MAXIM Conference 2002

"The Larger Role of Information Technology in Higher Education"
San Luis Resort, Galveston, Texas.
April 24, 2002

Good Morning. This may be the only hotel I have visited that is built on top of an artillery emplacement. Some of you may know that the San Luis rests upon the old Fort Crockett, which was established in 1897 and used to defend the coast in the First and Second World Wars.

The walls of the fort are eight-feet thick and what's left of the gun batteries is still down there, although it may be a bit damp and musty. If this were a university, no doubt that's where we would locate Information Technology Services.

You may be wondering about my access to such arcane information. Probably you are not surprised that people in jobs like mine often have support from speechwriters. So many speeches, so little time to find out enough about the nature of the audience and to compose the right set of remarks. Well, it turns out that my chief speechwriter, Geoff Leavenworth, is a reformed journalist who spent much of his career here in Galveston. He has written extensively on its historic sites, and he knows the city like few others do. I have to give him credit for the opening story.

Having served over the past decade as provost of the University of Illinois and as president of The University of Texas, I have observed the evolution of technology in higher education from some of the best seats in the arena. Today I'd like to share with you some observations about where we might be headed in this maelstrom of change, not just in a technical sense, but with respect to the shape of higher education in the future.

I need to be very frank. We desperately need information technology to help with the mother of all challenges, which is to control costs. It’s the black topic of our world. No one from higher education ever wants to talk it. But we have to. The escalation of costs has already damaged our credibility pretty badly, and it threatens our very effectiveness as social institutions of extraordinary value.

There are two large forces that drive costs in the academic realm.

First is the exponential growth of knowledge.

The basic structure of the American academic world was designed before the Second World War, with the idea of commanding, within a single institution, essentially the whole of human knowledge, or at least all of the “most important” parts. That idea went by the boards decades ago, but we still have to cope with the creation of large new fields that need departments of their own, such as computer science or biomedical engineering, or discipline-spanning programs such as those in neuroscience or nanotechnology. Even classic departments like history and English need staffing to cover regions of the world or cultures that have become more prominent in a global society. Libraries are bulging with old and new publications, and now with electronic materials of all kinds, even if no library that I know about can afford the 15% annual compounding rate on costs of materials. Another implication of the increase of knowledge is that the tools required to advance and manage knowledge become ever more sophisticated—and costly.

None of this will change. To be effective, institutions of higher education must preserve the ability to invest in tools and libraries and programs as the scope of knowledge changes. It’s fundamental to our social purpose.

The second big cost driver is people. Every university’s budget is mostly salaries. The faculty and staff members whom I know rarely seem to feel appreciated or appropriately rewarded with annual salary increases that just keep pace with the Consumer Price Index. They expect super-inflationary increases in compensation, and that, pure and simple, results in a super-inflationary cost base at universities.

This will not change either. Institutions will always have to invest in talent, which is the most important resource of all.

So what can we do about costs? Nothing, if we are unwilling to look at new models for carrying out our business. It has been easier to wrap ourselves in the flag of truth, beauty, and the value of knowledge and to insist on passing the cost increases along to those who pay the bills: the federal and state governments, donors, parents, and students.

In fact, we do have truth, beauty, and the value of knowledge on our side, and the large cost increases borne over the past three decades by all these folks have been justifiable. Probably even more is justifiable, if there is a close look at the economic impact of higher education. But that is beside the point, really, because higher education has developed a public image of having an insatiable appetite for money, of having an unbecoming focus on it, and of having little interest in controlling costs or even in providing accountability for cost and effectiveness. More than a little tarnish has built up on our nobility.

I was impressed by a recent editorial in The New York Times which cited a report stating that while only about 5 percent of high-achievement, high-income students fail to enroll in college, the non-entry rate for high-achievement, low-income students is about 25 percent. The editorial expressed concern that we are pricing the poor out of college, closing with this observation:

"If this pattern is not arrested--and quickly--the country will find itself back at that unpleasant juncture in history when colleges were mainly the preserve of a well-heeled elite."

Given the practically universal access to community colleges and the extensive availability of financial aid, I am almost certain that the Times is not correct in linking low college attendance rates among the disadvantaged to the realities of cost for students and families, but it may well be true that the low rates of attendance are linked to perceptions of the cost of higher education. My point is that the reaction by the Times is typical of the day. To a greater and greater degree, higher education is being seen by the public as part of the problem, rather than the key to the solution.

