Toni Morrison and Snooki: More Evidence of the Decline of Higher Education

The USA today just announced that Rutgers paid Snooki (of Jersey Shore fame) more money for a talk on campus than they will pay Toni Morrison (Nobel Prize winner) to give their commencement address. Both are being paid well (over $30,000) but the very idea that somehow bringing Snooki to a major college costs more than bringing Morrison and that this has happened at a major research university suggests how very wrong things are in higher education! This is not a critique of Rutgers because I think this could happen almost anywhere. It just makes me sigh!

The Irrelevance of Ideas to Education?

In my local newspaper, a columnist observed that tenure used to be a way to protect teachers from being fired for dangerous ideas but it has morphed into merely a way to secure a quasi-permant job.



I don't want to evaluate this claim whether it is true, although I suspect it may be the practical effect of most tenure decisions. Rather, I want to explore a potentially hidden assumption within this comment: Ideas either don't matter or have become irrelevant to teaching and learning. Now, the columnist (a former principal) does not actually make this case anywhere in his article. As is typical, his concern is about creating effective schools.



What confuses me is his sense that we could have good schools without an engagement with potentially controversial ideas. Or, in other words, tenure is no longer needed because teachers should simply teach skills and the fear of getting fired for holding, espousing, or exploring a controversial idea is just plain outdated. Given I live in a fairly conservative part of the country, there is plenty of local concern about governmental intrusions into individual freedoms, especially in terms of guns, religion, and the right to be entreprenurial (ok that last one is not in the Bill of Rights but lots of people think it ought to be). This would suggest to me that folks around here believe the government can and frequently does interfere with our lives but that intervention is just not a pressing issue for education.



All of this suggests that education, as popularly conceived, is no longer about ideas but about skill development and empolyment preparation. As long as education is framed in this way, the defense of tenure on the grounds of intellectual freedom and the need to explore controversial ideas will not be successful.



Perhaps more significantly, if education is "just" skill development and employment preparation (as opposed to training to become engaged and productive citizens), then the argument for public education and public funding for education seems diminished. If students and their families are merely investing in their personal financial futures, then why should society bear this cost?



Moreover, reframing education as vocational training begs the question of where society should debate what needs to be done with all that vocational training. If students are taught how to do things (from engineering to physical therapy to human resource management), where will they explore what they should do? What is their ethical obligations and the role of government, economics, personal responsibility, etc.?



The columnist persuaded me that defenses of tenure cannot rest on job security. Rather, they must emphasize the dangers of taking controversial ideas out of the classroom. Tenure is needed to help students engage dangerous ideas and develop their own ethical voice and their ability to become critical thinkers. Our country depends not only technical know-how about but the freedom to ask questions, especially questions about the nature of the good life and the good society.

The Poetics and Politics of Integrative Learning

Liberal Education, a magazine published by the Association of American Colleges and University, (see http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/index.cfm) has recently published an issue dedicated to "Integrative Learning at Home and Abroad." Carol Geary Schneider, in her President's Message, criticizes what she sees as the Cold War Curriculum with its focus on breadth and its heavy reliance on distribution requirements. She also laments the recent philanthropic focus on degree completion and the effort to rely on this Cold War Curriculum to facilitate transfer between institutions. Schneider points out this curriculum and recent reform efforts only exacerbate "the fragmentation of knowledge." She, along with other articles in the issue, call for a more integrated learning experience.



As someone who has spent the last 10 to 15 years dedicated to this proposition and general education, I welcome the conversation and Schneider's critique of recent educational reform efforts (frequently funded by high profile philanthropies). I also applaud Bill Newell's article in which he explains that "the challenge of integrative learning is to make sense of the contrasting or conflicting insights by integrating them into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in its full complexity" (8). I think he articulates precisely what a good education should accomplish.



This being acknowledged, I am growing increasingly skeptical about the rhetoric behind integrative learning and the ability for general education to achieve these lofty goals. More specifically, I wonder who benefits from this kind of paradigm shift and whether these are general education goals or something that really is the province of the major.

The turn toward integrative learning seems to focus increasingly on learning for a particular professional purpose. In his conclusion, Newell argues that "the best undergraduate education asks students to go back and forth between disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses, since interdisciplinary courses need disciplines for depth and disciplinary courses need interdisciplinarity for real-world application" (11). Hidden beneath this rhetoric or perhaps a key element of it is that learning for learning sake is not really the goal of higher education any longer. Education is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve other ends: specifically getting a job and making money. His model supports and makes more valuable disciplinary learning and helps it find a market for its graduates. I get why this is the goal of business and why perhaps politicians would embrace this model of education. I am not sure why AACU or humanities faculty should apply such market logic to their curricula. If education is merely about job training, I suspect that we can train people for jobs much more cheaply than universities and colleges do. We might even want to go back to the old master-apprentice model.

