Discussion by Howard Gardner

I AM HONORED to have been invited to comment on Bill Bowen’s first Tanner Lecture. The lecture is witty, insightful, authoritative. I had the privilege of reading the lecture in draft form and I can assure you that it contains an entire education about the financing of universities. In fact there is an additional education in the endnotes alone, more than seventy-five of them.

During the 2012 presidential election, Big Bird was in the news. Whether or not you were a regular viewer of Sesame Street, you probably know the game featured there: “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just doesn’t belong.” As I read through Bill’s learned lecture, I kept hearing this musical refrain.

I heard this lingering melody because, unlike Bill Bowen and John Hennessy, I have not been a respected president of a major university. Truth to tell, except for my own small research group, I’ve never run anything! In fact, come to think of it, I’ve never even been asked to run anything—let alone a flagship university like Princeton or Stanford.

To add insult to injury, I am not in any sense an expert on the financing of universities, on cost and productivity. What I know is what I read in the New York Times and what I learned from Bill Bowen’s text and footnotes. And so I am not going to take your time simply paraphrasing, if not bundling or bungling, his address.

Now that I have confessed to my disqualifications, let me attempt to atone.

My remarks today are bookended by conversations with two very bright and very self-confident recent young graduates.

Graduate #1 came to see me. I’ll call him Jerry. Jerry announced that he had just completed an educational intervention that had “transformed” the secondary schools in a developing country. Now, he indicated, he wanted to transform collegiate education in America. “Dr. Gardner,” said Jerry, “colleges and universities in America now cost over $50,000 a year. No one can or should lay out that huge sticker price. And so I am creating a system where high school graduates can get a first rate college education … for $5,000 a year.”

I listened for a while and then said, “Jerry, there’s one thing you haven’t talked about yet. Is this college of the future going to be simply a gathering place for people who already live in an area like metropolitan Boston or San Francisco, or will it be residential for students from all over the country and the world?”

Jerry paused for a moment before he confessed, “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.”

I want to speak today about residential education: the cons, the pros, its possibilities, single and collaborative, local and global.

Even when I went to college, Harvard College, over fifty years ago, we used to joke that we did not need faculty or courses. All we needed were our peers, who, needless to say, were as brilliant and talented as we deemed ourselves to be—our peers and Widener Library. One could repeat the wisecrack today, although, with all of the information available from search engines, we would not even need Widener—just guys, gals, and Google.

An interesting thought experiment: What would a post-secondary school institution be if you just made it possible for students to be together for twenty-seven or thirty-six months over three or four years? Would it be closer to Plato’s Academy or to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies?

We do know that there are some less than palatable consequences of having students domiciled together. There is a lot of drinking, a lot of carousing, too much hazing and sexual harassment. Recently, as many of you may have heard, a huge cheating episode involving a take-home examination was uncovered at Harvard. I’ve done quite a bit of probing into the episode: there is little question that it was facilitated by the residential character of Harvard College. Apparently students shared notes, met with one another and with the teaching fellows, and had a well-greased network for disseminating information, if not the precise answers to the exam (including, as it turned out, inadvertently sharing typographical errors).

Of course, cheating can take place in nonresidential environments. Indeed, the proprietors of online learning networks are already taking steps to prevent or reduce the amount of cheating in MOOCs.

My purpose here is not to undermine residential education. But I need to point out that it is not a panacea. Jerry’s goal (let’s call it “the best of Williams”) will not be instantly solved if he manages to fashion a less expensive form of residential education—a kind of fast-food tertiary institution, named McWilliams or McYale or, if you’ll excuse the wretched pun, McMacalaster.

Many of us who had the privilege of a four-year residential education appreciated our opportunities, even as those who did not have the privilege, or who feel that they wasted it, lament the loss. The challenge is to capture the best features of residential education while reducing or eliminating those that are not quintessential or not desirable, or, as Bill Bowen has insisted, are simply too costly.

And just what are those features? Here I could simply refer you to Andrew Delbanco’s excellent recent book College, but let me present my own short list:

  1.  The opportunity to spend extended periods of time with scholars from different disciplines and perspectives: learning what they do and how they do it; having a chance to become part of the process of mastering established lore and of creating new knowledge.

  2.  The opportunity not only to master one subject area, one discipline, but also to sample areas of knowledge that broaden one’s perspective, to synthesize that knowledge, and to participate in a culminating or capstone course, of the sort that was common a century ago.

  3.  The opportunity to live in close proximity to peers who come from very different backgrounds and have different life experiences and aspirations. Not just living, but sitting next to these peers in class and having the chance to exchange views and, at times, to disagree, in a respectful fashion.

  4.  The chance to receive intelligent, personalized feedback on work and on projects, with the opportunity for face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball discussions with teachers and peers.

