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

Page 32 text:

Chancelor A T I he university is the creator of knowledge, which can be phrased in many ways— the seeker of truth, the creator of knowledge, however you want to put it. I think it has a second role, which is equipping citizens to take their place in society; that is, the transmission of knowledge and the training of minds. In essence I would say you combine the imparting of the knowledge to enjoy life and to place yourself in the context of man ' s existence so far on this planet, the ability to appreciate the pleasure of creativeness, with the imparting of skills which equip you to be an economic and competitive creature and to function not only from the standpoint of appreciation of life, but from the standpoint of being competitive and contributing as an economic man to that life. If you sit back and take the broad perspective that I ' ve just taken, I think the answer to the question of whether the function of the university is changing has to be no. You change your knowledge art and you may change the kinds of skills you impart, but you ' re still in the business of imparting that knowledge and creating knowledge and making those skills. At one point, the universities had only about ten percent of the college age population. They obviously were training an elite. Now we have about 50 percent of the college age population. There still is a need for college education, but it ' s obvious that now we need systems analysts and computer programmers. We need to upgrade the criminology people; we need to upgrade the law enforcement, the corrections people. Nursing is more complicated. We have whole new knowledge areas in which to train people and so far as anyone wants to say, if this is a new function of the university, then we have changed functions. I don ' t view it that way. I think it is doing the same basic thing, but doing it in different areas. THE PLACE OF RESEARCH Obviously if the university is the place which creates knowledge, then you must have people around making it; creating it. You need the Mike Kashas in life to have an understanding of life, and, I suppose, eventual mastery of it and the ability to direct it. I think that there is more time wasted in so-called research, however, by people who have no particular abilities in this area, who are diverting time from areas where they do have abilities, such as teaching. Because the name of the game these days seems to be research. If you can put the word ' research ' after what you ' re doing, then you ' re in the in group. You have to have it, but the degree of it is open to question. PUBLISH OR PERISH Wi hen you are operating at the highest intellectual level in society, which is the university, I think that a man has an obligation to be scholarly, to do some writing. I think it forces him to organize his thoughts; it forces him to keep abreast of new developments. It forces him to expose his ideas to his peers instead of to students who must accept what he says in order to obtain a grade. I therefore think that some publication is not only desirable, but essential. I think that publication for the sake of publication, or promotion on the basis of the number of words produced, is just the antithesis of the kind of publication which I ' m talking about, and I think it ' s the antithesis, really, of what the research and scholarly activity should be. TENURE I am very impressed by a publication by Yale, the Yale Humanities Group, in which they said no one ' s ever been able to define good teaching to the satisfaction of anyone else, but because you can ' t do it perfectly doesn ' t mean you shouldn ' t attempt to, and they proceeded to set down some criteria for promotion. Among them is an occasional publication so that you ' re exposing yourself to your colleagues. I think student evaluation is another way to determine good teaching. I also think in a pyramid series of courses that the man who receives students from another professor knows pretty well how well those students are prepared and what kind of a job that faculty member did. I think there are ways of getting at this; I just think we ' ve been reluctant to spell them out. Many universities, such as Yale, have done so for the betterment of that university. RECOGNITION OF RADICAL GROUPS I 30 don ' t see any likelihood of change in the policy (not to recognize SDS or YSA). I think it is a sort of head-in-the-sand policy. The problem really is that recognition carries with it the connotation of

Page 31 text:

