The Land Grant Idea and the Evolving Outreach University

January 1998

To be published as Chapter 2 in University-Community Collaborations for the Twenty-First Century: Outreach to Scholarship for Youth and Families, eds. Richard M. Lerner and Lou Anna K. Simon, New York: Garland, 1998.

Garland Publishing, a member of the Taylor & Francis Group, New York.

I used to believe that neither society nor university faculty understood the Land Grant Idea. But, today, I am convinced that it is worse than that. It is the university as an historical institution that is not understood -- even by faculty. Remarkably, the reason is that academics, for all of their intellectual and analytic capacities, never reflect on it or study it -- or so few do. Rather, we faculty mostly take the university for granted and believe it has pretty much always had the same roles and functions, as when we entered it. In addition most faculty believe that it has only the "harmoniously integrated" roles that each of us plays within the university. In short, many of us behave as if the university was created in our "own image and likeness."

In fact, different faculty play very different roles. Their beliefs are in stark contrast to the complex reality of diverse, often conflicting, roles actually being performed across a large university, the management of which is far more difficult than most faculty appreciate. Nor are these multiple roles a recent phenomenon. Many are in fact ancient.

The basic argument of this chapter is unremarkable but not well understood by most academics: the university has survived for nearly a millennium by creating new roles and adapting its mix of roles to fundamental changes in the nature of society and its practical needs. Society is changing in radical ways again and we in the university are in a mode of adaptation that appears to be creating deeper involvement in society's efforts to resolve its practical problems. Today's evolving "outreach university" had its origin in a unique 19th century American educational innovation, the land grant college. The land grant tradition introduced "service to society" as a function of U.S. higher education. However, we still have difficulty defining and agreeing on what outreach, extension or service should involve as a legitimate university function. The existence of such a variety of terms is indicative of our lack of consensus about the nature of this century-old function of the American university.

This chapter first addresses the historical development of the university and the accumulating roles in which the university has served society over the centuries. It then turns to the impact of science on the modern American university and its societal context, and to a review of the challenges facing U.S. universities today, including the rise of a knowledge-centered society. The last half of the chapter is devoted to a survey of the growing direct involvement of U.S. universities in addressing societal problems, an attempt to define this more direct involvement, which we call "university outreach," and finally an assessment of the risks and limitations of outreach as a major role of the university.

With the rise of the renaissance university in the 14th and 15th centuries, education of a lay elite for societal leadership first evolved as a significant role. Humanistic studies and scholarship developed very slowly, initially outside the university, driven by the growing revival of classical Greek and Roman learning first in Renaissance Italy and then Europe. However, the medieval roles remained the dominant university functions in the Renaissance. Thus, the renaissance university continued to be motivated by society's perceived practical needs (Rudy, 1984, p. 40).

The pursuit of knowledge for its own, rather than God's, or in the Renaissance, man's sake, did not become a major force in European scholarship until well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Until this time, all scholarly study tended to be devoted to religion, vocational, and other perceived practical needs of society.

The "Scientific Revolution" began a fundamental transformation of society and its institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. While modern science as an enterprise runs back into the 17th century, it did not have a major presence in the university until the 19th century (Ashby, 1974, pp. 1-5). The university as a social organization resists and only slowly adopts new roles. The constraint of tradition on innovation explains much of the history of the university.

American higher education was established during the 17th and 18th centuries, borrowed from the British Oxford and Cambridge version of the liberal arts as conceived in the renaissance university (Newman, 1976). Initially these were church sponsored colleges or seminaries for undergraduates. University graduate education and science research were introduced in the 19th century, an innovation modeled on the German university that evolved out of Wilhelm von Humbolt's reforms of German higher education. This is the model for the modern research university, which in the U.S. was imposed on top of the undergraduate college. These two ideas of the university involve very different goals and values, and thus social roles that often conflict. Today some faculty are devoted to one, some to the other, some to both (Brubacher and Rudy, 1968, pp. 171-201).

It is difficult today to imagine the complexity of the conflict over the nature and purpose of the university that occurred during the early decades of this century. A confusing combat of beliefs and values drove a great diversity of views within the academy over the appropriate role of higher education in U.S. society (Veysey, 1965). Today we face a new configuration of equally complex conflicts and confusions, some new, but many ancient (Brubacher, 1977; Ashby, 1974, pp. 73-149).

The Land Grant Idea

But what of the land grant university, its "service to society," and origins? Some decades ago, I wondered "what do senior faculty mean by their endless appeals to the land grant mission or land grant philosophy?" I never got a satisfactory answer. The definitions proved too general or did not encompass many things going on around me.

I came to the College of Agriculture at Michigan State University from graduate work at Duke and then Harvard and was the first member of my department who did not have a farm background. Baffled by my environment, I started reading histories of land grant colleges and the autobiographies and biographies of early pioneers such as Liberty Hyde Bailey and Isaac Roberts. What I learned surprised me. Contrary to the beliefs of many faculty:

1. The land grant system of colleges did not spring into existence as a coherent idea or set of institutions in one decade or even one generation of leadership. The land-grant college evolved as an idea and then as an institution and a national system over many decades between 1850 and 1920. There was a lot of trial and much error, and it was not clear before the turn of this century whether the idea would be even a partial success or not (Roberts, 1946).

2. The land-grant idea was not conceived solely for agriculture. It is not any specific set of organizations, such as the trilogy of the experiment station, the extension service, and on-campus or resident instruction. These were designed specifically to address agriculture.

3. The land-grant idea is not just access to higher education for those with limited resources. It is not just good science. It is not just science applied to practical problems. It is not just extension education for people of the state who have practical problems to solve. It was all of this and more.

So what is the land-grant idea? It is, indeed, an idea. It is a set of beliefs about the social role of the university. What then are the beliefs that have defined the social role of the land-grant university? And what gave rise to this set of beliefs?

The history of the last half of the 19th century shows that the land-grant university arose out of an industrialized society's increasingly complex problems and deficiencies (Brubacher and Rudy, 1968, pp. 64-66). There was a growing need for more highly trained professionals, especially in the new science-based fields necessary to address the requirements of an industrial society -- in engineering, public health, agriculture, forestry, nursing, etc. Many of the professional schools of the modern university were needed but did not exist. Secondly, it arose out of an industrializing society's frustration with an unresponsive set of mostly private colleges providing a classical or "literary" education for a wealthy elite of less than 1% of the population. U.S. colleges of the day were generally church sponsored, and higher education was viewed as a religious responsibility. With few exceptions these institutions were unwilling to sully their hands addressing society's common but real needs. This was not their role. Thirdly, it arose out of middle class concern for the "American dream" of unlimited opportunities that was being threatened by industrialization. This was creating, not only great wealth for some, but a large, disadvantaged working class population of poor farmers and industrial workers with no prospect of access to the skills and practical education necessary for a better life. It was, they believed, creating a trapped underclass of potential peasants and workers. This concern was not only for equality of opportunity for a disadvantaged population, from which many in the middle class had come, but arose as well from their fear that democratic institutions and individual liberty, and thus survival of the middle class, were at stake in a society of growing economic inequality (Morrill, 1961; Eddy, 1957, pp. 1-45; Brubacher and Rudy, 1958, pp. 64-66).

In partial response, a new kind of college or university was created: the land grant university or college, the most unique part of the 19th century public university movement (Nevins, 1962). The land-grant university in its mature form was devoted to science and education in the service of society by:

1. Educating and training the professional cadres of an industrial, increasingly urban, society;
2. Providing broad access to higher education, irrespective of wealth or social status; and
3. Working to improve the welfare and social status of the largest, then most disadvantaged, groups in society -- farmers and industrial workers, the latter called "mechanics" in the 19th century.

Justin Morrill, the congressional sponsor of the act establishing the land-grant university system, was primarily concerned for broader, more democratic access to higher education to strengthen democracy.

The Land-Grant colleges were founded on the idea that a higher and broader education should be placed in every State within reach of those whose destiny assigns them to, or who may have the courage to choose industrial vocations where the wealth of nations is produced... It would be a mistake to suppose it was intended that every student should become either a farmer or a mechanic when the design comprehended not only instruction for those who may hold a plow or follow a trade, but such instruction as any person might need...and without the exclusion of those who might prefer to adhere to the classics(emphasis added)(Morrill, 1961).

By the turn of this century, these were a well formed set of U.S. beliefs about the social role of the university. This is the Land-Grant Idea. And it has, within the limits of society's resources, been generously supported by society for successfully pursuing these goals. Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, once observed that the land-grant idea is the one original contribution of American higher education. Today the land-grant university, along with other public and some private universities, appears to be evolving toward a 21st century "outreach university."

In pursuing these social goals, the most visible, early success of the land-grant university occurred in agriculture, where these beliefs were translated into the organizations of the experiment stations (a national system), the extension service (despite appearances, really only state systems) -- plus an ever changing set of research and extension programs. The improved welfare of the potential under classes of the 19th century was achieved through improved productivity and the wider distribution of its benefits through more equitable access to the opportunities in life. Open access and low tuition were long a general feature of the land-grant and other public universities and have provided opportunity for upward mobility in society irrespective of background or wealth.

From its earliest days the university has inherited several, very different roles: The scholarly pursuit of knowledge for God and man's sake, general or liberal education of clerical and later lay elites, and from the very beginning professional and vocational training. These constitute responses to major needs of medieval and renaissance society and thus primary social roles of the university. Scholarship contributed to the cultural capacity and knowledge of the society and kept the university intellectually vital. It was valued then as today more by academics than by the supporting society, although an increasingly better educated but small elite, lay and clerical, did share in and sponsor these values. Academics have frequently demonstrated considerable innocence in denying or denigrating the legitimacy of these historical roles.

