Apparently under the chair’s desk is where I should have been literally on Thursday evening instead of driving home (foolhardy words: “Sirens? Can’t hear no sirens for all that wailing noise”). I am delighted to report that, to the best of my knowledge, no-one from English was injured in the tornado. Lara Trubowitz and Dave Wittenberg saw rather serious damage to their house on Governor Street; Florence Boos on Davenport had a tree blown into a bedroom with consequent roofing damage; Robin Hemley’s house on College Street near College Green is surrounded by terrible destruction but got away with damage to the yard and to trim; while Marie Kruger had perhaps the scariest prospect, with a view out on St Patrick’s Church, Court Street, which was completely devastated by the tornado even as her apartment block came through pretty much intact. Among graduate students, I hear that Will McDonald was displaced by the damage while Joanne Janssen lost material from a destroyed shed. My sympathies and concern to all these folks and to everyone affected by the storms.

The university has gathered together some great information about the tornado, its damage, and possibilities for help on a useful website. There’s also a lot of straightforward coverage on The Daily Iowan’s website, with some particularly revealing aerial photos. (Click on the yellow "DI Web" button to see a list of links to their photos and videos.) The College has also published information about the storm here.

As immediate concerns get settled, there are likely to be increasing questions for dealing with pedagogic and practical issues around the storm. You will have seen the memos from the president and the provost that were sent to all faculty and are available here. Provost Hogan has requested that all faculty be as flexible as possible in making accommodations for students affected by the storm. I am sure that we will all be flexible about deadlines missed on account of the storm. Beyond that, it would seem reasonable to offer the option of an Incomplete to any student whose life and work has been significantly disrupted by damage from the storm, making clear what work needs still to be done. This is a straightforward arrangement that faculty members can undertake at their own discretion. More elaborate accommodations are also possible, such as allowing a student to Withdraw from a course without incurring course drop fees or, in exceptional circumstances, taking a grade earned to this stage of the semester, but these options require sending a student to CLAS Academic Programs and Services in 120 SH. A CLAS website is being set up which will contain the necessary forms and guidelines.

Best wishes to everyone in dealing with the aftermath of the storms. Let me know if I can be of any help.

Future Matters

I spent a few days last week at a CIC conference on the future of the university. Before you run screaming from this column, I should stress that I found some of the discussion downright inspirational even as other items inevitably threw up concerns. James Duderstadt, past President of the University of Michigan and currently on the presidentially appointed National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, was particularly interesting, as was Steven Rosenstone, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. Some of the trends were general ones, but most were related specifically to large public research universities and some will have a major impact on an English Department. Here are a few of the issues I found most interesting either in general or with specific reference to our department.

Access (and Costs)
Funding challenges for the University of Iowa mirror those for most state universities and it is predictable that the pressures will stay in place. States are willing to pony up a decreasing proportion of funding; federal support, both direct and indirect, is flat with direct support for research fickle in its focus; while donor support is probably maxed out. The one potential source of increased funding remaining open to us is tuition and fees. The private universities have demonstrated that students can bear significantly higher costs and all the publics have noted the lesson and are pushing up their tuition rates significantly. You will have noticed that the cost of our in-state tuition and fees for a CLAS undergraduate at the UI next year is $5,935, and for out of state students is $18,159, which are still relatively low amounts in terms of Big 10 Universities (the equivalent registration at the University of Michigan this year costs $10,194 for in-state and $29,350 for out-of-state undergraduates). Further significant increases in tuition are probably inevitable.

Increasing tuition need not be distressing in terms of our satisfying a public good if, but only if, we work on ensuring access for the least affluent. That means increasing grants to offset increasing costs for academic achievers among the poor. Currently we are doing a lousy job at that. There are many ways to quantify this. Take the composition of students at the 146 most-selective colleges and universities by family income: 74% come from the top income quartile, while just 3% come from the bottom income quartile. The reasons for that may be multiple, but the following statistic gives a big clue. The share of family income needed to pay for college at a public four-year university in 2003-04 was 11% for the top income quartile as opposed to 47% for the bottom income quartile, and that is after all forms of financial aid. The University of Iowa does a relatively decent job of giving grants and scholarships that total 61% of the true cost of attendance for families with income under $30,000, but that is still inadequate since it leaves a real cost of $6,054 (including costs of room and board and the benefit of all grants and scholarships), which is a well-nigh unthinkable sum for a family with an income under $30,000. The solution to this issue is clear: the university needs to increase the proportion of scholarships that are attentive to financial need, awarding scholarships at the intersection of merit and need, to make sure that higher costs only hit those who can afford to bear them. If we don’t, we are simply participating in the further social stratification of America. If we do, we can contribute to reversing that social stratification and meaningfully put the public back into the label public university!

