My recent critical appraisal of modern universities
makes necessary this second essay outlining how universities may be improved.
Given that the perfect university or college is impossible to achieve and
maintain, improvement is all anyone can expect. It is impossible to imagine,
for example, that the current corporate model of the university can be fully changed. To do so,
would require, first, that governments more fully fund public universities and
colleges, and perhaps also that parents and others assume a substantial share
of the cost of higher education in order that students do not enter university
thinking that, as purchasers of their whole higher education, they are clients
who can demand an end product on their terms rather than receive a true
education. Funding changes of that order are not likely to happen. The almost
religious dominance of free market economy ideology, and political systems and
parties that operate under the constraints of that ideology, are incapable of
making the most fundamental and necessary reform: public funding.
It
is just as unlikely that universities will abandon diversity in favor of more limited programs or a more tightly
focused unity of programs. The comprehensive, mega-university is here to stay.
As my son notes, universities and colleges must, in fact, experience more
diversity as long as knowledge continues to expand. He mentions neuroscience
but he could have added the vast new possibilities for new fields in the life
sciences and physics, which are in turn matched in less scientific fields like
anthropology, psychology, and history, where the scope of the subjects studied
is enlarged by new subject matter and new theoretical and methodological
possibilities. Some practical, applied programs that make up the diverse
university will always remain somewhat remote from grander, intellectually
purer, abstract or over-arching goals of the university, although the number
and influence of these narrow applied programs need not define the university
as a whole.
Given
that we will see no revolutionary change in funding and no stopping the
burgeoning diversity of the modern university, what is left? Here are a few
ideas that I have pondered (to say nothing of having tried to implement) over
the past 50 years:
1. Goals of Higher Education – Because universities and colleges have come to
assume that their very existence is based on educating for employment, they
have mistakenly drawn the conclusion that they must narrowly target the
supposed needs of given professions and occupations. They have thereby pushed
right past first principles, that are foundational and primary, to educate to
secondary and tertiary goals. That is, they have re-oriented themselves to
educate by way of information rather than knowledge, set formulas rather than
critical thinking, and narrow skill sets rather than a broad range of
methodological abilities. This approach to higher education has its own built
in high costs and inevitable failures. Primarily, it educates to the past and
not to advancement in the future. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy
in America, long ago noticed that Americans
interpreted their individual freedom to mean that all avenues of success were
open to them, only to discover that as they all individually converged on the
latest, seemingly vast and open, opportunity, that opportunity (read: specific
job) was suddenly closed and no longer available. And, as Tocqueville noted, as
young people swept, like flocks of birds, from one seeming chance to another,
they were turned away again and again. I know many people who have a bachelor’s
degree, multiple master’s degrees, and sometimes two or more PhDs, largely
because of their necessary chase after employment niches that quickly disappear
because the number of applicants far exceeds job demands.
Universities
need not have capitulated so easily and so fast to the dead-end, failed
approach that Jane Jacobs has dubbed, “credentialing.” Traditional universities are now beginning to
experience the competition of for-profit, on-line universities, and if credentials are the be-all and end-all of
education, those institutions that become the most lean (hiring the cheapest
teachers) and most systematized (low overhead and most target-oriented) and
least concerned with a culture of learning will prevail. The idea that one
needs to experience education on-campus, among peers and professors, has an
increasingly hollow ring among a clientele that sees the traditional university
as wildly expensive (as it is), especially when their sole focus is to acquire
skills that are marketable at the moment.
What
universities must do, and do so boldly and transparently, is embrace the idea
that their primary responsibility no longer involves teaching technical skills
or creating a factory floor environment of credential production but to forward
the idea that their primary focus will be on teaching and guaranteeing broad
intellectual skills, including the ability to think critically, reason,
read, write, understand and employ statistics, understand science and know how to use the scientific method, and appreciate and pursue creativity. If undergraduates leave universities with ability
in all or most of these areas, with a few professional credentials added into
the mix, they will be much more ready for ever-shifting job opportunities and
cultural change. Again, this is not to say that these intellectual skills go
unattended in universities today but they do not exist as the primary mission
of universities, even though some universities purport to do so in the often
unread and generally scorned romantic mission statements in their calendars.
The
evidence that reason, writing, thinking and creativity are no longer at the
forefront of universities is clear all around us. The humanities, for example, are increasingly seen as irrelevant,
and in order to avoid defending this argument of irrelevancy, critics simply
charge that post-modernism and
its attendant esoterica (go ahead, read Derrida, and you will understand this
charge) are the villains. The fact is, much of post-modernism is valuable
(though not as ideology), and much activity and teaching in the humanities has
nothing to do with post-modernism. Critical thinking is seen as more of a luxury or a bad joke by
pundits. Witness Margaret Wente’s recent article in the Globe and Mail,
in which she “disses” the humanities and social sciences (the “soft side” of
higher education; she herself, by the way, has Arts degrees with majors in
English) as useless pursuits with no employment future, hinting that they take
up to much of the university footprint (see “Educated for Unemployment,” G
and M, May 15, 2012). Individual
intellectual advancement in universities has recently been pegged at 7% (how
the statistics for this were derived boggles the imagination), and even if that
number is ridiculous, experienced university professors would certainly testify
that in too many instances this lack of intellectual growth at institutions
that are supposed to be all about intellectual life, is not far off the mark
(see a recent study by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska entitled, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College
Campuses).
