City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_00:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to welcome to the program Dr. Nicholas Dirks. Nicholas B. Dirks PhD is president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences, one of the oldest and most esteemed scientific organizations in the United States. He is a professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an award winning author of eight books, including his latest City of Intellect, The Uses and Abuses of the University, which we're here to talk about today. He's also the former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and executive VP and dean of the Faculty for Arts and Sciences at Columbia University.

[00:45]

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, he has been a MacArthur Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has also held a Guggenheim Fellowship.

[00:58] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:00] SPEAKER_00:

Nick, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Thank you, Justin. Great to be here. Well, I'm interested in learning more about your book, City of Intellect, because it is something of a memoir as well as a reflection on the challenges that universities face. Tell us a little bit about your tenure as chancellor and some of the major issues you dealt with that showed up in the book.

[01:23] SPEAKER_01:

You know, I'm an academic, and you mentioned I have taught history and anthropology in a number of universities, including Columbia and Berkeley, where I also held administrative roles. But, you know, I kind of fell into doing administration in large part because I was interested in parts of the university outside of my own departments and was given an opportunity to serve as a dean at Columbia because I'd gotten to know the then president of the university, Lee Bollinger, who had previously been at the University of Michigan, as I had been as well. So it was a great opportunity. I did it, and I guess I did it well enough that then I got some offers to go off and be a university president. And I chose to go to Berkeley because, first of all, it's just a great university, a great place to be. I'd spent a little bit of time in California.

[02:13]

My first job teaching was at Caltech in Pasadena. But also because Berkeley is a public university, And when I was recruited to go there in 2012, we were coming out of the financial crisis of 2008 and 9, but Berkeley was still suffering because of some of the financial hits it had taken. Although I was led to believe, at least before I got there, that it was fully on the road to recovery. But I spent, you know, four very interesting action-packed, sometimes two action-packed years at UC Berkeley, experienced a lot of different things. And when I stepped down I began to take notes from some of my experiences and began to think of writing a kind of memoir. As it developed over time, and in particular during the pandemic when I had time to write, it became half a memoir and half a kind of reflection on my time

[03:06]

and what I learned from my time in administrative roles in different universities, one a private university in New York and the other, of course, Berkeley. So I wrote this during the pandemic and it just came out this last year, but I really intended by it to do a number of things. First, to tell readers what is it really like to be a university president. Now, as everybody listening to this podcast knows, this year there's been a lot of writing in the press. about being a university president. And some of that writing has actually suggested that you have to be out of your mind to want to be a university president, particularly at this moment.

[03:44]

And indeed, this has been a very, very difficult year for university administrators. And of course, it's been a difficult time, I think, for everyone working in the sectors of education, from kindergarten to research universities at the most advanced level. But I had some interesting times too at Berkeley, and I wanted to capture some of those times and some of the lessons I think I learned from them in writing a book like this. And I wanted to also be as honest as I could because not everything I did worked. And I had some difficult times as well as some wonderful times during that tenure as chancellor. So I got to Berkeley.

[04:20]

I arrived, as I said, as I was told that the state coffers in California were being refilled because prosperity was coming back to a state that had been, of course, very hard hit, as all the other 49 had as well, by the big recession in 2008, 2009. But at the time, Jerry Brown was the governor. He had been governor, of course, back in the 70s. He had returned to a political world and was reelected to be governor just a little bit before I got out to California. And Governor Brown was very committed to austerity, so he didn't want to turn the tap back on and replenish all the funds that had come from the state to the university system. And he thought, In fact, that the universities had become much too expensive and that public universities needed to really think seriously about the cost curve of higher education and bring those costs down.

[05:08]

And he thought the one way to do that was to pressure us by simply not giving us the kind of money that we used to have. and not allowing us to raise tuition. So all the time that I was in this position, we had a tuition freeze as well as a very limited set of increases of state funding. But I found when I got to Berkeley that, in fact, there were lots of financial issues, and a lot of them had actually been developing for years. And so within about a year of my arrival, I realized I was confronting a huge structural deficit of around $150 million on a base budget of $2.4 billion.

