Larry D. Lauer

Teaching is why I got into higher education in the first place. Even with the many administrative positions I held over the years, I continued to teach and lead professional development programs along the way. If there is any lesson I learned about teaching, it is that you cannot “teach to a test.” It creates an ever-expanding negative atmosphere, and eventually learning  is no longer satisfying and fun.

Teaching is about finding the talent potential within each student and working hard to develop it. Some do best with abstract thinking, or artistic expression. And they are likely to demonstrate it better by writing essays, or expressing themselves artistically, or presenting material orally. Some subjects lend themselves to memorizing facts, but many others require seeing big picture trends, thinking critically, or solving problems that have more than one right answer. This type person has the same potential for long-term career success as anyone else. He or she, however, is likely to become unmotivated in a quantitative testing environment that features threats of punishment for everyone involved–students, teachers, and administrators. 

Students with learning difficulties, no matter their cultural background, generally lack basic self-confidence and will not respond well to calculated discipline and pressure.  But an ideal teacher will find their special abilities and interests, use intellectual freedom to nurture them, and locate other mentors and influencers to reinforce them. In schools like this, pure magic can happen.

And what’s more, the teachers become energized.  This is when teaching becomes an art, and teachers get hooked on a way of life.  They sacrifice to stay in their profession rather than burn out and bail out as so many are doing today.  Most new teachers in a “teach to the test” environment last only a few years because threats out balance emotional and professional rewards.

My story as a student is a case example. A professor in junior college helped me discover that if I would pick the courses where I could write essays and term papers I could excel. Armed with this self understanding, the further along I progressed in school the better I performed. And when I eventually learned that being a teacher was really a wonderful life of “living a subject matter I could master,” I was hooked on the very profession that earlier was turning me off.

The key, therefore, to improving K-12 education is to find young people early who want to make a difference, and then help them see they can really do this as teachers. Encourage them in developing their own best talents, and make  sure they are in a learning environment that supports their quest. Simply put, teaching excellence requires the flexibility to deal with each student and situation individually, and getting to do it in a system that rewards doing it well.

Everyone is concerned about the cost of higher education. Make no mistake, institutions are concerned too.  But finding solutions will be difficult.

The president’s recent proposal that institutions that fail to keep tuition low will be punished by receiving less student financial aid will only be constructive if it leads to honest industry and government dialogue. Otherwise, it sets a totally negative tone, and demonstrates no comprehension of the management realities facing today’s colleges and universities. 

First, it must be acknowledged that diversity of type is what distinguishes US academic institutions in all the world. Second, that diversity means that even now there is a quality institution somewhere accessible to most everyone desiring an education. That said, virtually every institution I know is also working hard to cut expenses, and to keep its net price as low as possible.

For solutions to be found, it must first be acknowledged that each institution has a different set of factors each year that determine budget and pricing.  For example, each  one  serves a specific market, and must respond to the expectations of those in that market. For many, maintaining a high level of academic productivity with top performing faculty and state of the art facilities is expensive. Also, certain types of programs cost more to offer than others, and so financial parameters will vary widely among institutions.

For everyone the cost of maintaining buildings and grounds moves higher every year. When utilities and vendors increase prices, everything else is affected. Universities are really small cities and have similar constantly increasing maintainance challenges. And it also must be noted that costs driven by the need to monitor and comply with over 25 categories of government regulations is counterproductive to keeping costs lows.     

An acknowledgement that each institution is different, that government-funded financial aid is critical, that the amount of regulation should reconsidered, and that universities are capable of creative cost-cutting initiatives, is the constructive way forward. As with so many of the issues facing this country, if government and higher education  will  accept that each has a role to play in this solution, and will sit down together to collaborate, I have no doubt that we can make higher education available to everyone.

There has been much talk this year about how polarized US politics has become. The intensity of the situation has reminded me of why many universities ended their debate programs over the years.

Some institutions were concluding that while competitive debating taught students how to stick with an extreme position until the bitter end, argument to that extreme rarely if ever produced actionable conclusions. One could devise a way to score the competition, but the result was winners and losers based on a point scale, and not a framework for collaborative decision-making.