My philosophy of education emphasizes asking critical questions, exploring ideas, gaining insight into myself, and using what I have learned to gain greater autonomy in my life. It does not simply prepare for a career, but multiple careers (I am paraphrasing Andrew Mills's "What So Good About College?" here). I fear that the rhetoric of integrative learning is abandoning these goals in favor of something that is more politically expedient. That rhetoric may extend the life of some programs or universities or few years but may very well lead to contribute to the ongoing demise of universities in American culture and society

Where Have all the Dangerous Ideas Gone?

I have been thinking a lot about banned books and the world of ideas lately.

Recently, I participated in Drury's Banned Book Celebration by reading a selection from Toni Morrison's Beloved. In reviewing the list of "Banned" Books, I noticed that relatively few books have been banned outright in recent years in that it was illegal to sell them.

Rather, the battle has turned to school curricula. Many books have become part of the curriculum wars, mostly for mentioning "forbidden" topics or words. Rarely if at all was the actual message or thesis of the book the problem.

Just today, I read the heart-breaking story of Risha Mullins at http://rorr.im/reddit.com/r/wtf/comments/dmzok/9b52fde5785125f3a0ebc44caca66852.html. She was accused of promoting "soft pornography" because the award-winning books she had chosen for students dealt with "dangerous" topics. As her blog outlines, Mullins ultimately lost her job but she stood tall for the idea that students should read books that matter. (Similar battles have been fought in the areas outside of Springfield, including Republic and Stockton)

For one of my classes tomorrow, I will be teaching Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience." It is a great essay but one that will, I suspect, perplex my students because he was willing to go to jail rather than violate the dictates of his conscience by supporting the state.

All these things seem to inform or set the context of the recent national conversation about higher education and the many ideas to change or abolish tenure. In a commentary posted at chronicle.com, Cary Nelson (the president of the AAUP) argues in support of tenure largely on the practical reason that parents should want their children educated by full-time professionals who devote their complete energy to teaching a reasonable amount of classes and have the employment safety to experiment with teaching and delve deeply into their subject matter. (See http://chronicle.com/article/Parents-Your-Children-Need/124776/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en) As a tenured faculty member, I am pretty partial to Nelson's argument (regardless of some of its flaws). The comments to the article echo, however, the broader national conversation that questions the competence of teachers and cost of tenure.

What links all of these topics for me is that feeling that ideas have lost their power. Tenure was created at a moment in U.S. history when holding the wrong idea was scandalous and was connected with a form of treason. Nonetheless, everyone agreed that colleges and universities were in the "idea" business. Thoreau, a national literary treasure, went to jail on principle.

Somehow, I doubt that contemporary Americans take ideas that seriously. Certainly, the critics of higher education and tenure seem to suggest that colleges and universities ought to get out of the business of reflection and ideas and more involved in practical skills training. Many defenders of tenure, I think, have missed that the real attack is not so much on the employment practices of higher education but the entire purpose of the modern university. If professors are "just" teaching job skills, then there are no dangerous ideas and tenure is not needed or so the argument appears in the mainstream media.

Risha Mullins may be the exception to this general picture, but one that proves the general rule. She lost her job because she thought education should be about ideas. While a number of authors lined up behind her, most of her colleagues did not or if they did, it was not in the way that Thoreau would have suggested. Rather, her critics associated with her controversial topics and succeeded in getting her removed.

I worry about all these things because I fear that we are forgetting how powerful ideas have rocked the world. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions transformed societies and toppled monarchies. The invention of monotheism and the prophesies of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad have inspired religious traditions and caused tremendous wars.

Ideas don't seem to scandalize anyone these days. No one objected or was outraged at Drury's Banned Book Celebration. Sure, we might object to kids hearing dirty or inappropriate words, but ideas seem to be some sort of quaint artifacts of an earlier, more naive period. Rather than having revolutionary potential, we view ideas as forms of intellectual property we can accumulate or leverage for more stuff.

While I don't want to return to the Spanish Inquisition or the Communist Scare of the 1950s, I am saddened by how ideas don't seem to matter. I suppose I could now begin ranting about the evils of commercialism and consumerism and how economics has trumped everything else, but that may not be the real problem. Postmodernists, post-structuralists, and post-colonial thinkers were so successful in undermining the grand narratives and big ideas that modernity brought us that we no longer believe in anything. As a supporter of many of these positions, I do believe their criticisms were necessary to create a more democratic society. Unfortunately, their/my attack on ideas and idealism has been too successful and now we are all postmoderns whether we want to be or not. And all that may be left is shopping or the consumption of our niche goods.

I am looking for that one scandalous idea that will cause sufficient outrage to restore our faith in ideas and their power.

