Florida State University - Renegade / Tally Ho Yearbook (Tallahassee, FL)

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VMRSHKLL T his is a difficult time for higher education anywhere. We ' re going through a period of a kind of national anger expressed toward young people generally, I think, and most of all young people on the campuses— I suppose that ' s because campuses are where most of the active young people are, those most heavily involved in change, in new ideas; that ' s where you ' d expect them to be. This is being reflected, this anger, in the action of legislative bodies all over the country toward colleges and universities and we ' re part of that movement here in Florida. This puts to the ultimate test, I guess, the role of the university president, because one of his important roles is to defend the university against outside attack. It ' s often said that he has two roles, and he must wear those two hats. First to defend and protect the university, the community itself, from attack from the outside, and at the same time turn in the other direction and try to help the people outside understand the peculiarities of people inside the university. There ' s been a good bit of politics, I think, in the most direct sense, involved in the activities of the legislature in respect to higher education this spring, where the issues on campus have become political issues in the most direct sense of that term. I think the long-range picture is still rosy. Florida has a history of caring about education, more than many states. Certainly higher education is part of that. And I think the present period of disenchantment will pass and we ' ll return to a period in— I don ' t know how long, two years, three years, four years maybe— to a time when education will again be viewed by the populace as a worthy enterprise, and something justifying the investment of their resources. These things go in cycles, you know. If you look at the early 50s, when Joe McCarthy was riding high, there was a real period of anti-intellectualism. That aspect of it, I think, was more serious than now. Now it ' s largely a matter of anger and frustration and disappointment in the young people. In those days it was really anti-intellectualism of the worst kind, but it passed in two or three years and I guess the end of it really came in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik. Then the American people needed education, so they embraced the universities and they said ' please take this money and do research for us and get us ahead of the Russians. ' That ' s kind of an unwholesome way to go. People just have to look at the contribution the universities have made, in the matter of delivery of health care, in the great revolution taking place in recent years in communication and in many, many other areas. The fact is that the universities do occupy a unique role in this country as knowledge factories, and we have to have knowledge factories in any society, but particularly in one like this where the progress of the nation is so directly dependent upon technological advances. r Dc CPE vrL came into existence because there were some things students, entirely on their own, decided they wanted to know. That ' s learning at its best, it ' s self-motivation, it ' s an expression of intellectual interest by a people— by the people who come to the university. I think these non-credit informal things are the most desirable way possible for our students to spend their own time, following their own intellectual pursuits. I think the route of moving from that sort of thing to credit courses, having credit courses evolve in that way, is probably far superior to having them handed down from on high from some authority. Admittedly there is still a place for the well-trained mind, you know, for the professor in saying here are some things I think you ought to know, but there also is a place, vastly neglected in the past, for the student himself to determine what it is he wants to study. PUBLISH OR PERISH My position is that if faculty members have something worth publishing, they should publish it, not only as a means of advancing their own careers, but of advancing knowledge and in advancing the prestige of the university. If they don ' t have something really worth saying, they ought not to waste their time writing it up for publication and we shouldn ' t waste time and space and money publishing the stuff. It ' s common knowledge that there ' s a very low level of discrimination by faculty members in the evaluation of the bibliographies of their colleagues. It doesn ' t matter so much the quality of what you ' ve published, it ' s largely a question of how many publications you have. And that ' s just so true and so obvious that no honest, conscientious faculty member can deny it— I ' m not saying it ' s true in all cases, but it ' s a very prevalent situation. 26

