Is Penn State A Real University? Part VII of VII
Editor’s Note: Safeguard Old State is publishing online for the first time former Penn State Trustee Ben Novak’s original series, “Is Penn State A Real University?” The articles, exploring the founding and purpose of the Pennsylvania State University, originally appeared in State College, The Magazine throughout 1988 and 1989.
Is Penn State A Real University? — Part I · Part II · Part III · Part IV · Part V · Part VI · Part VII
What does it mean to be a real University? The question just will not go away. Former Penn State President Eric A. Walker has phrased the question in another way in a recent article in the Centre Daily Times (Nov. 13, 1988).
“What is a college education anyway? Many times I have asked myself that question,” he writes. “Certainly it is more than just accumulating 124 pass credits, although sometimes a college degree is given for just that.”
The problem is that college is, and must be, more than just the acquisition of job skills and knowledge, the certification of courses passed.
“If it were just accumulating credits,” former President Walker goes on, a student “would not need to leave home. One could study textbooks and pass exams at home without traveling a mile or taking four years. If a college education entailed only course-passing, we could dispense with teachers, dormitories, fraternities, football teams and college deans,” he writes.
It is a strange questions — “What is a college education anyway?” — to be asked in a University community, and especially by a former University president. But something seems to be missing in higher education today, and Dr. Walker is not the only former University President to note the lack. The former President of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti, has just published a book in which he raises the same type of question in ever starker form.
Giamatti was President of Yale from 1978 to 1986 and is now President of baseball’s National League. His observations on the state of higher education seem as relevant to Penn State as they are to Yale.
“I believe,” writes Giamatti, (despite all the growth in higher education) “that since the end of World War II and the Korean War, America’s Colleges and Universities have failed…” He Says this for the reason that, “they have failed to examine their norms, natures, and roles in a period of immense change.” The problem that Giamatti sees is that America’s Colleges and Universities have lost their ability to talk about themselves and what the are doing to people.
Giamatti sees the real problems of the University not as problems of underfunding or capital expansion, but as a problem of a cancer-like growth in which neither values, nor purpose, nor meaning are articulated nor apparently fostered.
“Of all the threats to the institution,” writes Giamatti, “the most dangerous come from within. Not the least among them is the smugness that believes the institution’s value is so self-evident that it no longer needs explication, its mission so manifest that it no longer needs definition and articulation.” He calls this the University’s “failure to redefine and reassert itself, to be accountable or even to appear to be accountable.”
The accountability that Giamatti has in mind is not accountability in terms of budgets or dollars. It is something much deeper and much more important.
“Few are the assertions,” he writes, “of the ideals to which higher education must aspire, few are the assertions of the shape an institution of higher education must attain and why, and few are the consistent visions of the purpose of higher education.”
Giamatti sees that the same lack of a vision exists at Yale as at other Universities across the land. But he also sees this as an issue absolutely crucial to the future of all American Universities. “When those who know best the realities and ideals of higher education fall silent for whatever reason,” he writes, “or believe themselves only managers, not leaders, then the public is denied access to higher education in a fundamental sense…”
Giamatti gives an example which might strike many as right on point. “A parent who hungers to know, for instance, why a child’s college education has cost so much, or worse, has seemed to unsatisfactory or pointless or lacking in connectedness with anything in the past, will have heard very little from higher education about its issues and problems.” Not only parents, but the students themselves, taxpayers and all people concerned with the education of tomorrow’s America are asking the same questions.
Giamatti concludes with a statement about higher education across the United States which ought to be seen as a magnificent opportunity for the Penn State community as a whole. “The net effect since the Second World War,” he writes, “is that institutions of higher education have lost vital connections to their surrounding institutions.” By the term “surrounding institutions,” Giamatti means institutions at every level of society. These include the families of the students who attended, the surrounding towns and communities in which Universities are located, alumni, and the academic, social and student communities of which Universities are supposed to be a part. In a broad sense he means the entire University community is out of touch with its constituency.
Giamatti speaks strong words. When he talks about the ideas of a real University today, he asks what he calls “the question beneath all the questions.” That question is: “What is the purpose of your College or University? You have not told us, educators and administrators, and we no longer see or know the point.”