Stout denials to the contrary notwithstanding, vocational training has always been a function of the university (Paulsen, 1906). How else does one view the medieval and renaissance university training of priests, medical doctors, and lawyers? It does no good to argue that these are professions and thus different. The university took them as vocations and professionalized them . They are no less vocations for it.

It is quite clear historically that the university has served society in every epoch by training and professionalizing those vocations that society judged critical to its functioning. This stabilizes training, establishes common standards of professional performance, and bestows an enlarged social status upon the vocation increasing its access in and capacity to serve society while enabling the profession to attract talented individuals. The university continues to this day to professionalize those vocations that the ordering of society makes essential, as for example not only in engineering and agriculture, but also primary and secondary education, journalism, social work, public administration, dentistry, architecture, business, hotel and restaurant management, industrial relations, police administration, and on and on.

Interestingly enough, over recent centuries there has been resentment within the university that this vocational and professionalizing role should exist. This attitude arises out of academic values that honor the pursuit of intellectually pure over applied knowledge -- for that which has no obvious value in immediate material and practical use, whatever is intellectual meaning. This belief arises from the 17th and 18th century European ethic of the leisured, land-owning, aristocrat turned gentleman scientist or academic, further reinforced by aristocratic resentment of the growing social and economic power of the material and practical-minded, rising commercial middle class.

The primary values of the academic vocation are determinedly intellectual. Sustaining the integrity of these values against the everyday pressures of the world and from outside meddling in the affairs of the university has never been an easy task -- as a personal or institutional matter. In defense of its interior intellectual life, the university tends to produce a culture that in its extreme form rejects as inappropriate all direct involvement in the affairs of the world, which leads some individuals even to deny that the university as an institution has any social role. This, of course, is wishful but hardly clear thought. Some balance of these multiple roles is necessary, along with respect for those who pursue the roles of the university that one does not oneself pursue. This makes the governance of the university a complex challenge.

All academic protests to the contrary do not change the historical fact that any institution that has survived for nearly a millennia is inevitably a social institution. Society has secured its survival simply because of the university's utility in society, i.e. its social roles. In fact, the university from its inception has been preeminently a social institution, a creature of its society and time (Paulsen, 1906). To deny this is to deny the history of every epoch of the university's existence. The real question is one of defining or redefining the social role of the university for each age and society so that legitimate needs are met while the university's intellectual integrity (and therefore, its long run vitality as a social institution) is protected from external encroachment and compromise. Sir Eric Ashby concluded that "What has survived and is significant is the social purpose of the university, its independence from church and state, and its peculiar method of internal government" (1959, p.2). Not only is the social role of the university one of its preeminent dimensions, but it is a role that by nature is in slow but continuous evolution. The social role of the medieval university was somewhat different from that of the great renaissance university and further still from that of the modern university, which was formed in the crucible of the scientific revolution of the 19th century. As the nature of the society that sustains the university changes in fundamental ways, the social role of the university will very slowly undergo change in response to that new social reality.

This keeps many academics thoroughly confused, for just as they begin to grasp the reality of their environment, it changes. This is especially the case in an organization with multiple roles in which any one academic's experience may extend to only one or a few of those roles. There is a predictable response. Reaching out for what they know, academics will use their bit of academic "turf" as a model of "the university" substituting the values and norms of their own activities for those of the university as a whole. Thus, the individual, for example, from the humanities, or one whose commitment lies primarily in undergraduate teaching, will argue the primacy of the humanistic and scholarly values of the late renaissance university. The bench scientist and the graduate and professional school teacher will often assert the exclusive claim of the values of the 19th century German university model, even when unaware of their historical origin. This idea of the university is devoted all but exclusively to the creation of knowledge of the material world and to graduate education rooted in that search for knowledge. Both the humanistic idea of the renaissance university and the German or research university idea are inherently elitist in intellectual terms, which, in 20th century practice, can and does deteriorate into a social elitism that is anti-democratic. The research (German) university idea and the land-grant college were introduced in the U.S. in the 19th century. Both were merged in the land-grant university, creating a constructive tension between knowledge creation and its use in society and between the intellectually elitist values of a scholarly life and the egalitarian values of a democratic society.

The land-grant idea at its best is determinedly democratic in a social sense, while intellectually elitist. It requires a commitment to first class science and excellent scholarship -- to an intellectual elitism. But the land-grant university is also committed to apply that science and scholarship to the practical problems of society. This combines intellectual excellence with equality of access to scientific and scholarly knowledge which is socially democratic or egalitarian both in research and education. Involved is an inherent tension that must be understood, accepted and managed.

The science beliefs of the land-grant idea were put well almost six decades ago by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1936, p. 267). Speaking at Harvard's tercentenary celebration of its founding, he said:

In the process of learning there should be present , in some sense or other, a subordinate activity of application. In fact, the applications are part of the knowledge. For the very meaning of things known is wrapped up in the relationships beyond themselves. Thus, unapplied knowledge is knowledge shorn of its meaning. Careful shielding of a university from the activities of the world around is the best way to chill interest and to defeat progress.

Science has probably been the single greatest force molding the culture of the modern age. It has transformed a traditional society into an industrial and now an information age in which vastly different technologies and organizations and a radically different view of human life and of the world prevail. This is quite as fundamental a transformation as occurred between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Its philosophical and organizational impact on the university is still being assimilated.

Science as an empirical enterprise swept all before it in the university and the society in the late 19th and 20th century. "The scientific method" (in actuality a variety of methods in some degree positivistic) became the dominant and, in most environments the only, or at least the most, acceptable and respected approach to knowledge. Positivism was a reaction to and rejection of the Aristotelian idea that explaining or understanding the world required a technological explanation -- i.e., the belief that purpose determines the character of the natural world which man experiences. Consequently, the purpose of any entity must be divined before it is possible to explain its nature. Positivism sought to limit claims of explanation to the more proximate causes of phenomena, to observable dimensions of causation, while avoiding metaphysical inquiry or unnecessary value judgements. A logical positivist view of science (an extreme now generally rejected in philosophy) accepts as scientifically meaningful only those propositions implied by a scientific theory ( a group of scientifically meaningful propositions) or those propositions which are capable of being defined precisely and quantitatively measured. This logical positivism excludes from scientific knowledge, as best it can, all normative and subjective matters. The contribution of a theory based empirical science to the understanding of the material world and to the wealth of society has been immense. But positivistic rules of evidence of whatever degree when accorded the role of the sole means to knowledge, has disordered and eroded -- even in the modern humanities to a great extent -- the society's and the university's commitment to the celebration of human values and culture. "Hard scientists" often talk of science as involving a logical positivistic method devoid of subjectivity, but for many practical reasons practice a "softer" less rigorous positivism in research. This hard science talk intimidates the "softer" social scientists and humanists of the academy. Thus, the great renaissance university, that marriage of faith in reason with human values, has unnecessarily but inexorably all but dissolved in the early positicism of the age of science. This and the progressive secularization of society has left education and society with a moral void and a different concept of man.

We have replaced the renaissance ideal of the whole man with that of man the research specialist -- the expert, the technocrat. This is the ideal to which our education has aspired, the prototype of man most valued in society. Like most cultural evolution, for the most part this has not been a conscious change. We have become what we set before ourselves as valued, although we now seem to be struggling to escape the cultural trap we have created.

The great demonstrated power of science has been so generally admired in society and in the university that the ethos and methods of science are mimicked in most, even if not all, matters. Science derives much of its intellectual power from two things. It concentrates on matters of positive knowledge (relatively "value-free knowledge") to the most careful exclusion or impounding of questions of normative knowledge (values) in order to obtain singular answers on which after empirical tests scientists can reach consensus. In addition, science pushes its intellectual frontiers further and further into the unknown by factoring positive knowledge into progressively smaller, more specialized categories in order to make operational the empirical tests of underlying conceptual hypotheses. Despite a certain illogic, the old gag definition of an expert -- as a person who knows more and more about less and less until he knows all there is to know about nothing -- has an increasingly poignant, if not painful, ring.

The societal and university response to science has done several things to man's view of himself and his world. The philosophic distinction between positive and normative knowledge, i.e., between relatively value-free and value knowledge, has been powerful and useful. However, as MIT's 1970 review of its educational enterprise observed, "the adulation of scientific method has acted to prevent a synthesis of the humanistic and scientific perspectives by casting doubt on the need for any but the scientific mode of thought" (Creative Renewal, p. 75). This "scientific mode of thought" has led educated man to depreciate human values and their study and has contributed to a progressive dehumanization of society and to a degradation of wisdom derived from the human condition and experience. If in the Middle Ages God was the measure of all things, and in the Renaissance, man, today man-made technology is that measure -- despite some growing dissent.

The decline in the celebration of human values has lead to the treatment of mankind as an object, as a part of the technology that science has made possible. In such a society the eternal search of the individual for meaning in life has little significance if human life itself has no transcendental or humanistic value, but is constrained to material, technocratic ends. Thus, if the past foretells anything, the promise of western civilization may likely end in the technologically efficient but lobotomized man of Walden II (Skinner, 1948) or in an extreme ideological and authoritarian fundamentalist revolt against any material understanding of man as only instrumental to technological and economic ends. One must hope not.

The effect of this on educational ideals has been disastrous. In describing the pre-1940 German university and its faculty, Lilge (1948, pp. 82-3) concludes:

"...their reduction of the human person to a thoroughly determined mechanism constitutes an emphatic denial that education is a moral problem at all. For them it has, in fact, become a branch of technology."

That is the point. It is as if we had to make man a machine in order to accommodate our technologies.

