About UCEA

President's Letters

Even the Cows Have Earrings

As a graduate student many years ago I remember a conference talk by a medical sociologist, Mark Field, about the dire conditions facing Moscow residents during World War II. The only choice facing starving Moscovites was to find their way to nearby villages in search of food. Since the villagers never trusted cash, especially under wartime conditions, the only thing urbanites could offer for food was their finest jewelry. So, in exchange for potatoes and cabbage the peasants accumulated the accessories of urban excess. This was the context that led Dr. Field to quip: even the cows have earrings.

Remembering this talk-at least its title -got me to wonder: Can one dress up a cash cow?

This is a more exacting question for some than for others but regardless of our institutional type, size, location, or mission, to some extent we are all experiencing rising expectations in terms of budgetary metrics. Many now feel that financial performance is the behemoth from the "dark side" that stifles other means of "keeping score" in our institutions and subordinates other values. As I've listened this year to UCEA members throughout the country (and abroad) this, more than anything, explains our discontent about how we tend to be evaluated.

I don't see a plausible workaround; in fact, in our growing managerial culture, even more will be asked of continuing education with respect to our financial performance. Instead of contesting this tilted terrain, perhaps we should complement our financial prowess by defining a vibrant case statement as to how we enrich our students, our home institution and our communities in ways that are not distilled in terms of resource generation.

We help part-time, distance, and adult students realize their personal and professional ambitions, tuneup their capacities, prepare for or change careers. By serving individual students we, in turn, refine and extend the pool of talent underlying prosperity in the workplace. For our institutions we incubate curricular innovation and we creatively integrate theoretical and applied learning. We innovate program delivery methods and design services in support of learning. We are, in fact, the crucible for market-driven and missiondriven imperatives. We are right to claim that we are consequential in ways that are far more varied than generating cash for the central coffers.

This is why UCEA celebrates and strengthens the importance of recurrent education; we appreciate its transformational power for individuals and its essential place in a prosperous economy and a vibrant democratic social system.

As this is my last essay for InFocus before completing my year as UCEA president in April, let me suggest that while we accept our stewardship of precious resources for our universities, it is time for us to affirm and profess-as we have for a century-the elegant blend of aspirations and values we hold dear so that even in institutions inclined to judge us primarily on our financial performance, we may dress up our practice to claim: "even the cash cows have earrings."