The opportunity that we have at Penn State is to delve as a community into this “question beneath all the questions.” For the question beneath all the questions is not a question limited to administrators or erudite professional educators, but is a question of community. We all need to see and know the point. We all must be part of the solution.
Penn State is fortunately poised in time and space to answer that “question beneath all the questions” first. In space, Penn State’s opportunity lies in its location in a small rural town in the middle of Pennsylvania. Here we have what Dean Erwin Runkle has called a “splendid isolation” and a “stream of college life” in which Penn State has always had a special “way of her own.” We have a tradition of finding new answers to the challenges of higher education, as I have recounted in previous articles in this series. Thus both time and space have conspired to let Penn State lead the way again.
Let us talk about space for a moment, State College is a rural community focused on the University Park campus. Here we have a center and a compactness around which the entire community revolves. The challenge of higher education is at the center of our life as a community.
In State College we are at some distance from major communication centers and metropolitan areas. We are thus able to focus and sustain our quest and discussion without the distractions and formlessness of big cities. We are also free of the stresses and pressures from national trends and lads which other Universities in metropolitan centers facec. Here we can find our own way more easily and see the whole picture more clearly.
In a word, we have space and distance, both physically and mentally, to tackle the problem. But at the same time we are not unconnected to the rest of the world. Indeed the growth of our Commonwealth campuses, our extension service, and our research and economic development functions have placed us into greater connectedness with the world than ever before. Thus Penn State can have the best of both worlds, both by being totally in touch, and still with proper distance.
To be in the world but no tof it has always been the essence of a real University. The University has always been the idea of a place where men and women could get a little distant from the world in order to gain a greater sense and perspective on the human experience. Here in State College we have that distance, not only in a metaphysical sense, but also in a real and tangible way, while at the same time being anything but an ivory tower.
In this special community setting, we have the opportunity to create a very special organism for sensing the world, of giving higher education a new articulation and new definition, and of giving back a real vision to an outside world thirsting for some deeper meaning to it all.
What is this lack, this need, which is at the heart of the crisis in higher education today? Why is it that former University presidents ask questions like “What is a college education anyway?” or “What is the purpose of your College or University?” These are the questions that our community is situated to answer.
As always, the answer is so simply and yet so profound, so great and yet so ordinary, that only a whole community can respond to it creatively and concretely. Once again John Henry Newman furnishes us with the polestar we need for our quest:
“A University,” he said, “is the great, ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivated the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life.”
That is a definition of a University which no program can encompass, no amount of money can buy. It can only be accomplished by a community dedicated to things higher than itself.
The catch is that no University can give anything like that to the world unless the poeple of that University community live it themselves. To raise the intellectual tone of society, we must be first able to raise the intellectual tone of our own community. To dream of cultivating the public mind and purifying the national taste, we must first cultivate our own community’s mind, and uplift our own community’s taste. To supply true principles and fixed aims to popular enthusiasms, wee must first find and articulate true principles for ourselves and set for ourselves fixed aims which we believe are worth achieving. To give enlargement to the ideas of our age, we must first enlarge our own minds.
But we have, here in the splendid isolation of the Nittany Valley, the traditions, customs, history, dreams, hopes, feelings and people necessaryto take on these goals as a community. We did it once before when Penn State was founded. We can do it again. We have the space and the distance necessary to allow a new seed to take root. We can, if wee choose, take on the challenge of giving the idea of a University community new meaning.
“It is in Universities,” wrote Lord Haldane, “…that the soul of a people mirrors itself.” We must forge a new mirror which can gather up all the disparate rays of light and refract them into a new image of ourselves as a people. This is the challenge to higher education which we are situated as a University community to take up.
The name of President Giamatti’s book which I deliberately failed to mention at the beginning of this article, is A Free and Open Space: The Real World of the University. The significant words in that title are “real” and “space.” We here in State College truly have real space, a “free and open space,” and we have many more than one dreamer of the real University whose seeds are here.
We can take on the challenge President Giamatti sees of redefining and rearticultating a new meaning for the University. Then we shall truly become the heirs of our Founders who gave higher education a new form and a new meaning when they founded Penn State in the face of a similar challenge to rethink higher education 133 years ago.
This article appears in the January issue of State College, the magazine, just a few days before Christmas. One Christmas morning give at least a moment to the thought of the new hope to which we could give birth in this Happy Valley of ours.