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So what I think we ought to do is be discriminating and measure publications by their quality, not by the number of publications a faculty member has. If he hasn ' t published good stuff, not only don ' t count it at all, but it ought to be counted against him, because that ' s academic dishonesty, and we ought to give much more credit to quality teaching. If he doesn ' t publish at all and he ' s a good teacher and shows evidence of doing that aspect of his work in an outstanding fashion, you know, fine teaching, good preparation, working well with students in advisement roles and that sort of thing, I would say that he ought to get the best the university has to offer in terms of tenure appointment and promotion in salary increments. I think there ought to be no need for apology by a faculty member or his department if the man doesn ' t publish at all as long as he is a thoroughly outstanding teacher. | TENURE I think it ' s time that there be some changes in tenure rules and regulations. I think that if faculty are wise, they will take the lead in seeing that some of those changes are made, rather than having them thrust upon them. I think the tenure system really contains some very bad elements. It provides for faculty a kind of job security that almost nobody else in our society enjoys. Really, the kind of security that a faculty member on tenure has is almost unique in our system. At the same time, faculty who have that tenure want all kinds of other protection that go beyond that. They want the best of both worlds. For example, in our decision to recommend to the Board of Regents the phasing out of engineering science, those faculty members who are on tenure want to be preserved in the system. Let me modify that a little bit: they haven ' t told me they want that, but other faculty have come forward to say yes, we must keep those tenured faculty members on the faculty and give them some other assignments just to give them job security here. That seems to me to be exactly contrary to the basic notion of tenure; the academic freedom part of it, which is, if a faculty member is an expert in a field and he is the most knowledgeable person in society in that area— because he ' s highly trained and highly specialized in it— he therefore has a certain freedom to speak out on it in a community. We look upon him as an authority and his expertise qualifies him to say anything he wants to in his classroom. That ' s his domain. Why? Because he is an authority in that field. Now these people are saying, let ' s take those people out of engineering science; these other faculty members are saying, if engineering science is phased out, let ' s take them out of that field and put them some place else in the university just to give them job security. Well, if we put them some place else where they aren ' t really well-qualified, how can we defend tenure, you see? To me, we have the two major parts of tenure in direct conflict. I realize that job security is important and I realize that there are personal considerations— families and careers and so on— involved here. I also recognize that this system that we are a part of, just like Pan American Airways or General Electric or somebody else, has gross technological changes that result in changes in the character of the enterprise, and people inevitably have to make changes in their lives. If one didn ' t approach a job in that way, you ' d end up with a vast, amorphous, meaningless organization that had very little relation to the job i t ' s supposed to be doing, and obviously the people of Florida aren ' t going to support that. BLACK STUDENTS think there will continue to be an increase in black students. I don ' t know that there will be a sharply dramatic rise in student enrollment. We will continue to seek out black students as we have in the past, but a seriously limiting factor here is financial aid. We ' re giving a substantial part of the student financial aid now to black students, and there ' s a limit to how far we can go in that. After all, there are poor white students too, and if we believe in the commitment to the training of the good mind, we can ' t ignore non-blacks. If there is a great infusion of financial support from the federal government or elsewhere, I would guess that would cause a sudden increase in black enrollment. I hope there will be a continuing, that is, a steady, increase, but until we get some new source of financial support, I would not look for a sudden rise. FAMU has a greater proportionate share of the Board of Regents student financial aid than any other university. The Council of Presidents voted on that distribution, and we are quite agreed that they ought to have a larger proportion. If EDUCATIONAL CHANGE 28 you look at the present curriculum, broadly conceived, that we offer in colleges and universities in this country, it came about because some people sat down and said, ' here ' s what we think students ought to know after they leave the high schools to be broadly educated people ' and then, in the last two years, to be professionally educated in nursing and home economics education and so on. But there ' s nothing sacred about those ideas that some people sat down and called curriculum. And I think it ' s high time that we take another look at curricula all across the board and recognize that the world has changed vastly in almost every field since those original ideas were put down. We need to give students much more latitude, to let them choose what they want to study, to break down the formal and narrow barriers on the way to achievement. For example, in the matter of foreign languages, I really don ' t see what ' s so sacred about having to take a certain number of courses in a foreign language for a baccalaureate degree. I ' m all for foreign language education. I think students ought to spend much more time studying a foreign language, but studying it to the point of some mastery, some understanding of the language and the nature of the country or the culture.