A Beacon Bright and Clear

The University and the Common Good

Sara M. Evans

Thank you so much.  It is a tremendous thrill for me to share this day with you.  Rituals like this are powerful.  They mark a liminal moment.  One phase of your life is completed.  The next – for which you have long been preparing – is about to begin.  We gather here to recognize what you have accomplished and launch you into the future surrounded by the family, friends, teachers and mentors who have been with you on the journey so far and who promise to continue to be there for you. 

Graduation (completion)/ Commencement (beginning). 

Here we are.  Your potential fills the air, and we breathe it with you in celebration and hope.

I want to think with you briefly today about the fact that we are also in a liminal moment in this university – and in public higher education more generally – and ask you as you move out into the next phase of your lives to take a message with you about the university as a public institution whose products – in the forms of educated students and new knowledge – are public goods. 

You marched into Northrop Auditorium under the following inscription:

The University of Minnesota

Founded in the Faith that Men [and women] are Ennobled by Understanding

Dedicated to the Advancement of Learning and the Search for Truth

Devoted to the Instruction of Youth and the Welfare of the State

This university, from its founding, has focused its core mission on education and the search for knowledge "for the welfare of the State."  However, as Professor Ken Keller warned last year from this same podium, there is a serious move afoot to redefine both education and knowledge as private goods, of benefit to individuals rather than to society – and that in turn dictates that individuals, rather than the public, should pay.  This is a dangerous direction, signaled by higher tuition and falling state support.  It is up to us to respond, to proclaim "near and far" that the University of Minnesota is a "beacon strong and clear" to all the people of the state. 

A year ago I had the good fortune to serve on a task force charged with articulating the value of the University in non-quantitative terms.  We took our slogan from Albert Einstein:  "Not everything that matters can be counted, and not everything that can be counted matters."  Our task was to think about the fundamental purposes of the University of Minnesota and how we can best communicate those purposes to the people of the state – whose university we are.  The metaphor we chose was the lighthouse.

• Beam is available to all.
• Any ship can use its light to avoid rocks and shoals and to steer a safe course.

Common goods – like air and water – are the shared features of our natural world that no one "owns," and we must care for them together or risk the consequences of degrading them.  Public goods – like the lighthouse beam and this university – are created by human action for the good of all, the common good.  Let me quote from our report:

"Like the beam of the lighthouse, the University produces public goods that cannot be hoarded by any one group but are available to all. … Like the lighthouse, the University provides the light that enhances all of our lives. …  If the light is bright, we clearly see the way ahead.  But if the light should disappear, we would find ourselves in the dark and suddenly become aware of its fundamental value." ¹

An educated citizenry is a public good, fundamental to a democratic society.  The production of knowledge is a public good when scholars are free to pursue questions of their own choosing and when the results are openly shared.  This is where research universities are different from corporate research institutions where "intellectual property" is generating huge profits for drug companies, agriculture, and industry.

What would it mean for all knowledge to be defined as a private good?  It is easy to see the danger of defining the purpose of science as in the service of immediate profits:  avoiding research that might step on powerful toes [as for example the research on tobacco which our own School of Public Health pursued against strong pressures from industry to drop it], or be less profitable as in the case of "orphan drugs" for rare diseases or basic science whose possible uses are unknown, and suppressing findings that might be unprofitable (as recently revealed about studies of several very popular painkillers).  In my field of History, stories of the past would in the hands of elites who use it to authorize their own power like the southern whites I grew up with who said that slavery was benign and anyway it didn’t cause "the war".

Indeed, a world in which knowledge is a private good would have little use for the intangible benefits of the liberal arts preferring instead the more instrumental benefits of "training" over "education."  Yet the presence of this university has made Minneapolis and St. Paul major centers for literature and the arts.  It was a basic education in the Arts and Sciences that set most of you on the path to professional education.  Humanities, Arts, and Sciences teach undergraduates how to pursue knowledge for its own sake.  They introduce students to a diversity of disciplinary approaches with their different ways of asking questions and generating knowledge.  There is no better preparation for life than to learn alongside a practitioner how to pursue knowledge for the common good – for its own sake.  As Tennyson said in his poem "Ulysses":

"To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."

