The Uses of a University Education:  Mr. Jefferson's Vision Confronts a New Reality

Fall 2004 Graduate School Commencement Address presented December 10, 2004 by Kenneth H. Keller, Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs

Good afternoon.  Let me add my welcome to all of you and especially to those of you here in front of me, our honorees.  I’m really delighted and honored to be here with you today.  For people like myself who’ve spent most of our adult lives in the university world—I completed my 40th year at the University this fall—the occasion of a graduation never fails to be a deeply satisfying reminder of what this enterprise is about. 

You know, this is not a country with many formalities or ceremonies or rituals and, in fact, over time there seem to be fewer of them.  But I’m grateful that this celebration, at least, continues—because what we acknowledge and reward today seems so overwhelmingly important: the thoughtful, disciplined, creative power of mind that each of you should be grateful for possessing and proud for exercising.  So the music and the processional and the gathering of family and friends speak to both seriousness of purpose and joy of success.

But this celebration is not only about individual accomplishment.  It’s about a nation’s commitment and a community’s gain.  Because we know that in providing broad educational opportunity, a nation reflects its most fundamental values, and the success of the system, your collective successes, is the best assurance of the nation’s future health.  These more public purposes have always been central to the role of higher education here in the United States.  The form of our universities may have taken much from the traditions of Europe, but here they took on a distinctly American character.  No one captured that character, that new purpose, that vision so well as Thomas Jefferson, who helped found the University of Virginia, the first American public university, arguing that it was necessary “…in order to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown equally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.”

Let me repeat those words: “…in order to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.” 

Notice where Mr. Jefferson begins: not with some idea of public charity, not with some notion of providing for individual gain, not with some glorification of smart people, but with a pragmatic public purpose—“to avail the state of those talents”.  And what follows is the recognition that talent is not class or wealth related, and that a hardheaded, ambitious young country had better find it where it is, because it will need all of it.  And if it is not sought for, and it is not cultivated, it will perish without use, wasted, a clear message to people who understood the principle of stewardship of the land and the source of their wellbeing.

This vision of higher education—in fact, all education—has been part and parcel of the growth of this country since its beginning.  Our commitment to education has always led our growth and success as a nation, through the 19th century and the 20th century, through the industrial revolution, through depressions, wars, and peace.  That is, our commitment to education has anticipated our needs, not merely responded to our successes.

For example: Minnesota’s commitment to provide a free high school education for all of its citizens came about in the 1870s.  At the time, a much smaller fraction of its population was actually graduating from high school than graduates from college today, so that it was not a question of absolute individual need.  But the State saw, rightly, that it was in its own interest to encourage people to get that education because we needed to cultivate those talents to provide us with the people power to build our future.

On the other hand, it was never very easy to know just what kind of education to provide. Mr. Jefferson himself—statesman, farmer, architect, aesthete—thought about it on many levels, perhaps most famously and importantly when he argued that education would “…render the people the safe… guardians of their own liberty”; that is, understanding history would help them to anticipate and avoid the mistakes of the past; that knowing enough to be participants in government would protect them against the corrupt ambitions of the few.

But he also understood that it was important to teach all of what he called the “useful sciences” and for every student to focus on “…such of the sciences as their genius shall have led them to.”  (I hope you appreciate that nice turn of phrase to describe your talents).  In the 18th century, the term “science” was used to describe all fields of knowledge, and Jefferson was recognizing that we have the need and obligation to produce experts, professionals, scholars in the many disciplines on which a country depends.

The education of generalists, the guardians of our liberty; the education of specialists, the talented people on whom much of our wellbeing depends.  We have always worried about how to balance those two goals.  Do they apply to different groups of people?  Should they be blended in each person’s education?  Should we differentiate undergraduates and graduates?  And where does practical education come into the mix?  That debate has reappeared again and again in our history—at the time of the Morrill Land-Grant Act, following World War II when huge numbers of veterans returned to college campuses, in the social upheavals of the ‘60s, and it continues today.  We aren’t going to resolve the debate this afternoon, but I want to make a point that I think is particularly appropriate for you who have achieved the highest level in our education system and it is best made with another quotation, one attributed to Halford J. Mackinder.

