University Times

Following their procession in academic regalia, Pitt administrators and faculty listen to Carnegie Mellon University President Jared L. Cohon address the value of his 16-year partnership with Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg and the future of their two universities.

Uncertain times are ahead for major institutions of higher education such as Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University, outgoing CMU President Jared L. Cohon told those attending Pitt’s honors convocation Feb. 22.

Cohon, keynote speaker at honors convocation, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Public Service by Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg.

Jared L. Cohon

The CMU president praised Pitt’s strong position among universities nationally and thanked Nordenberg for “a partnership between research universities that is unprecedented worldwide.” The annual ceremony at Carnegie Music Hall recognized distinguished alumni; undergraduate, graduate and professional academic honorees; students and faculty. It also marked the end of Pitt’s 225th anniversary celebration.

“The future of our universities … is certainly cloudy now,” Cohon said. “Public expectations and demands on universities seem to be growing and changing every day … and with a broader array of challenges.” Students insist on improvements in everything from health care and job-placement services to university facilities. “Providing them in the measure demanded is enormously challenging,” he said, thanks to budget cuts, particularly state support that has “dropped drastically in recent years,” along with state threats to cap tuition increases for state-related universities.

“On the research side, the situation is similarly filled with challenges that are maybe more foreboding,” Cohon said. While surveys show that the public finds university research just as crucial as ever, neither the public nor the government seems as interested in offering monetary support for this endeavor. The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other major government agencies that fund research most likely will have budgets that are flat or even declining in future years, Cohon predicted, putting at risk “a whole generation of researchers” who may choose to opt out of academic careers.

Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg addresses Pitt’s 37th annual honors convocation Feb. 22.

A study by the Lumina Foundation for Education shows that most Americans recognize higher education as essential for their own and their children’s prosperity, yet most also question its value, based on its high cost. As former University of Michigan President James Duderstadt has suggested, perceptions have shifted in America: While once the government was expected to aid universities’ academic mission, today universities are expected to help the government with workforce development. If universities respond by acting as if “we are merely higher-level career-preparation centers,” Cohon said, these institutions will have abandoned their central mission.

“That pressure I referred to will increase in the future,” he added. “We must work to get back to the acceptance of higher education as a public good,” and work harder to make this case to state governments.

At the same time, universities must take seriously the increasingly higher levels of student debt by raising more private money for student scholarships, he said. University efforts to cut costs also may change how education is delivered, which may mean using technology “as a means to redesign the whole student experience.”

However, he cautioned, “the most promising path is not online-only courses … but rather an approach that combines digital learning” with the social aspects of in-class learning. Media attention to the early success of MOOCs — massive open online courses that increasingly are being offered by major universities free to everyone — is “unfortunately feeding expectations” that all university offerings can be put online for free. He said it also encourages the thinking that “American universities are a bubble about to burst” and were undeserving of the public’s confidence, like the housing bubble.

Honors convocation marshal Sherry Miller Brown, director of the College of General Studies’ McCarl Center for Nontraditional Student Success.

Cohon pointed to CMU’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI), developed in collaboration with Pitt, as a very promising technology platform, offering continuous targeted feedback and self-assessment tools for selected online courses. Students in the OLI statistics course, he reported, learn just as well as those in CMU’s traditional statistics classes, but in half the time. “That’s the kind of result that makes university trustees and leaders pay very close attention indeed.

“This area could be an area where our universities could join once again,” he suggested. The collaboration of two neighboring institutions such as Pitt and CMU during Cohon’s 16-year tenure has been unusual and unusually fruitful, he said.

“The University of Pittsburgh is without a doubt one of the most important public research universities in the world,” Cohon concluded. “The University of Pittsburgh is at the top of its game.

“Mark is my very close friend,” he said of Nordenberg. “The truth is, it was Mark who reached out to me even before I arrived in Pittsburgh,” and Nordenberg who proposed creating the economic development partnership and other mutual endeavors.

In introducing Cohon, Nordenberg praised the CMU leader’s “competence, character and caring human qualities,” as well as “the high priority you have assigned to building strong partnerships between our two communities.

“Today … the relationship between Carnegie Mellon University and Pitt is recognized as unique and a uniquely powerful partnership.”

Noted Nordenberg: “By awarding him an honorary degree … in a few minutes we will be able to claim him as a distinguished alumnus.”

“Give me a few days before you ask me for money, Mark,” Cohon joked in response.

—Marty Levine