ONE-ON-ONE
- May 2002
by Ed G. Lane
'You Cannot Continue to do Business
the Way You've Always Done and Expect New Results'
Gordon Davies, departing president of the Council on Postsecondary Education,
on where the state stands on education
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Gordon K. Davies
Appointed as the first president of the Kentucky Council on
Postsecondary Education in 1998, Gordon K. Davies was assigned
the task of overseeing the sweeping higher education reforms
approved by the Kentucky General Assembly in 1997. Davies came
to the post from Virginia, where he had been director of the
State Council of Higher Education for 20 years. During his tenure
in Kentucky, the state's college enrollment has increased by
25,000, the Kentucky Virtual University was created, and an
impressive number of university endowments have been received
under the "Bucks for Brains" program. Still, the road
was not always smooth: Last month the Council on Postsecondary
Education voted not to renew his contract. He will step down
from the post on June 15. In one of his last interviews as president
of the council, Davies offers his views on the state of higher
education in Kentucky.
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Ed Lane: At the end of state government’s fiscal year (June 30,
2002), your four-year term as president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary
Education (CPE) will expire. What are the reasons that your contract
was not renewed?
Gordon Davies: You have to
ask the CPE council or Gov. Paul Patton for the reasons my contract
was not renewed. I would not speculate on that.
I’m disappointed, but
I’m not disappointed for me. Nobody is irreplaceable. I’m
disappointed that some key people, who have been friends to this reform,
are compromised on this reform. And they compromised at a critical
point. That is too bad.
EL: What are the issues that
are now confronting postsecondary education?
GD: All reforms are easy when
there’s lots of money. This year is the first time there wasn’t
lots of money. And this is when the reform was compromised.
The Council on Postsecondary
Education had three things going for it in this reform. The first
was the support of the governor. The second was a set of incentive
funds, called trust funds, that were in CPE’s budget, with which
the Council could reward certain kinds of performance, certain kinds
of behavior. And the third was the power of good ideas.
Gov. Patton’s support,
at least of me personally, obviously waned. But, it’s not as
important that his support waned as it is that he’s written his
last budget. He’s going out of office. So the governor’s
support of reform is now largely gone; and the administration and
the House of Representatives took apart all the incentive trust funds,
so they’re gone. As for good ideas, we’ve seen – in
the public market place – that bad ideas will trump good ideas
on any number of occasions. Good ideas themselves are not enough.
EL: With regard to the incentive
trust funds in the budget, was that money deleted from CPE’s budget
and reallocated for expenditure somewhere else?
GD: It was taken out of the
CPE budget and then reallocated directly to postsecondary institutions
without regard for performance. Case in point, Eastern Kentucky University’s
enrollment has declined by 3 percent over the last three years, EKU
got 10 percent of the new money, regardless of the school’s performance.
The Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS) achieved
well over half the growth of student enrollment in Kentucky in the
last three years. KCTCS received about 20 percent of the new money
and wasn’t rewarded with regard for performance. The new funding
was given out the way Kentucky has always done business – which
is to spread it out smoothly like peanut butter across the whole system.
You pay for the behavior you
want. When I came to Kentucky, people expected behavior to change.
The incentive funds were a way of promoting a change of behavior.
What we see is that some legislators are all for reform but they are
not for change.
EL: Do you feel that the future
of postsecondary education is jeopardized by this major change in strategy?
GD: Yes. But there are some
areas of reform that have happened in the last four years that are
enormously significant and can’t be undone. Reform progress has
been made.
EL: What do you consider the
Council’s two main missions in its reform program?
GD: To create an economy in
which there are better jobs that help people and their families to
live better lives and to build stronger communities is mission one.
Mission two is to create a
citizenry that is capable of doing those jobs and enjoying the benefits
of them.
EL: What successes have you
had over the past four years and what progress has been made?
GD: First of all, KCTCS is
in place; it couldn’t be taken apart at all at this point. And
it’s a resounding success. Its accreditation problems are resolved,
it’s growing strongly, organized, and consolidating its organization.
Secondly, the University of
Kentucky, under the leadership of Lee Todd, is energized and moving,
and sees itself in an entirely new way.
Third, enrollments. CPE initially
set a goal for 80,000 more students by 2020, we’ve achieved 25,000
of those 80,000. The goal will be achieved by 2015.
Fourth, adult basic education.
One fourth of Kentucky’s population, 40 percent of the workforce,
is challenged as to basic reading and arithmetic skills. Enrollment
in adult basic education has increased from 50,000 to 63,000 students
annually.
