I mean, think about it. On balance, people tend to live in neighborhoods with others who share socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, to engage with social media and traditional media with people who think like they do, to develop friends groups whose members have common backgrounds. This “isomorphism” is showing up geospatially and in ways that impact the political process. The number of “safe” congressional districts—now in the majority—has increased dramatically in the last 30 years.
Of course, the pursuit/realization of homogeneity that appears in so many spheres doesn’t mean we have totally written off debate and discussion. It’s just that debate and discussion is made safe by the virtual elimination of challenging topics that come with who people have very different world views, experiences, hopes, and dreams.
So, at the gym or over dinner with friends we’ll debate the strengths and weaknesses of different sports teams, movies, or books and the aesthetic and functional qualities of different clothing lines. At work we’ll negotiate how best to pursue a particular objective and debate what objectives we ought to be pursuing in the first place. Nothing too controversial there.
Even the expected holiday family brawls over our nation’s political circumstances didn’t materialize to meet the media’s expectations. In fact, a study presented recently on NPR reported that only 4% of the extended family gatherings were likely to include people with divergent partisan political opinions. What?!
The fact is that very few of us willingly seek out opportunities in which our beliefs and experiences are challenged by people who have fundamentally different world views, experiences, and belief systems. This is unfortunate at many levels.
By engaging directly with those who are unlike ourselves we grow as individuals in ways that are fundamentally important.
- We gain a deeper understanding of the human condition and, consequently, of ourselves.
- We learn to have—not to avoid—difficult, courageous conversations in a respectful and courteous manner.
- We learn to evaluate information and ideas critically, analytically—often amending our own thinking as a result.
- We learn that those who we may have viewed as “the enemy” or the “outsider” have interests and hobbies and loves and hopes and dreams—just like we do.
This is one reason that our universities are such special places. In them students from affluent and less affluent backgrounds share the same classrooms. In them, black, brown, white, rural, and urban students live and learn and eat and play and work together. People of all different religious affiliations, political persuasions, and gender orientations are not only present, they are all welcomed to gather and share experiences that prepare them for careers, indeed for their whole lives.
Our universities wear as a badge of honor the value that all people and perspectives are welcomed to participate in our university communities, to engage within them in the critical exposition and review of ideas, and to develop sensibilities that, I hope, may lead to a more humane and tolerant society.
‘Tis the season of celebration, and with you I celebrate everything that makes our universities such unique places for our students, for our commonwealth, and for our country.
‘Tis the season too when thousands of students will gather together one last time to celebrate what they’ve accomplished, to receive their diplomas, and to begin the next fruitful chapter of their lives.
I look forward to speaking at Lock Haven University’s commencement on December 14 and sharing the experience with so many deserving students. And I want to congratulate everyone who will be with friends and family during the coming weeks, energized and full of boundless possibility, as they begin their post-graduate careers.
There’s no reason why what we learn while attending a university has to be left at the university’s gate when we leave. We can choose to carry tolerance and compassion forward into our lives. We can choose to use the critical thinking and communication skills we have developed to evaluate information and ideas. We can choose to embrace our new abilities to interact with new—perhaps one-time alien—world views and perspectives. We can choose to cordon ourselves off from people who are unlike ourselves or to continue to engage.
These are choices each one of us will make—choices that will have lasting implications for ourselves, our families, and for the world in which we live.
But our universities don’t simply breed tolerance and compassion. They also are fertile ground in which social and economic mobility flourishes. The impacts of a strong public higher education system are measurable for the Commonwealth through the generation of good jobs and the talented individuals to fill them, a growing tax base, and a healthy, happy citizenry. Frankly, it’s impossible to imagine Pennsylvania remaining competitive without this.
That is why we have spent so much time thinking, talking, planning, and advocating for reshaping the State System into a sharing system—one that aims to ensure all Pennsylvanians are able to engage with affordable, relevant, postsecondary education now and into the future.
