Science & Tech Quote by Roy Romer

Romer is speaking in the language that most unsettles universities: not ideals, but outcomes. Calling higher education a "product" is a deliberate provocation from a politician who spent years governing budgets and selling reforms to skeptical constituencies. The line is pitched as common sense--who could oppose doing better for less?--yet its real work is to reframe the campus as an underperforming industry, not a civic institution.

The first move is disarmingly modest: "more than just technology". This nod acknowledges the easy scapegoat of gadgets and online platforms, then pivots to the real target: faculty culture. "It's also an attitude" suggests that cost and quality problems are not structural (state disinvestment, rising administrative complexity, healthcare, facilities arms races), but behavioral--professors are resistant, complacent, or insufficiently customer-oriented. That is classic reform politics: shift the debate from resources to responsiveness, from public funding to personal accountability.

The subtext is managerial. "Think through" sounds collaborative, but it implies someone else--often outside the classroom--gets to define "better" and measure it. "Less cost" arrives as a nonnegotiable constraint, the kind that opens the door to larger classes, standardized curricula, contingent labor, and performance metrics that treat learning like output per unit time.

In the context of post-1990s education reform and chronic state budget pressure, Romer is trying to make the political case for efficiency without sounding hostile to academics. The irony is that by borrowing market grammar, he invites the very pushback he anticipates: universities hear not improvement, but downsizing with a smile.