Ne should have more technical training, yes; but outside the colleges and universities. I think we need a vast increase in the number and quality of programs of technical schools. I think, you know, we still have this archaic notion in this country that just getting and possessing a baccalaureate degree is a good part of the battle toward success. And we really have to knock that notion down. A college degree really doesn ' t mean much anymore. I think there are lots of people who now come to college who ought to be told no; don ' t come here. Go and learn to be a bricklayer, or a television repairman or an automobile mechanic or something, and learn to do it well, but also learn at the same time something of liberal education, and you ' ll earn more money, earn a good living, have a very satisfying life and learn enough of language and literature and communications and those things so that you can engage in an intelligent active civic life as well. I think we ' re much too restrictive on that score. Change will come painfully, slowly. The basic mode of education really hasn ' t changed much since the 15th century, with the so-called learned scholar standing up in front of the group of learners and pouring it out and having them soak it up. There are so many things we can do today that take into account the interests and talents and capabilities of the individual in a way that you never can do with that kind of instruction, and that means the use of the liberated electron to take advantage of all the electronic devices we have. You see, this has a kind of flexibility about it that we just haven ' t had in education in the past. Most of all, it removes time as the constraint in education and lets accomplishment, achievement, become the real variable. Now we say to a student, ' y° u must master this course in 10 weeks because that ' s how long our quarter happens to be and if you haven ' t mastered it by that period of time, we ' re sorry, you ' ve failed. You might take it over, but if you fail too many, we won ' t even let you do that, you ' ll have to drop out of school. ' But for the student who really wants to master something, time ought not to be important at all. You know, people do different things at different rates, so why not give him the extra time if he needs more time or less time, let him master the subject and demonstrate mastery in less time and then go on to something else, and that, you see, changes the whole character of the college degree. It may mean that if we continue to have something called a college degree, you may be able to get it in a year. The average student will perhaps continue to get it in three or four, but some students may require five or six or seven and if that ' s what they want, if mastery is their goal, if they want to achieve knowledge, then why shouldn ' t we let them do it in that way? The technology of the TV cassette is now so well along that we ' re within a very short time, a few months, maybe a year, of having inexpensive cassettes with video tape on them that you can plug into a playback machine on your own TV viewer and play your own program. This is very close to being available for schools and libraries and it will evolve in a very short time and be available for home use at a price that the average person can afford. This me ans that the universities ought to, and I hope will, go into the business of preparing an endless variety of programs in all areas. You not only teach calculus in one of these things, you teach calculus in a dozen or a hundred different methods to take into account the level of the background of the learner, his interests, what he wants to do with calculus at the end of the time, and so on, so that the individual then pulls off the shelf the particular lesson in calculus he wants to study, plugs it into his viewer and gets his instruction that way. That gives him a much greater variety of teaching than he could get by going to a classroom, and it allows him to spend as much or as little time as he needs to and wants to on that lesson. If he ' s a rapid learner who brings a good background with him, he may master that assignment, that lesson, in 30 minutes, but if he ' s slow or if he has a lesser background, he may want to spend two or three hours on it. He may want to do it all today, he may want to spend 10 hours on calculus today, or he may want to spend no time on it today. 29

Page 33 text:

aulz In terms of the day-to-day administration, only the president can have day-to-day control. In terms of policy, it should be the Board of Regents. The problem then becomes what is policy and what is administration, and this is the age-old conundrum. approval and we ought to have some kind of process in which we regulate the use of university facilities, in which we regulate the methods by which money collected through the university process can be given to students and spent. The kind of social activities conducted by students off campus has to be more or less a matter for each student. I can ' t see that we can have much concern for that, whether we should have or shouldn ' t have. POWER TO THE STUDENTS I have essentially a democratic orientation and I believe that decisions are best made, in fact the wisest decisions are made, when you involve the people who are going to be affected by the decisions. The trouble with that in this complex a society is that it is very hard to implement. A decision that FSU will be one of the top graduate research centers in the state is the determination of some of the things we can and cannot do and that decision is made by the board, not by FSU, nor did the students have any vote in this, and you can ' t give them a vote on that because that ' s a broad policy that assigns a broad role to a university. On the question of the kinds of living accommodations you should have, I think this is totally a matter that students should have a major part in. ' With the increasing legal recognition of the rights of human beings, students will have more and more voice in those things which have an immediate impact on them. But I think the way we ' re going, they ' ll still have probably the same voice they have now in the major policy decisions of the system. TUITION HIKE expected $200 a quarter. This bill was accompanied by a reorganization of scholarship aid and I have mixed reactions to it. The cost of education has increased more rapidly than the charges to students for their tuition. I paid more when I was a student, relatively speaking, than you ' re going to pay with $190. I can ' t become excited about the $190, I ' m sorry. I can become excited about a trend which would price students out of the university, and if this trend continues, then I think we have to have some massive scholarship aid along with it. All states are having this same problem. The unit cost of education is higher, it ' s almost irreduceable. The demand for education is great. Given that irreduceable minimum cost and increasing demand, you have an increasing percentage of the gross national product, of society ' s efforts, in education, an d tuition is one way of controlling it. The difficulty is that it is a fiscally elitist way and not consonant with the democratic society. So that if you begin to move much beyond where we are, except on a sort of annual keeping up with costs, I think you ' re beginning then to price people out of the market. AUTONOMY VS STATE CONTROL I like our present system. It ' s very obvious that you cannot give to a university an increasing amount of money without having some voice in how it ' s divided. It ' s also obvious that the legislature can ' t make those decisions. Someone has to make decisions about which university is going to be what, about which university is going to have graduate programs and what graduate programs. I don ' t think you can let each university make those decisions. I think the system we have is one that allows each university to have a measure of autonomy in how it will spend its money within a broad policy grounding set by a group that has spent some time studying the total implications. Show me a better system. FSU ' S PLACE IN THE SYSTEM FSU , along with the University of Florida, is to be one of the graduate research centers in the state. That means our graduate programs will be concentrated in those schools and there will be fewer and fewer master ' s degrees and more and more PhDs relatively. The percentage of freshmen would decrease— the number will stay the same. More and more of the people who come here will be the ones who are headed eventually for graduate or professional programs. That ' s its role. I think it ' s going to do very well in that. It ' s done very well already. OPINION OF MARSHALL I think President Marshall is one of the outstanding university administrators in the country. He ' s a very strong, fair-minded man and has done a fine job under very difficult circumstances. 31