Fifth, the general education
equivalency diploma (G.E.D.) you can earn if you don’t finish
high school. Kentucky had the third greatest increase among all the
states in the number of people taking the G.E.D.s last year: It went
up 14 percent. Not only that, but five percent more of the G.E.D.
recipients are going to college.
CPE has created in Kentucky
a new kind of expectation and understanding about the value of advanced
education.
EL: The resignation of the
University of Louisville president John Shumaker so he could accept
the presidency of the University of Tennessee was a major loss to Kentucky.
What can Kentucky do to retain top educators, like John Shumaker, at
state colleges and universities?
GD: John’s done a terrific
job at the University of Louisville. The University of Tennessee offers
an entirely different set of challenges. Tennessee’s revenue
problems are enormous. But it is a big system: some 40,000 students
in the university system at multiple sites. I just have to assume
that it’s the challenge of doing that and working very closely
with Gov. Sundquist that attracted him.
You’re always going to
have a certain amount of turnover. Kentucky shouldn’t look at
John’s leaving as a huge defeat. What that says to me is that
people are watching Kentucky, and people are watching for good people
in Kentucky. If your people aren’t moving, you’re stuck.
EL: John Shumaker’s annual
compensation was about $500,000 annually, plus perks. Is this the range
of compensation required to recruit presidents of major colleges and
universities now?
GD: Major college and university
presidencies now pay somewhere in that range. Is a $500,000 annual
salary high or low? I would guess it’s probably on the upper
end of the range, but I don’t think it’s extraordinary.
EL: You have been described
as very intelligent, blunt, brilliant, highly experienced, opinionated,
direct and sometimes lacking people skills. How accurate is this description?
GD: I’m pretty comfortable
about my people skills. I worked for 23 years with the Virginia General
Assembly. It’s no easier a general assembly than Kentucky’s.
I don’t buy, at all, the notion that nobody in the general assembly
liked Gordon Davies. There are 138 members. I probably knew half of
them and I could tell you that six or eight of them are the ones that
wanted me gone.
As to being blunt – yes;
but I feel a real sense of urgency about this job. We don’t have
a lot of time to waste in Kentucky. An amoebae in the middle of a
slide, under a microscope, doesn’t move unless you apply a little
heat to the slide, then it moves. If you apply the heat, there are
people who really don’t want it. You can’t make a reform
like this and keep everybody happy.
EL: Where was the heat in
postsecondary educational reforms – was it in the allocation of
the money, empire building, regionalism, politics?
GD: All of the above. Whenever
anybody says it’s not about the money, you know it’s about
the money. And bricks and mortar are money. Operating budgets are
money. This is a well-funded system. Kentucky is the 12th best funded
system in the United States per student. And the system is an over-resourced,
under-producing set of institutions. That means the money is in the
wrong place and it’s being used for the wrong things.
EL: One of the benefits of
restructuring community and technical colleges was to make the system
more responsive to the needs of students, local communities and businesses.
Has KCTCS succeeded in this regard?
GD: If you overlay 30 mile
circles around every community and technical college site in Kentucky,
there’s virtually no one in Kentucky more than 30 miles away
from an institution of higher education. They (KCTCS) trained, last
year, some 7,000 workers on job specific skills for particular companies.
That does not include all the people who came to learn Cisco Systems
or Microsoft Program Management and those kinds of things.
EL: A number of colleges and
universities around the state are developing educational facilities
or branches in nearby cities. Is this a cost-efficient strategy for
increasing postsecondary education in Kentucky and is that in any way
competing with KCTCS?
GD: There are ways in which
it competes with KCTCS. And there certainly are arguments for doing
it. Personally, I would have not have done those regional postsecondary
education centers. That was the first compromise. If you look at the
amount of space in this system, according to space planning guidelines
that are normative in the United States for higher education, Kentucky
has a significant excess of space in its system. And yet the space
is not in good shape. Its laboratories are 1950s labs. Kentucky is
not maintaining space, it’s building new space. I would have
used different priorities.
EL: How would your rate UK
President Lee Todd’s first year?
GD: Spectacular. He’s
shown uncanny, good judgment and his instincts have been right on
target. It’s a very good university that has never known or had
permission to be as good as it is and Lee Todd is an enabler. He has
allowed people to come forward with ideas, he’s listened to ideas.
It’s more than just symbolic that he puts the kiosks and the
benches out and takes the iron fence down from around his house. There’s
a spirit of intangible currents of excitement that just run through
the place now. I think he’s done a terrific job.