  5.  The chance to participate in, and perhaps even initiate, activities that are fun, activities from which one can learn, and activities that serve the wider community.

  6.  Last but perhaps most valuable: the creation and maintenance of a community that embodies the best of human values—intellectual, social, and ethical. Recognizing that the outside world falls short, but that a better community is possible, is a crucial lesson that can be conveyed through high-quality residential education. This is a reason why alumni so often return to campus; they think of their college experiences as the best years of their lives.

Sounds great—let me enroll. But even if we do not have in mind Tom Wolfe’s dystopian novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, we need to make a confession. Most of our tertiary institutions, indeed most of our very best tertiary institutions, have fallen very, very far from these six ideals.

I don’t know whether it was ever much better. In fact, truth to tell, I don’t even care whether it was ever much better than it is now. What I do know is that the aforementioned sextet of ideals are often honored more in the breach than in the observance. A few of our institutions are likely to survive for a while, especially if they have ten- or twenty- or thirty-billion-dollar endowments. But the vast majority of tertiary institutions, which number in the many hundreds, are at great risk unless they come closer to these ideals. Unless they can actually prove to a skeptic that their residential education is worthwhile, indeed—truth to tell—if they, if we, are to retain our highly valued tax-free status.

What might be done to preserve the best of residential education and to make it less expensive? I will not try to legislate for other places, but let me tell you what I’d recommend for Harvard, the place that I know the best.

  1.  Hire and retain only those scholars who want to teach, who get a kick out of teaching, and who like spending time with students. As I phrase it in the Boston area, More local, less Logan.

  2.  Present subjects in ways that connect to the lives of students and to the options that they will face. Ninety-five percent of students are not going to be miniature versions of their professors, and it is not fair to treat them as if that is what they are aspiring to be.

  3.  At the same time, don’t simply become vocational or pre-vocational. If McDonalds or McKinsey or Morgan Stanley wants to run their own colleges, let them.

  4.  Embrace distance learning, let it do what it can do, and save your time and effort for what cannot be achieved, with quality, online.

  5.  Create time and space for extracurricular activities, but don’t allow them to dominate the students’ time. Extra should mean extra in the sense of added, not merely outside of. Do not admit students primarily on the basis of their nonscholarly gifts, and don’t allow them to segregate themselves on that basis. Personally, and here I know I am stepping on many toes, I would recommend having only intramural sports, in the spirit of Swarthmore and the University of Chicago.

  6.  Cut the frills. I can’t do the cost analysis, but there is no reason why our elite schools need to be competing with the Marriott Hotel chains, let alone the Four Seasons. Or, if schools insist on keeping these frills—the top floor of the dormitory, so to speak—then charge those who want them multiples more for that privilege: $250 a day for Marriott College, $500 a day for Four Seasons University.

  7.  Cut the support staff while making sure that the primary mission has been preserved.

  8.  Develop and maintain a community that embodies the most admirable values of society; become shareholders in this community, create the norms together, and make sure that they are known, maintained, enforced, and, as appropriate, revised. Until recently, I did not devote attention to honor codes and codes of respect. I now believe that they are important, indeed essential—and places like Harvard, which don’t have them, are delinquent. Wherever it may be housed, Jerry’s college will need such a code as well.

On support staff, a short anecdote: A scholar friend of mine wanted to know how many support staff there were in the central headquarters of the New York City public schools. Turns out there were thousands. He decided to get a comparable number from the parochial schools. He kept going back to the same informant, who said that she did not have the figure. He persisted and persisted. Finally, she said “Okay,” and closed her eyes. “Let me count them,” she said. “I think there are twenty-seven.”

You may well be thinking, well, Howard Gardner sure has a lot of advice, but on the basis of what? Here I draw on almost twenty years of research in the United States on what it takes to develop good workers, good citizens, and good persons. What can I say on the basis of this research?

Many students in elite schools are searching for admirable role models. If they take the time to get to know teachers, and vice versa, it turns out to be tremendously rewarding on both sides. The establishment of reflection sessions—students and faculty facilitators participating in discussions about important life choices somewhere in between classes and bull sessions—can be worthwhile, even transformative. We’ve done this for freshmen at Harvard, and last year Stanford adopted similar ones. It is worth trying to establish a commons—a real and a virtual space where members of a community can identify dilemmas and try to resolve them, drawing on the wisdom, rather than the tyranny, of crowds.

I’d like to mention one other line of research in which my colleagues and I have been involved. It entails collaboration among tertiary institutions. At wealthy schools like Harvard, Princeton, or Stanford, collaboration used to be an option: fine if you do it, fine if you don’t. But even the most wealthy and the most vainglorious institutions now realize that they can no longer afford to go it alone. For 150 years, Harvard and MIT have been located within a few miles of one another, but only in the last few years has the vital importance of collaboration come to be appreciated. And so there are already impressive collaborations, like the Broad Institute in biomedical science, and promising collaborations, like edX, with its tributaries at MIT, Harvard, and a rapidly growing set of other tertiary institutions.