Until early in the 20th century higher education had at its center the formation of a moral human being to sustain a moral society. The growing hollowness of Western civilization (along with other problems) was explored early in this century by Thomas Mann in his novel, The Magic Mountain. Today, at the end of the century the same endemic failing is a central theme of the thought of Vaclav Havel, poet, playwright, anticommunist dissenter and the first poet-communist president of Czechoslovakia. Havel faults not just totalitarian society but all western civilization and, indeed, the world for an erosion of the human spirit, for destruction of man's humaneness and his metaphysical certainty. Modern man's search for certitude, for a moral compass, is evident in the growth of both fundamentalist sects and terrorist organizations associated with Christianity, Islam, and other religions. However, some of these sects and all terrorist groups are intolerant totalitarians. They are themselves symptoms of the moral collapse to which Mann, Havel and other traditional humanists testify. Make no mistake. Science did not do this; man did -- in the ideals celebrated, in what has been valued.

Another factor that complicates this problem and structures modern man's view of himself and his world is the progressively more intense specialization that tends to fracture knowledge. Man's activities and social organization have also become more specialized and fragmented, leading to greater human isolation and alienation. To give meaning and coherence, to synthesize, is today a heroic task. But the effort is rarely made, for we now celebrate not holistic man, not the educated generalist or the traditional philosopher, but the technical expert.

A rather basic dilemma arises from the social response to the great accomplishments of science. In reaping the benefits of a modern scientific and technological civilization, how do you "prevent the separation of technical power from moral responsibility?" (Lilge, 1948, p. 69). This perhaps is the real question that lies behind the distress in American society today over such diverse ideas as censorship of pornography, the impact on employment of corporate downsizing, environmental pollution, and the political alienation from and decline in legitimacy of government and, indeed, of the university and of science. We seem to have difficulty in bringing into effective, common focus both the technological (or economic) alternatives and human values that are inevitably involved in any decision large or small. Because the technological capacity to wage war at great remove exists, or because we can produce our national industrial output cheaper by promiscuous dumping of byproduct wastes, it does not follow that this is what should be done. Yet it almost seems that this is what happens all too frequently in modern society, whether democratic or totalitarian.

There is a world of difference between is and ought. In every decision of man both the relatively value free positive knowledge of what is and what can be done is unavoidably combined with normative value criteria of what is "good" or "bad," and processed through the social and political decision rules of society to produce something very different -- a prescriptive statement of what "ought" or "should" be done that is either "right" or "wrong". There is no such thing as a value-free decision. Positive knowledge we are generally able to bring to bear with expert skill, but normative knowledge is too often handled without rigor and in a manner accidental and unconscious. Needless to say, this frequently leads to flawed or sloppy, if not immoral, social decision making. We have become a nation of experts in specialized positive knowledge, but we are often inept and unconscious where application of normative knowledge is concerned. We leave ourselves vulnerable to the ideologues who, with or without moral vision, stir man's passions. It constitutes a moral time bomb at the very center of modern scientific - technological culture.

It is clear at this juncture that the real source of our difficulty lies in the specific furniture of man's mind, the epistemologies and configuration of factual and value beliefs, which, in collaboration with a few other institutions, is education's primary responsibility. Thus, this ticking time bomb is embedded in the curriculum as well as the research and outreach activities of the modern university. How the university handles this is perhaps its greatest challenge today.

Over the last century and a half, as society and its expectations of the university have changed, the university has evolved by adapting to society's needs. The period since World War II has been one of unprecedented growth in the scale and scope of higher education. Despite an expected future expansion of the student age cohort, university capacities are now constrained by limited and even declining real or inflation-adjusted resources. From these changes in society and the university many of our current problems flow. It is in this changing context that the outreach role of the university is now evolving.

In most of the fifty states the great growth of universities since the 1950s has created more activities (and institutions) than today's resources can support. The question in today's resource-limited world is where and how will cuts be made. How should individual institutions address this problem? As a national system, what values and strategy should American universities pursue? For surely we will sink or swim together as well as individually.

Low levels of economic growth since the mid 1970s, plus national budget deficits, inflation, and now the end of the cold war defense budgets, have eroded the real dollar support of universities by both federal and many state governments. At the same time the cost of running large public (and private) universities has increased faster than the per capita income of society. This is at least partly due to the competitive effort of each institution to create outstanding research and scholarly presence in all the expanding number of major fields of intellectual endeavor. Among the several consequences are growth in university overhead costs and in nonacademic staffs, constrained research budgets and rising student tuition. Much of the increase in oversight and regulation arises out of a widening belief in society that the university is failing in its traditional responsibility to police itself.

While the scale of higher education was expanding after World War II, progressive specialization in science and scholarship shattered the intellectual enterprise of academia into a myriad of activities and organizations frequently isolated from each other and from society, leading some academics to believe they have little or no obligation to society. Matching this fragmentation of our enterprise is a set of specialized journals and professional associations that now tend to dominate the tenure and promotion decisions of universities. This has pushed tenure criteria toward national level activities and toward research, while pulling institutions away from their state and regional missions and from any emphasis on teaching, outreach, and service obligations. This trend is reinforced by the growth since World War II of multiple, external funding sources that have increasingly dominated university priorities and faculty incentives, making it difficult to pursue coherent institutional obligation and compounding problems of university governance. Internal governance of most universities has grown more structured with multiple levels of faculty and administrative councils and committees greatly increasing the transaction costs of making internal governance decisions. As a consequence, the university has trouble today getting its act together both as an individual institution and as a system of national higher education.

At the same time, for more than a decade the society has been saying that it is not satisfied with our performance. This is made confusing by the fact that society is experiencing fundamental conflict over many of the values that govern its own behaviors, and these inevitably spill into the university and into supporting institutions such as state legislatures, the Congress, private foundations, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, etc. We are caught in the middle of, and are often a forum for, these conflicts. Compounding the university's problem in many cases are rising expectations of university participation in, and even leadership for, state and local problem-solving and economic development. As the federal government has cascaded its budget deficits down onto the states (by mandating state functions, but not financing them), the governors and state legislatures have slowly realized that by default the economic development and conservation of state resources as well as other roles have become a state responsibility.

Many governors and state legislatures have turned to their state universities, expecting to get help and even leadership. Very few have gotten what they wanted from "their university." No doubt some of these expectations were unrealistic, but disillusionment has seriously eroded support for the university. When Derek Bok, president of Harvard, lectures his peers in private institutions about their accountability to society and their obligation to help society solve its most urgent problems, it is time for the public institutions, especially the land-grant universities, to ask themselves "how well are we performing our obligations to the society that sustains us?" (Bok, 1982, 1990).

We must face the fact that the covenant that has governed the university's relationship with society since World War II has dissolved. During World War II a unique relationship developed between U.S. universities, its science community, and the Federal government. Scientific and engineering resources were combined in a major mission to unleash the energy of the atom and beat the Nazi's to the atomic bomb. Statisticians, language scholars, social scientists and other academics deciphered codes, encrypted intelligence, and performed unique feats of analysis based on probability theory. During World War II, and since, university scientists have worked on a wide range of weaponry and national defense problems. Department of Defense, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Atomic Energy Commission - Department of Energy research funding has made major demands upon the university but also built much of the current university basic physical science research capacity -- from which it is now withdrawing. The creation of the National Science Foundation and the investment of other government resources to sustain basic science after the war was, in a sense, the quid pro quo in the institutionalization of university science in the service of national interest. Thus, society's covenant with the university and with science was born in the crucible of war and continued in an act of faith by society that in peace science would contribute to the greater economic strength and welfare of the nation. Such a direct university-government relationship has raised questions about the independence and the intellectual integrity of the university.

Today society is in the midst of respecifying that covenant in Congress and state legislatures and in other legitimating and funding sources. The university needs to participate vigorously in the debate over the design of any new covenant, since its complex, multi-dimensional, nature is so poorly understood, even within the university, to say nothing of elsewhere in society.

At the same time the conflict over national science policy suggests that the post World War II covenant between science and society has also unraveled. Since so much of science takes place in the university, the university and its science faculties have a great stake in the outcome and must inform themselves and participate fully in this debate. The decline in the legitimacy of science has undermined the university's legitimacy in society as well. Too many scientists still think the only problem is one of funding: It's not! Renewing these covenants is both a matter for individual institutions in their immediate environment and for the society-wide system or systems of higher education.

G. Edward Schuh, Dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, points out, "Society will let the university contemplate its navel if that is what we want to do, but it does not have to pay for it" (1991, p. 4). University administration, faculty, student bodies, and governing boards must recognize this fundamental problem that all U.S. universities face today and respond in a coherent, unified manner on the issues essential to the survival of the university as an effective social institution. In doing so it is imperative that within the university each of us respect the other's views and grant each other the dignity we expect from others. Without ethical standards and civility, which are declining in society and the university, neither intellectual community nor intellectual integrity is possible.

Many public university faculty follow careers focused almost entirely on basic research and on national or international problems. This adds to the stature of their institution as a national and international research university. But these faculty must respect and support others in their college and departments who, in many instances, literally make the existence of national and international faculty activity possible. Without a large endowment, no public university can survive solely on its national or international activity and reputation. The keystone in the arch of a public university's existence are its state and local sources of support. You cannot be a great national university without national and international dimensions, but with few exceptions the public university would be quite weak or not even exist without its state support for educating the state's young and for addressing state and local problems. Public universities forget at their peril that they are creatures of their states. That said, however, in an increasingly global and interdependent world, it is also true that to be effective in state and local problem solving and in undergraduate education, the university must develop national and international knowledge and involvement.

