Feature: Lou Anna Simon

MSU PROVOST

Lou Anna Simon was named MSU Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs in 1993. Although she is one of the youngest provosts in the AAU--and the only female provost in the Big Ten--she boasts 27 years of administrative experience at the university.

Over the years, she has proven to be a dynamic, visionary leader for the university. In January she shared her outlook for MSU with editor Robert Bao.

Bao--One theme facing every provost at Michigan State is the balance between teaching, research and service. What should that balance be, and do we need to shift it on this campus?

Simon--We need to recast this issue. President McPherson and I have made presentations around campus about the faculty needing to be 'research-active or scholarly-active and student-focused.' The strength of a university like Michigan State is the ability to blend research-active faculty and those with student-focused orientations. By focusing on the 'and' we can create excitement, vitality, and the assurance of intense faculty/student interaction.

Bao--You've been here for 27 years. Has that always been our balance or are we now shifting in any way?

Simon--If I were a constructionist historian, I would think that Michigan State to some extent paralleled a national trend. MSU entered the AAU (Association of American Universities) in the '60s because of the strength of its innovations--be it the living/learning environment or its strong interdisciplinary research teams, blending applied and basic research. Through the period of the '70s and into the '80s, MSU began to emulate other research universities. We suffered, then, from balance issues regarding our various constituencies. Today all research universities face the challenge of reinvesting in undergraduate education. That's true from MIT to Stanford. We are in many ways a part of those trends. With the Guiding Principles we've reasserted MSU's special parentage as a research- intensive land-grant university where people matter. The way to success is via those basic tenets that got us essentially into the big leagues.

Bao--John Hannah was instrumental in getting us into the big leagues. I remember he liked to say, 'Only people matter . . . ' That's now a Guiding Principle. What other tenets embody our land-grant tradition?

Simon--The shorthand view is that land-grant universities were created to be concerned about providing access to knowledge to broad segments of the population. Access wasn't a reason to have lower expectations of the products of the institution. It simply added an additional dimension to blend quality with a broadened base.

Bao--When we were founded some 140 years ago, the land-grant concept was associated with agriculture, which then dominated the economy. Does the concept still apply as we head into the Age of Information?

Simon--Sure. There are two other important aspects of the land-grant philosophy besides access. One is a concern that universities be active partners with society in promoting economic competiveness. In 1855 the major way in which universities could promote economic competiveness was looking critically at the issues affecting agriculture. In 1996 the same commitment requires that we engage in issues around technology transfer. In today's age that requires a much more global prospective than it did in 1855. The third component of the land-grant concept has to do with the quality of life of individuals--being concerned about how the ideas and their related products affect the environment, the lives of people, and the public policy dimensions of our society. We need to focus at the intersections, and a good example is the land use conference on campus this week (second week of January). We have to be a partner with a number of folks in the communities -- citizens, governmental entities, companies to worry about issues of land use. That's where the quality of life, concerns around the environment, having a factory in your neighborhood--all of these kinds of things--intersect with our need to create jobs and to translate ideas effectively.

Bao--Is the role by universities more pivotal today in accomplishing this societal goal?

Simon--The irony is that on one hand we are extraordinarily pivotal in the preparation of graduates and in learning across a life span. But at the same time, because information is the economic commodity of this century, we no longer enjoy the monopoly-like state we did in 1855. Competitors are emerging in different forms for both the generation of ideas and for the educational process.

Bao--Some futurists speculate that the delivery a college education through the Internet could make universities obsolete. What is Michigan State doing to position itself ahead of the curve?

Simon--It's hard to know what curve to stay ahead of because the futurists all have a different take on how the Information Age will actually unfold. Let's go back to my original statement. We need faculty that are extraordinarily research active, because ideas are the commodity. You have to support the scholarship of the faculty to generate the commodity ideas. That's the fuel of this Information Age. At the same time, the faculty must transmit that knowledge into not simply the scholarship of discovery but the scholarship of teaching. Future forms of teaching will be very different from 'the talking heads,' or the typical ways we've all experienced education. We're looking at 'just-in-time' education--being able to package information in non-traditional ways. We're also looking at ways in which we can participate with other institutions in the development of educational software that can facilitate both on campus instruction as well as off campus instruction.

Bao--Some of our departments have already done so, having produced CD-ROMs and other multi-media forms.

Simon--We have a CD-ROM that can help you learn German and business, for example. Part of our role is the preparation of material for an audience other than a traditional undergraduate student class in some hall. One challenge is to support that effort, which is very time consuming, while meeting our obligations to traditional populations.

Bao--Some CD-ROMs seem to make learning interesting and even exciting. Your predecessor, David Scott, once said in these pages that many MSU students come from a K-12 system that did not prepare them adequately. Could this technology eventually solve this problem?

Simon--As multimedia 'edutainment' becomes more readily available, we need to infuse that into the traditional curricula of K-12 and other settings. We can also use it to augment courses for different types of students. And we're beginning to push in that direction. One of our faculty members has been involved with a new magazine involving national standards for science and math education. Over the next period of time we'll look at those standards and see how we can be a partner with K-12 and business and industry in developing alternative formats to assure that students receive those standards necessary for success. Right now those things are happening because I, as a faculty member, want to do them. What will transpire in the Information Age is that those kinds of things, invovling multimedia packages and so on, will become a regular part of the university offering and seen as a part of our role. Those developments I think will be done in partnership with other universities or in partnership potentially with the private sector because the development costs of that kind of software is very significant.