Let me give an example from my discipline about where this freedom can take us.  In 1976 my department decided to allocate a position to a field that did not yet exist, women’s history.  They had the wisdom to recognize that a new set of ideas was challenging the very definition of what counts as history and to take the risk of hiring someone – me – to teach and write in that field.  Today I have more than a dozen colleagues (not all women, by the way) for whom the study of women and gender in just about every part of the world is central to their research and teaching.  As a department we have been at the leading edge of an intellectual revolution involving not only gender but comparative and international studies that has transformed virtually every discipline in the humanities and the social sciences.

When our committee asked students what they valued most about their education at the University of Minnesota, they pointed to the an almost unlimited access to the study the full range of human experience over time and space, to understand people different from themselves.  This prepared them, they said, for civic engagement with a world in which they must be able to understand points of view far from their own. 

Finally, a world in which knowledge is a private good would be a world in which professional education would become prohibitively expensive, and some of it might well be turned over to corporations as professions lose their independence.  The fact that 40% of the practicing professionals in this state – physicians, lawyers, social workers, teachers, artists, etc. etc. were trained right here at the University of Minnesota would probably change, and frankly I don’t really know how we would manage to sustain the remarkable, educated labor force that we now enjoy.

I know that I am talking against the grain here.  Public support for the University of Minnesota (like public research universities across the country) is in decline.  Today it is about 24% of our budget.  The day is not far away when tuition will bring in more funding than state allocations.  This is the context for our new strategic planning initiative.  This university is making it clear that it intends not only to remain one of the best but to get even better.

I believe that it is essential, however, that we be very, very clear that we value excellence as a public good.  The case for public research universities is precisely that. I would argue that nothing is more basic to the future of our democracy, and if we make it available only to those fortunate enough to be born into families that are able to pay, the “welfare of the state,” the common good, will be irreparably harmed.  We all know, however, that there are serious obstacles to making this case.

In the current political climate the very concepts of "public purposes" and the "common good" are under fire.  When my daughter complained about how much taxes she had to pay after her first year of full-time employment, she didn’t realize she was going to evoke one of those 50-minute lectures we professors are famous for.  I found myself explaining to her in the most basic ways I could think of that the very fabric of her daily life rested on things we take absolutely for granted – roads, schools, parks, public health, food safety – all of which are available to all because we all share the cost.  Taxes are not a bad thing in a democratic society.

There are hopeful signs.  The town of Salinas, California, home of John Steinbeck, recently made the news when, in the wake of a city vote against raising taxes, it announced the closing all of the city’s public libraries.  But today there are stories of possibility there.  Volunteers have been going door to door talking with voters, asking them whether they understood that this would be the consequence of not raising taxes – not many did – and generating a more inclusive public conversation about what their community needs and how it will pay.  That kind of political education, which draws citizens into the substantive conversation about what we value in our shared life (as opposed simple-minded tax v. no tax) has the capacity to change the political climate.  To quote Jim Wallis:  "You don't change politicians by changing wet fingers in the wind, but by changing the wind."

Now back to you – sitting here waiting to have that degree conferred.  You are the ones we have been waiting for.  We proudly send you out, ready to engage the world with the knowledge and skills you acquired here, prepared to continue the search to understand the world in new ways, to offer it new discoveries and new works of art, and to participate wherever you are as active, engaged citizens.  Carry this with you.  It is up to you to ensure that what you have had will remain available to future generations.  Help us to spread the word that public universities – but most especially this University of Minnesota – must remain "beacons bright and clear" for the common good.

Congratulations and best wishes.  You’re on your way.

¹ "A Lighthouse Build On A Rock-Solid Foundation Lighting The Way For A Bright Future."  Report of the Instrumentalization Task Force.  University of Minnesota, September 1, 2004.  Available at http://www1.umn.edu/usenate/fee/lighthousereport.html.