Homework as an end in itself

Because I increasingly believe that college ought to be as much about instilling certain habits of mind as it is reaching levels of proficiency or knowledge, I find myself assigning and grading more homework assignments than ever before. I like written homework because it forces students to keep up with the reading and come to class prepared. Class discussions are better and students tend to say all or most of the interesting things that I was planning on saying. My job then is more about organizing their analysis and/or supplementing their comments with additional and background information.

Homework also allows me to provide some regular feedback about progress. While this feedback cannot be too detailed, I can save students from significant errors and give them lots of positive encouragement.

I have come to believe that regular homework might be more important than tests or papers. The one challenge with this is helping students understand that the homework is for them, not me. What I mean by this, is students occasionally want to turn in the homework late (after we have had class discussion), submit it by e-mail (rather than bring it to class), or turn it all in at once. In these conversations, they sometimes suggest that the most important thing about homework is that I get to grade it. I try to tell them that homework is their way to see if they are getting the gist of things and heading in the right direction. It also allows them to formulate their ideas so that class is more meaningful and their paper ideas can germinate longer.

In other words, homework is not really a "means" for me to grade their progess, but an end itself. Doing it, being prepared for class, askig questions by yourself, formulating your opinions before class discussion and creating good work habits is the "end." I have come to realize that by my grading it, I increas the likelihood of instilling the habit.

Analysis and Application vs. Critical Thinking

Students, faculty, administrators, critics of higher education, and its proponents all seem to be questioning everything about higher education from its cost and public funding to the future of tenure and shift toward more professional majors. While many things underlie these debates, one unspoken issue is whether universities should be teaching students to become skilled in applying or analyzing a fairly narrow range of issues or problems that relate to a particular field (sometimes called a major) or become good communicators, critical thinkers, and engaged citizens (what Andrew Mills calls the swiss army approach to education - see http://faculty.otterbein.edu/Amills/MillsCollegeEssay.html).



Of course, by framing things in this way, I have created a false binary. The reality is more complex than this simplistic either/or. However, the public dialogue seems to also rely on this binary when approaching the question of the purpose of higher education, mostly because the graduates skilled in certain kinds of analysis or application possess identifiable and relatively easy to market skills.



Consider professional majors, such as accounting, architecture, or education. These majors claim to provide students with the ability to apply basic principles in those fields. While many folks have tried to get these fields to focus on communication, citizenship, and critical thinking, the meat and potatoes classes in these majors are focused on how to solve concrete problems facing practitioners and function as members of the profession. Moreover, based on what I have heard from my traditional-aged students is that they like this kind of "hands on" focus. To succeed in these programs, students need to learn how to analyze problems and how to apply. From my own experience in law school, developing the ability to "think like a lawyer" was probably the most difficult academic task I ever experienced and made graduate school relatively "easy" by comparision to law school.



Yet, this is not the same thing as becoming a critical thinker. A critical thinker goes beyond analysis or application and interrogates the existing categories, structures, paradigms, and procedures. (I don't want to rehash all the great stuff about critical thinking at criticalthinking.org/. Their stuff is great - you should check it out). A critical thinker respects the immense value of being able to apply a concept or engage in a specific kind of analysis, but also explores the limits of a given paradigm or approach. Critical thinking considers the approach's assumptions and consequences. It looks for what gets omitted or neglected. It also asks questions about who benefits from the standard approach.



My own journey to a Ph.D. in American Studies, I think, reflects my allegiance to a broad area of inquiry over a specific disciplinary allegiance. In other words, by choosing an interdisciplinary program, I explicitly rejected the idea that only one method, discipline, or paradigm can produce adequate knowledge. For better or worse, this has left me a "jack of many trades but master of none." I realize that not everyone shares my assumptions or my values, so I hesitate to foist it upon the masses.



That being said, I find it odd that many partisans in the debates about higher education want higher education to become an either/or kind of place where students either analysis/application or critical thinking. From my point of view, the application/analysis seems to be winning this debate, but I think at a huge cost. I am not sure that we can afford to focus only analysts or folks specializing in application. On the other hand, focusing on critical thinking or citizenship without some sort of specialized skill or knowledge does not produce the kind of creativity, entreprenurial sprirt, or engage citizens we need. It seems like we need to create institutions of higher education that can do both and do both well.

For students, I think this means coming to grips with the fact that college is both about learning employable skills and the awareness about their limitations and/or flaws. As I tell my students, high school is about identifying the difference between "black" and "white," while college is about navigativing in the "grey area."

For professors, administrators, and pundits, embracing the difference between analysis and critical thinking and valuing both is probably the only way to strengthen our institutions and help students achieve their goals.

Pleasure Reading vs. Academic Reading

The beginning of the new school year is almost upon us. So, I thought it might be useful to remind students and colleagues that not all reading is the same.

Reading for pleasure is not the same thing as reading for learning, intellectual development, critical thinking, and/or application. For most folks, pleasure reading is defined by enjoying a plot, identifying the main character or (in the case of non-fiction) learning some cool facts. Pleasure reading rarely entails note-taking or even doing anything with the text other than stacking on a shelf.

