The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education — the statewide network of public universities such as Slippery Rock and Indiana — traces its roots to the so-called “normal schools” of the 19th century. These institutions had a very specific purpose: to train teachers for the commonwealth’s primary and secondary institutions.

The purpose of the state system today is not so easily defined. This isn’t to say that it’s useless, far from it, but rather that the system lacks a clear identity, and therefore objective, as it tries to adapt to changing demographic and economic conditions.

This is particularly clear in the Post-Gazette’s recent reporting on the streamlining of degree programs that is occurring alongside campus mergers. Several previously stand-alone majors are being recast as “concentrations” within a parent department, and some departments are being eliminated entirely. At the same time, state system Chancellor Daniel Greenstein insists that students will have access to more academic offerings than ever.

For too long, the state system has tried to be all things to all people: 14 independent universities that, while each having its own informal specialties, tried to be full-scale liberal arts and workforce training institutions. The merging of Edinboro, Clarion and California universities into PennWest — along with a similar merger in the northeast — shows that leadership recognizes the unsustainability of this arrangement and is on the right track.

But still the state system seems to be oriented toward competing with larger, more prestigious, better funded institutions rather than crafting its own educational identity. We’d suggest that the system’s students have already shown the path forward by their own educational choices: More than 40% study one of three professional disciplines — business, health and education. A considerable proportion of the remainder also pursue professional programs while, for instance, only 4% study all the “social sciences” combined.

In other words, the future of the state system is in embracing its past: training competent professionals for the commonwealth and beyond.

And so we don’t shed too many tears for the closing of departments like physics or philosophy. It’s not that these disciplines are unimportant; certainly we’d say that reading Aristotle (on physics or philosophy) is good in itself. But a budding construction engineer can learn the physics he needs within that department’s coursework, and an aspiring history teacher can read Plato and Aquinas without a major dedicated to them.

When taught well, the liberal arts are humane and valuable in themselves — but every college does not need to specialize in them. Further, a bachelor’s degree is no longer, in itself, a ticket to the middle class and beyond. We could fill this entire newspaper with first-person accounts of young people who regret their mediocre and expensive liberal arts educations.

Meanwhile, the state system has strong specialties scattered throughout the system. These can be enhanced and expanded to more students by further integrating the system’s schools, and by a clearer focus on the system’s strengths.

Wendy Lee, a philosophy professor at Bloomsburg University, lamented that the state system’s departmental mergers and cutbacks risked “destroying its mission as a university.” We would suggest it is precisely the universities’ mission that has been too broad and needs to be reformed. That will come with costs, to be sure, but we are hopeful that the system could become a model of innovation and clarity of purpose in the dynamic and unstable world of modern higher education.

First Published: December 6, 2021, 10:57 a.m.