We need to put our house in better order not only in identifying clearly and making more consistent our department, college, and university priorities, but in very consciously cutting the cloth of our activities to match our available resources, which are going to be limited for the foreseeable future. In doing so we also need to pay closer attention to those who provide us support and those whom that support is intended to serve. In every speech to the faculty of Michigan State University, President John A. Hannah used to state, "Our first obligation is to the sons and daughters of the taxpayers of the State of Michigan -- to our students." It still is. The public university must also respond within its relevant capacities to the expressed needs of the state especially in the research and development obligations financed by the state. It must perform well the outreach obligations financed by the sate and by state and local institutions (public and private). Finally, many public universities also have major national and international obligations in teaching, research and development, and outreach. If faculty do not serve their state well in the first three of these obligations, they will not long have the resource base and capacity necessary to attract the resources to serve their national and international clientele. The alarm bells are ringing for American universities. Yet many faculty and some administrators and trustees do not seem to hear. Some hear, but are deep into denial of their problem. Other see only that their specialized interest is threatened.

The land-grant university has a unique niche in the structure of higher education. Such institutions need to understand and strengthen what is strong and unique about their role. I despair of colleagues and administrators who compare their land-grant university to Harvard, Princeton, Berkeley and other "elite" private and near-private institutions and insist their institution become like them.

From community colleges, through regional four-year colleges, to Ph.D. granting universities, to the mostly private, national research universities, everyone is in a mode of emulation and envy trying to climb the ladder to become another Chicago, Stanford, or Harvard. As a Harvard product, I honor Harvard for its contributions to scholarship and to this society. But society will be poorly served if every college and university is a Harvard clone.

In an era of limited resources, the individual public institution to prosper must differentiate its product -- play to its strengths and unique role in its environment or societal niche. That niche will determine most of the demands made on an institution. The question each institution needs to answer is "what is our niche?" What are our strengths and how do we build on our strengths? How do we match our strengths to current and future opportunities? In what direction does our future lie?

Society is demanding greater accountability for its investment in universities. We are being asked to change our performance and mix of activities undertaken at society's behest, since society's needs are changing. There is nothing new in this. The university faces these challenges periodically. But we are also being asked, in this process, to share the resource limitation burdens of society. This makes our choices more difficult, especially since newly developed, competing institutions make the university less unique in society.

As university educators and intellectuals we are an especially privileged group in society -- and with that privilege goes special obligations, which perhaps we have not tended to all that well in recent times. In any case, we now face the task of relegitimizing the university after several decades of growing criticism and erosion in credibility -- some of which is justified, much not. We appear to have exhausted most of the moral credit conferred on the university in the past.

We need to explain ourselves better. Many critics, right and left, of the university are just wrong or with media help greatly exaggerate the incidence of that about which they complain. Legislators in some states, for example, and certainly the public, have never understood how much time good teaching takes, requiring many hours outside of class, if it is to be done well. While there are only so many hours in the day, it is the university reward system, the faculty culture at individual universities, and the mind set and behavior of individual faculty that makes research either highly competitive or highly complementary with teaching. Without involvement in scholarship or research, teaching can easily become stale and even isolated from developments in a field, while student interaction with faculty in class and in the lab often contributes to or stimulates ideas for research.

Man, with the help of science, has transformed the role of knowledge in society. In the early stages of industrialization in the 18th and 19th century, society's man-made capital was increasingly embodied in machines, but as the industrialization process matured and as the scientific revolution began to have a significant impact on society this has changed. Increasingly, the largest and most strategic investment is that made in the human resources and organization that are devoted to problem-solving and innovation in the production process (Boulding, 1953). "Today, the economically significant industrial property is not the machine, but the design, and not so much the design as the capacity to innovate design in process and product. This is scarcely (physical) property at all, but is rather a capacity inhering in an organization" (Piel, 1961, pp. 274-5). It is the organization of human knowledge and the human capacity to create new knowledge that is driving the information revolution. This has been clear for some decades.

Knowledge has become a highly valued input in the production processes of society, largely as a consequence of the application of science to the activities of man. Whereas university education had previously been viewed in the U.S. primarily as a cultural or a consumer good, it now tends to be viewed as a producer's good necessary to society. This change has given rise to research and development activities in universities and in industry that early on in the information revolution were termed "the knowledge industry" (Machlup, 1962; Slichter, 1958). The systematic application of science leads to an increase in the rate at which material knowledge accumulates and thus also in the rate at which the existing stock of earlier knowledge grows obsolete.

Historically, the university has been a primary knowledge center of society. However, as society becomes more dependent upon scientific knowledge for its continued growth and vitality, its focus on knowledge shifts in emphasis from the conservation, retrieval, and communication of existing knowledge to place in a strategic role the process be which knowledge is created and moved into productive use. The capacity for creating and transmitting knowledge has made the university even more important to society as society becomes progressively more dependent on the creation of new knowledge for continued growth. At the same time other institutions have developed, which now complement or compete with the university. The university no longer has, if it ever did, a monopoly on the creation of scientific and scholarly knowledge.

The Social Organization of the Knowledge-Centered Society

Applied science, particularly through communication and transportation technologies, has transformed a traditional 19th century society of many small localized decision systems, organizations, and communities that were viable and reasonably self-sufficient into a modern society of functionally specialized, large-scale, and therefore bureaucratic organizations, which are frequently managed from a regional, national, or international level of decision making. Many of these specialized decision systems transcend the scale of even the largest city or nation. Since such decision systems are usually focused around a single specialized function such as international finance or national highway building, they function effectively in a vertical sense but are not often coordinated well across society with other functions and decision systems. These functional systems do not respond easily to broad, complex, social problem requiring integrated cooperation of multiple decision systems. Vertically specialized systems thus are not responsive to multidimensional developmental goals or to more general public or community needs.

Under the impact of the changing scale and intense specialization of organization and decision making, there has been a breakdown in effective community, both local and national. More recent globalization of markets and growing international interdependence compound the problem. Immense capital flows slosh with electronic speed back and forth from one national economy to another undermining the capacity for any effective national monetary policy. In fact, the concepts of national sovereignty and community self-sufficiency may well be themselves obsolete ideas at this point. Many traditional functions of national governance appear to be moving in two directions, some back down to state and local levels, while other strategic elements of policy making have passed beyond the immediate control of national governments to international organizations. Private transnational organizations increasingly seem little constrained by the policies and power of government at either national or international levels. There is a pervasive feeling in American society and elsewhere in the world that, despite the great technological power with which we live, we lack the power to control our own future. The sense of community and individual identity decays and with that decay the potential for democratic governance also erodes. At the same time historical ethnic and regional separatism is threatening to fragment current nation states into even smaller entities in Spain, Canada, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans as well as in the Middle East and the sovereign republics of the former Soviet Union (Guéhenno, 1995; Sandel, 1996; Elshtain, 1995).

America and other parts of the world face a rising incidence of social pathologies generating problems of civil disorder, crime, poverty, unemployment, pollution, inadequate education, housing, transportation, medical and health services, and justice. In the U.S., a society that has long been committed to the optimistic belief that the application of positive knowledge can solve all difficulties, these problems create great pressures to involve the university in addressing societal problems.

The American university, through some of its parts, has long worked on societal problems. Over the years its most visible commitments have variously been termed university extension, outreach, or public service. It is not a new commitment. But it is still poorly defined and focused, and thus not well internalized in the value system and incentive structure of the modern university. What is new is the growing pressure of an increasingly complex society for commitment by the university to assist in a wider range of society's problem-solving efforts. Pressure is now felt in private as well as public institutions, community colleges as well as large universities. The responses vary greatly. Higher education, however, seemed to be slowly evolving toward the creation of an outreach mission or extension of education and research on a par with its social commitment to on-campus teaching and research. The land-grant idea is the kernel from which much of this grew and certainly one of the most highly developed, and successful examples. Nevertheless, it must be observed that the land-grant university, the large state universities and even the private research universities are now increasingly alike in their functions and societal roles.

Some think of university involvement in society's problems as simply the service part of the classical rhetoric about university functions -- teaching, research, and service. However, most extension or outreach activities involve not just service but teaching and/or research as well. The teaching of urban planners and sanitary engineers, for example, can be regarded as both teaching and a service to the society. University research to find a means of ridding humanity of cancer or controlling environmental pollution is both research and a public service. Such applied problem solving in the past also required or led to contributions to basic scientific knowledge. University outreach commitments are complex combinations that usually exhibit some mixture of teaching and research, but with a clear purpose that serves society much more directly than disciplinary education and basic research.

Almost all public universities have long had among their roles public service to society in the sense of professional training of the new vocations of an industrial society. The Morrill Act of 1862 founded the land-grant colleges around an explicit commitment to education and public service for the broader society. This was made concrete primarily in the university's application of science and involvement in social action to improve the productivity, material well-being, and social status of the two largest components of the laboring classes of the 19th century, farmers and industrial workers. Large parts of this rural and urban working class achieved upward social mobility through democratic access to college education (Nevins). The land-grant college and the associated institutions that it helped to build in rural life have transformed the productivity, welfare, and social class of today's successful commercial farmer to an extent that would astonish its early founders. The consequent lower relative cost of food has contributed to the welfare of all laboring people and to the more rapid development of the American economy. In terms of deliberate national commitment, the Morrill Act was certainly the beginning, but only the beginning, of higher education's mission in outreach or extension (Eddy, 1957, pp. 78-79; Bonnen, 1990).