Academic or professional reading is different. First off, you need to determine the expertise of the writer, the book's likely audience, and the nature of the book (is it a romance novel or a scholarly treatise?). Next, you need to identify the book's goals, its topic, its main thesis, and its general structure. Once you have a good overview of the book, then you need to evaluate the evidence (how was it collected and evaluated), analyze the writing quality, identify the writer's assumptions, and consider if the evidence and the assumptions support the general conclusion. You also might need to look at how the ideas developed and how the author relies on tradition.

To get the most out of an academic or professional text, most folks need to take notes, highlight key passages, jot down how to apply an idea to an example, note important phrases or quotations, and even identify places where you have questions for the author and/or disagree with him/her. There are a range of academic books and a similar range of goals when reading academic/professional books. You may need to evaluate the idea it presents or apply the idea to future examples or cases. For many humanities classes, evaluating an idea is a key skill. For social science, natural science, and professional courses, much time is spent on learning to apply concepts and skills to the field.

Whether reading a philosophical treatise or textbook on accounting, students will need to "read with a pen" and highlight key parts of the text by putting them in your own words. Increasingly, I am encouraging students to "brief" readings or learn how to summarize them in a page for future use. No matter one's job or profession, one will need to keep updated on the literature and it will be crucial to possess the reading skills to get and apply new concepts and facts. Teachers focus on reading because it is a key way to develop the intellectual, analytical, and critical thinking skills and habits students will need once they leave the university.

The longer I am involved in teaching the more I think that we need to develop a new word to describe academic or professional reading. The lack of specificity makes what we do in education unclear and confuses folks about what we are asking our students to do. Moreover, it breaks the link between reading the kinds of habits of mind we are trying to foster among our students. Academic or professional reading is not the idle passing of eyes over words but engaging in critical and analytical thought.

By differentiating between pleasure and academic/professional reading, students and their professors are more likely to meet their goals this semester.

Finding the Right Mentors

A few weeks ago, my graduate department held a party for a retiring faculty member, who just happened to be one of my mentors. What is interesting is that I never took a class from him but he was one of the biggest influences on my career. He taught me about higher education, administration, research, and teaching. There is not a week that does not go by where I don't rely on some morsel of wisdom he shared with me. I had also had the good fortune of having another 3 or 4 other faculty from PhD department who helped in significant ways as well. (For what it is worth, I graduated with law school without having any faculty mentors on the law faculty. I did manage to find one in the English Department even though I was in law school but that is a long story)

I write this post for two reasons. First, it seems like the national conversation about teaching and higher education seem to forget advising and mentoring as a key element of teaching. I realize that part of this is because mentoring doesn't really fit the requirements for tenure at most R1 institutions. On the other hand, I think that we, as a country, will continue to "waste" money in higher education if we keep thinking that the all that matters about college degrees is "value added learning". I am particularly concerned that all the talk about reducing costs in higher education will make it more difficult for other student to find the kind of role models and mentors they need for professional and personal success. This, at least from my point of view, is where the turn to adjuncts hurts the most.

This leads me to my second reason for sharing this. I want to encourage all my current students to find not one but a couple of mentors. Obviously, not every faculty member wants to become a mentor or has the ability. While it may take time to do this and get used to having a mentor, the benefits are simply huge. Mentoring, however, is a two-way street. The "mentoree" needs to do his/her homework about faculty and take the time to cultivate these relationships. It is not easy but a key part of having a successful college career. Certainly, a mentor can write letters of reference, help you pick classes, and aid in finding internships. The biggest benefit, however, is the wisdom and guidance you will receive.

The Place of the Lecture in Higher Education

A recent article in the Chronicle (http://chronicle.com/article/More-Professors-Could-Share/64521/#comments) discusses whether professors or institutions should record lectures and make them available online.

Hidden in the conversation about who owns it, public access, and how students might use and benefit from such recordings is a key assumption about the nature of teaching and learning. While it is unstated, it appears that the article and the debate assume that higher education is primarily about knowledge transfer, ostensibly from faculty to student. Based on this assumption, the lecture is one method for facilitating that transfer. Further relying on this assumption, the next question is whether we need universities at all if students can simply "listen" to the lectures on their own.

Despite the framing of the issue around new technology, this is really part of an ongoing debate about the nature learning. Are teachers engaged in a form of banking in which we deposit knowledge into brains that will be accessed at a later date or are we more like fitness coaches who are helping people develop "healthy habits of the mind"?