In my work, I have found that super intelligent people can chose to use their superior talent in one of two ways: They can use it to be more cleaver than the other person, thereby out-maneuvering their competition. Or, they can use it to find constructive ways to solve real problems. The result of the first approach is always a polarized environment where everything becomes a horse race with people taking sides, and the second approach is much more likely to enable teamwork and eventual progress.

The problem-solving approach requires learning the art of compromise. And while partisan politics may require clarifying ideology during campaigns, the business of governing requires frequent teamwork once the campaign is over. So what does learning the art of compromise require?

My experience suggests that compromise first requires a commitment to clarify and understand all the action possibilities. Teamwork requires a willingness to brainstorm ideas first, and then analyze the pros and cons of each alternative. It means having a predisposed willingness to follow the directions careful analysis dictate, and a fundamental belief that when a solution with more pros than cons is finally articulated, that a decision to act never has to be final. It can always be revised along the way based on actual experience.  

In other words, compromising to win means that you are able to see beyond what you gave up now to what can happen later on through experience and revision. And I believe this applies to finding revenue to offset a nation’s debt, as well as to important decision-making in organizations.

This is the time of year communicators are tempted to do the standard “year in review,” and sometimes follow it a bit later with resolutions for the coming year.  “I resolve to fix this, and to do better at that…” we promise the whole world! 

Following that custom, this is the time of year when my current “lessons learned” exercise first came to life.  My editing approach was to identify only the “best” and the “worst” happenings each year… but sometimes I must confess I ended up just putting my notes aside!  None of it seemed very important.

But this year the worst happenings clustered  under the general theme “our awful polarized politics.” And I must say I have been emotionally struck by the degree to which this horrible national condition has affected my thinking, and therefore my work!

Our totally dysfunctional congress has eliminated any possibility of finding resources to support important research and projects. But that almost seems irrelevant now. Even more, our legislators have embarrassed us terribly in the eyes of the rest of the world!  Our leadership role is fading fast.

Polarization totally eliminated any hope of influencing narrow thinking on important national issues. Extreme ideologies drove otherwise honorable representatives and senators to the most unattractive behavior and name-calling  imaginable. Real experts were never truly engaged. Jobs were cut in the name of creating jobs, without revealing detailed analysis. Budgets were cut to generate revenue, all without any details on how this kind of plan will actually work. 

And, of course. there never was a respectful reference to days when genuine statesman could put differences on hold and achieve reasonable compromise. We have forgotten that this actually worked for the good of the country. Our  society has been sadly soured by all this, and the world disappointed. And now we are even losing confidence in our own economic future.

But the best of the year was my delightful discovery of the high potential of my own industry, higher education.  Indeed, the internationalization of higher education is establishing a solid framework for world problem-solving, and therefore has the potential to transcend petty national politics.

I had the privilege of sitting in on all the sessions of the American Council on Education’s (ACE) Blue Ribbon Panel on Global Engagement.  Twenty university CEO’s from around the world were invited to meet in Washington over an entire year to consider the issues related to internationalization.  And several of us “expert presenters” and observers were invited to join them.  That experience, combined with two trips to Australia and one to India, convinced me that higher education is now a truly global enterprise, and we should now all see our individual institutional missions in a global problem-solving context.

My past resolutions tended to be more building on the best of the year, rather than on trying to fix the worst.  Focusing on the worst tends to reinforce the negative and result in a kind of plateau-type feeling in institutions.  But building on the best, making it even better and more visionary, tends to reinforce the positive and an overall institutional  feeling of moving ahead.

So this year I say: “I resolve to achieve a better understanding of the potential of my industry of higher education to be a world problem-solver, and to do what I can to advance the cause.” 

I know from experience that when educators meet our tendency is to get more interested in each other’s culture,  religion, food, and ideas.  I, of course, realize that political ideologies exist in these forums as well. But the ” we agree to disagree” academic standard still persists.  And, in the final analysis, I know that if we are ever to produce truly internationally savvy world leaders, and make headway on solving our looming life-threatening problems, it will be the world’s great academic institutions, large and small, that lead the way!