The "land-grant tradition" has generated organizational arrangements that constitute one major historical model of university outreach. Basic and applied research activities developed around the federal and state funded problem-solving focus of the experiment stations established nationally by the Hatch Act of 1887. In the effort to move knowledge more effectively from the university campus to the farm and rural user, the Cooperative Extension Service was created by the Smith Lever Act of 1914. This organization, financed from federal, state, and local sources, provides for on-campus specialists and for a field staff in local communities both of which together attempt to relate the campus to the community, providing a means for facilitating community problem identification and the direction of university knowledge toward the problems selected for university action. While the informational educational activities of the land grant college of agriculture have more recently broadened their scope in some states with strong agricultural sectors, these organizations were designed to serve agriculture.² However, a mistaken idea persists that because of their success the organizational structure of the colleges of agriculture are a model that can be transferred without modification to other parts of the university and to entirely different problem areas.

Even before the development of Cooperative Extension, some public universities were creating general extension programs for continuing adult education. General extension has tended to focus on formal classroom teaching, but for the evening hours or weekends and frequently in locations removed from the university campus. The needs served have ranged from training adults in technical skills (e.g, secretarial, accounting, etc.) to refresher and continuing education for various professional groups (e.g., engineers, lawyers) to general cultural enrichment (Ziegler, 1964). In a few cases general extension program, for example at Syracuse University, developed around the informal needs of the community and its leadership. It is also worth noting that well before the Morrill Act engineers were trained at West Point and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private institution in Troy, New York that spent the first decade after its founding in 1825 providing training for farmers.

Many university outreach-like activities take place outside the context of the university's different extension frameworks, and some of these were in existence before either cooperative or general extension. This is because some outreach activities evolved as a logical extension of the regular teaching or research activity of the university's many professional schools, which in both public and private universities have long independently carried on quite varied activities in problem-solving research and for the continuing education of their own professional and related groups. Some more recent on-campus teaching programs attempt to expose students and their values to learning situations that have also been described by some as a form of outreach. In other cases, graduate research programs collaborate in the U.S. and abroad with communities or societal organizations that constitute a laboratory in which the university provides problem-solving research and education.

In a few states, very unique relationships were forged between the university and state government, creating a partnership in which the university trained some professional cadres of state government, led or worked in the planning of state economic development, provided analysis of state problems, and on occasion, participated in the design of legislation in a broad range of areas. This happened, for example, in Wisconsin and California. One of the products of this type of collaboration are the many university institutes of government or government research that have existed for decades. In an often closely related process public administration developed as an academic field and as a profession. These policy-oriented university efforts occurred early in private as well as public universities. Today some of the most distinguished schools of public administration (or public policy) are in private institutions such as Syracuse, Harvard, and Princeton, to name just three.

Individual universities have often developed unique relationships to specific industries where such industries constitute a major and strategic element in the well-being of the region or state. For example, the University of Minnesota early committed resources to research on the technology of mining and, in past decades, mounted research on the utilization of low-grade iron ore in an attempt to offset the decline in economic activity and employment that occurred in Minnesota as the high-grade ores of the Mesabi range were exhausted. North Carolina State University has long invested in the research and education that sustains the state's major textile industry. There is, in fact, a general national pattern of specialized public service commitments that have developed from geographic location and the nature of the economic base of the state service by a given institution.

In the period since World War II one of the most distinctive public service missions developed by American universities has been in international programs. Both public and private higher education in the United States have become increasingly involved in activities ranging from cultural exchange to helping build various institutions abroad, particularly research and educational institutions, to a major involvement in various types of foreign economic development. This has included development planning activities and applied research programs for the improvement of the technologies and institutions of agriculture, industry, and other sectors of developing nations.

In a complex and rapidly changing knowledge-centered world, to invest only in research is rarely sufficient to assure that new knowledge thus created will be most effectively utilized or make the greatest contribution to society. If new knowledge is to produce the greatest social value, research on R&D demonstrates that it must be moved into use as rapidly as possible. This normally requires some institutional interconnection between the research process and society. Some of these outreach arrangements are operated by the university, some by commercial users of knowledge, and others by agencies of the state. Some are combinations. Most are the consequence of a pragmatic tailoring of institutional form and function to specific purpose.

The university is often directly involved in the affairs of the society (Price, 1965; Bazelon, 1967). Since World War I, universities have acquired access to primary instruments of power in this society, through a complex of private, professional and governmental organizations, ranging from foundations and the National Academy of Sciences and the National Science Foundation to the President's Council of Economic Advisors and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Eminent members of university faculties, particularly in the physical, biological, and social sciences, now exercise direct influence in private sector resource and public policy decisions far beyond the wildest academic dreams of 50 years ago. Formal institutional arrangements and long-term contracts now link private firms and universities in complementary and common endeavors. Most major universities now employ national and state lobbyists, something they would not do if they were not able and did not feel a need to influence public policy.

University Outreach: Imperatives and Constraints

The diverse nature of these involvements raises questions about the appropriateness of some university activities and their impact on the nature and integrity of the university as an institution. The post World War II expansion of higher education, which is at least partly responsible for this diverse involvement, has ended. It is time to rethink and to clarify the social role of the unviersity. We need more precise definition and articulation of the appropriate roles of the university. We need tomorrow's society, if that society is to understand us and renew its covenant with the university. The current financial "downsizing" of almost all major public and private institutions creates a window of opportunity for that purpose. Unfortunately it has been accompanied by financially opportunistic privatizing of some university academic functions, which further confuses the primary public good purpose of higher education.

Adding to the confusion is a current focus on unethical behavior in science, and the university generally, testifying to an apparent erosion of academic values and integrity as competition for resources and advancement has become intense in a resource-constrained era. With this rising level of visible influence of the university in society comes greater pressure for accountability and a growing volume of criticism of the university. No one needs reminding of Lord Acton's dictum about power corrupting (Price, 1965). Small wonder that some faculty wish to retreat from society's embrace to an academic "ivory tower."

The outreach role of the university arises as society is confronted by problems for which the university is a highly competent and relevant source of knowledge. In the knowledge-centered society this involves a growing range of problems. In some fashion society will be served in its most urgent needs. When the university has the knowledge and expertise needed in society's problem solving efforts, particularly where there is no good alternative source of this knowledge, the university must have convincing reasons if it refuses to respond to the most important of society's needs. Refusal, without adequate reason, will lead to further withdrawal of societal support and to the creation of even more substitutes for the university.

The university's social responsibility has long been to give society what it needs, not necessarily what it wants. There is often a difference. Thus, the university's responsibility as a social critic is a most serious one. Society through its many public and private organizations often asks of the university things that would serve society poorly or not at all. Some simply attempted to "use" the university for political or private gain. Similarly, many real social needs tend to go long unrecognized in society. The university's public responsibility is to exercise it role of social critic as persuasively as possible, in identifying genuine social needs, establishing university priorities as best it can, and responding with its knowledge whether it has been asked to do so or not. The problem for the university is not really whether it should act but what it should do and how, as well as when. The real problem for the university is one of appropriate choices and their timing.

Values are unavoidably embedded in all choices or decisions to act. Value judgments are as important to the success or failure of societal efforts to solve problems as is any positive knowledge with which these values are combined. Responsible decision making involves understanding the implications of the value choices involved, accepting responsibility for a decision, and educating one's partners in outreach and the people affected as to the likely consequences of the proposed action or outreach activity (Castle, 1971, p. 553).

Often the university is asked to involve itself in commitments for which it has little capacity or for which other institutions are better prepared and, thus, in which it probably has little legitimate role. Consulting firms and other private and public organizations are often better equipped today to handle some need than is a university. Other requests would make the university an agent of partisan interests, perhaps embroiling it in political conflict and impairing its capacity and reputation for objectivity. Such activities are inconsistent with the true nature and limits of a university. The university must be careful to commit its limited resources to outreach activities that are legitimate for a university and are of major social significance.

But the question remains, what is legitimate? What has major social significance? By what criteria is such question answered? Indeed, what is meant by the very term university outreach? How is it to be defined so that we know what we are talking about, can manage it intelligently, and can communicate its meaning to others? Out of the almost infinite range of activities that are sometimes described as university outreach or public service activities of the university, what is legitimately included in its outreach role?

The term "outreach" is slowly but increasingly replacing those of "extension" and "public affairs."³ The traditional view of university outreach identifies this role as the third member of that long-revered trinity -- teaching, research, and service. This view persists apparently for its simplicity. Its logic is clearly deficient. Any careful examination of what universities do under this rubric leads to the conclusion that outreach activities are some combination of teaching, research, and service.

One does not need to talk very long with faculty and administrators in different institutions to realize that the range of activities that they collectively would include in outreach is so diverse that little a university does would be excluded. This is not very helpful. It signifies only that university people believe that practically all their activities have a direct public value -- a belief that is not fully shared by the public or state legislators these days.

What Do Faculty and Administrators Include?

Generally, no one suggests basic or pure research be included in the definition. But the varieties of mission-oriented research that are seen as outreach are extensive. A distinction is made by some between research done at the researcher's initiative on general funds at the university and the applied research contracted for with an outside financing source. In the latter case a distinction is also often made between research contracts with government and those with private firms. Some who would include contract research with private firms distinguish between research having a public or scientific value and research having only a private value to the firm. Closely related is the distinction between classified research, whether for government of a private firm, and that which is public. Finally, many also distinguish between applied research contracts entered into by the university or contracts to which the university is a party, and those in which only an individual professor is involved. Some of these categories are not only excluded by many faculty from university public affairs, but also are described as not legitimate for the university or its faculty to undertake -- e.g., research with only classified or private and proprietary benefits.

Another set of questions arises in considering the entrepreneurial enterprises of faculty outside of their on-campus teaching and research activities. Many faculty in the sciences and engineering are involved with corporations spun off from the research generated in the university laboratories. Their involvement ranges from minor commitments to situations in which a predominant portion of a faculty member's research time is devoted to the firm. Many are shareholders or participating partners in such firms. In some cases these activities are the result of conscious university policy aimed at state economic development; in other cases they are tolerated in order to hold strong faculty.