New Delivery and our Niche
If you look at the longer term, higher education will surely be delivered in more and different ways than today. There are already many models – look at the huge success of for-profit on-line Phoenix University, as well as the growth in religious schools, the strength of community colleges, and the array of private universities as well as of publics. If we are to expect students to continue to come to Iowa City, it will be for something they cannot get more cheaply and effectively in other ways. That is probably not the case with large lectures. Why should students pay our tuition rate to come to Iowa City and sit in a large lecture when they can receive such lecture content online at a time and place that suits them at a fraction of the cost? What we do provide that others can’t do better is a learning environment based on personal interaction and a breadth of experience that comes from our range as a large public university.

That first is great news for an English Department. The stimulation of discussion in a relatively small class and the individualized attention to students’ thinking and writing is what many of us most enjoy about teaching and is probably our special gift to the system. In the future, students may go through their introduction to study online, their basic instruction at a community college, and then come to us for the relatively specialist work of the major. If, instead of that, we want to play up the value of a complete education at our university, then we need to think more about ensuring that undergraduates benefit from the university’s breadth and from our distinct combination of teaching and research. Capitalizing on that breadth makes me think about being more attentive to the quality of our General Education and trying to ensure that a degree in the Liberal Arts and Sciences offers a genuinely integrated educational experience.

New Student Populations
The National Commission on the Future of Higher Education is likely to stress the importance of life-long learning and this makes sense given demographic realities. While the proportion of young people declines, there is an increasing number of affluent and healthy older folks, i.e. the 55-75 year olds, who no longer need to spend their time pursuing their career but may choose instead to continue their education in some revitalized form of retirement. This is an audience that we in English might particularly want to embrace. I believe that all our classes teach skills of reading and writing, analysis and critical thinking, that are utterly crucial to the 18-22 year old demographic and that will help them get jobs and be better citizens. For all that, though, I most enjoy teaching an audience that is interested in the material I cover for its own sake and I expect the same is true of many of us. A mature audience that is no longer ramping up for a career but instead building on life experiences in areas they haven’t yet had the chance to fully develop seems a particularly appealing audience to me!

How do we get from our present concentration on the young to become more accessible to that mature audience? That will probably take some big steps of reorganization across the whole university, since the current residential set-up clearly favors the young. One starting point might involve alternative modes of delivering our knowledge (despite my earlier suggestion), i.e. course instruction over the web in Guided Independent Studies (what was once correspondence courses). We in English have an array of those courses that we have hidden away under the designation “for non-English majors” (see 08A on the ISIS listings) and that we mostly ignore. It may be time soon for us to reconsider those, I suppose. Maybe they should be gateways into the vitality of our classroom offerings?

A new student population will also be increasingly diverse and increasingly international, but only if we solve the problem of access outlined above.

Impact of New Technologies
New technologies lie behind a lot of the new delivery and new conception of higher education, of course, but maybe they should be modifying our thinking even further. Maybe they should also imply new learning methods for our students that most of us haven’t fully assimilated. Our students are totally wired in a way that surely affects their learning style: rip, smash, burn; collage; self-publishing; collaborative writing; multi-tasking. I found appealing one speaker’s suggestion that we don’t want to get into an arms race over the technologies of detecting plagiarism but should rather find a method of instruction that makes sense for this kind of audience, e.g. have students create a blog rather than a research paper.

Globalization
Everyone at the conference agreed this is important in all kinds of ways. Our students need to be citizens in a globally interconnected world that is flatter than it has ever been before, while China and other nations will become an educational as well as an economic rival. This is another issue where I think we in the English Department are already ahead. We theorize and historicize the idea of globalization in a whole array of our courses. We also foster imaginative inquisitiveness about the world and intellectual engagement with global issues in a way that serves the public good. This is a feature of our English Department that we should take more care to play up.

There were plenty of further issues. One was a consensus that K-12 education is struggling to provide an appropriate pre-university education. On this one, the sciences seem to be well ahead in intervening in the public schools to raise the level of the education and to increase the pick-up rate to universities, but it’s not like most of us think our students’ high school education has been adequate, even in English, although I have no idea about how we would tackle this one. Another recurring theme was the need to play up the centrality of basic research in the sciences, arts, and humanities, i.e. not to see public universities as some kind of simplistic economic engine, but rather as a long-term benefit that is as crucial as healthcare, prison spending, and defense that government obsesses over funding. Watch for the report of the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education to bring these and other issues more visibly into political discussion sometime soon.