If
intellectual skills and intellectual rigor are most important for higher
education as well as our public and personal well being, how is this rigor and
these skills to be achieved? Let me attempt a partial answer under two
headings: “Things we do now but
could do better” and “New things to do in the future.”
1. Things
universities do now but could do
better
a) We
still offer degrees in the “arts” and “sciences”
not degrees in English or History or Physics or Chemistry. In other words,
universities at least still pretend that they are educating students broadly,
and they often do so with breadth requirements and other mechanisms to guarantee a true intellectual
experience rather than narrow knowledge in a particular field. Universities
must be more sincere and insistent about the need for students to have both
breadth and depth of education. I, and friends of mine, still think the best
formula for undergraduate curricula is to have one-third of student’s
undergraduate courses dedicated to the major, one-third to breadth, and
one-third to the student’s discretion. We cannot afford to drift toward what
appears to be the next logical step for the corporate-credential factory: degrees that would read “Bachelor of
Retail Marketing” or “Bachelor of 20th Century American History.” (I
have heard students describe themselves in such a manner, and even proudly to
proclaim themselves specialists in some narrow sub-division of knowledge which,
by the way, they do not actually possess).
b)
Most universities offer first-year courses in the subjects that they offer which have the potential, at least,
to be exciting introductions to new ways to see or experience knowledge. The
retention of good first-year courses is critical to intellectual development
down the road. Many persons will not encounter again subjects they were
required to take in their first two years of university. My first two years were
among the most intellectually stimulating of my life. The very best teaching
must take place in these first-year or introductory course, which usually means
employing older, more experienced, professors in these courses. By taking
first-year courses seriously, teaching itself may be taken more seriously. When
push-comes-to-shove, teaching must will out over every other interest of the
university and the professor.
2. New
things to do in the future
After
a career of batting around different liberal education strategies for providing
intellectual skills and intellectual rigor in undergraduate education
(including interdisciplinary studies, independent studies, capstone courses,
integrated studies for first-year students, and so on) I have settled on two large
strategies that I believe all universities should promote at the undergraduate
level above all else.
a) The development of good writing
skills among all graduates is fundamental.
Some universities would be embarrassed if they knew the number of their graduates
who could barely write at all. When my wife and I were living in Maastricht
(where I was looking at their “problem-based” education programs) we met a very
bright woman from Indonesia who was trying to write her PhD dissertation in
English, but who had very little knowledge of written English. I have since
heard distressing stories about non-English foreign students who have the same
problem. Many students maneuver their choice of courses to avoid having to
write much at all. Universities would be more embarrassed if they knew how much
their graduates read (almost nothing at all, on average). Knowing how to write
well requires an extensive background in good reading, so the two matters are
naturally joined. Universities will protest that they already are committed to
“writing-across-the-curriculum,”
but these proclamations of virtue are usually just covers for sweeping the
problem under the carpet, and under a cheap carpet at that. I believe that a senior
essay requirement for all undergraduates
(yes, including those in business school or health or mathematics or music) is
the best solution to the writing issue, if it is taken as a priority and taken
seriously by all members of the university community. I know that ivy league
and superior liberal arts colleges in the U. S. often have this requirement but
they have also lost their interest and intensity in administering this
requirement, or they have just made the requirement so routine as to be
uninteresting. Other than suggesting that good education is getting too
expensive, Anthony T. Grafton is not at all clear about his objections when he
says: “Like a string quartet, too,
the college cannot improve its productivity if it goes on doing what it has
always done: for example, putting
small groups of students into classes run by full members of the faculty, or
requiring every senior to write a thesis based on original research, supervised
by a professor.” (see Anthony T. Grafton, “Can the Colleges Be Saved?,” NYRB,
May 24, 2012). In fact, those two things are essential to creating truly
educated undergraduates. Democratic education need not be diluted education, as
it has become.
b) A commitment to insure that
every student successfully completes a large (probably a semester-long credit
course) problem-based course strikes me
as another way, along with the senior essay, to cap an undergraduate’s
education and send her forward into the world with real credentials.
Problem-based courses are not new; they have been employed at McMaster
University and Maastricht University for some time. Advocates of this approach
are sincerely enthusiastic, once they have seen how they can be implemented.
Design is critical, of course, and this essay is too short to address specific
design problems and resolutions. Suffice it to say here that problem-based
education incorporates creativity in subject selection as well as in approaches
to solve the problem. Problem-based approaches also provide the invention and
enhancement of research skills, cooperation, reflection, critical thinking,
and, perhaps above all, the explicit conjunction of intellectual life and real
life (a natural conjunction which should be obvious to all of us but, alas, is
not).
Many other specific things can be done to rescue
universities from the grip of the econocentric, market-place driven, corporate
model. A change in the overall culture of universities would help but that will
only come from the implementation of some smaller, targeted improvements. The
true university has long existed and it, or some facsimile of it, will always
exist as long as there are people who believe, as did Cardinal John Henry
Newman, that real education involves knowing and educating students one by one,
not by employing some kind of factory output method (see Newman’s The Idea
of the University).
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