As I get older, I am realizing that I view teaching through the lens of creating good intellectual habits. I just don't have much faith in the banking theory of education, especially as knowledge expands and changes. Moreover, the internet is really good at reminding us of names, dates, and definitions. On the other hand, the internet is not so good at helping us figure out how to evaluate information or apply that information to discrete contexts. This is where you need to talk to an actual human being and engage in a conversation. This is where "hands on" and experiential learning kick in. This is also why students need classes to jumpstart the processes of reflection and analysis. I guess this is why I don't really lecture, but try to hold discussions with my classes. As my friend, Chris Panza, says, education is not so much about knowledge but relationships and wisdom.

From what I can tell, much of the conversation around online lectures relies on the banking theory of education. So, I really don't have much of a problem with posting online lectures, but I don't think that is really a substitute for higher education though either.

Right now, there are tons of books in libraries that possess more information than I ever could ever relate to my students. However, they are not a substitute for actual classes even if the books could be made more widely accessible. The information is not enough. Online lectures, while probably better than many books, still are not engaging, experiential, or conversational enough to serve as the primary basis for teaching and learning for most students.

Oddly, after reading the article and thinking for a bit, I remembered why I don't lecture so much. I just don't believe in information transfer as the key element of learning. The key is dialogue and feedback. All this talk about online lectures speed up and/or increase the productivity of information dissemination, but it does not really revolutionize how individual feedback and guidance is handled. When someone figures out how to dramatically improve the productivity of my grading and working with students on formulating and editing papers, then we will have a real revolution in education!

College Completion Shortfall

In 2009, College Complete America was organized by folks like the Lumina Foundation, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation to help increase the number of students who complete college in a timely manner.

They identify a number of problems that are contributing to the problem:

To name only a few of the many reasons: inadequate academic preparation, poorly designed and delivered remediation, broken credit transfer policies, confusing financial aid programs, a culture that rewards enrollment instead of completion, and a system too often out of touch with the needs of the today’s college student. (http://www.completecollege.org/completion_shortfall/)

Their hope is to change state policies to focus on graduation (not enrollment) and knock down impediments to graduation.

It is hard for me to be too critical of this kind of agenda as I want all of my students to succeed. I don't really quibble with their general strategy even for accomplishing this.

I do want to note a few curious items that tend to get omitted from their discussion:

(1) America is pretty anti-intellectual. Having more college graduates who don't read and lack curiosity and critical thinking skills are not going to help us compete economically. I think (although I am not supporting it here) that a college degree is much more than a mere device to improve employment possibilities or earning power. It is about critical thinking, innovation, and being a good citizen. We really need to change America's understanding about college. I just don't see this group succeeding in this when they adopt essentially corporate rhetoric about education. They seem to be viewing the degree as the end, rather than the importance of the habits of mind developed and the relationships nourished during a college career.

(2) Many students struggle to graduate because they can't afford it - either in monetary terms or opportunity cost. Between the economic, family, and health care catastrophes I regularly hear about, the problem is not always government red tape.

(3) I wonder if the increase in overpaid and overworked adjuncts play any role in why graduation completion rates remain a problem. Folks with little connection to their institution, teaching too many students, and little job security probably are not the best people to respond to this crisis. (This is not to say that adjunct instructors are not good at what they do, they just can't always create the kind of relationships that many students need to help them graduate).

I like where this organization is heading and some of the steps they are taking. I just wish they were tackling some of these other challenges as well. When education is generally de-valued and students are not healthy or safe, we will struggle to succeed in our educational goals.

Tupac, Biggie and the Academic Library

I am beginning to prepare for my next session of my "Hip-Hop Nation" class. I was hoping to talk about Tupac and Biggie among other things. Because their image is a key element of their connection the hip-hop nation, I tried to find a video or documentary about either in my university's library, especially something discussed their respective legacies and how their deaths affected hip-hop.

So, I searched the electronic library and found that the library did not have any sources no books or videos, related to the pair. I had to admit that this stunned me, even if it is not completely surprising. Tupac and Biggie are among the most significant figures from hip-hop and African American culture over the past fifteen to twenty years. Their absence from the library reveals the potential disconnect between academic knowledge and how cultural operates, circulates, and signifies. Over the past decace, I have participated in more conversations than I can count about the relative merits and value of Tupac and Biggie. However, my library does not provide evidence of that spirited debate. Certainly, many libraries do contain books, films, and articles about the pair. Nonetheless it did make me wonder about how libraries represent contemporary cultural debates and how libraries fail to record them.

The End(s) of General Education?

Drury, like many institutions, is in the midst of reviewing and revising its general education curriculum. The conversation is intense and as someone who has been deeply involved in the current curriculum, I have participated in many of these discussions. I do think the conversation is progressing even if I am not sure exactly where it is leading. (Curricular reform is kind of like sausage, you don't want to watch it being made . . . . )

This whole conversation, however, has left me feeling rather conflicted between the vocabulary of general education reform and my own approach to teaching and learning. The key words in general education reform - assessment, learning styles, pedagogy, student engagement, global learning seem to miss the point.

