Taking it higher: Sky's the limit if we elevate our aim for our colleges

What is the public's stake in higher education? That large question has been the backdrop for an unprecedented level of conversation about Washington's colleges and universities over the past year and a half — among policymakers, civic and business leaders, the press and thoughtful citizens.

That large question has been the backdrop for an unprecedented level of conversation about Washington's colleges and universities over the past year and a half — among policymakers, civic and business leaders, the press and thoughtful citizens.

The conversation, around issues such as access and funding, is welcome. It is also badly needed. It signals a widespread and legitimate concern for the health of the state's higher-education system, and it will certainly continue during the legislative session that begins tomorrow.

I've spent 35 years at the University of Washington. In all those years, there has never been a time when the university's potential for public benefit has been greater or more exciting than it is right now.

Imagine a revitalized Puget Sound economy, built around new developments in biotechnology, photonics and other emerging fields. Imagine treatments for cancer or Alzheimer's disease tailored to one's own unique genomic profile. Imagine K-12 education shaped by new discoveries about the brain and learning — and new ideas about the training and support of teachers. Imagine a regional plan to manage climate change based on cutting-edge environmental science.

These imaginings are not fantasies. They are rooted in work going on right now, in UW programs nationally recognized for the brilliance of their faculty members, the breadth of the questions they ask and the innovative way they bring together people and resources to answer those questions. As it has done repeatedly in the past, university research can change and enhance and even prolong the lives of Washington citizens.

Should people care about this? Of course. Should it influence the debate about higher education? Absolutely. But research is not my main subject here. Instead, I want to talk about undergraduate education — the first thing most people think of in connection with higher education, and the thing they believe they understand the best.

I say "believe" because undergraduate education is morphing into something quite different from the images and memories most of us carry around. Teachers are still the heart of everything, but their role is shifting. We haven't abolished the large introductory lecture class, but we've created very different kinds of learning opportunities even for new students. Books are still central, but students now "access information" in myriad other ways, both technological and experiential.

If I had to summarize the changes I see in undergraduate education, I would stress three things. First, students today are crossing old boundaries. They combine disciplines; they blend academic and off-campus learning; increasingly, they study abroad.

Second, the large campus is becoming a constellation of small learning communities. These range from freshman interest groups to the teams of seniors who collaborate on "capstone" projects in certain majors. Different as they are, these small communities all have one idea in common: the power of social and academic connections to reinforce each other and to engage students more deeply in their own learning.

Finally, undergraduate education is far more hands-on than it used to be. Every year, more of our undergraduates do research in faculty labs, pursue self-designed projects as Mary Gates Scholars, and sign up for classes that build learning around community service.

All these changes are due partly to a new focus, over the past few years, on undergraduate learning. Some of the best minds on our three campuses — historians, engineers, mathematicians, biologists — have been asking themselves how to build a better education for their undergraduate students. The result has been a ferment of new programs and new approaches. When the president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation was here in September, he went out of his way to tell me that the University of Washington is considered a national leader — an exemplar, in fact — of educational innovation.

But what's happening in undergraduate education is not happening in an academic hothouse. It reflects currents that are sweeping the university as a whole and the society it serves. The undergraduate movement toward interdisciplinary study, toward collaboration, toward question-driven learning, toward a global perspective, is just the movement one would hope to see in a research university that tackles questions of daunting complexity and reach.

Increasingly, every important problem on our Northwest horizon — health, environment, economics — has global dimensions and requires multiple kinds of expertise. The same is true of our most exciting opportunities. UW students are being educated for that world. Indeed, I would argue that the very size, complexity, and research pre-eminence of the UW — qualities often thought to be at odds with undergraduate education — are the source of our educational strength. I think most of our students agree.

And those students are quite amazing. Two of them have been in the news recently, and their educational careers illustrate some of the things I've been talking about.

Jennifer Devine grew up in Yakima, spent two years at Yakima Valley Community College, and then transferred to the University of Washington. She brought to the UW a driving interest in poverty, economic development and the role of women in both, an interest that led her to double-major in geography and international studies.

Devine spent a year in Spain as a Rotary Scholar. Back in Seattle, she graduated from a national women's leadership institute offered through the Center for Women and Democracy (a university-community partnership) — and then or-ganized and led the institute's alumnae association. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she works closely with professors Victoria Lawson and Lucy Jarosz in their research on rural poverty in the Pacific Northwest. She is also helping Lawson with a book on development.

In November, Devine — who will be the first in her family to graduate from college — was named one of 40 American students to win a prestigious Marshall Scholarship for graduate study in Great Britain. She will continue her development studies at the London School of Economics. But she hasn't lost sight of her Yakima roots.

"It's just that much sweeter," she told a UW Daily interviewer, "knowing how far I've come and how much people have done to help me, how many people believed in me."

And then there is our new Rhodes Scholar, a young African-American woman named Allyssa Lamb. A graduate of Bothell High School, she too arrived at the university with a passion — in her case, ancient history (thanks to her grandfather's gift of a book on Egypt when she was 8). Her freshman interest group included a course in the classics department, where professor Larry Bliquez spotted her talents and interest. He urged her to major in classics and steered her also to the Near Eastern Studies Department.

From this early mentoring flowed Lamb's double major (classics and ancient Near Eastern studies); her study of Greek, Latin, Hebrew and hieroglyphics; her quarter at the UW's Rome Center; her summer as research assistant to classics professor Sarah Stroup at an archeological dig in Israel; and ultimately her Rhodes Scholarship. At Oxford, she will be studying Hellenistic Egypt and its blending of Greek and Egyptian cultures. For her, this ancient "multiculturalism" is endlessly fascinating.

I cannot pretend that these two students are typical. Their gifts and drive are extraordinary. But they are not children of privilege. They came out of public high schools and went through the UW on a combination of public and private scholarships. They are exactly the kinds of students a public university exists to serve: young people of modest backgrounds who, with the help of public resources, are able to realize their highest potential.

Thousands of other Washington students on our three campuses — aspiring doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs, public servants, engineers, and young people with other goals and dreams — are living out their own versions of Devine's and Lamb's stories.

These are inspiring stories of individual opportunity and transformation. But they are also stories of social good. Society needs people trained to do its work and to move us all forward into a future we cannot know. Increasingly, higher education provides those people. This is more than a matter of "work-force training," important as that is. It is a matter of educating citizens — people with broad horizons, with ideas, with a drive to ask questions and a sense both of where we came from and where we might be going.

That is the public's stake in higher education. And that is why the ongoing conversation about our public colleges and universities is so important. We have not yet figured out how, as a state, to fund this critical piece of our common future. We haven't provided enough space for Washington's students, and we haven't really confronted the costs of quality and innovation.

Unless we get this right, we face a radically diminished future for our children and for our state. More and more people understand this. But time is running short.