The Future of Ohio’s Regional Campuses: Three Essential Elements
It is a pleasure to be with you this morning and to speak with you for a few minutes regarding the potential of Ohio’s regional campuses.
Let me begin with the bad news. The bad news is that Ohio has under–invested in the education of its citizens. By almost any standard, we have taken an approach guaranteed to ensure a continuing brain drain, a further decline in average income, and, in general, a reduction in opportunity for the state and for its people.
The good news is that we have in place a network of educational institutions ideally situated to address this situation and turn it around. Given adequate support, Ohio’s regional campuses stand ready to play a lead role in returning the state to its former eminence as a leading economic producer and source of opportunity.
Our regional campuses already have in place many of the elements most critical to such a turnaround. Their commitment to workforce education is clear. Their ties to their communities are solid. Their record of dedication to the development of their students, one by one, has earned them the respect of all Ohioans. Their schedules, their campuses, and their programs all testify to such dedication. They have proved their agility by identifying and responding to emerging needs for higher education, and they have made creative and efficient use of available resources.
But there are at least three elements required if Ohio’s regional campuses are to succeed in the job they are so well qualified to do. The first of these is adequate support from the state. Tuition rates that in Ohio represent access to higher education would be seen in many states as a barrier. We are passing on to our students far too high a percentage of their higher education costs, with the result that many are deterred from the pursuit of higher education, while others must either work killing hours to pay for their education or accept the burden of sustained debt.
Ohio must learn what other states know: higher education is not only a personal benefit but one critical to the welfare of the entire state. Thomas Jefferson offered us a delightful phrase when he spoke of higher education as a “publick happiness.” That is what higher education should be. We need to be willing to make the investment if we are to reap the reward of a more prosperous, self–assured, and forward–looking Ohio.
The second missing element is vision. Through some curious twist of logic, a state lagging far behind in the number of its citizens earning baccalaureate degrees has exercised itself more in the prevention of program duplication than in the expansion of access to higher education. No one wants to waste state resources, but we know—and you know better than most—just how many citizens in Ohio are indeed “place bound.” For reasons of employment, family obligations, or cultural ties, we have thousands of individuals in this state who are well qualified to benefit from a baccalaureate education but unable to undertake the travel or the relocation that would be required.
This is your job, I should add, not that of the community colleges. Their mission is a different one, and they perform it well. Your mission, in my view, is to be Ohio State, or Kent State, or Ohio University, or the University of Cincinnati in the community you serve. You bring the challenge, the breadth, the opportunity of a university to your region with an immediacy and a capacity for personal attention that distinguishes you. In my first year at Kent State, I made a point of visiting all of our regional campuses, some more than once. And I soon learned that while I thought of our campuses as Ashtabula, or Salem, or Stark, the students attending those campuses identified themselves as students of Kent State. That is how it should be.
And it was that recognition that inspired my notorious fine of one dollar for anyone who refers to a “branch” campus—or, for that matter, to the “main” campus. As I learned one morning at Salem, the campus a student chooses to undertake or continue an education is the “main campus” for that student. Even General Colin Powell had to pay. When he praised the good work of our Trumbull “branch,” Dean David Allen thanked him and sent him a bill—which he duly paid.
The third missing element may be our capacity for describing your mission in ways that clarify what you do and that create an appropriate level of appreciation for your mission. To this end, I would propose Ernest Boyer’s definition of scholarship as discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
Advantages of Regional Campuses
In each of these areas, while you face some constraints, you enjoy certain advantages. Your resources for discovery may be limited in comparison with those to be found today on campuses in Kent or Columbus, but as this AURCO 2002 conference demonstrates, with OhioLINK, an expanded capacity for computer simulation, and other available resources, there is an expanding potential for the scholarship of discovery throughout the regional campuses.
With regard to the scholarship of integration, you may enjoy an advantage. The opportunity to confer regularly with colleagues from many different disciplines represents an intellectual discipline of its own, one which many of you have exploited fully.
Let me offer an example. Having been asked to prepare in one month’s time an essay for Kent State’s Democracy Symposium this spring, I quickly reviewed the literature on my subject and found one book above all that addressed my interest. I read the pertinent chapter with growing appreciation for the author, whose original insights were solidly grounded in a thorough and discerning integration of both primary and secondary sources. I am convinced that the book is one of the two most authoritative on the novelist Walker Percy, and its author is a professor on the Kent State Trumbull campus.
In the scholarship of application, regional campus faculty are the true pioneers. Seeking alignments of scholarly productivity with community need, the regional campuses have created distinctive partnerships of their own. At the annual conference of the Ohio Learning Network, I attended a session offered by the educational coordinator for Cincinnati Public Television. There I learned of applications developed at Kent State Stark. The education of a provost!
Finally, there is teaching. Ohio is blessed with dedicated teachers, but the regional campuses may enjoy an edge. Your students testify to your concern with their intellectual development as individuals and to your interest in their welfare following graduation. On a recent visit to Kent State Stark, I learned from an English major there why he preferred to complete his program of study on that campus despite opportunities to transfer. It had to do with the quality of the teaching he was receiving and with his sense of an intellectual community joining faculty and students.
As we understand more clearly the mission and potential of our regional campuses, we will be in a stronger position to seek from the state the two missing elements in your future: adequate support and an appreciation for the contribution you can and should make to the baccalaureate education of Ohio’s underserved citizens.