Peder Saether Symposium (March 9-10, 2000)

Professor Martin Trow Presentation

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Professor Martin Trow, Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

We’re here talking between nations, across national boundaries and institutional boundaries. And that poses a kind of danger, a danger that was captured in the English story of an Anglican minister, a rector, on his way to church one Sunday morning, seeing his friend the Methodist minister coming in the other direction on his way to chapel. And as they met, the rector stopped very courteously, bowed, dropped his hat and said, ‘Sir, we are both going to do God’s work. You your way, and I in His.’ That captures in a way the wonderful English genius for combining courtesy and arrogance. I assume here, and I believe indeed, that we do preserve those elements of courtesy. But of arrogance, we have no right to have any. We’re all groping to understand the rapidly changing and enormously complex world in which there are no canonical works, no orthodoxies, no great certainty of any kind, despite the fact that professionally we all attempt to master this complex world intellectually, if in no other way.

We’re talking on this panel about policy. And policy is a kind of ethic to master this complex and rapidly changing world in practice, which may even have some relation, some problematic relation, to the efforts to master it intellectually. It seems to me the question we might bring to this issue is if policy, what kind of policy? Are we talking about prescriptive policies? The traditional kind? Or something that you might now call supported policy? The former examples are certainly the managerialism policies of Europe in the 60’s and 70’s; unlamented, if I may say. Or the more painful, in my own biography, the long and still current history of government-university relations in the United Kingdom. Those prescriptive policies set forth a set of rules or guidelines to some bodies of actors—institutions, individuals—who are subject to the authority of a rule-maker. And the rules tend to be common for all the units subject to that authority. They are common by principles of equity, but also according to the legal norms of bureaucracies. The question that might be raised, then, is who is to determine that prescriptive policy and where is it to be located? Who are the authoritative bodies? Are they in government, either of nation or region or, in this country, of state? Are they bodies above the policies that apply to sets of institutions, or to specific institutions, or the faculties, or the departments? Or, finally, when we come to the individual, it’s no longer prescriptive except by the power of conscience and the internal forms of regulation that we each carry inside of ourselves. We hear at different times of the high autonomy in America, of our institutions, carried to a high degree in our extension divisions. And that, we noticed, is related to their being largely self-supporting and with an entrepreneurial perspective. The alternative is not prescriptive policy, but a policy of support. But then we might well ask, support by whom, for whom, and support according to what constraints, to what criteria?

So in respect to supported policies, we begin to see that funding bodies are making decisions. And there may be more of them than there are of political or legal authorities. Prescription changes as it moves toward being supportive, from instruction to suggestion. And with the latter, suggestions vary in their weight, depending on how many potential sources of funding there are. Obviously, the more diverse the funding sources, the more gentle the suggestions become.

But there are peculiar difficulties for prescriptive planning, even for traditional forms of university planning in the area which we’ve been discussing. And the overwhelming difficulty is the speed of change of the technologies, the speed of change which threatens to make much of life instantly obsolete. Prescriptive planning requires some reasonable time frame, some period over which planners can reflect on, analyze, perhaps even study the connection between decision and intended outcome. A very rapid change narrows that predictive time horizon drastically and narrows the scope of rationale planning. In addition to this speed of change, which I think is decisive in a certain sense, without precedent in the history of higher education, a kind of speed of change which it seems to me defeats all efforts at serious planning, IT also applies as well to this enormous diversity of applications, contexts, uses, kinds of students, and all of that. And that defeats principles of equitable or standard policy.

Thirdly, and you heard a bit of that also at this conference, our deep, profound lack of understanding of the social psychology of learning in different contexts, by different populations, and using different forms of technology is not the least difficulty. So I may say in passing that this is a subject for a long discussion, that the policy and the problems that I point to for prescriptive policy are also, I may say, problems for research. Rapid changes make research findings obsolete very quickly, as it does our planning prospects. That is not a happy, welcome observation by the scholars and scientists for whom making sense of the bloom and buzzing confusion of the world is what we do for a living, and for many of us, a commitment to research as well.

Well, we’re left, I think, with a policy by authorities of support and encouragement of experiments. But experiments involve risk, and the essence of an experiment or a series of experiments is that some of them will fail. Governments tend to be risk-averse, even more than universities. And Dr. Matkin warned us this morning against timidity. And it’s all very well to exhort, but it seems to me very difficult to modify the deeply implanted habits of caution of these institutions, which are not only, you might say, institutionally or psychologically built in, but also involve concern for the necessity to account for powerful outside bodies--parliaments, civil servants, and their own academic senates, none of whom like sums of money to be spent on failed experiments. So there’s an inherent bias in the world against support for risky experiments, even in those institutions which are inclined to be supportive.

So that leaves us a question. And I leave that with the panel and with all of you, and   certainly with myself. Where will policies be made? At what level of the world? To what extent will they be prescriptive or supportive?  And if they are largely supportive, can policy makers accept the levels of risk inherent in experimentation and thus inherent in policy?