Popular Continuous Improvement Symposium Draws Over 650 to Dallas in September

One of AACSB's most popular programs, the Continuous Improvement Symposium (CIS), drew over 650 people representing over 200 schools to Dallas in mid-September. The symposium theme, "Challenges and Opportunities: Sustaining Your Commitment to Quality," recognized that incorporating the learning experiences of business schools dealing with similar environmental, resource allocation, and faculty and stakeholder involvement issues may be the most efficient approach to translating a school's challenges into opportunities. More than 50 plenary and workshop sessions led by over 90 presenters focused on programs and processes that strengthen curricula, document outcomes, develop administrators and faculty, improve instruction, and enhance intellectual activity.

The symposium's kickoff plenary, "Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Universities," featured Shirley Strum Kenny, president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Kenny is widely recognized for her initiatives to build bridges between the academic and business communities. In order to achieve an institutional goal of enhancing undergraduate education, she chaired the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, a group charged with creating a new model of undergraduate education for major research universities. The Commission's work, which was funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, culminated in a number of recommendations designed to stimulate new debate about the nature of undergraduate education in research universities that will produce widespread and sweeping reform. A copy of the report, "Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities," was provided to all CIS registrants.

The controversial report revealed that research universities too often have failed - and continue to fail - their undergraduate populations. What is needed now, it stated, is a new model of undergraduate education that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole. "Members of the Commission developed a list of 10 ways to change undergraduate education, which actually provided a framework through which institutions could look at what they're doing in a comprehensive fashion," said Kenny. "Every institution has its own culture and needs and community, but the framework is proving to be valuable to schools."

The response to the Commission's report has been extraordinary and surprised Commission members, said Kenny. One reason for all the attention, she said, is because for a lot of years "we've kept this dirty little secret about undergraduate education, we've talked about how we involve students in research, how we are doing these wonderful freshman seminars, when, in fact, very few students actually are getting that kind of experience. We now have a generation of parents who know that isn't true because they went to universities and had the same kind of experience and they know what to expect for their children." Kenny said there now is much more of a consumer's attitude toward what happens in undergraduate education. "The fact that employers often are disappointed with the product we are putting out as undergraduates makes this exceedingly important - to us and to students. The report really was a call to arms," she said.

The state of undergraduate education at research universities is such a crisis, an issue of such magnitude and volatility that universities must galvanize themselves to respond, said the Commission. Research universities cannot continue to operate as though the world around them is that of 1930 or 1950 or 1980, it stated, adding that not only must universities respond to the change, they ought to lead it.

Plenary II, titled "New Pathways II: From Inquiry to Practice - Faculty Careers and Development," featured R. Eugene Rice, scholar in residence and director of the Forum on Faculty Roles and Rewards at the American Association for Higher Education in Washington, D.C. In addition to directing the Forum, Rice also provides leadership for the New Pathways project, "Academic Careers for a New Century: From Inquiry to Practice."

Rice focused much of his presentation on issues related to faculty but urged delegates to prepare for increased pressures for change throughout the industry. "We are facing a major transformation in higher education," he said, "and particularly as it relates to our work." There is a move today, he said, from a focus on faculty to a focus on learning, on the student as learner and on the reliance of the community on the university. "There also is a major shift from professional autonomy to new responsibilities for institution-building and that is a major cultural change," he said. "The way we think about our work individually also is changing, moving from individualistic ways of working, focusing on "my" work, to a focus on "our" work ... the capacity for collaboration and engagement. Business schools, with cohort model, with team-building, can provide a lot of help to the rest of the university," he said.

Rice outlined a number of dramatic changes under way that affect the professoriate, including pressure to develop a culture of evidence ("How do you know that what you're claiming does indeed happen?"); a shift in the way in which faculty think about their careers - from career dependence to career resilience ("How do we get faculty that are self-renewing, self-motivating?"); and a shift from viewing colleges and universities as separate, set-apart worlds, to a place where faculty will be called upon to take responsibility for public life and for democratic participation.

"People look on colleges and universities and see them as a place where members of society struggle for competing advantage," said Rice. "There's the widely held perception that there's a serious disconnection between higher education and the larger purposes of American society. Higher education is regarded by all too many as a private benefit and not a public good. We've sold higher education on this basis," he said. "If you take that perspective, then what we value and have valued about the academic career makes no sense - professional autonomy, discretion over our time, tenure - that makes little sense to a larger public. The faculty role has lost its social meaning - it is tied to the common good. That is an issue we have to address. The future of the faculty career depends on the legitimacy of the special role of the college and university in the larger society."

Rice described two forms of rationality: procedural rationality, having to do with the questions of "how" and substantive rationality, having to do with questions of "why." Society increasingly is getting caught up in the procedural, the technical, in process, he said. "We do more than we can care for. The push on technology is just going to exacerbate the dominance of that form of rationality," he said. The questions of "how" go a long way, added Rice, while pointing out that "it is not enough. As we redefine the faculty role, the challenge is to have faculty who are more engaged, more collaborative, more accountable, more responsible, but also are autonomous enough that the hard substantive questions get asked. This is a particularly important question for business schools," said Rice, "because they are very good at procedural rationality; what's the place of those substantive questions - where do they get asked - how does that get built into the curriculum? How do we maintain a faculty that can, in fact, ask those kinds of questions?"

Another major shift under way is a shift in culture, said Rice. "We're in a major struggle between a collegial culture on the one hand to a new press on the managerial side. Part of it has to due with the growth and increasing growth of business schools within our institutions. But they are two different cultures." Business faculty can move between the two cultures much better than the liberal arts faculty can, said Rice, pointing out that the managerial culture comes out of the corporate sector and tends to emphasize the bottom line, things like accountability, productivity, efficiency. "Often it's more hierarchical, customer-oriented, a different orientation to time," he said. The collegial culture comes out of the liberal arts, out of the research industry. It is faculty-oriented, leaders are chosen from peers (the faculty), there's a strong emphasis on the "community" of scholars, academic freedom is critical, and shared governance is important. "Faculty prize very much the use of discretionary time," said Rice. "Whereas in the managerial culture, there's an organizational time that takes hold. And then you have, within the collegial culture, an emphasis on merit - whereas in the managerial culture, the emphasis is on worth."

Both cultures are important, said Rice, emphasizing that "there's no going back - both cultures are here. But we've got to be able to become bilingual, bicultural, to speak across those lines. We've got to develop a collaborative culture. We no longer can afford that split. Those in the quality movement, those in business schools who really understand the managerial culture and yet appreciate the important values on the collegial side, need to provide leadership and help us develop learning organizations that are bicultural, where there is the creating of the future, where the institution really is proactive, interdependent, systemically oriented, learning-centered. The pressure is on to develop a collaborative culture where we can work together, that transcends both of these cultures and brings them together," he said.

Rice then talked about the New Pathways project at AAHE and the three areas selected for special focus and further study: faculty appointment policies, post-tenure review and the tenure process. "We are pressed to come up with a new and broader vision of what it means to be a scholar," he said.

In closing, Rice said, "As we've worked with faculty priorities and trying to match them up with institutional mission, we've moved toward bringing together our scholarly loves with societal needs and that is the challenge of the future and it is what gives special meaning to the calling that all of us feel in our work."

Plenary and workshop sessions of the Continuous Improvement Symposium were audiotaped by Nationwide Recording Services, Inc., and can be ordered through the company's Web site.

The 1999 Continuous Improvement Symposium will be held September 12-14 in Minneapolis, Minn.