EDUCAUSE Southwest Regional Conference 2007. Summary: Collaboration and the Academy of the Future
Created by Lida L. Larsen (EDUCAUSE) on March 15, 2007
Summary:
Opening General Session
2007 Southwest Regional Conference
February 21, 2007
Austin, TX
Collaboration and the Academy of the Future
Brian Hawkins, President, EDUCAUSE
Abstract
This session will discuss the essential need to collaborate in the new models of higher education. Collaboration is no longer an alternative strategy—it is the only means of competitive survival. The session will identify reasons why we must collaborate, obstacles to collaboration, and new business models to facilitate this much-needed approach in the current and future higher education environment.
Summary
Quoting from “The Mirage of Continuity: Reconfiguring Academic Information Resources for the 21st Century,” (http://www.educause.edu/LibraryDetailPage/666?ID=PUB6004) Brian Hawkins made the point that the things that have made US Higher Education strong in the past are now the barriers to the maintaining that strength in the future.
A short walk-through of history looked at the 1960-1980 as a period when we had fewer users and specialized uses of computing on college campuses. Computing was done with mainframes. People had limited use. Networking was not in the picture.
The 1980’s brought an explosion of computing with microcomputers which expanded the order of magnitude of use but still were somewhat limited. Networking was in the picture but still not a major player.
Today IT is ubiquitous and the increase in users is by two orders of magnitude. Support staff and financials have gone up 2-3 times but in comparison the user bases have grown astronomically. Much of our infrastructure and services simply can’t scale to meet the demand. We don’t have enough people and we don’t have enough resources.
Hawkins suggests that the resource problem is that we continue to have an incremental approach to our budgets. Our budgets have increased by about 3.5% per year over the past 30-35 years and that’s our budgets today. The role of the CIO is relatively new.
Issues we face include:
- An inability (unwillingness) to do major reallocations
- An inability (unwillingness) to ever cease ending programs
- An inability (unwillingness) to refuse the desire of users – we’re not good at saying “no” which means we have too many people to serve with complexity and have a labor intensive approach.
New models are needed as we move into the future.
From the Spellings Commission report (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/index.html)
What we have learned over the last year makes clear that American higher education has become what, in the business world, would be called a mature enterprise; increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied and unduly expensive.
Hawkins indicated that we must work together as we look for new models for the future and said that “we can’t get help from the government and there is no gravy train.”
Companies that are successful and compete successfully are agile, nimble, and flexible. Higher Education is not. Higher Education IT needs to collaboratively develop new and adaptive structures! If we don’t we won’t have critical mass and we will not have enough resources. Trying to go it alone doesn’t work. We’ll NEVER have enough resources if we do not collaborate.
Hawkins spoke of the ideas of Milton Friedman, monetary economy and policy expert (http://www.adamsmith.org/friedman/home.htm) and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the marketplace” (http://www.answers.com/topic/invisible-hand)
We are not used to collaboration and cooperation and we have excuses why we can’t
- Not enough time
- Competition with campus priorities
- Recognition – who will get credit
- Sharing/trusting/inequities
- Diversity of standards and cultures.
Hawkins suggested that we talk the talk, but we don’t walk the walk. We meet at the conferences and get excited about collaborating but we forget it when we get back to the minutia of our day to day work-life.
Often we choose our collaborations by “who do we play football with” rather than by our values and circumstances.
Prejudices that hinder our moving forward in collaborations include:
- Pride in “our way” (“the name-your-institution her” way”)
- The “Not-Invented-Here” Syndrome -
- Control: Who will be in charge? If you have a collaboration of 75 institutions they can’t all be in control.
- Desire for “yesterday” when things were “simple”
- “Uniqueness” of our campus
- Something we do after our primary work is done.
Hawkins asks “Are these differences strategic or merely an exercise in hubris?”
Our basic services from campus to campus are essentially the same.
Mandates to collaborate include:
- Finding the personnel to implement and maintain individual campus services can be a roadblock. For example, rural areas may not be able to find appropriate personnel yet a large campus may have access to many.
- We have redundant/duplicative efforts even on our own campuses with our libraries and other units. We often ignore economies of scale and don’t think about how to share the little excess that we may have.
Hawkins discussed work on models of social infrastructure by Andrea Youngdahl (http://www.oaklandhumanservices.org/department/message.htm)
Cooperation – for us this is like EDUCAUSE conferences and activities behavior, informal and superficial, where we do information sharing, have committees, but fundamentally stay separate.
Coordination – for us this is where the activity lasts as long as personal relationship trust results in a mutual commitment. Differences are accommodated, we work on filling in the gaps together, and we share resources.
Collaboration – for us this is activity that leads to a new community through a shared vision and is based on a business model that is sustainable.
Hawkins described a need for classics study in small schools where each couldn’t afford to hire faculty individually. They received a grant that enabled them to split up the work and it worked as long as the grant lasted.
Another situation described was one in which the National Association of College Stores, (http://www.nacs.org/) who could not individually compete with large university bookstores, set up a separate third party, not based on a relationship, that succeeded in helping all, both small and large.