EL: How many years will it
take UK to become a top 20 research university?
GD: Twenty years. This Top
20 is like a chain around its neck. Top 20 shouldn’t be a literal
mechanistic definition. We have to redefine what it means to be a
great university. For me that means people will say, “if you
want to see a set of universities that responds to the needs to the
people of their state better than those of any other state, go to
Kentucky.” And that will be the new great university.
EL: How important is the “Bucks
for Brains” program in Kentucky?
GD: Very important. What “Bucks
for Brains” does is create a sense of intellectual excitement
on the campus. I feel very strongly, as does Lee Todd, that “Bucks
for Brains” should not be used just to go out and recruit outside
educators but should also be to recognize those who are outstanding
within the university. And UK is now doing that. When UK has a $600
million endowment, it’s in the big leagues. It’s in the
lower end of the big leagues, but it’s in the big leagues.
EL: What advice would you
give the next president of CPE?
GD: Don’t compromise
the basic principles of this reform. It is easy to use the rhetoric
of reform to get money to do the same old things. About half these
universities understand what this reform is all about and the other
half subvert it. If you come to Kentucky to make change, you can’t
compromise the basic principles.
EL: Do you feel any outstanding
candidates for the president of CPE are available from Kentucky colleges
and universities or do you envision that the new president will come
from outside of Kentucky?
GD: I certainly hope CPE does
a search that involves people from outside Kentucky. Somebody observed
to me, as this unfolded, that Kentucky had a pattern – I don’t
know if this is true or not – of bringing people in from outside
who tested the limits of their tolerance and then they went to Kentuckians
for their successors because then they could sort of back off and
relax. I hope that doesn’t happen.
Are there people within the
state who could do this job? Yes. There’s one person within this
system who could do this job and do it extraordinarily well, and that’s
the president of Northern Kentucky University, Jim Votruba. He’s
a man who thinks systemically and understands community building.
And both systems-thinking and community-building are essential. Whether
Jim would want the job or not, I have no idea. Obviously Lee Todd
could do the job and John Shumaker could do the job, but Lee Todd’s
not about to move and John Shumaker’s gone.
Jim Votruba would also be
a very good president at the University of Louisville, incidentally.
He understands the kind of stewardship role that a university plays
in a community, in a region.
EL: Is the quality of postsecondary
education opportunities on equal footing around the state?
GD: We have a problem in the
eastern part of the state. As Mayor Gorman in Hazard has pointed out
to me, every public institution or public university is west of the
mountains. There are two things we can do to relieve that problem.
One was enacted in this legislative session. It gave CPE the right
to contract with private colleges for essential services, which means
the council could contract with Pikeville or Alice Lloyd in areas
like teacher and nurses training. That could be very helpful. It helps
to bring the private colleges more closely into this reform. And the
second is what Bob Kustra was trying to do at Eastern, which is to
go over into the mountains and say, “EKU will come to you.”
EL: Even as Kentucky continues
to excel in improving educational opportunities for all of its citizens,
the state still has to deal with the out-migration of young adults because
an adequate number of jobs are not available. What do we need to be
doing to create more jobs? How do you see the universities and business
working together to create those jobs?
GD: Kentucky has to decide
which industries should be targeted. We have to invest our money strategically
and we have to focus, focus, focus on those industries. We have to
create these kinds of jobs out of “Bucks for Brains” and
out of those faculty who are here. And this will take some time because
these will be small companies, they’ll be new companies, they’ll
be start-ups. But they are the ones that will grow and, in turn, attract
the branches of major companies like Sun Microsystems.
EL: Is there anything about
leaving CPE you’d like to add to our interview today?
GD: You cannot continue to
do business the way you’ve always done business and expect new
results. And yet there are some people, particularly the House leadership,
who don’t see it that way and that’s a critical roadblock
to this reform. This reform is by no means dead, because you have
people like Todd and McCall and Votruba who – if they form an
alliance – will be able to keep this reform going. It’s
just that it will be back to the old Kentucky way of doing higher
education budgets, which is institutions will scrap among themselves
for resources. The Council’s job was to bring some sort of rational
to that. And in the Senate, CPE by and large succeeded in that, but
in the House I think we failed. I think the Senate understands this
in a way the House doesn’t. If you are going to change behavior,
you reward the behavior you want.
Ed G. Lane is chief executive of Lane Consultants Inc. and publisher
of The Lane Report.
edlane@lanereport.com
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