The island of North Ronaldsay, where Chancellor
David Scott spent his childhood, is a bit of land just four miles long
and two miles wide, the smallest and most northerly of Scotland's Orkney
chain. During winter storms, ocean waves can break clear across the island.
How's that for an early lesson in immutable flux? And what a school for
the nerves. If you've watched the North Sea rush unimpeded across the sheep-pasture,
the prospect of retooling a huge and occasionally reluctant institution
may seem less daunting to you
Scott, a shy, wry, witty physicist with
a penchant for the big picture, did indeed seem quietly undaunted this
fall as he discussed the "historical cusp" on which we find ourselves
and the institutional courage required to move us forward.
That the courage can be summoned he doesn't doubt: our upbringing has prepared
us for it, he believes. In Scott's view, an educational idea legislated
in 1863 established a durable matrix of change not only for UMass, which
owes its existence to it, but for education as a whole and the future of
modern societies.
The Chancellor reminds us that the 1860s, when the acreage for this campus
was assembled from six Connecticut valley farms, were no picnic for the
young U.S.A. In fact they were cataclysmic. A fratricidal war was being
fought to the finish, the conquest of the western territories and its native
people was in full cry, and an economy based on ancient agrarian principles
was undergoing convulsive transitions.
Into this hurricane of change, came what Scott calls "a very bold
idea, one that was really quite original at the time." The idea, promoted
over a period of years by Senator Justin Morrill of Vermont and others,
was land-grant education, and it was not just a way of financing colleges
but a democratization of the very idea of college.
The mechanism that would eventually produce some 100 schools and hundreds
of thousands of educations was very much in tune with its land-rich times.
Under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, a state could receive up to 30,000
acres of federal land as "seed money" for higher education. More
radical than the machinery was the purpose: a new kind of education for
a new class and kind of people.
Scott says that "really innovative aspects" of "the land-grant
model" were in the barriers it broke down. The most obvious was the
barrier of class: the land-grant were specifically directed toward agriculture
and "the mechanic arts." Henceforth a quality education was to
be available to anyone qualified to engage in it, regardless of wealth
or background.
"And not everybody was happy about that," says Scott. "Just
as in the 1940s not everybody was happy about the G.I. Bill -- which now,
of course, we think was a heck of an idea."
The land-grants breached two more barriers: between liberal and industrial
education, and between higher education and society. "In order to
cope with an industrialized society and economy, it was felt that one needed
a people educated and prepared in a different way than in the past,"
says Scott. "It was also felt that research was no longer something
that should be done in the university and just kind of -- lie there!
In books and on shelves! It was to be taken out for the betterment of society
and the benefit of the economy."
Sound familiar? Tell the Chancellor that this sounds pretty much like higher
education, period, and get a sample of his very pleasant smile. "Yes!"
he exclaims. "Because today all universities have really copied the
land-grant model." The near-universality of these ideas today can
obscure how remarkable they were in 1860, when classics-based curricula
were the rule.
So UMass was not only present at the creation but embodies the creation
of a socially relevant university. Relevance is in our institutional genes,
and has continued to express itself, especially in the commitment to research
-- a commitment Scott is determined to promote by pushing for admission
to the American Association of Universities, a group of the nation's most
prestigious research institutions.
Scott considers our present circumstances closely analogous to those that
gave rise to the land-grant university. "In the 1860s we were making
a transition from an agrarian to an industrial society," he says.
"Over the next 10 to 20 years -- though it really started 40 years
ago, with the invention of the computer -- we're making the transition
from an industrial to an information-based society.
"And just as the land-grant university was brought into being to prepare
a different type of educated person to cope with that kind of change, so
we face the same kind of challenge today -- but in a far more complicated
milieu."
He might add that part of the complication is the established nature of
the university. The inventors of Massachusetts Agricultural College, our
grandparent institution, had the advantage of building from the ground
up. They could determine what was needed and put together a curriculum
to provide it. Modern UMass already has a curriculum some 12,000 courses
strong, evolved over six generations.
" It's an interesting theoretical exercise, at least, to say that
if you were reinventing higher education today, as they were 130 years
ago, what would we say are the areas a university should focus on? Would
we still identify agriculture and engineering? Probably we would. But there
are many, many other areas of need. And one of things I think a modern
university should is try and pinpoint some over-arching themes that draw
on our expertise.
"Problems of children and families. Problems of youth at risk. Problems
of the environment. One could easily extend the list. All are areas where
the knowledge and expertise the university can surely be brought to bear."
This has been the whole point of arcane-sounding process of "strategic
planning," to which the Chancellor has devoted much of his attention
over the past three years. The idea is to examine what current conditions
actually require of us and discuss how we can best organize ourselves to
provide it. He's been guided by the tenets that research and outreach should
be entwined rather than scattered, and that curriculum is a properly a
matter of conscious evolution.
Scott is well willing to cast the net more widely, to ask even more basic
questions about why UMass should survive and thrive and be supported.
"I think it's worth asking what it is a university makes," he
says. "You know, General Motors makes cars; what is it we make? Well,
it's pretty amorphous, perhaps; but I think what we really try and make
is more complete human beings, people who reach their full potential in
every dimension.
"At the dawn of the industrial age, that meant technical education
with a humanistic perspective. Now, if you think of an information-based
society, surely the ability to integrate -- to extract important
information and connect it to other pieces of information, in a setting
where you're swamped with infomation -- has to be a very important
component of the mindset we create. And in doing that, I think, we begin
to create people who can make a better and wiser world."
Are we creating such people now? Perhaps not as many as we'd like, Scott
acknowledges with a smile. But he feels our current efforts to rethink
the university set us on the right path.
"You know, it took a long time to bring the full power of the land-grant
model into being," he says. "It wasn't until l867 that the Hatch
Act created the agricultural-experiment stations, which was the research
arm, if you like. Then it wasn't until 1914 that the Smith-Lever Act created
the cooperative-extension system, which would actually take the results
out to the farmer in the field.
"So it really took 50 years to put the whole machinery in place for
what we think of now as the land-grant/research university model. Fifty
years, that was a long time! We're now trying to create the analogue of
that model for an information age.
"And in a much more compressed time frame," adds the Chancellor.
"I think one has 10 years to do it now, rather than 50." He says
this in his pleasant burr, he says it with his pleasant smile, he says
it as if confident this farm can ride that wave.
-Patricia Wright
