The president of the Association of American Universities told an audience of Rutgers academic and administrative leaders recently that the challenges facing higher education in 21st-century America are rooted in the growing disparities of wealth and income.
“The most ominous threat to America and its institutions . . . is the growing and in some sense relentless division of wealth in this society,” said Robert M. Berdahl during a morning presentation, “Challenges Facing American Public Research Universities Today,” in the Board Room of Winants Hall.
Berdahl’s remarks came during a two-day visit to Rutgers last month in which he also participated in a roundtable discussion with the university’s Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute.
Attending Berdahl’s presentation on the challenges facing public research universities were Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski, and about 75 vice presidents, department chairs, deans, graduate directors, and other university administrators.
The event was a special session of the Academic Leadership Program (ALP), sponsored by the Center for Organizational Development and Leadership, the Graduate School-New Brunswick, and the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs.
Berdahl, who served as chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1997 to 2004, started off by saying he had no idea Rutgers was so sprawling, and that he felt “geographically challenged” – remarks that drew laughter from the audience.
But he quickly struck a serious tone. In illustrating the stark disparities in wealth, he drew from research by Paul Pierson, a political science professor at Berkeley who co-authored with Jacob S. Hacker the book Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.
Berdahl noted that between 1979 and the eve of the Great Recession, the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans received 36 percent of all the gains made in household income. Between 2001 and 2006, the top 1 percent received 53 percent of the wealth.
Even more striking, he noted, is that between 1979 and 2005 the top one-tenth of 1 percent – or 1 out of every 1,000 households – took home 20 percent of all income gains.
Those trends have had a devastating impact on inter-generational mobility, Berdahl added.
“The notion that (the United States) is the place where each generation improves itself is no longer the case,” he said. “There is a loss of the prospect for hope of social mobility; a loss of confidence in the fairness of the system.”
He added that the disparities cannot simply be attributed to globalization or decline of unions. He said they are the result of government policies on tax structure, financial regulations, as well as the increase in executive pay.
The wealth disparity, Berdahl said, undermines public higher education because it leads to a decline in public investment and a corresponding growth in privatization – which in turn drives up tuition costs and forces public colleges to spend more time marketing themselves.
The rising tuition costs then invite greater skepticism toward the institutions, particularly toward long-term research, or as he said, “curiosity-driven research that we have faith will lead to things of value.”
“I think this is a fundamental public problem we have in the United States,” Berdahl said.
As chancellor at Berkeley, Berdahl led the campus in a major effort to renew its infrastructure. During his tenure, more than $800 million was invested in a comprehensive plan to renovate and seismically upgrade numerous buildings, rendering them more suitable for modern scientific research and teaching. He worked to restore library collections to a pre-eminent position and undertook the construction of two new library buildings.
Berdahl became president of the Association of American Universities in May 2006.
Following the morning presentation, Berdahl met for two hours with students in the Pre-Doctoral Leadership Development Institute (PLDI) certificate program. The focus of the informal discussion was: “What Higher Leaders Need to Know and Do”
The institute provides leadership skills to doctoral students across all disciplines, helping them prepare for the transition from students focused on teaching and scholarship in a single discipline to members of a multidisciplinary university community..
During the session, Berdahl explained why he considers good listening, open-mindedness, and careful analysis before arriving at a decision to be the most important considerations for effective leadership in higher education.
“Since it’s impossible to please all constituencies with the decisions you make, what becomes important is to understand the various points of view, think carefully through the options, identify the core values that are at stake, and then make the decision that seems like the right one to you—and then maintain that position with consistency and integrity,” he said.
During the discussion, he shared a number of personal experiences from his years as a faculty member and academic leader. He described some of his most gratifying and also some of his most difficult moments as the senior administrator at Berkeley and University of Texas at Austin, related the factors that led him to decide to accept a leadership role in higher education, and discussed alternative pathways to higher education leadership positions that PLDI students might consider.
This is the second year of Rutgers PLDI program designed to provide Ph.D. students with an orientation to higher education practices and challenges, and an introduction to an array of leadership concepts and skill-building opportunities. The experience is designed to complement the disciplinary education provided in one’s primary field, and to contribute to the preparation of future faculty members for a broad range of informal and formal leadership roles. More detailed information about the two-year initiative, a list of participating faculty, content of the “0” credit courses, and a roster of the 2010-2011 fellows and their disciplines is provided in the program website.
Read a feature story on the PLDI.