Rethinking Education For The Information Age

by George Johnson

The story of George Mason University (GMU) is a capsule of twenty-first century development. It is a story of an institution deeply involved in the economy of its region, frustrated by the constraints of conventional wisdom and a repressive tradition. It may well be everyone's story.

In 1978, GMU was a small regional university in a key location in Northern Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C. In the midst of the burgeoning information technology industry that was transforming the region — a single gas pump and general store in one of the suburbs became within twenty-five years the site of nineteen million square feet of office space — a new urban configuration was born which came to be called "edge cities." Within two decades, Northern Virginia had the second highest concentration of high-tech firms in the nation.

This development, however, was viewed as an ambiguous boon by Southern Virginia. The state’s cultural establishment viewed the people of its northern sector as rootless, transient and undependable. The high-technology industry itself was suspect. Unlike the traditional tobacco, coal and metal industries, it was not settled and tangible. In other words, software and systems engineering could not be grasped. And where once great industries rose, where once the railroad brought in and took out iron ore, limestone and coal, where once huge machines extended human muscle, now machines expanded the human brain and the confluence of information highways constituted the new geography.

Hence, because of its location, GMU was caught in a bind: It was given a third-class status by the state; it was not to be a real university — for example, it was forbidden to build student housing and offer any advanced course already in existence at an established state institution. Yet the region cried out for the presence of a major entrepreneurial university. Scholars like David Birch at Massachusetts Institute of Technology had demonstrated conclusively that such a university was absolutely crucial to the region’s further economic development.

There was however a way out. GMU would be able to garner significant political and financial support, if it could play an unusual role in an unusual region. At that time, Northern Virginia was a fragmented society emerging from serving primarily as a Washington bedroom. Its polity was also broken into competitive political jurisdictions with no organizing center, no place for people to meet and communicate. Moreover, the new service industries provided jobs that were transitory by definition. All this provided the university a ready-made opportunity to become the glue holding together this new urban organization, the center for the intellectual service industry and the home of the region's cultural life.

Thus GMU’s strategy for development became one of tying itself to its region, keying its programs to regional needs, looking to regional talents to embellish its quality. Unlike the classic university, which maintains some distance between society and itself, it would become an "interactive" university, becoming deeply involved with the regional economy. It would not offer established curricula, but would instead work in partnership with it to develop unique, region-oriented programs. The objective was also to build a university of national distinction, but to do so on a narrow regional base. It would hold Harvard aspirations, but keep a community college outlook. As simple as that sounds, that dual objective has heretofore been difficult to achieve in American universities. But it seemed possible within the pool of talent available in Northern Virginia.

Three programmatic areas would receive priority: a) information sciences, as opposed to the expensive disciplines of the natural sciences; b) public policy studies, in a context dominated by all levels of government; and c) the performing arts, one of the main means to a common culture in every society. Within those areas, any course or program offered had to be prototypical and unique. It also had to be designed flexibly enough to meet the changing quality demands of a sophisticated region, which in turn required a novel interdisciplinary approach supported by a highly reputable faculty. To achieve this level of excellence, GMU had to attract the very best in academia. Attractive salaries were not enough to overcome the iron law of academic sociology ("full professors move only between peer institutions"). Success was ultimately attained by offering targeted faculty the chance to build a university on their terms, the opportunity to develop their creative personalities. The overwhelming response showed how restless many of the most established university professors had become.

The key to the development of George Mason was its offer of an unstructured opportunity based on trust. In other words, there had to be an understanding that no one would know what specific programs ought to look like, and that every one would have to be willing to operate in an unregulated environment. This reliance on trust was crucial to progress in an era of proclaimed "accountability" and political suspicion of the intellectual elite.

But there was still much to overcome. Such openness and possibility could not be realized within the traditional confines of a departmentalized and static organization. Established departments had to be wedged open with the help of the regional connection. For instance, the engineering school, which was strongly opposed by the other established universities in the state, was sponsored by the regional high-tech community. Conceived as a cradle for the information rather than the physical sciences, it was new and attractive. (Of the first twenty- two faculty recruited, a dozen had been major league department chairmen.) Another example was the formation of a new institute of computational science and informatics by faculty migrating from existing departments and schools. New institutes in public policy studies, conflict management, the arts, etc., became temporary conduits in the creation of a new culture, one aimed not at the establishment of fixed programs, but rather at the fostering of new common ventures.

While the opportunity was great, so were the obstacles. Unlike the typical American university, which is usually a static, vertical and hierarchical organization, the new socio-economic culture is one that instead follows a horizontal model, one that constantly reinvents itself and whose structure is open and flexible. Corporate leaders, who are bound give up the rigidities of the past and adapt to new realities, dislike the static university model. At the same time, they defer to the research reputation of established institutions while decrying their detachment from the real world. The flip side is the resistance of universities to interference by business.

In this complex environment, the difficult challenge for a new institution such as GMU, which is based solely on its collective expertise and does not yet have a clear sense of its final destination, is to embrace the Socratic lesson that the confession of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.

Whether George Mason University achieves its objectives is still open to question. With a current enrollment of 25,000 (almost half of which is at the graduate level), a curriculum incorporating whole new disciplines, and an internationally recognized faculty which includes recipients of Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, it is said to be a success. However, whether it will ultimately succeed will be determined over the next twenty years. While it has the necessary cadre of quality faculty, it will still require a great deal of continued commitment and determination to abandon authority, embrace chaos and accept ambiguity.

However, far from the realities of the states in the region the GMU experience may seem, it nonetheless offers an interesting microcosmic example of the kind of challenges and opportunities faced by all states, large and small.

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