We have no choice but to regain public confidence, and to do that we must find ways to improve efficiency and to control escalating costs. It will take new ways of doing our business. Information technology will turn out to provide many of the answers, I feel sure.

The reason why folks in higher education become so uneasy when cost control is opened for discussion is that they understand that cost is so directly linked to quality in our sector. What is the first index of quality that springs to mind when anyone discusses undergraduate education at any college or university? Of course—the student-faculty ratio, a cost intensive index if there ever was one. As we address costs, we need to look especially for opportunities that can also preserve or actually improve quality of service.

In the service sector of the economy, we have seen some good examples. Many companies have used interactive technology to provide better, more personal service than they could ever have given using old-style human interaction. Think of Amazon.com's ability to remember your last book order and make comparable suggestions. It uses your book buying history to serve you better. Southwest Airlines now makes more than half of all reservations via its website. Herb Kelleher and the stockholders are happy, because they save a good deal of money on each reservation made with the automated system. And evidently the customers feel even better served than they do by speaking to an agent at 1-800-IFLYSWA.

At UT Austin, we have introduced services that provide a student with online records of all outstanding bills from various departments, a complete payment history, a schedule of when future payments are due, and the ability to pay all or part of the bill from a dorm room at 3 a.m. That--and about 450 other services, many of them academic--are available through our personalized web portal, UT Direct. There is no doubt that we have been able to deliver services better using Web tools and strong database support than we can by having people stand in line in order to transact business with a person. By the way, our lines used to queue up in 100 degree weather. I remember.

On the educational side, technology has already changed the way teaching is done. It provides a richer base of support to students in individual courses, and it can actually increase interactions between students and teachers. As the technology improves, these opportunities can only grow better, and we may come to the point where some of our teaching methods, such as lectures to sections of hundreds or delivery of primary material by teaching assistants, may be abandoned in favor of web-based delivery of some materials, coupled with wider use of small discussion sections or even tutorials. We may even see a rebirth of living-learning organizations, such as the residential college, as a result.

People have mused in recent years that technology might make ghost towns of great campuses like ours--that students will just get what they need working alone, via the Web, from corporate suppliers. I don’t foresee that. The residential collegiate experience is extraordinarily valuable because of the human interactions: between student and professor, between student and advisor, between student and student. What technology can do is to liberate us to concentrate on things of lasting value in that experience.

Things like imparting standards, as well as knowledge; like showing by example, how fine minds, of different kinds, work; like fostering creativity by showing how ideas can be transposed from one setting to another; like building character and citizenship by stressing the importance of virtues such as truth, loyalty, charity, friendship, and personal integrity.

That’s the real goal. To make education at the collegiate level better and less expensive than it would otherwise be.

Being the University of Texas, we don't just observe and fret and respond to these challenges--we find ways to complicate life further by tackling still greater challenges of our own making. Let me mention one such initiative. We are calling the project, the Digital Knowledge Gateway. Our goal is to provide access for every citizen of our state, via a personalized Internet window, into the resources of our libraries, collections, museums, and much more. The University is a dynamo, now with the power to bring light into every home and business in Texas, and we mean to realize that potential.

Our target is to establish an online service that exceeds anything else of its kind, permitting Texans--and the rest of the world--to access, use, and benefit from the core materials at the heart of our University. This will require three developments--(1) building the new portal, (2) digitizing our holdings, and, (3) strengthening our information technology infrastructure to handle increased traffic.

The great treasures of our institution belong to all citizens of the state. We want all to use them. Also, we intend to be a leader in the new realm where research, learning, and scholarly discourse are not limited by the walls of classrooms and laboratories. We are excited and energized by this vision. We hope to produce some genuinely new manifestations of the academic world, and a much larger and more engaged public. That is, for sure, a worthwhile target.

I have run through some fearsome challenges, and I have told you, in effect, that we have no hope of meeting them without your imagination and industry. Despite our warts and other imperfections, higher education is a powerful tool for any society in addressing an uncertain future. The most powerful of all, I believe. These institutions for which we work are remarkable creations of the human spirit. Historians a thousand years from now will mark the American universities as the greatest innovation of our time. They will be seen as the greatest engines of progress in this era, not only in economic terms, but for personal development, and for social analysis and development. They deserve every ounce of imagination and skill that any of us can pour into them. I thank you and congratulate you for the effort that you, personally, are making.

Thank you for listening. And good hunting.

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