ACTA's Must-Reads
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ATHENA Roundtable 2011: Rethinking Old Models
For the final panel of the day, Anne Neal moderates for both Mike Nietzel, Education Advisor to Gov. Jay Nixon; and Teresa S. Lubbers, Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education:
Mike Nietzel recounts his volumious experience in the Missouri higher education system and its four main goals of improvement: increasing college attainment, scaling back mission creep, more academic collaboration within the system, and performance-based funding.
Nietzel discussed the myriad successes Missouri had in all of these key areas, and focused on the importance of performance-based funding in increasing accountability. He emphasizes that institutions must be compared to their individual past rather than to each other so as to account for the different missions that each institution strives to achieve. Neitzel also discussed the fruitful, system-wide program review that discontinued 118 academic programs and modified another similar amount.
Ms. Lubbers also gave her experiences and successes with the Indiana higher education system. She spoke of a "shared responsibility" in that both students and institutions need to expect more from themselves. Indiana also adopted a performance-based funding measure, but she stressed that it was not designed to be punitive, rather we should envision increased productivity as serving more students in a quality way without increasing costs. She praises ACTA for their support in Indiana in seeing difficult reforms through.
Both Ms. Lubbers and Mr. Neitzel spoke at length about the importance of having a governor and state legislature open to reform. True innovation is very difficult without the support of these two key groups. Their role in choosing trustees will largely impact the success of reform efforts. Both said it is imperative that governors and legislatures appoint trustees that are willing to ask tough questions about how to do the job differently and better. And despite all the resistance they face, they both intimated that a major achievement has been that all recognize the old model of higher ed no longer comports with reality, and no matter how one believes higher ed should change, everyone realizes it must.
What a terrific day! A colorful cast of speakers that really shed new light and provoked new questions on the state of higher ed. Don't forget about tomorrow evening, where ACTA will honor historian David McCullough with the Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education. Until then...
Posted by Max Brindle on November 04, 2011 at November 4, 2011 06:37 PM
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