[05:41]

A lot of money. and not an easy situation to be in because of course, when you don't have money, you're just cutting, you're somebody coming in as I was from the outside, you didn't have a lot of allies on the faculty and you didn't actually know your way around the political system. But I quickly began to focus on a number of things that included trying to build new programs in data science and to bring different departments and colleges and schools together to really think differently about how we taught some of the most important skills of the 21st century, but did so in concert with and using a lot of collaboration across the university to find different ways to teach what used to be just done by computer science, but which I really believed could be done in everything from teaching courses in philosophy to teaching courses in biology and other scientific fields. And one of the great, I think, accomplishments of my time there was to find a new interdisciplinary kind of

[06:35]

way of organizing the teaching of data science so that every student could develop the kind of basic skills in data analytics and computational science that they might need in this world at the same time that they didn't leave aside the fields that they were working in. And that's been a big success. There were other things that were less successful because in trying to deal with $150 million You have to propose making certain kinds of cuts. Nobody likes that. And meanwhile, there were lots of other things happening in California. I'll just mention a few, and then let's open this up a little bit.

[07:09]

The first thing that happened when I arrived was it turned out that the academic performance of the men's basketball team and the football team had seriously eroded over the previous few years. There was a graduation rate, for example, on the football team that was under 50%, which at Berkeley was considered anathema. So I had to do a lot of different things to look at the academic support we were giving to our athletes in the revenue sports, as they call them, but also rethink the place of intercollegiate athletics in a what was then Pac-12 university sports program. It was vexing to try to deal with. And of course, as anybody knows who's been following higher education, intercollegiate athletics is a very big deal. The Pac-12 actually fell apart over issues around money, number of teams to camp to the Big Ten.

[08:00]

And now there's really nothing much left of the old Pac-12. But it's because the amount of money in sports is both something that universities are trying to understand and, of course, benefit from at the same time that they're doing a lot of other things in their sports programs, supporting women's sports that are not revenue earning. And in the case of a place like Berkeley, supporting Olympic sports as well. So there was a lot of controversy about that. Then there were issues around sexual assault among students. And those were very, very difficult issues.

[08:32]

And eventually I learned as well that there were major issues around sexual harassment involving faculty. So there were crises around that. And then finally, and I think exacerbated by the change in the White House in 2016, there was a growing sense of political tension, political polarization, and huge blowback around the invitation by certain student groups of certain speakers who were seen as highly controversial. So we had riots and protests and debates as to who could be invited to speak on a university campus, what is hate speech, what is permitted under the general conditions of free speech in the First Amendment. And at the case of Berkeley, of course, this is all very, very intense. And we did have actually some major damage that was done on campus and major protests that required calling in not just university police, but police from neighboring towns.

[09:25]

And of course, these are all issues that are in the news today, but they were happening back there then on my watch. And so I write about them.

[09:32] SPEAKER_00:

So at this point in history, we're roughly a thousand years into having universities, you know, give or take a century or two, and depending on how one defines a university. And one of the things that has come to the foreground in recent years, you mentioned the growing importance of athletics and the questions around the role that athletics should play in higher education. And then also the cost of tuition, the cost of providing higher education and the growth of administration in higher education has been a major topic. Take us back, if you would, to what you see as kind of the core purpose of the university, because anytime we're considering something else, whether it's athletics or administration or different student programs, speakers, we have to evaluate those to some extent against the core purposes and the mission that the university exists.

[10:25]

And in the title of the book, you call the university a city of intellect. What does that mean for a university to be the city of intellect? And how does that inform your perspective on these various issues?

[10:34] SPEAKER_01:

Well, that's a great question because it really does speak to the core of what I was trying to convey in this book. I used the term city of intellect from Clark Kerr, who had been the first chancellor of UC Berkeley, and then he was president of the whole University of California system back in the late 50s and 60s. And he was concerned even then at the extent to which universities were beginning to stray from their core missions. And he coined the term multiversity to characterize what a big Not just single research university, but system of research universities and a public system were in that era and, of course, still are today. But as you have a multiversity and you have a city, you have a lot of things going on. And then you have to begin to really think about, indeed, the question you asked.

[11:20]

What are the core functions of the university? What is the core purpose of the university? What is fundamental to our mission? And there are times that I think a lot of people are very critical and they think that costs have gone up in part because universities try to do too much. And of course, I think as an administrator, I can point to a lot of the programs that have been added over the years and say, well, we do this because we're a public university. We want to reach out and we want to make available some of the great things that go on in our university for the public at large.