I find my confusion is the greatest after teaching a "good" class. It seems to me that the best class sessions are pretty narrowly focused affairs in which students and faculty really grapple with some text, evidence or problem. While we may hit a whole host of general education outcomes, the bland goal or outcome statements just don't do justice to the detailed conversation in which I just participated. Learning is not always predictable and it can be a challenge to figure out what will work with a given group of students and where classroom conversations lead. Moreover, it was the preparation and the participation in an intellectual conversation that seemed to be the point more than the subject-matter or the intellectual products produced. While the claim of general education is that helps "educated people" share an intellectual universe, the reality is that sometimes learning alienates us from the supposed intellectual and popular universe for which we are supposedly preparing!

As a result, I want to say that the goal of general education is to create a structure where students might have a wide range of intellectual experiences and develop their thinking and communication skills. This is it - nothing more and nothing less. But, how do you quantify that? How do you know when a student is done? How do you do that in an era in which students get dual-enrollment in high school, transfer frequently between institutions, and change majors every semester? How about curricular structure, advisement, and the relationship between departments and general education? In addition, the assessment gurus will tell you that merely having a handful of good learning experiences does not necessarily translate into broader improvement in writing, critical thinking, etc.

But I think that is the problem. Education, following the ancients, is probably more about cultivating certain habits of the mind than it is becoming a repository of facts or reaching a particular level of attainment. I increasingly view education as a process or a way of life, but the trend in higher education administration is to view it through the lens of products, assessments, portfolios, and measurements.

So, where does this leave general education reform? I am not too sure other than to note that the tenure of national conversation about general education seems very modern and/or progressive. The irony is that most of us (especially university professors) have adopted a postmodern worldview and possess a deep skepticism about our disciplinary knowledge. Rather than a neutral or objective rhetoric, the whole concept of general education seems to carry with it a set of assumptions that may, in fact, be hostile to classical notions about learning and wisdom. The concept of general education also seems to conflict with contemporary assumptions about culture, sustainability, globalization, diversity, etc. The rhetoric of general education may be more attuned to the 1950s (or a caricature of the 1950s) with its neatly defined career paths, finite disciplinary boundaries and the confidence in academic knowledge to master and improve the world.

This all leaves me to wonder if general education is kind of like a rotary phone - at one point a great advance, but no longer a current technology. I am getting the sense that the "Age of General Education" may be passing. I just don't know what the next age will bring. Probably one version of this new world are places like University of Phoenix where general education is a checklist of sorts and something that can be infinitely transferred across borders and boundaries. The question is how places like Drury and other traditional liberal arts institutions will respond.

Confessions of an Assessment Skeptic

At a recent AACU conference and President Obama's State of the Union address, there was more talk about assessment (okay the president did not really talk about it directly) and how we need more information to evaluate educational institutions and determine which ones are good and deserving of more public money.

I must admit being ambivalent about assessment. Although I don't rely on quantitative data or analysis in my research, I think that most proponents of assessment oversell the value of this data/analysis and underestimate the real cost of and effort in producing this information. I must confess, I am an assessment skeptic! Despite being pretty engaged with assessment over the past decade, I am fairly cautions about what it can accomplish and how it can and will be deployed.

I am sure I am missing something important here, but I think the general argument is:

If we government, employers, prospective students, and the parents of prospective students have more information about outcomes, then these people will make better choices about their education.

This argument seems to rely on a number of unspoken assumptions:

(1) students, employers , and governments make rational decisions related to college.
(2) academic achievement (as opposed to convenience, potential earning power, location, athletics, campus social life, etc) are the main factors in shaping decisions about college.
(3)ll institutions (and/or majors) have similar educational goals and thus can be usefully compared.
(4 the primary concern of campus administrators is academic quality (as opposed to budgets, fundraising, enrollment growth, etc)

There is a part of me that really wants to believe in assessment and the promise of a rational conversation about student learning outcomes (after all I am a notorious idealist).

However, my pragmatic side looks at the rest of our capitalist society and thinks about the general irrationality of our stock market and our capitalist system (e.g. the housing and dot.com bubbles - not to mention CEO pay) and wonders why these other areas of our economy have failed to adopt the kind of assessment models proposed for colleges and universities. Just as an aside, I wonder what Walmart (or Target, Kohl's, or K-mart) would be like if consumers applied some sort of assessment measurement tool to its products. I think that most consumers value efficiency and economy over actual achievement - isn't that the whole business discussion about price points and convenience? My guess is that most consumers of higher education rely on their own formula that takes into account a series of factors from convenience to social life to locale to major to reputation to actual quality.

OK, I have probably gotten off track here. It seems to me that the call for assessment is really a an acknowledgement of the failure of the employment market and the behavior of college students (and their families). Neither employers nor college students make good choices and the government is left paying an increasing amount of money to more colleges each year.

