implementing the strategic tasks of the organization. The dialog would have to provide valid data about how well strategy, organizational capabilities, and leadership behavior fit each other. And that data would have to be subject to rigorous analysis of and reflection about inevitably emotional issues that block leaders from fitting their behaviors to strategically driven organizational requirement. Lacking the capability of an open dialog and rigorous analysis of how leader behavior fits strategy and organization, it is inevitable that fundamental transformation in corporations occur only after financial crises leads to the replacement of the CEO and his top team. Although this appears inevitable given present leadership skills and social technology, the economic and human cost of waiting until a crises creates a revolution are sufficiently high to warrant a search for an alternative to the heroic leadership model we argue dominates the landscape of change (p. 129).

Emery and Purser (1996), Lippet (1998), and Weisbord and Janoff (1995) have all demonstrated that the type of change that is required today can only be sustained on a base of trust and understanding and that this foundation can only be built on broad-based and frequent open communication that includes all interested parties from across the organization.

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Summary and Conclusion

The environment for all of higher education continues to evolve into a truly global system. All aspects of American higher education will have to change in order to prosper in the coming years. It is doubtful if some of the implications outlined in this paper will be felt before the end of the next decade. For higher education to overcome its tendency towards inertia and the "isms" that characterize its day-to-day operations will require a systemic approach. The learning organization as outlined is one possible approach. Regardless of the approach selected, it is clear from all of the research that bureaucracy will have to give way to open organizations in which dialog is practiced on a daily basis.

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