[11:51]

And there are lots of programs that are good. But we also have added a huge number of administrators, a huge number of programs, and the cost of public higher education everywhere, certainly at Berkeley and the University of California, has gone up dramatically. I mentioned Governor Brown before, and Jerry Brown had gone to Berkeley, and he'd gone to Berkeley in the 60s, and he said it cost him $75 a semester. And by the time I got there, it was closer to $7,000 a semester. And although that's a lot less than what tuition is at the Ivy League and at Columbia, it's still a lot of money. And you add to that, of course, the cost of living in California, cost of rent and food and books and other things, and you get a pretty high price tag.

[12:34]

And even though public universities like Berkeley have financial aid, They don't always have as much money for financial aid as some of the wealthier private institutions. So, you know, you're now talking about both what is fundamental to the university on the one side, but also what is it reasonable to charge students for? And if indeed you're going to add to the cost of higher education, how do you justify it? And what at the end of the day do you choose to focus on? And as you said, the kind of investments that are made in things like intercollegiate athletics, while a lot of students come to universities because they want to play sports, and a lot of alumni are very interested in having their universities continue to put on terrific sports programs so that they can root for their team. But, you know, the costs do go up.

[13:20]

And in fact, even with these big television contracts I was talking about before, the cost of having 30 athletic programs, 30 teams, which is what we had at Berkeley, is very high. And again, you have to ask what is actually justifiable and what isn't. By city of intellect, I really mean to focus on the fact that, you know, the core mission is what, you know, you think it is. It's education. And that has to be really the central thing you think about when you put together a tuition bill for a student and you say, come to our university, we're going to give you this great education, but it's going to cost you the following amount. Now, you know, one of the differences, of course, between schools before college and schools at the level of higher education is that when you get to a certain level, research is fundamental.

[14:09]

So Berkeley, of course, is an R1 institution as these things are ranked, and that's a research university at the highest level. And Berkeley has top departments in just about every field. It has one of the leading departments of computer science. It has the number one department of physics, number one department of chemistry. It has just wonderful programs in the social sciences and humanities, and also in professional areas ranging from law and business to public health and journalism. And all of that is part of what a major university is.

[14:41]

But at the same time, you need to figure out how to fund advanced research using one set of funds from often federal support for that kind of research from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, from foundations of different kinds, and of course, also from private philanthropy. And it's important not to mix that with what you're actually spending to mount the kind of educational programming that your undergraduate students in particular are coming to take advantage of. But it's complex because it's all mixed up together in a single institution. You have faculty who were recruited to these universities, not just because they're teaching great students, but because they're given the opportunities to do the kind of research that is what brought them into the academic world in the first place. And then you have students who want to take advantage of these research opportunities. And increasingly, we do have undergraduates who not just go and work in labs and learn how to do

[15:36]

experiments, but begin to do everything from be part of the preparation of scientific papers on the one side and build startup companies out of their work in a research lab on the other. So these are all things that also are very attractive and exciting even for many of the students who come. But still, the inexorable increase in the scale of the activity that you have and the cost of those activities gets reflected then and becomes a real problem in terms of access. And then, of course, in terms of how students pay for it, often by taking loans. And you have the growing student debt crisis, which, just to remind listeners here, in 2011, crested over a trillion dollars. So just the year before I got recruited to Berkeley, student debt became a major issue.

[16:25]

And now, of course, it's much, much more than that. And a lot of students feel that once they graduate, they can't buy a home. They can't necessarily do the jobs they want to do. They can't get on with life because they have these debts that are hanging over their necks and staying with them for years and years and years.

[16:40] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, if I could, I wanted to ask about the relationship between the growth of administration in higher education and And the role of research, because I went to an R1 institution, the University of Washington, and was doing a PhD program in educational leadership. And I was surprised that almost every single person in the program other than myself was employed at the university in some sort of graduate assistantship, or I would say most people are actually administrators in some sort of office position. And I was just astounded by that, that I was the only person who had a job outside of the university. So I feel like there's, to some extent, an understandable connection between having a lot of people working at the university and having a lot of people do research at the university. But we've seen, I think about a year ago, there was some press over the fact that Stanford and Yale and Harvard seemed to have about one administrator per student, which just seems like an impossible ratio.