JSTOR and ARTstor efforts to make resources (periodicals / art images) available are succeeding because of having an appropriate business model. (See www.jstor.org and www.artstor.org)
ITHAKA – (http://www.ithaka.org/)
To do things not addressed by the “invisible hand” of the marketplace (we need it now)
To create new organizations to address critical needs not met by the market
To create sustainable models
The Boston Consortium – procurement and more and could get together because they were close.
Hawkins listed the following elements needed for success:
- It should be run professionally
- It should not be dependent on volunteerism
- It should be an investment
- It should have an appropriate business structure
- It should be able to do business across state boundaries
- It should have a Governance structure like a corporation (not yet another consortium)
- It should be based on quid pro quo (not just good will)
He concluded that what’s good for one side is philanthropy, what’s good for business is good for both sides
Some illustrations included:
EDUCAUSE, which is run like a business.
Open Source
CAUSE began in 1952 as the College and University System Exchange. They shared programming, had high cooperation, and bordered on collaboration. This was essentially Open Source as it was primarily about sharing code. However, the actions to keep up the documentation, upgrades, maintenance, and ongoing support were not so good. Today a great deal of cooperation and coordination, but not yet collaboration, is happening in this space.
Ira Fuchs, who funded SAKAI and other collaborations, is now talking about EDUCORE as business. You can listen to a podcast by Ira Fuchs that includes comments about EDUCORE at http://connect.educause.edu/podcasts/ira_fuchs_cni_2006.
More characteristics needed for success include:
- Help institutions avoid the tyranny of stair-step increments
- Actively leverage the technology
- Stay out of areas in which the market is working effectively
- Draw upon existing perceived strengths and brands (great universities are a great brand)
- Where saving are not just temporal as buying consortia which delay the inevitable because corporations will eventually just jack up the price to gain what they want in profit.
To combat the myth of going it alone, we should ask questions such as
- Do we have the expertise to do this internally?
- What can we leverage if we work together?
- What price are we willing (or able) to pay?
Hawkins discussed cost reduction strategies reported in the Core Data Survey and responses to these from his perspective
- Consortia/shared purchases. These only delay the inevitable price jacks.
- Freezing salaries before outsourcing. We need to re-examine outsourcing and see how to better use our resources.
We have grand challenges facing us in Higher Education.
“If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem”
The process:
- What are the big issues?
- What role will IT play in solving them?
- What are the Impediments to IT impact on Issues?
- What can we do together to work on these impediments?
EDUCAUSE top ten issues are a look at our own navels.
We need to ask our Presidents and Provosts about their top ten issues.
Higher Education issues include: access, affordability, assessment/accountability, effectiveness, workforce development, economic development, and change in the social contract (we need educated people for democracy to succeed)
Is IT
- a solution to the challenges?
- a contributor to the needed answers or just another cost and yet another cost center in the eyes of Higher Education administration?
We need to review and rethink campus IT services.
We need to develop a business plan to under gird and provide feasibility for a significant project to demonstrate the viability of a new service delivery approach
We need to look at shared services where the “invisible hand of the marketplace” is not at work.
We need to stop thinking about collaboration as an avocational approach – it’s not something we do in our spare time but how we will survive and well support our clients.
Focus – remember Alice (in Wonderland) asking the Cheshire Cat
Alice: Which path should I take?
Cheshire Cat: Where are you going?
Alice: I really don’t know.
Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t matter.
Hawkins remarked that “whining won’t get you anywhere.” What we need our new models and to know where we are going. He said, “Where are you going, because if you don’t know, it really doesn’t matter!”
Q & A
It was suggested that this presentation should be made available to those in Higher Education administration
Hawkins suggested that we need to have demonstration projects to show Higher Education administration.
A question from the floor suggested a need to map the two lists (IT and Presidents/Provosts) and note where they are the same and where they are different. Hawkins noted the fact that IT showed up as a saving in labor costs for corporations but that is not true for us because we work in a culture where we don’t put people out of work.
Another question asked clarification on Hawkins’ statement that we stay out of areas where the market is not effective, asking where is the market not effective? Further clarification regarding demonstration projects was asked including suggestions on how EDUCAUSE members can participate? Hawkins said that Adam Smith was right and the market place does “work” but some markets are very specialized such as “Classics” for Academics. We should ask how many of our very specialized markets do we need. security? research support? etc.
Regarding, demonstration projects, Hawkins said that things are just getting started and but there should be some things in place by mid-late summer and presentation will likely be made at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Seattle in the fall. Everything will be on the EDUCAUSE website. The EDUCAUSE executive team agreed to “under-promise and over-deliver.”
A query on policy and funding frameworks asked Hawkins to discuss the fact that education leaders are not incentivized to work together and asked how can we encourage the collaboration needed? Hawkins replied that a market place approach works better in these situations because it’s a business decision not policy or governance.
The last question asked how we can reach the heart of new faculty in these issues and use of technology. Hawkins suggested inspiration and reducing the cost so we that can keep the faculty we need. We should ask how some of these shared resources/support can help in the teaching areas. What’s the lowest hanging fruit for EDUCAUSE is important now. The core may not be in the teaching arena.
Information about Brian Hawkins is available at http://www.educause.edu/PeerDirectory/750?ID=05619.
Information about the 2007 Southwest Regional Conference is available at http://www.educause.edu/swrc07.
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