Part 6: 'The Seven Breakthrough Solutions'

Over the past few months, discussions have taken place over various reforms for higher education. What are your thoughts on these reforms, including the Seven Solutions for Higher Education, which have dominated media reports over the last few months?

Transcript

Kathryn Greenwade ’88, Vice President, The Association of Former Students: Over the past few months, discussions have taken place over various reforms for higher education. I invite each of you, beginning with Dr. Box, to respond to our next question. What are your thoughts on these reforms, including the Seven Solutions for Higher Education, which have dominated media reports over the last few months?


Dr. Richard Box ’61, Chairman, The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents: Well, you know, in our positions, Dr. Loftin, Bowen and I, get a lot of advice, and so I think, I view this as a third-party group that’s very interested in higher education and has given some advice. Some advice we take and some advice we don’t take, but in this particular instance, I think that some things that happened on the campus 100 miles west of us somehow changed and spun out of control; thank goodness it hasn’t happened to this campus. I know there’s been some concerns about that. But, as I’ve said, the most important thing for us to do is to focus on the needs of higher education in Texas and the problems that we’ve just discussed and how we’ll go about to solve those problems, and we want to do that in a collegial manner. Elaine Mendoza, who is, as I mentioned previously, she’s an Aggie, Class of 87 of aeronautical engineering, very bright, been on the Higher Education Coordinating Board as vice chairman, and she’s helping us move through and develop protocols for these issues and how we handle them, so, the Seven Solutions are, as I think Michael told me one time, the seven deadly sins for higher education. I think it was well meaning, but it took a different connotation from what I think the original intent was. So we still have those problems out there that we want to handle and we will go about handling those in our own way.


Dr. R. Bowen Loftin ’71, President, Texas A&M University: I think it’s worth saying again, I’ve said it many times in the past, but first of all, the seven solutions are not brand new. They’ve been around several years. I first learned of them in 2008, so they’ve been here for a while. As Chairman Box said, the most recent discussions in Austin have sort of elevated that and made them seem like they’re brand new. They’ve been around for awhile, and there are similar kinds of things you’ll find across the nation that all derive from what we said earlier in this conversation about public perception. That’s where I think the root of the whole issue is really lying, is in public perception of higher education being a private good and being inefficient and being non-transparent. Those are the kinds of things that are out there generically, and different places have sort of codified those into certain kinds of policy, proposals, or solutions, as these were called right here.

If you dissect the Seven Breakthrough Solutions proposed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and I said to many people, some of them at the very highest levels are basically things we would all agree on. Why should we not reward good teaching? What’s wrong with that? What I’ve said all along, though, is it’s how you succeed that’s important. We’re not all the same. We’ve already discussed the fact that Texas A&M University is the flagship institution with 10 other sister institutions out there that are regionally focused. We’re not the same. So how this university might go about rewarding good teaching may be different than what you might do in Laredo or Corpus Christi or Stephenville or wherever you might go. So what I’ve really talked to the board about in particular is that I think A&M needs to find solutions, or rather pathways, I should say, to these solutions that makes sense for it. I think that’s what we’ve been doing for awhile.

We’ve been talking about how we can reward good teaching. By the way, we do that here, and thanks to The Association in many ways. The Association for years and years has provided resources to the university to reward good teaching and that to me is something we want to expand, not simply keep constant even, but expand. We need to reward those people who really make a huge difference in the lives of our students. That’s a good thing out there and we want to continue working on that.

A lot of us focused on this research/teaching thing. Well, those of us in university settings for my entire lifetime have always heard about research and teaching being at odds. What I try to say very publicly and forcefully is that I’ve never felt that way personally and I think most of our faculty agrees with me that teaching and research go hand in hand. That’s the beauty of being here. If you’re a student at Texas A&M, you get a chance to do something that few others get to do, which is actually work hand in glove with the top person in a particular field. Here at Texas A&M, you can actually be in a classroom led by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and you can also be in a research project one-on-one working with that same person. That’s pretty extraordinary. Those kinds of opportunities come along very seldom and I’m very pleased that our faculty here at Texas A&M don’t simply limit themselves to classroom instruction. They’re accessible to our students in their offices, in the hallways. I can walk in a building any day and I’ll find students walking down the hallway with a faculty member talking to them, asking questions, getting responses, getting advice, and that goes on continuously here at Texas A&M. So that’s the type of interaction I believe that students value immensely. I’ve always said I’ve been far more productive as a teacher in terms of getting an idea across in talking to one or two students at a time in my office with a whiteboard behind them, as opposed to going into a class of 500. So, you can teach some things in a class of 500 very effectively; some things you can’t. The mixtures of modes of teaching are very important to us and here we integrate those very, very directly with research.

At the graduate level, it’s even more fundamental. Sure, graduate students go to classes, they sit in organized sessions all the time, but they really learn their trade, if you will, by going side-by-side with a Michael Benedik here in his laboratory and being guided through the ability to actually do research, to answer hard questions, by developing experiments, conducting experiments, analyzing the data and drawing conclusions. That’s what we do here at Texas A&M. I think those kinds of things are what people have a hard time grasping who haven’t been a part of higher education. They just don’t see how that works, and so, given we haven’t done a good job of explaining how we do our work here at Texas A&M, how it’s not simply a single mode of instruction we go through, but one that covers many, many approaches, many dimensions, and includes research on the part of undergraduates and graduate students both at Texas A&M.