Some faculty spend considerable time consulting. Much of it is for proprietary firms, but not too many faculty see this as a university outreach activity. On the other hand the equally large volume of consultation with governmental bodies is often regarded as outreach.

The same distinction is often drawn between the activities of university professors when on leave to government service or private firms. The distinction is not always clear cut, for some consulting and service in private firms may carry a substantial element of public interest while work with some governmental activities may be of dubious public value.

Faculty generally do not see their individual involvement in local community activities and public service as any part of university outreach. A few distinguish between those situations in which faculty members serve because of professional competence and situations in which they serve as a citizen.

A third set of questions concern the university's corporate involvement in the local community and broader society. A distinct subset is the university's unavoidable corporate responsibility as a citizen in a specific community setting. Student and faculty activists have brought this area of previously vague responsibilities into sharper focus. Different, higher, and more distinct standards of behavior have been imposed on the university and on many other corporate entities. This accountability ultimately takes the form of federal, state, or local government regulations. Thus, university policies in land acquisition and management, housing, investing, employment, etc. are now evaluated and managed, not just for their effect on the university, but for their impact on the university's various external communities.

Beyond responsibility for the effects of its day-to-day operations on the community, the university has also undertaken a broad range of voluntary, university corporate commitments in the problem-solving activities of society. These range from programs that are aimed at improvement of productivity in various industrial or business sectors to improvement of critical public services in health and education. These activities all exhibit some effort to build long term, organized linkages into the society from on academic unit or units of the university. Thus, the activities of such diverse organizational forms as university associated laboratories, research institutes, policy institutes, general or university extension, and cooperative extension can all be appropriately included in this category. In general terms, these activities of the university are direct corporate responses to societal needs in human and cultural development, community and resource development, and economic development.

A fourth general set of activities, which faculty often include as university outreach, involves manpower training and leadership education. Many faculty distinguish between training for professional or vocational roles from the education that develops general human capabilities. Both can be seen in the undergraduate and post-graduate preparation for high priority social roles in leadership and in the complex technologies and organizations necessary in modern society. In the case of post-graduate training and education, university research activities are often an intimate part of the process.

Ordering The Universe of Possibilities

How does one impose conceptual order on this wide array of activities? Is there such a thing as a clearly definable role for the university? If there is, at this point it is obvious that it is not a pure category such as teaching or research. The one common dimension is that of social response or responsibility. An approach that orders but reflects many of the differences between university activities is presented in Figure 1. While it is not totally satisfactory, it does provide an initial step into the problem.

Behavior while managing its day-to-day operations that is undertaken by the university as a responsible corporate citizen of its immediate specific communities. Disciplinary research plus multidisciplinary, subject-matter research. Undergraduate education. Mission-oriented research to serve society. Renewal of the university and of society's capacity-through research inputs to teaching and the education of the next generation of researchers. Manpower training and master's-level professional and graduate education. Corporate commitments of the university in extension or outreach that involve problem solving, the processes of development and conservation of human and natural resources, delivery systems, and institution building. Figure 2.1

At least three dimensions seem essential to any university and to a definition of outreach: the university as a socially responsible organization (Area 1), as a researcher (Area 2) and as a teacher (Area 3). Research and teaching are primary university functions and cannot per se be considered outreach, even though it is possible for faculty to extend their research and teaching into the outreach milieu.

Several perspectives develop from this approach. A series of three university activities are often seen as elements of outreach but in themselves may also be viewed as distinct roles of the university. These are found in Areas 4, 5 and 6 of the Figure. Area 4, which is common to research and social responsibility, incorporates mission-oriented research and consulting. Area 5 represents a parallel, but slightly different, interface between research and teaching that includes the university's activities of self-renewal through research inputs into teaching and the education of the next generation of university and other public and private sector researchers. Area 6, which is unique to teaching and social responsibility, includes primarily manpower training and some, mostly Master's level, professional and graduate education. In addition, a useful distinction can be made between the university's activities as a responsible corporate citizen whose normal day-to-day operations have an impact on society (Area 1) and those activities (Areas 4, 6 and 7) that comprise the university's more volitional response to a broad set of societal problems. Nevertheless, as one analyzes specific cases there often seems to be no hard, clear line between these categories. Rather, for example, the manpower and applied research activities of Areas 4 and 6 overlap or blend into Area 7 in cases where they are part of an organized corporate commitment of some part of the university devoted to a clear societal need.

The logic of this approach suggests that the heartland of university outreach lies in that area which alone is common to all three fundamental dimensions of the university, in Area 7; but it is also something more. Thus, an examination of the many examples of university corporate commitment to society suggests that at the heart of university outreach is an implied synergism generally characterized by:

1. Developmental processes;
2. Institution building; and
3. An interactive linkage into society for the explicit purpose of societal problem solving.

Most substantive outreach commitments appear to involve the university in some developmental process in society, human and cultural development, community and resource development, or economic development. When the university activity is not part of a societal developmental process, the university may be performing some valuable function in society, but it probably is not a full example of university outreach.

As the university extends its resources and expertise into society, it cooperates with numerous societal agencies and organizations already in existence. In major outreach efforts, however, the university and these agencies inevitably encounter situations demanding the creation of new organizations and institutions to facilitate their problem-solving effort either because existing societal arrangements are incomplete, anachronistic, or missing. When this occurs the university occasionally builds new organizations and institutions directly, but more often finds itself in a collaborative or catalytic role with its societal partners in such endeavors.

Since both development and organization or institution building are innovative roles, they demand considerable creativity and experimentation from the university. The university is not the exclusive agent for these creative processes, but it is often better prepared to work on a high-risk, knowledge-intensive public goal than are proprietary or political institutions. The university is one of only a few institutions having much of the necessary expertise for such endeavors. Finally, since its primary motivation for involvement is neither political nor proprietary, it should be easier for the university to disengage itself once the organization or institution-building and the developmental process is self-sustaining. If the university outreach role is to remain innovative, it must eventually disengage from the programs and organizations it helps to create. Otherwise, it will find its outreach role weighed down with increasing numbers of bureaucratic operating responsibilities and eventually becomes little different from the action agencies of government.

The final element of the tripartite conception of outreach is some form of interactive, two-way linkage into society. Since problem solving is a process that implies working with rather than for other segments of society, the university must operationalize knowledge, skills, and expertise through an outreach structure that is capable of providing external linkages for the university to institutions in society and also reciprocating linkages back into the university. The concept of institutional linkage is not meant to imply that the university already has the solution, but rather that it participates or collaborates in the problem-solving processes of society. Its organized linkage to society enhances university access to societal experience, and thus its capacity to help identify problems as well as tap needed societal resources more effectively.

A Proposed Definition

One must go beyond the tripartite approach in the graphic above to achieve a definition that considers the other distinctions and dimensions discussed above. Outreach can be defined as:

The corporate activities of a university beyond its immediate civic responsibilities that involve conscious commitment by academic units of the university to some role in the problem solving efforts of society and which are focused on the developing of human, national, and community resources. It involves a purposive extension or linkage of the university's special competence and resources to organizations and individuals outside the university.

This outreach effort will usually lead to participation in the creation of new organizations or institutions to facilitate problem-solving. University outreach is the response of the university to what it perceives to be primary local, state, regional, national, or international needs. Thus, it is university teaching, research, and service that are combined in problem-solving missions, conceived in the public interest, and ordered by the university's understanding of the priorities of social need, but within the constraints of the university's special competencies, resources and societal environment.

What are some of the implications of such a definition? By virtue of limiting university outreach to those activities sponsored and sustained by one or more of the academic units of the university, the private activities of individual faculty are excluded. Also excluded are activities associated with such things as university land acquisition, capital investment, and employment. These activities arise as a consequence of the university's responsibility as a corporate citizen whose operations have an important effect on its immediate communities. Thus, this definition limits outreach to Areas 4, 6, and 7 of Figure 1.

By limiting university outreach to conscious, direct commitments to societal problem solving, one excludes from university outreach the incidental services delivered in the execution of some other university function. An example of the latter might be the medical services provided a local community as a by-product of its clinical curriculum.

Since we have defined outreach as a role in society's problem-solving processes, those activities that are not mission-oriented are excluded. This does not mean that university involvement in outreach is always itself directly a problem-solving activity. In some cases it may be only a partial input into one of society's well institutionalized problem-solving processes. But it is a corporate commitment of the university whose ultimate social value lies in societal problem solving.

University outreach involves the creation of socially useful knowledge and services, plus conscious effort to extend this knowledge and service to problem areas in society. This is more than the effort of individual faculty to propagate their ideas. Rather it presumes a corporate effort by the university or one or more of its academic units to design and maintain linkage into society that runs well beyond the university's general public information or research publication activities. It is seen in its most highly organized form in the university's various interactive outreach structures such as extension and the policy and practical problem-oriented applied institutes and laboratories.

University outreach is also limited to responses involving societal problems in which there is a major public interest component. Those matters that are solely or predominantly of private or proprietary interest are excluded.

Finally, the university is an institution of finite resources and competence. It is not a surrogate for society. It has neither the resources nor the expertise to do all things well or safely. Its role in outreach is limited to specific areas in which it has a unique or at least a comparative advantage.

Everything imaginable in the way of university interventions in society have been described as outreach at one time or another by faculty or administrators. Some fall within what we have described as the heartland of public affairs (Area 7 above); others do not. The somewhat broader definition provided here includes Areas 4 and 6 as well. Greater order is imposed by a definition that distinguishes between different types of university interaction with society and limits outreach to a subset with specific, definable characteristics. However, an important question remains.