I have come to the very tentative conclusion that the assessment movement is failing for a pretty classic fallacy: confusing a means for an end. Assessment proponents appear to believe to have a transformed the process of assessment (or some kind of rational rating or evaluation system) into goal in and of itself. The problem is that the mere existence of information does not mean people will act on in it, they really want that data, or that academic excellence is the main point of college. Moreover, like any market, some sellers focus on low-quality, low-cost education while other sellers will inevitably focus on a different market segment that desires high-quality, high cost "luxury" goods.

My second tentative conclusion is that assessment proponents have failed to understand the nature of the scientific method and statistical analysis: (1) statistical data must be interpreted, (2) the results are only as strong as the inputted data, (3) they frequently give you only probabilities, not eternal verities, and (4) past performance (a la the stock market) does not determine future results, especially as colleges and universities respond to all sorts of situations. Consider how economists continue to struggle to understand and the predict the economy despite a bevy of statistical models for evaluating the health and future of the economy.

I don't think assessment is necessarily a bad thing. (In fact, I have improved my teaching and/or learned stuff about what was happneing in my clas). I just don't thing it is a silver bullet that can cure everything that ails higher education. Moreover, it is a pretty convenient whipping boy or straw man because who wants to defend academic mediocrity or a second-class education? However, the underlying premise is that if we only had more data, then folks would stop making bad choices about higher education. If this were true, then how come consumers continue to make so many unhealthy and inefficient choices when it comes to everything to fast-food to cigarettes?

I really believe that higher education can improve. I am just not sure if the assessment movement is the always the right way to promote quality! It also takes faculty away from what they do best: profess their fields.

I really wish I had the answers to the questions that the assessment movment raises, but I don't. And neither do they.

Technology, Productivity, and Teaching

The common wisdom is that technology increases productivity. If this is true, how come I feel more scattered (in my teaching) than usual after adding blogs and a message board to my classes?

A Link Between the Humanities Job Market and Accreditation?

In a two excellent posts, Brian Croxall (http://www.briancroxall.net/2009/12/28/the-absent-presence-todays-faculty/) and Cathy Davidson (http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/future-humanities) discuss the crisis in the job market and the increase in the number of adjuncts being used at most colleges.

What I found so interesting about this piece was that I spent much of today working to prepare a small portion of my university's self-study for its reaccreditation for the Higher Learning Commission. For those familiar with the criterion for reaccreditation, I was working on Criterion 2 or, in layperson's lingo, the criterion focusing on institutional planning and continuous improvement. As far as I can tell, the percentages of tenure, tenure-track faculty, and adjunct faculty are NOT a key element of our reaccreditation report. I suspect that these numbers will be found somewhere in my university's report. However, I am pretty sure that those numbers will not be referenced in the chapter on planning and continuous improvement (primarily because of how the HLC defines the subject-matter of this chapter). It certainly was not discussed in much detail of the sample reports I received when I attended conferences on preparing for reaccreditation. Only after reading Croxall and Davidson's blogs did I notice this gaping absence.

Just for fun, I went to the IPEDS data collected by the Department of Education at http://nces.ed.gov/IPEDS/datacenter/InstitutionByName.aspx?stepId=1. I learned that Harvard University's faculty relies on more than 50% of non-tenure or tenure-track faculty. I also learned that my alma mater, the University of Kansas, has close to 30% of its faculty, not on the tenure-track. Both appear duly accreditated. Similarly, the local branch of University of Phoenix has no faculty on the tenure-track (according to the IPEDS data) and appears accreditated as well.

My question is this: should the accreditation process take more notice of this data?

I have no doubt that most accreditors would probably respond with something about the amount of adjuncts employed should be linked to institutional mission (thus allowing institutions to ignore this issue by and large).

Obviously, I think that accreditation should consider this issue. Despite the great work that many adjuncts and non-tenure-track folks do, they tend not to write re-accreditation reports. These folks are rarely empowered to start new programs, be innovative, or engage in entrepreneurial thinking (accreditors are very interested in seeing institutions adapt to the market-place). These folks might participate in assessment programs but probably do not help create and manage them (assessment is another big topic in reaccreditation reports). These folks, by and large, will not have the credentials to become the next generation of department chairs, program chairs, deans, and administrators (once again, continuity of leadership is important in many assessment reports). These folks probably do not have the job security to represent the institution in the community and create long-standing relationships with k-12 schools, non-profits, or local businesses (yes, this too seems important in reaccreditation). While R1 institutions may be so well-funded that they can pay special administrators engage in the items listed above, small liberal arts colleges, like where I work, rely heavily on faculty to do all these things. And, I think that faculty can help shape these activities so that the institutions remain focused on teaching and learning.