[17:37]

Yeah. And if you look at the tuition bill, maybe that makes a little bit of sense that, okay, if I'm paying a salary with my tuition bill, then I understand why it's $70,000, $80,000 a year. But help us think about this issue of administration and research and the educational mission of the university, because it definitely seems unsustainable to have one administrator per student.

[18:00] SPEAKER_01:

Well, the institutions you mentioned, of course, are very wealthy private institutions that have big endowments and also very big research profiles. And yet, you know, when anybody hears that, they immediately use the term bloat to characterize what's happened to the administrative cadre. Berkeley had somewhere between 8,000 and 9,000 employees, although it had about 40,000 students. So at least our ratio was a little more defensible, perhaps. But still a lot of administrators and you're right, of course, one of the benefits of being an administrator in a university is you basically tuition reduction to take courses at the university. And so it's a major bonus.

[18:37]

And of course it's not that the administrators get paid a lot of money for the most part, but it is a major benefit and you experienced it firsthand. But I think it's important to understand there are a lot of different reasons why there are so many administrators. I mean, in the first instance, We are always trying to recruit the very best faculty. To do that, you're sometimes competing with the same private institutions you mentioned, certainly at a place like Berkeley and certainly at a place like UW or University of Washington. And when you do that, you're recruiting faculty who are used to having a few administrators in their home departments to help them with their administrative chores. Increasingly, especially in large public universities, you're hiring administrators who are doing a lot of the student advising.

[19:21]

50 years ago, much of that student advising was actually done by faculty. It's now done less and less until students get to the point of majoring in a particular field and especially doing advanced graduate work in those fields. They're actually seeing full-time administrators as their sub-deans or as their departmental advisors or whatever you might call them. And so there is a vast network of people who are in student affairs. And when they're not doing direct academic advising, they're often doing things that range from mental health support to support for student activity, student clubs and other things which have become part of what the experience of going to a university is all about. And then you have the whole research side and there's a huge amount of compliance that goes into research in big universities.

[20:08]

And so actually, as part of the grants that are secured from the federal government, for the most part, you have to put on your grant a number of people who basically are staff members who ensure the compliance of the projects that you do, everything from human subjects reviews to equipment monitoring and repair and maintenance to just about everything else that goes into research, depending, of course, on what the field is. But when you add that all up and you get the kinds of numbers and ratios we've been talking about. And it's a huge number of administrators. And the question becomes at some point, where do you draw the line? And do you, in fact, begin to evaluate some of the kinds of services that are offered to students, and for that matter, some of the kinds of services offered to faculty? in ways that really look at the trade-offs and not just at what has become sort of the conventional sense on the part of many university administrators as to what the needs might be.

[21:02] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I'm thinking of the kind of tail wagging the dog problem that we see, of course, at a much smaller scale at the high school level, where often our primary objective is to hire a coach. And in order to hire a coach, we hire a teacher who also coaches. And we have these various kinds of things getting perhaps out of the proportions that we would like them to be. And yet we can't ignore those multiple functions. We can't ignore the importance of athletics to so many people and just have to find ways to balance all of those purposes, to stay compliant and to deal with the various stakeholders that have a say in what we're doing. I wanted to ask if I could about the subtitle of the book.

[21:40]

Again, the book is City of Intellect, the Uses and Abuses of the University. Talk to us a little bit about the abuses that you've seen over the past few years.

[21:49] SPEAKER_01:

Well, I think there are a range of things I had in mind when I used that as the subtitle. And one of them had to do with the issue I just mentioned at the beginning around not just free speech, but open inquiry and the usual idea that basically you go to university, you can explore any subject, you can ask any question, and the faculty can teach as long as what they're teaching is part of their own professional toolkit. teach anything you want. And I have been concerned, like many others, that there's been a kind of growing sense that there are certain things you don't say and certain things you don't teach anymore. And this is true from perspectives that go across the full spectrum of political opinion. So I'm not identifying one particular set of things as a problem.

[22:34]

But I am worried, like many others, that we've begun to abuse the kind of enormous privilege the university has to really engage in free inquiry. to limit that and to close down some of the kind of curiosity, even when it takes you to places where some people may be offended or at least made to feel uncomfortable. Another area of abuse, I think, and by the way, on the subject of student athletics, I want to make clear that I completely understand that both at the school and the college levels, young people want to have the opportunity to play on sports teams. And by the way, I have a son who's teaching in high school and he's both teaching English and he's the crew coach, right? And he's very, very happy to be doing both of these things. But for him, crew was actually something that helped him organize his life in high school in a way that really helped him succeed.