We can only achieve our goal if we break down traditional barriers, work together, leverage the tremendous collective strength of our faculty and staff, and take advantage of the fact that we are a single corporate entity comprising unique universities that are interdependent with each other. The power and promise resulting from our “systemness”—from this new sharing system—is enormous.
- Working together, we will expand the courses, degree programs, career advising supports, and library services that are available to students across the System.
- Working together, we will engage with any number of innovations that promise to improve student outcomes—lifting us into the ranks of industry leaders where our students and the Commonwealth need us to be.
- Working together—learning from one another—our universities can partner more effectively with the business and community leaders in the regions they serve to lift up whole communities economically as well as culturally.
- Working together, we will deliver on all of these promises in a less costly manner that will help us remain the most affordable postsecondary option available in this state.
In the past few short months we have:
- begun to address our most immediate and urgent challenges—yes, they are financial— with measures that enable us to achieve financial sustainability including a suite of tools that help us identify and act together to address our most pressing needs; holding each other accountable for our progress in doing so
- developed an implementation plan for shared services that will drive down costs—helping us to be financially sustainable (thus contributing to student affordability) while dramatically expanding our capabilities. In this latter regard, I am particularly excited about the opportunities we are pursuing to enable students cross-university access to courses and programs.
- engaged the tremendous talent of our employees in recommending improvements in areas that we know will benefit our students—improving how we support students who are academically underprepared when they arrive at our universities; enhancing student advising; effectively addressing the mental health and wellness issues that our students confront; ensuring student affordability; strengthening our efforts to prepare students for and guiding them to sustaining careers. There is also work underway improving the flow of students into our universities and partnering with schools and colleges in order to do so (e.g., with dual enrollment high school programs and through improving community college transfer processes).
- changed our governance structures and expectations to emphasize inclusive consultation, transparency, and openness, and to ensure there is more effective cross-university and cross-constituency consultation around at the System- and university-level.
- begun to speak openly about our organizational culture—its strengths and the opportunities—to develop them. That work will pick up significantly early in the new year when we circulate results of our organizational culture and engagement survey and begin formally to review and to respond to it.
- engaged in a wholly different kind of dialog with our owners—the Commonwealth—through the General Assembly and elected leaders. This dialogue is transparent about our progress as well as our challenges and involves actively listening to the very real concerns of our elected officials and to frame, execute, and report progress with concrete responses to them. In doing so, we seek to inform the policy and budget trade-off decisions that elected officials need to make with hard data about impact and consequence.
Yes, these are incredibly difficult things to do. They work against organizational cultures, expectations and practices that have been bred over more than a century of our universities operating in isolation—at best alongside one another. They require courageous and often awkward conversations between people from different universities and different constituent groups—people who disagree vigorously/passionately with one another around issues that have existential importance (the type and number of students we enroll, the scope and purpose of the credentials we offer, the expectations of our faculty and staff and leaders). They require us collectively to suspend our disbelief, to agree to look in the rearview mirror only so we may learn from it, to engage in what I heard one of our colleagues refer to as a simultaneous mutual “trust fall.”
Sound familiar? In a real sense, our efforts to create a sharing system require the same willingness to seek out opportunities in which our own views, experiences, and beliefs are challenged. We must be willing to do the very thing we are asking—and equipping—our students to do when they graduate.
I am tremendously optimistic that we will succeed. Why? Because our universities are one of the few places left where people who are very unlike one another can come together and with compassion and integrity engage with and learn from one another. One of the greatest gifts that we give our students is one that engenders tolerance and respect, and that enables difficult and courageous conversations.
During this season, I am asking that we bestow this gift upon ourselves, and to see in it the sources of our enduring strength and boundless opportunities. Building the sharing system is a partnership of mutual respect, which is possible because our universities are places where we come together with people from different backgrounds than our own and then have shared experience.
You should know that I get a constant flow of great input and feedback—emails, conversations, web comments—from people around the System. It fuels me. It inspires me. So, keep it coming. Comment below or share your thoughts on our System Redesign site.