But I want to mention two other kinds of collaborations. Ten miles west of Cambridge are three schools whose collective geographical span is less than that of the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There are Wellesley College, a liberal arts school known to all of you; Babson College, a business school with an emphasis on entrepreneurship; and Olin College, a still new and innovative engineering school with a commitment to a broad, interdisciplinary education.

In the last few years, these schools have embarked on an ambitious collaboration to enrich the experiences of students. The BOW collaboration, as we’ve dubbed it, has the advantage that the schools are almost ideally complementary. That is, with their different foci, there is little overlap or competition. In this respect they differ from collaborations among similar liberal arts institutions, like Swarthmore, Haverford, and Bryn Mawr. And so students can really have experiences on one campus that they could not have on another. Moreover, certain issues of our time are ideally suited for such multicampus work. The first identified issue has been sustainability. I trust you can see how the input from business, engineering, economics, demography, and sociology is all relevant to the achievement of sustainability. Many other problem areas, of the sorts to which aspiring citizens naturally gravitate, can also benefit from the kind of multidisciplinary, multicampus collaboration fashioned in the BOW spirit.

America is a highly individualistic society, perhaps the most individualistic in the world. To paraphrase that noted educational philosopher, Finley Peter Donne, known more familiarly as Mr. Dooley, “Collaboration ain’t beanball.” To get the financial arrangements in order is not easy, even for the heating of buildings or the shoveling of snow (not a problem in Palo Alto, to be sure). To get calendars aligned risks giving heart attacks to faculty and to registrars. Joint hiring of faculty, granting of certificates or even degrees, and common grading rubrics require the diplomatic skills of Secretary of State James Baker, Senator George Mitchell, and United Nations chief Dag Hammarskjöld. (And ultimately it can save a lot of money, lowering that denominator which properly concerns Bill Bowen.) And yet the synergies across three different institutional cultures, each with its own residential flavor, can be considerable. The BOW experiment is worth watching and, if it goes well, worth emulating in any jurisdiction with more than a single tertiary institution.

Very much in passing, let me mention one last form of collaboration: that involving tertiary institutions in different countries, continents, and hemispheres. (We’ll leave aside planets or galaxies for now, unless NYU President John Sexton happens to be listening or perhaps seated somewhere in this auditorium, or even floating above us!) The problems of collaboration that I have just mentioned are compounded when one wants to unite NYU and Abu Dhabi, Cornell and Qatar, Yale and Singapore, or MIT and Singapore—and, though I don’t know it for a fact, Singapore is probably looking at Stanford and Princeton as well. International collaborations have the enormous dividend of exposing American students to dramatically different populations and cultural settings. And of course international students can add tremendous value to our sometimes highly parochial college campuses.

To be sure, there have always been study-abroad programs, and these have yielded dividends for those who take them seriously. But the opportunity to reach beyond Florence or Barcelona, to have genuinely joint degrees, to share resources both over distances and face to face, to work together on problems that are global and require genuinely interdisciplinary and intercultural thinking, opens up vistas not imaginable fifty years ago. Perhaps they can even give a new meaning to the phrase residential education, or, if I can be permitted a neologism, coresidential education.

Well, I hope I’ve succeeded in hiding my ignorance of issues of costs and productivity in higher education. I’ve sought to do so by focusing on what, under the best of circumstances, can and should be achieved by residential education and perhaps doing so at significantly less cost, with perhaps, as a bonus, significantly more rewards—even more productivity!

Back at the start of my talk, I mentioned Jerry, the recent graduate who had great plans to undercut Stanford and Princeton but had not thought about where his imagined college might be domiciled. Let me close with the story of another encounter, with another bright and self-confident young man.

I had given a talk about the kinds of minds that we need to cultivate in the future. After the talk, this young man—we’ll call him Larry—came up to me and said, “Professor Gardner, here’s my smartphone. Why do we need to have school at all? After all, this device contains answers to all the questions one might ask.”

I paused for a moment, looked Larry squarely in the eye, and then said, “Yes, the answers to all questions—except the important ones.”

The series in which I’m privileged to be a commentator is called the Tanner Lectures on Human Values. In our economically oriented and productivity-obsessed environment, we need to pause to think about the meanings of the word human and of the word values. Distance learning has great potential; an accounting system has its place. But if our tertiary institutions are to retain their primary reasons for existing, we need to insist on the rights and responsibilities of human beings and on the place of values in our brief time on the planet. And if our esteemed educational institutions are to live up to their vaunted reputations, they must remain not only the repository but also the embodiment of what humans can aspire to.