The sky is falling

Call me Chicken Little, but I think the sky is falling.

It all started when I was reading IU President Michael McRobbie’s State of the University speech the other day. For those of you who didn’t get a chance to read it, no worries. You didn’t miss much.

Here’s the 10-second summary:

IU continues to be hunky-dory despite the recession. Faculty members are awesome. We are continuing to build on the campus and increase efficiency. I won’t be talking about any of the cool stuff, such as the new School of International Studies, or be announcing any new proposals.That was pretty much the speech. 

But buried beneath the mountain of platitudes about value and academia and who knows what else, there were a couple of key statistics that you should know. Two decades ago, the state provided 50 percent of IU’s operating budget. This fiscal year, it is providing 18 percent of the budget. Some project that by 2020, this number will be less than 10 percent.

McRobbie’s response to this was irresponsible. He suggested that the solution is to cut wasteful spending and increase efficiency. My guess is that’s going to work for about another year. You can only cut so much fat out of a cow before it falls over.

And worse, he didn’t mention what he’s been saying to visiting politicians: The state legislature is made up of a bunch of kids who just don’t listen to facts.

In other words, there’s no knight in shining armor here. The level of state funding will not go back to “normal.” No, what’s going to have to happen is that tuition levels will rise to meet the shortfall and students will be unhappy.

McRobbie defensively noted that almost three out of four in-state students in Bloomington receive some form of financial aid. What he didn’t mention was that the average amount of debt per graduate last year at IU-Bloomington  was above the average for the Big Ten.

I thought of this when I was reading the New York Times and came across an article about a new class being offered by a Stanford professor. The class is a version of Stanford’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” taught by Professor Sebastian Thrun, who led the team that built Google’s self-driving car. The class is free and open to the public. I’m skeptical about the clarion call of virtual classrooms, but I can’t think of the last time I was this excited about a class. If you live in a technological world, you should sign up for this class.

McRobbie spent a long time talking about what it meant to be a public university in the 21st century and came up with a generic answer that I can’t remember for the life of me. If you ask me, at the core of this answer should be real innovation (like the Stanford class) and flexibility, no matter what. I don’t think McRobbie gets this.

He says, for good reason, that the academy has always been a strong, durable institution. Thing is, that’s what they said about former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

I don’t think academia’s going to be wiped off the face of the earth, but I also don’t think students will be as willing to put up with tuition increases. It’s simply not going to be good enough to defend the institution and muddle through.

If I were president of IU for a day, I would announce that the University will transition during the course of a decade to an Oxford-style tutorial system with virtual lectures given by professors all over the country. That’s a bold response to trying times. It’s not a perfect, one-size-fit-all solution. I would expect a few drawbacks, such as a scaling of IU’s population and a potential faculty revolt.

However, I happen to think it’s a better solution than simply “cutting waste.” This solution would take a set of iron balls to implement, so I’ve got my doubts.

But to tell you the truth, I just can’t get the image out of my mind that a large piece of technology is going to drop out of the sky and hit Michael McRobbie on the shiny part of his bald head.

The sky is falling. Let’s fix it.

­— sidfletc@indiana.edu