The university is a unique social institution whose relationship to society, like any institution, has limits. The university serves society by creating, preserving and transmitting knowledge, and by playing the role of social critic. In the U.S. at least, it also serves as a handmaiden in societal problem solving. Both the roles of societal problem-solving and social critic are risky and can involve conflicts over strongly held political and value beliefs. Society grants the university the freedom to preform these roles on the condition that it limit its corporate intervention to knowledge-based persuasion and its corporate participation to that of handmaiden. In short, the university as a corporate entity may not substitute itself or attempt to act for society. As an organization it may serve one or all societal combatants in a policy debate but it must maintain a careful corporate neutrality in society's political wars. Despite its profound engagement with society, the university is not a surrogate for society. Faculty are free within the law to take any position or action they wish in political or social conflicts, but the price paid for academic freedom of faculty is the corporate neutrality of the university. This is a constraint on outreach as a corporate activity of the university. Since outreach involves an intimate embrace with society, a tension exists in which there are risks for the university and its perceived legitimacy.

University involvement in society's affairs can be categorized in terms of a risk continuum of varying degrees, which rests at one end close to the conventional teaching and research activities of the university and at the other extreme in a deep involvement in the making of societal decisions and in the risks of public advocacy. Thus, these strategies range from very low to high in visibility and in risk. In all cases we are concerned with the university's corporate commitments and exclude the activity of faculty as individuals.

1. There is a "low silhouette" involvement that consciously avoids conflict. In this cast the university extends research, education, and service on demand and pretty much in the form in which it is requested. There is little independent university initiative in problem identification. Also there is very little effort, except as requested, in applied problem solving. In short, the balance between problem solving and the delivery of services is focused toward the delivery of services on demand. Generally, the groups served are elements of the existing political establishment rather than groups not empowered by society.

2. The next level of risk is exemplified by programs that focus on the processes of problem evaluation, identification of possible alternative solutions, and an evaluation of the consequences of following any one alternative. In this approach, it is relatively easy to maintain the scholar's objective stance and yet work on societal problems. Depending on how conflict-ridden and controversial the problem is, this approach will produce more or less controversy.

These first two levels of risk involve activities that are normally no more difficult to defend than the university's conventional role in teaching and research. Level two does entail a slightly higher amount of risk, since it involves the direct evaluation of the consequences of alternative policies or solutions that some groups will not wish to hear or have others hear, especially when cloaked in the authority of the university.

3. Risk level three is level two plus organized interaction with, or outreach to, the decision makers and influentials in society associated with the particular problem upon which one is focused. In effect, this approach carries the academic capacities of problem identification and alternative evaluation directly into the society's decision processes. The decision makers in this case are those highly legitimized ones who dominate the existing social system. Despite deep involvement in the decision process, you do not in this case put yourself in the position of providing objective analysis and evaluation of consequences.

4. The next level is similar to risk level three but this case involves the university with participants who are in direct political contest over the problems being addresses. One example might be the university programs that work with poorly legitimized or stigmatized and disenfranchised groups. These groups, such as minorities and the poor, are not generally part of the existing power structure. Depending upon the nature of the university's program, the minority group's political activities, and its acceptance in the society, this will be a more or less risky program area. The tricky part of it is that you are working with the often fractious leadership elements of minority groups in an attempt to wire them into the overall decision processes of society while simultaneously dealing with other groups antagonistic to your program goals. Maintaining credibility in the midst of this can be difficult, but usually necessary to success.

A different situation might involve intense conflict for high stakes between well legitimized groups in society. In the 1980s, for example, the electrical power industry of a midwestern state proposed to expand capacity to meet expected demand by building nuclear power plants. Well financed and politically strong environmental and other groups adamantly opposed this form of energy, and the beginnings of a long, high cost political conflict spilled into state politics. The land-grant university was asked by a beleaguered governor to help resolve the conflict, which it did in a few years of consensus building between the parties. The effort was begun on the neutral ground of the university and constructed around a program of research agreed to by all parties to establish a common factual base. This was followed then by a complex educational effort ending in a compromise negotiated in private by the leadership of the contending groups -- well away from the university and the unstable waters of state politics. It was a dangerous undertaking which, if not managed astutely, could have injured the university's reputation for objectivity. On the other hand, to have refused the governor's request might have impaired the university's state support.

5. An even higher level of risk involves a major break from the educational posture of avoiding advocacy. In this case one takes the additional initiative of privately and informally advocating specific solutions to problems with influentials and decision makers of various power structures. Since this outreach effort would already be involved in activities characterized by risk levels three and four, it would have highly developed informal relationships with the influential role players in the decision system. One becomes an advocate but only in an informal and personal manner away from public exposure. This does not put the politician, decision maker, or outreach personnel on the spot politically. As with level four this takes very skilled practitioners of outreach who are themselves politically astute.

6. Risk level six, besides providing analysis and evaluation of alternatives and other knowledge for various decision systems, adds the dimension of university involvement in building new organizations and institutions. When attempting actually to solve problems in society, one almost invariably finds that the design of the solution requires some alteration in the fabric of society. That is, there is not in place an adequate set of arrangements for implementing an appropriate solution. Thus, before one can insure genuine resolution of the problem, new organizations, new rules, new roles in society need to be created. In this approach the university participates in the creation of that new arrangement in the fabric of society.

For example, when one needs to change the values of central city youth in order to do something about a social pathology, it will be necessary to build community centers or youth clubs, or some new institutional arrangement to reach them and to involve them in an educational and socialization process. The university's involvement can vary from creation and direct management of a project to rather indirect collaboration with other organizations or community groups.

7. The highest level of risk involves the ultimate step to public advocacy of a particular position in the policy process. There are few examples of universities taking corporate stands involving public advocacy. These exceptions involved universities in their roles as corporate citizens (where the university's interests were at stake), and also a few situations in which there was such great consensus in the community over the program goals and actions that the risk associated with public advocacy was nil. Indeed, often the university only appears to be supporting an already highly legitimized community action. There are also the blessedly rare cases in which faculty senates and presidents, speaking for the university, have injudiciously taken stands in the past on inflamed public issues such as the Vietnam War and the draft. Generally, this would appear to be the sort of action that is unnecessary and carries with it the very highest risks. Individual members of the university's board of trustees, if they have highly visible and legitimized standing outside the university, may have more freedom to be advocates but even this is usually limited to defending the integrity or interests of the university. The faculty as individuals and in groups that do not represent the university are free to take such stands, but the university as a corporate entity and those who speak for it do not -- or not without the risk of severe political costs.

One thing is clear. Beyond the obligation to protect its existence and integrity, ideally the university should not be involved in corporate advocacy at all. In rare instances universities can find themselves in situations that appear to dictate the necessity of advocacy. As we have seen this can occur when a social consensus is so great that risk of advocacy is practically nil. In some cases failure to participate as an advocate in one problem might preclude the university from working on subsequent problems as a consequence of having injured its relations with the community. But such situations are extremely rare.

Thus, as a rule public advocacy should not be undertaken at all and informal advocacy only under very special circumstances. Too much is risked, and corporate advocacy is fundamentally inconsistent with the maintenance of academic freedom.

These different levels of risk do not constitute separable strategies, but levels of risk associated with varying degrees of intervention. It does not appear possible to sort out from university experience any distinctly different general strategies of university intervention -- only differing levels of risk. The design of organizational strategies is too dependent on the specific capacities and environment of the university, and on the nature of the problem and sector of society with which the university is collaborating in some problem-solving effort.

Other Considerations

A few other dimensions appear to be important to successful intervention. Some are contextual, others are organizational, a few are process variables associated with the dynamics of problem-solving, and finally there appear to be some general action or behavioral principles that are important to understand.

Both the degree of risk and the probability of success in design and institutionalization of a program strategy depend to a considerable extent upon the degree of consensus that prevails in the community over both the objectives as well as the means of implementation. The higher the level of consensus, the less risk and the higher probability of success. As pointed out above, in some cases consensus can be so high that universities are induced or forced to become public advocates.

In most cases outreach participants describe a need for the creation and organization of clientele to support new programs. It would appear that this is a concomitant of program success especially when there is little consensus in the community concerning the program goals and means. If the community and its major organizations agree that the objectives should be pursued, there is far less need to develop specific clientele organizations. On the other hand, if you are developing programs for embattled minorities or unorganized groups, it is quite clear that the program will encounter difficulty becoming self-sustaining until effectively organized clientele actively support the program politically. Innovators can often sustain programs initially, but in the long run, if their efforts are to be institutionalized, some kind of clientele relationship and organization will usually be necessary.

When developing new university outreach programs, one frequently encounters difficulty in establishing the legitimacy and credibility needed to gain access to the groups and individuals essential to the program. New programs normally involve entirely new groups of people, so that the university frequently finds itself starting from scratch. Several obvious resources are at hand. One generally is offering new and often critical resources to the community and this combines with the neutral ground and credibility of the university as an objective and relatively disinterested actor to cause people to listen and often invite the university into their problem-solving efforts.

There are other less obvious considerations. In developing entry one must always proceed with a non-threatening approach. That is, one must proceed in a manner that does not threaten or challenge any of these groups with whom one must have cooperative relationships. This means that as a mater of initial strategy it is necessary to practice a most careful public organizations neutrality. Later one will have more freedom with the same groups of people, but not initially while lacking full credibility.

It is also true that as a matter of timing initially one should not engage in any organization or institution building. The creation of new organizations or rules invariably threatens someone in the existing structure. In the initial stages of developing a program and establishing credibility with new groups in the community, institutional and organizational innovations should be entered into only under conditions of high consensus.