Mackinder, a professor of geography at Oxford at the turn of the last century, had this to say, “All knowledge is one.  Its division into subjects is a concession to human weakness.”  Think about that for a moment. It isn’t a putdown of specialization; far from it.  Instead, it recognizes a rather clever strategy that we humans have evolved: as we have confronted the overwhelming challenge of understanding this complex world, we’ve discovered that we can break that challenge down into pieces, specializations, and thereby cope with it.  In fact, it’s worked quite well and through our specializations we have advanced our understanding enormously.

But there’s a caution.  Until we learn to put the various pieces of knowledge back together, to see the relations among fields, to synthesize a complete picture, we’ll come up short in our understanding of this world and our ability to use our knowledge for its benefit. 

For you, completing graduate studies, there are two important messages there.  First, your education, more than that at earlier levels, has focused on specialization, on learning some one set of things very well.  But now you are going to have to find connections, to position your expertise within a larger framework, to begin to think systemically, in the professions, in corporate life, in public life.

And, second, as you find those connections, you may also find that Mr. Jefferson’s two goals—training citizens and training scholars—may not be so different after all.  My colleague, Harry Boyte, speaks often and eloquently about the nature of civil society.  His message is that citizenship is not an extracurricular activity, a volunteer effort, a life separate from one’s profession; he argues that you need to figure out how your profession, your expertise, and your knowledge, can define your role in the political life of your community.  Again, it’s a question of putting it all back together, of recognizing that a society is not merely a collection of people, but a collection of people with many ways of knowing, and that their talents, their ways of knowing, must be combined and organized around the very practical goal, in Jefferson’s words, of “rendering the people the safe guardians of their own liberty.”

For universities and for the society that sponsors and supports them, Mackinder’s words provide a different lesson.  What he reminds us is that the advances in one field will often drive or depend upon advances in a quite different field, and not in easily predictable ways.  New insights in condensed matter physics may—frequently do—help us to understand how biological systems function.  The progress in molecular biology helps us to understand how to assemble new materials that have properties of extraordinary strength or ability to absorb the sun’s energy, or to conduct electricity.  Studies in communication, sociology and political science are necessary adjuncts to plant genomics research if society is to actually benefit from the promise of genetic engineering.  Philosophy, bioethics, and law are key to properly thinking through many issues that arise in the course of medical research.

So Mr. Jefferson provided us with a vision of what an American university should accomplish and Mr. Mackinder helped us to understand why it’s not so easy, but also how we might approach the task.  The question I want to raise now is, “How are these ideas faring today?”  And the short and disquieting answer is that they seem to be getting lost in a maelstrom of shifting public values and real economic stresses; what I would sadly label as “a new reality.”

One could argue that higher education is suffering from its own successes.  In the last half century, hugely increasing numbers of people have been enrolling in our colleges and universities.  Universities like ours are producing ever more research to stimulate our economy, improve our health system, and increase our understanding of our world and ourselves.  Many of you here have contributed to those efforts.  About half of all of the basic research in the United States, is carried out at fewer than 100 universities, of which this is one.  Not at federal laboratories, not in corporate America, not in research institutes, but right here and in other places like this one.  The United States has no national universities; it depends on this federation of state and private institutions to serve its national needs as well as its state or regional needs.  We in Minnesota share that national responsibility with great universities elsewhere, and we do it well and we do it proudly.

But all of this costs money.  Higher education, which cost less than $1 billion a year in 1940 now costs about $300 billion a year.  Instead of the 1.5 million students we had in 1940, we now have almost 15 million.  Those are big numbers.  And when the bill gets large, those paying it, particularly in government, look for reasons to cut it back, which can range from arguing that it really ought to be done more cheaply to constructing reasons why society may not need all of it or, at least, may not be responsible for it.  And on the other side, those vying for the money often choose tactics that maximize short term gain at the expense of longstanding principles.  Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Mackinder suffer in such an environment.

Consider this: in Alabama, in the recent election, the voters defeated an amendment to remove language from its constitution which stated, “…nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as creating or recognizing any right to education or training at public expense.”  And the reason for wanting to retain that language?  The fear that some activist judge or misguided Washington bureaucrat might use it as a weapon to force costly increases in the state’s education bill.  So, as a hedge, the state turned its back on one of the commitments that has always been part of the American dream.