[23:28]

And he wouldn't have, I think, done nearly as well in college and graduate school as he did without that experience of being on a team where there was a certain kind of discipline, a certain kind of physical challenge that really brought out in the end the best of him and for him so you know i want to make clear that i'm not suggesting that when one you know talks about the city of intellect one throws out anything related to one's physical or for that matter one's mental well-being just a question of how the balance is set but of course one of the abuses really is i think when You begin to have what looks to all intents and purposes like a professional set of teams that basically are using universities to launch people into the National Football League or whatever the particular sport pathway may be. I also think that this question about cost, and it does relate in part to administration, but it's also really about public support.

[24:24]

Because, of course, at the end of the day, one of the problems, and I identified this with respect to Berkeley as well, in college costs is that states are giving less money, at least per student, per capita, to many state institutions of higher education than they did in earlier days. The reason that Jerry Brown only was charged $75 a semester is that the state of California used to provide something like 70% of the university budget. Now they provide 12%. So it's a really very different kind of situation. And in that sense, I think the abuse is that we have detached the university a little bit too much from the public and not, I think, cultivated the kinds of relationships that are needed to understand that state support of a major kind for affordable quality higher education should be right up there with all the other things that states are funding and states feel is their responsibility.

[25:21]

And another thing, and this relates perhaps to your particular interest in the podcast, which is that the University of California used to play a major role in determining the curriculum for public schools in the state of California. And at some point they said, no, no, we don't want to get involved. We don't want to stay involved in that. We'll let others deal with it. Well, I think it actually was a mistake because to have a better set of connections between school before and school after that magical moment of high school graduation to really maintain the sense of connectedness. It's good for students.

[25:55]

It's good for teachers. It's good for faculty to know where their students are coming from, what kind of preparation they have, how they might be involved in helping to change the expectations for curricular offerings in a way that would be better suited for preparation for the changing kind of Courses and programs available in college, that too might be a good thing. So there are a variety of different things there I think that could be done better. There are others. Those are, I think, you know, just some of the areas where I call universities to account for really dropping the ball when it comes to thinking about both their core mission. and the kinds of public engagement and support they need to operate at the highest level.

[26:34]

One thing I will say, which relates to my current role, because over the last four years, I've been president of the New York Academy of Sciences. And the nice thing about this job is that we have a lot of connections with universities and, of course, with scientists who both teach in and do their research in major universities. But we also do a lot of work in the K through 12 sphere. So we're constantly bringing advanced college students and graduate students and postdocs and putting them into schools. We call the program scientists in residence, but we try to use them to provide both role models and mentors on the one side, but also, you know, real advice for teachers about how you put together a challenge or an innovation project or whatever it might be to get students genuinely excited about both doing research and working together to solve a challenge, solve a puzzle.

[27:25]

And in doing that work, I think it really reawakened in my own life the sense that we hadn't been doing enough in universities to remember that when you're thinking about pipelines, whether it's STEM pipelines or just pipelines that bring more diverse students into your university or whatever it might be, you have to begin to really meet students where they are. And where they are is they're not necessarily aware, even when they get to college, that they want to do physics or chemistry or engineering. But they sure are aware that there are these issues like climate or artificial intelligence or gene editing that are incredibly interesting, very powerful, and probably critical to the future of our world in one way or another, either as a threat or as an opportunity for actually meeting some of those challenges and threats.

[28:18]

And sometimes to kind of just forget about all these structures that we have in terms of majors and in terms of how do you really prepare and get the best grades and write the best statement of purpose and get the best recommendations, that schools and colleges might be able to collaborate a little bit more in terms of actually what the purposes of education are for and how to meet students in terms of what they're really thinking about in their lives and how to make the educational journey more compelling, more interesting, and ultimately more accessible through, as I say, trying to figure out what they need at any particular time and what are the things that they're thinking about, worried about, and ultimately excited by.

[29:02] SPEAKER_00:

So the book is City of Intellect, The Uses and Abuses of the University. Dr. Nicholas Dirks, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio.

[29:10] SPEAKER_01:

It's been a pleasure. Justin, it's been great to be here. Thank you.

[29:14] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.