Dr. Michael Benedik, Speaker, Texas A&M Faculty Senate: To say that the seven solutions have been on the minds of faculty members is really understating it. It’s probably the issue that has seriously miffed the majority of faculty in a really, really large way. And the reason is because of a lot of the underlying assumptions behind it and I think a lot of those underlying assumptions are, at least I find them, somewhat insulting and they’re also, I think, many of them are flawed. So why do I say that? That’s a little bit of a leading comment. I think they’re flawed and I think they’re insulting because they are saying a couple of things.

One, some of them are saying higher education is broken, research universities are broken, and they’re also saying faculty don’t work. I would really argue with anyone about those points. Higher education is not broken, Texas A&M is not broken. Tier 1 universities have a real role to play in America and the world and are really critical for educating the future leaders, the future scientists, the future educators, the future engineers, and all that. It’s critical that we have research universities. It’s not a negative to education, it’s a real positive.

So, I want to begin and make a couple of points following up on what Bowen said: research and teaching. They’re really intertwined. They’re inexplicably intertwined. I do research, I have a research lab. I have grants, I have many papers, I don’t work in the lab. Last time I held a pipette was, I don’t know, a year ago. I don’t have a single publication with only my own name. What is called research for me is I have doctoral students working in my lab, I have master’s students working in my lab, I have undergraduates working in my lab, so my research is one-on-one teaching to students. I also take my research and I bring it in the classroom. When I’m teaching one of my classes in biotechnology, which is my area, I always end up the year giving my “research talk” because what it does is it ties the entire semester’s work into how to solve a problem. You can’t separate the two. If someone said how many hours a week do you spend on research and how many hours a week do you spend on teaching, I wouldn’t even be able to answer that question because there’s no boundary. Most of us don’t do them in isolation; faculty members don’t do research half of the time to the exclusion of teaching and teaching to the exclusion of research. They’re all completely intertwined at the graduate level and also at the undergraduate level.

Now, other parts of that whole seven solutions that sort of hurt faculty are (about) rewarding teaching. Great. We think teaching should be rewarded. We recognize that there are some faculty members that do outstanding teaching and we recognize that the majority of faculty members do really good teaching. There’s some really outstanding people. The rest of us would love to be there. But we’re very good. But we all really struggle, we all really work hard to do great teaching. We appreciate being rewarded for it. There’s no problem with that. What’s our concern? Our concern is how they define the criteria for what is good teaching. Is it making students happy? That’s not good teaching. When my students come up to me and say that was a really fun class, I liked it, that makes me smile. I’m glad I pleased them. When I send a student off to a job or off to graduate school and their mentor or employer calls me and says that was an incredible student, I want another one, then I know I did a good job. So, being evaluated by the students at the end of the semester is important, but that’s by no means the whole picture because they are not at a position to know whether I’ve done a good job with them. So that’s been one of the things that’s really upset faculty: the trivialization of excellence and the trivialization of what it is we’re trying to do.

One of the other things is, why not make classes larger? It would be more cost effective. Let’s just make all the classes 50 percent larger; we’d save all that money. That’s true. We could significantly cut the cost of an undergraduate degree, but the value of it would go down, too, because what you do in a classroom of 500 students is not the same as what you do in a classroom of 10 students, and there’s a need for both of them. If you’re just imparting information, that’s not a problem doing with 500 students. Maybe not quite as good, but you can do it. If you’re trying to get people to think, to write, to deal with data, to analyze, and if you’re trying to take those students who’ve gotten the information and moving them to a place where they can do something with it, that’s extraordinarily difficult to do in a large group. That’s why there’s large classes; that’s why there’s small classes. So, suggesting there’s a solution to just teach more, teach bigger classes, completely ignores the fact that that diminishes quality.

I’m not going to go through all seven solutions, but I just want to say that the reason it upset faculty is because it starts from a place that we disagree with, we think the fundamental assumptions are wrong, and we think that most of the solutions that they propose are in fact not solutions that are good for higher education.


Box: Kathryn, I might also add that the Board of Regents has never made the seven solutions an official part of the curriculum or dealt with that for the system.


Greenwade: Never been formally proposed for adoption?


Box: No, no. Never have. And won’t be.


Jorge Bermudez ’73, 2011 Chair of the Board, The Association of Former Students: I find the discussion interesting because coming from the private sector, I’ve never been part of academia, but I’ve been part of management teams trying to navigate companies through very difficult and challenging times. When you’re doing that, it is incredible the number of suggestions that you get, the number of solutions that you get from consultants and various other parties who don’t really know or understand the business that you’re in. When that tends to happen, if you publicize all of those potential solutions to your problems and make them public, I think you could really drive up the level of tension inside your company and probably with shareholders, because some of the solutions made no sense at all. At least that’s been my experience. And so, one of the things that always guided me through those periods is to say, “Does management have a vision, does management have an understanding of where they want to be at the end of this process, this challenging time.” I have taken faith as I’ve read about the seven solutions and many other things that have been raising the temperature and blood pressure of various constituents of Texas A&M, including former students, that there is a leadership in the university, there is a leadership that knows how this university functions, there is a leadership that is committed to excellence, there is a leadership that understands what the challenges are, and they will sift through all of these various suggestions and potential solutions and eventually come up with the right answers that will allow Texas A&M to continue to be the excellent university that it is.

And so, today’s discussion and chat that we’ve had here, there’s been nothing that’s been said that would lead me to believe that there isn’t the best of intentions to sift through all of these suggestions and come up with the right solutions that can then be implemented to address the challenges that the state and the university have and still come out where we want to be, which is a Texas A&M that reflects and projects excellence.