Another important strategic consideration is that of responding to the felt needs of the various groups in the community with whom one is trying to develop relationships, even when these make little sense in terms of the problem at hand. In the early stages of entry into a problem situation, before any research or educational work has been done, groups often have inaccurate perceptions of their problems and will focus on factors and needs that in reality are low priority, if not sometimes counter-productive. The university must respond to some, if it is to gain the confidence of the other actors. It is this practice that regularly gets university outreach organizations ridiculed for having published or done something apparently frivolous or wasteful for a university, but which is specific to some "perceived need" of the community or a group in that community.

Another strategic factor that is very important is establishing the credibility necessary for setting up new programs is that of being very careful to take no credit for program accomplishments but rather to let those with whom one is working take credit. University attempts to claim credit for accomplishments in the community are usually counter-productive and in the early stages of program development often fatal. Let the leaders of the community give you credit, if they will.

After the institutionalization of a program is well under way, a natural human instinct frequently destroys its potential. This is the desire to eliminate all ambiguity from organizational relationships and role definitions. This must be resisted. While it may complicate management, it is ambiguity that most often provides the freedom for initiative and creativity on the part of individuals as well as organizations. If the purpose of outreach is creative innovation, an outreach organization that has become an efficient command and control bureaucracy has lost all ambiguity and is dead.

In building new institutional or organization arrangements in society, one often encounters a difficulty analogous to that in medical transplants in the human body -- rejection by the host environment. Such change usually implies new values, but in order to succeed one must include enough of the old to make the new arrangement palatable. Revolutionary changes or major social inventions will usually require great consensus or a major crisis to allow the mobilization of sufficient strategically placed political and organizational power to make the change effective. There must be some degree of readiness for change in the society. There is only a finite degree of freedom for manipulation and facilitation of the process. A university acts in this process not so much as a leader but as a catalyst for change. It does not have the capacity or authority to act for society.

One human characteristic seems to run through all successful university outreach activities. It permeates the personalities of the leadership that operate successful programs. Not so surprisingly this is the trait of pragmatism. It is seen in the design, implementation and management of outreach. Pragmatic behavior, of course, is necessary for survival in most social and political processes. This is worth remarking on since it is a trait not commonly admired nor cultivated in academic life.

A strategic dimension of great importance is that of the difference between intervention at the informal level or organization versus the formal. This is the primary distinction between risk level five and seven described above. In both cases one becomes an advocate of some specific policy position. University outreach organizations have proceeded well into the stage of advocacy without incurring excessive risks by keeping their intervention private, staying out of any public debate. This is to say that they worked informally to persuade the critical decision makers and influentials of the society, but stayed entirely away from advocacy in public forums. One can find a few cases in which great arguments took place privately over protracted periods of time without apparent injury either to the program or the university. Even informally, pushing very specific action programs with community leaders obviously takes some skill, if one is to avoid injuring personal relationships. If done ineptly it can be destructive of both university and program relationships and at the level of personal as well as political relationships.

There are many societal problems the solutions to which a university may have some capacity to contribute, but there are many more to which it does not. One of the clearest reasons why university outreach organizations fail is that they do not command enough knowledge of the problem addressed. It is a mistake to construct a university outreach effort without linking it to or developing a relevant research base within the university. Corporate university commitments to outreach must establish their foundation in the knowledge base of one or more academic units of the university. If the problem is not amenable to knowledge-intensive educational effort, or if the university does not command the needed knowledge, it has no business becoming involved. Some early urban affairs efforts of universities failed for having mounted outreach structures without a research base. A related knowledge failure occurs when university outreach organizations apply their accumulated research knowledge without having developed adequate understanding of factors within individual communities that might influence the applicability of knowledge from the research base. It is also a fact that research is not available or capable of dealing with all of society's problems. Some must be dealt with using the best judgement of society -- not necessarily that of university faculty.

However, it must be recognized that the knowledge base for outreach differs in nature from that of the core disciplines of the university. It requires a different way of knowing -- a different epistemology -- because it faces not the clear and carefully defined questions of science, but the ill-defined and often large and messy problems of society, only small pieces of which may be amenable to the quantitative rigor of science. Rather, the large, highly relevant problems of society must be addressed from the perspective of eclectically combined subject matters and analytic methods, some no more than accurate descriptions that allow one to think more clearly about societal options for action and their potential impact on some specific problem. Addressing the relevant question is paramount. The business of outreach involves producing knowledge for decisions to act: this can not be delayed or debated until full or precise knowledge is available from the academy. In fact, much of the knowledge needed must come from the decision processes of society rather than the university.

Professor Donald Schön of MIT argues that the epistemology of knowing and learning for both teaching and research is fundamentally different for the professional schools and outreach activities of the university that address society's problems than for the science disciplines of the university. Science, he says, produces fundamental knowledge under high standards of rigor (reductionism?) focused on "manageable" (well defined) or "technical problems" with no practical relevance to individuals or society. On the other hand, professional practice deals mostly with the messy, practical problems of society and individuals, problems most of which are "incapable of technical solution." Solutions to these practical problems require combinations of diverse elements produced and combined at a much lower level of rigor. This results not in fundamental knowledge but in highly judgmental knowledge and experiential learning. Professor Schön calls this "knowing-in-action" which "makes up the great bulk of what we know how to do in everyday and professional life. It is what gets us through the day." It should be noted that his epistemology readily admits values into its calculus. This very different epistemology must be recognized as legitimate and respected in academe, if outreach is to become effective, university-wide function.

Also before such success is achieve the internal university incentives and reward system -- what the university values -- must be modified to sustain outreach as a systematic function of the university. Even in many professional schools this is still not the case.

Finally, the university cannot overlook the challenge it faces to educate its societal partners in outreach about the character and limitations of the university's participation in society's affairs . The partners in outreach must learn as a condition of collaboration to respect the university's need to protect its institutional neutrality in partisan political issues, to protect its reputation for objectivity and for consensus building as well as its commitment to public over private interest. Above all it must be recognized that any university's knowledge base has limits and that knowledge is not the universal solvent for all problems. Failing most of this, the direct collaboration in society's affairs that outreach entails becomes a danger to the university, not an additional strength.

The dangers in university outreach arise in part out of the paradox of a growing societal ambivalence in wanting more knowledge to solve problems (vide outreach) while simultaneously fearing knowledge because of the concern over how it might be used. Clearly the traditional optimistic American belief in the inevitability of progress and in human improvement through knowledge, beliefs the Enlightenment that spawned the land-grant, have lost much of their hold on society. Thus the construction of university outreach takes place today in a very different and more challenging societal environment.

Some of the strategic dimensions of university intervention have been described. The evidence suggests that the design intervention structures and behavior are specific to particular institutions, environments, and missions and must be worked out in a pragmatic and experimental manner. Thus, it would appear that while one may discover general principles that guide intervention, such as those above, the organizational form and strategies of university outreach remain specific to each university, its various academic organizations and their competencies, and the societal and political environment of the problem addressed. University leadership should give up the search for a standard organizational solution for university-wide outreach.

Universities have assumed many roles in society's problem solving processes. As a consequence, some difficult questions are inevitably posed: "In helping society solve its problems can the university participate as an action-taking decision maker?" "How far can the university go toward such a role?" "How far can it go without endangering the integrity of the traditional functions of teaching and research and thus the intellectual life of the university?" This is not a question about mere involvement in the action process. The American university has been so deeply involved in society and its problems since the public university and land-grant movement of the last century that it is no longer worth debating whether the university legitimately should be involved. It is. Sir Eric Ashby put it well two decades ago.

Today universities everywhere face a common peril: the peril of success. Formerly each was a detached organism, assimilating and growing in accordance with its own internal laws. Now universities have become absolutely essential to the economy and to the very survival of nations...They are living through one of the classical dilemmas of systems in evolution: they must adapt themselves to the consequences of success or they will be discarded by society: they must do so without shattering their integrity or they will fail in duty to society (Ashby, 1974, p. 7).

The only real question is the nature and degree of that involvement and its legitimacy and clarity. Two and a half decades ago, one of the most astute scholars of higher education, Martin Trow, identified the central danger.

It is a matter of continual amazement that an institution so deeply involved in public service in so many ways has been able to preserve its autonomy and its critical and scholarly and research functions. The question is whether its new commitments to public service, on campus and off, will seriously endanger that autonomy and the disinterested and critical intellectual life it allows. One answer, very tentatively is: that depends on how it performs these new services. The issue is very much in doubt. But if the autonomous functions of the great state universities are threatened and then crippled by the political pressures arising out of their commitments to service, then those functions, at their highest levels of performance, will be confined to the private universities or forced outside the university altogether (Trow, pp. 39-40).

The viability and social significance of the outreach university turns on the answer.

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1. I am indebted to Ed Bishop, Emery N. Castle, Kenneth R. Farrell, James C. Hite, Elmer W. Learn, Richard M. Lerner, James M. Meyer, Lester V. Manderscheid, Paul A. Miller and Bruce Poulton for thoughtful critiques of this chapter.

2. It is also true that in their early decades, the land-grant colleges offered a very broad scope of off-campus education. They pioneered in areas ranging from personal and public health, nutrition education, clothing design and production, design of indoor plumbing and water supply systems, to youth programs -- all aimed at improving the health, human capacities and welfare of the population served. Successs and economic development has brought most of this to an end.

3. The title public affairs has eroded as a descriptor for outreach, in part because is has been appropriated for the office that lobbies for the university and manages its public relations. The term Extended Education has also been used where education is defined to include both research and teaching.