Not all of the examples are so far from home.  Two years ago, the Minnesota Private College Council, a consortium of the distinguished private colleges in this state, commissioned and distributed a paper on the funding of higher education, written by a professor of economics at one of its colleges.  Let me quote the operating premise of the paper, “… most commentators agree that the social benefits of higher education pale in comparison with those associated with K-12 schooling.  In short, most of the benefits of higher education go to the individual.” 

Now there was a good tactical reason for making that assertion.  If higher education were simply a private good, there would be no strong reason to make direct appropriations to public colleges and universities.  The state could let students pay their own way, and could give support to students it judged to be needy and the private colleges assumed, probably rightly, that more of those dollars would to flow to them.

I don’t mean to debate that position here.  Our private colleges have much to offer and we should welcome their partnership.  But should we sacrifice Mr. Jefferson’s vision to the struggle to get a bigger share of diminishing public resources?  Will we not, in the end, lose more than we gain, throwing the baby out with the bath water?

Sadly, that seems to be precisely what is happening.  When we question the public purpose of higher education, we allow it to be diminished in the public eye, to be treated as a lower priority. Minnesota, which used to devote fully 15% of its state budget to post-secondary education, now allocates less than 10%, and private as well as public institutions are the losers.  When you read in a headline that the Legislature has “protected education” as it dealt with a shortfall, know that the term “education” no longer includes “higher education”. We, it is alleged, are about personal gain rather than public benefit.

The implication is that the level of education that this state needs to encourage its citizens to achieve has not changed in the 130 years since a free high school education became available for all.  Despite all of our arguments that an educated work force is the key to our economic wellbeing, we are still willing to say that a high school education is the limit of our public responsibility; anything beyond it is a private benefit.  And the consequence?  Skyrocketing tuition, a reduction in the last 10 years from 43% to 36% of our 18-24 year olds enrolling for post-secondary education; and “those talents that nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, perishing without use,”

There is, unfortunately, still more.  As tuition rises, as students are asked to pay most of the costs of their instruction, universities will and do respond by tailoring their offerings to the most popular fields, the courses most able to pay for themselves in a market approach to education.  When we view education as primarily a private good, the interest of the public must take a back seat.  The state may have need for more veterinarians, but the logic of the market would not support it; students can’t pay the actual costs of a veterinary education and ever expect to recoup their investment.  For its national security, the nation may need some people to speak the languages of the Middle East or central Asia, but unsubsidized language departments can hardly afford to hire a faculty member to teach what will necessarily be only a few students.  In that circumstance, students will be able to learn Spanish at any college in the State, and Urdu or Arabic at none.  Thus, a University constructed on the principle that higher education is a private good may be forced to compromise on serving a public purpose.

Let me be sure, as I come to the end of these remarks, that I am not misunderstood.  No nation, no state, is so wealthy that it can ignore restraint in how it spends public money.  Moreover, every public university has to share the responsibility of the stewardship of limited public resources.  But in times of fiscal restraint, even more than in times of plenty, it is vital to remember what an American public university is about; how it serves society, how it works, what it can be at its best.

At any moment in time, a nation or a state must weigh priorities and make choices.  But trying to ease the pain of those choices by distorting or ignoring the opportunity costs, turns a temporary setback into a permanent loss.  If we allow Mr. Jefferson’s vision to be sacrificed to the political convenience of the moment, it would be no less than a tragedy.  Further, although it may be attractive to a budgeter to think that we can economize by cutting the basic support for the University and making it up by investments in a limited number of fields, say biotechnology or computer science or energy, all of which are important, that nevertheless misses Mr. Mackinder’s insight about the interconnectedness of knowledge.  It makes little sense to pay for the icing if you’ve thrown out the cake.

So we have our work cut out for us.  It is time to reconnect with the past in order to succeed in the future.  This is clearly a day for celebration and what better time to remind ourselves of the heritage of American higher education.  This University is now in its 153rd year.  You now join those two people who first received degrees within 100 yards of this auditorium in 1873.  I hope we’ve forged a connection with you that will last the rest of your lives.  I know that in helping you to achieve your goals, we have benefited this community and this nation.  That’s a source of pride for us, and I hope that as you see us from near or far over the course of your own careers, we will give you further cause for celebration.