William Powers
President, University of Texas at Austin

EVENT REPORT - February 6, 2012

Bill Powers, president of the University of Texas, has become an outspoken defender of public universities in the state's emerging debate about their future.  At the Gulen Institute Luncheon Forum, Powers argued that public universities play an essential role in fostering future innovation and productivity, and he insisted that these results cannot be achieved by "short-circuiting" the research model.

Some improvements are needed, he allowed.  The current cost to families and the increasing time that students spend finishing their degrees are important problems to be addressed.  But Powers insisted that the important questions of affordability and productivity have to be framed within the broader question: "What do we expect our universities to do?"  He expressed concern that unless there is consensus on what the fundamental purpose of a public research university is, none of the needed improvements can be made.   

Such a consensus will require real dialogue between the two sides of the debate. Speaking to a distinguished audience of legislators and educators, Powers acknowledged: "There is much we all can learn about improving higher education in Texas."  He began by emphasizing the value of different educational institutions.   Powers recounted a meeting with the president of the new Western Governor's University who, when asked if one educational model was better than others, replied, "It's not 'better than,'  it's 'better with.'"  Public research universities are not the only model of what higher education can be; community colleges, regional colleges, and technical institutes all help to meet Texas' diverse educational needs.  But Powers insisted that public universities do serve a unique function, one that he intended to explain and defend.  According to him, this unique purpose -- to allow students and faculty the opportunity to pursue knowledge for its own sake -- cannot be amended except at a cost to society's future well-being.

This does not mean that public universities are intrinsically opposed to change, as some opponents suggest.  "Let me say that every large, and especially governmental, institution with a bureaucracy absolutely acquires a certain inertia that is resistant to change," Powers conceded. "But I can assure you that there is nothing in the DNA of American universities that is resistant to change.  On the contrary," he asserted, "they are committed to change."  He then sketched the historical development of the university in a brief attempt to demonstrate the dynamic nature of the institution. Advanced, adult education had been a feature of many early societies, but universities resembling our modern institutions did not begin until the twelfth-century.  Instead of working for wealthy families, scholars began to gather together in a single location, thereby accommodating more students.  These early "universities" represented a definite productivity gain: together, scholars could attract more students while enjoying more autonomy.  Universities formed in Italy and throughout Europe at this time, and many of them, such as Oxford and Cambridge, are still functioning today.

In America, the first universities served a very small portion of the population.  They were designed to give a theological education to those who had already been educated in reading, writing, and some mathematics.  Powers credited the Jeffersonian ideal of religious plurality and freedom with transforming these institutions, replacing their religious curricula with courses in the humanities and basic social sciences.  With this model in place, the university became a place where those who would become leaders in the community, still the rich, white men, could go for cultural refinement.

It wasn't until the late nineteenth-century that universities became centers for collective science, Powers noted.  German institutions began to place an emphasis on collaborative research and scholarly output, and by the twentieth-century, this new model was transforming universities like Berkley and the UT.  And as educational opportunities were opened to women, minority students, first generation students, and poor students in the twentieth-century, the university became both the agent and consequence of vast cultural change.  Powers argued that educators are still experiencing the consequences of these major reforms: universities have come to include workforce training at every level, and they are now more inclusive that ever.  He encouraged those involved in the current debate about higher education to consider this dynamic history: "There will be change, and we need to be engaged in actively directing it."

Powers admitted that the university is a strange institution: "We take young people, mature and ready to be productive members of the workforce, and we ask them to lie fallow for four years."  This venture is only defensible if it makes students better members of society in the future, which Powers insisted it does.  He pointed out that many incoming students have never met someone from another culture or religion, and the university offers them important opportunities to engage in cultural dialogue, not to mention academic training that will make them more productive in the workplace.  Powers then addressed a function of public universities that has come under recent criticism: their role as centers for publicly funded research.  Many see this "esoteric" work as unproductive and unworthy of public funding, complaining that the resultant research is read "by only thirteen people around the world."

To answer such critics, Powers reminded the audience of UT faculty member John Goodenough, responsible for developing the Lithium-ion battery.  This innovation has transformed modern consumer electronics, and it depended on decades of obscure work in material science and mathematics.  Powers emphasized that the research of thousands of people has contributed to this single technology without their ever imagining it.  "Now project that pattern forward," he urged.  "Something will happen in twenty-five years, maybe a development in technology or medicine or political science....We don't know what it will be, but there is a team working on it now," he stated.  This is the nature of scholarly inquiry and the importance of undirected research.  Powers defended all of the faculty members working in relative obscurity and emphasized that the "productivity" of a given inquiry cannot always be measured in advance.  He cautioned that it is very difficult to direct these sorts of innovations and transformations from the top.  

"There are certain activities that, if pursued for their intrinsic value, have beneficial effects," Powers concluded.  "But if pursued for their beneficial effects, they will not produce."  This is exactly the case with universities, he suggested.  Attempts by legislators to short-circuit the research process, either by requiring measures of productivity or dictating the areas of acceptable inquiry, will undercut the potential benefits of the process.  "We will have short-term gains," Powers stated, "but the long term advance of knowledge will be shortchanged."  By giving students and scientists freedom to pursue knowledge for its own sake, the American university is the envy of the world.  Powers insisted that the public cost of education should be viewed as an investment in the future.  "Every generation does something for the next," he said.  "Generations before us built the subways and the highway system." Our present-day investments in education can have just as much of an impact on the future shape of society.