Learning From Janus

Raymond Rice's piece on the University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI) names as critical the "dual-identity institution" that universities must acknowledge if they are going to survive the current enrollment and existential budget crisis. 

UMPI is a residential campus and a national competency-based provider, sharing faculty, governance, and standards, across the traditional "main campus" and their CBE and non-traditional programs. It's a duality similar to the one that has existed for decades at most universities. The difference is that UMPI treats their identities as equally necessary and valuable, where many universities (particularly privates) treat their secondary identities as something to be tolerated.  

Schools and colleges of professional, continuing & online education at mid-tier private universities have been presenting a second face of their institutions since adult programs (and later distance and online education) where created with different calendars, different advising models, different students, and sometimes different physical locations than main campus. I've often referred to this hyper learner-focused work as the Janus head of higher education, with one face turned toward the quad and the other toward the part-time non-traditional student. Recall that Janus is the god of thresholds, transitions, and doorways, exactly the business PCE/O units have always been in. (Wink, wink. Nod, nod.)

To say it yet again another way, the challenge is that most private universities can't decide whether to be Janus or just be embarrassed by him. They'll accept the tuition revenues from the PCE/O side and then reorganize it into oblivion in their chaotic and campy responses to enrollment declines on the traditional side. They'll do this partly because most academic leadership is embarrassingly unsuited to operate amid crises. They'll also do this because too many of these universities still believe only one of its faces is recognizable to the market. These are the universities weighed down by brand nostalgia, a fixation on selectivity, sinking rankings, and a campus experience that increasingly serves an evaporating demographic. They'll take the non-traditional learner's tuition and fees without the structural humility of admitting these are the students representing half the current market and growing at pace they're woefully ill-equipped to support.