If teaching (defined here as writing syllabi, lecturing, leading discussion, and grading) were the primary functions of faculty today, then reaccreditation probably need not be too worried about the use of adjuncts and the growth of non-tenure track people. However, faculty are becoming managers, entrepreneurs, advisors, mentors, and community outreach specialists. And it appears that this might be accelerating due to the recent financial squeeze most institutions are facing. I am not sure how these functions of the contemporary university can be outsourced to adjuncts and remain healthy institutions.

I realize that institutions are facing financial pressures and this has shaped the current job market in the humanities. It seems to me one role of accreditation should be to assure that institutions are realizing their educational missions. Part of that accreditation inquiry should focus on who is doing the teaching, assessing, managing, mentoring, and community outreach. One way faculty might improve the academic job market in the long run is to have the major disciplinary organizations, such as MLA, AHA, APA, etc, play a greater role in discussions about reaccreditation.

While I harbor doubts about the efficacy of our current reaccreditation system, I nonetheless think that faculty might find it a useful arena for dealing with some of the issues we face.

3 Years of College?

(Given that I placed the term “critical thinking” in the blog’s title, I thought that I would begin to discuss a key element of critical thinking in my first real blog entry.)

There has been considerable discussion that college should be reduced to three years. As someone who teaches at a university, I am deeply interested in this debate.

So, let’s begin with the first step of critical thinking: identifying the claim. What is being claimed and what are the stated reasons for that position?

In this debate, the claim (i.e. we should decrease the length of time it takes to get a bachelor’s degree) is pretty easy to spot, but the reasoning is implied at best. From the articles that I have read and the ongoing debates I have witnessed at various conferences, it seems like two reasons for this proposal (feel free to elaborate those other reasons in the comment area) recur:
· The increasing cost of tuition
· The academic calendar inefficient, unnecessarily stretching out the college experience (i.e. campus operate at capacity and faculty appear to work only 9 months a year)

Typically, the next step in critical thinking would be to identify the evidence that supports of each of these claims and then evaluate the quality of that evidence.

For today, I want to assume that there is solid evidence underlying each of these potential reasons so that we can examine the assumptions within this claim. I think these assumptions help reveal the underlying concerns folks have about college and higher education.

The Increasing Cost of Tuition

Many proponents of shortening the length to a bachelor’s degree identify the cost as the most pressing problem facing higher education. In other words, their main beef with colleges and universities is that tuition simply costs too much (or perhaps more cynically, they use the issue of cost as proxy for other concerns about higher education). It is important to note that it is not the content but the length or cost that is the problem. While cutting off a year of college appears to remedy this problem, I am not sure it does. These proponents rarely identify what courses, skills, or knowledge they would omit from the curriculum. If universities simply try to repackage their current four-year degrees into three-year packages, I am not sure where the cost savings would be (other than room and board). Moreover, this argument seems to rely on the premise that most college students are 18 to 24 year olds who are primarily focused on getting their degree. It is not clear to me that working moms and dads in college could take any more classes than they are currently taking.

The Inefficiency of the Academic Calendar

A variation on the concern about costs (discussed above) is that the academic calendar simply wastes a lot of time that could be spent in the classroom. Given I am writing this during my university’s winter break, I am quite sympathetic to this argument. However, it is the very inefficiency of the current system that enables many students to pay for their education. Most traditional-aged students work during summer and winter breaks. Without freeing up students the time to work, they would need to take out bigger loans or have the government subsidize their education further. In addition, many study abroad during these times. Equally as important, it is during these breaks that most faculty keep up with their fields and engage in their research and other professional activities. It is quite possible that making higher education more efficient may reduce its quality.

Some Critical Reflection

fully admitting that there are other reasons at play in the debate, these two objections (cost and efficiency) to the current structure of higher education tend to neglect the content of most degrees and the differences among students. They also omit some basic truths about higher education:
1. Some majors require more content than others, meaning that they might justifiably take longer. In fact, many professional schools (e.g. education, accounting, architecture, etc) have more extensive requirements than more traditional majors.
2. Some majors require skills that take longer to develop and perfect than others.
3. Some students are well-enough prepared that they possess sufficient knowledge and the right kind of study habits to proceed at an accelerated pace. I have met a number of students who possessed this knowledge and the requisite study skills to graduate in three years. Many students, however, do not possess either. In fact, that is why they are in college!
4. Most students do not proceed through college following just one path. Many students change major multiple times and others try to complete multiple majors.
5. The number of majors and career paths seem to be expanding exponentially, which turn puts pressure on universities to offer even more courses and incur more costs.
6. Many students (especially non-traditional students) move as fast or as slow as they are able, no matter what the official pace of the university suggests.
7. Many students need the four years to mature and acculturate into a new profession and a new way of life. This is probably obvious, but education is about growth and development. Unlike a sandwich that can be consumed pretty quickly, education requires reflection. Many arguments focusing on efficiency and cost appear to forget that.
8. Higher education is social. A key element of college is learning how to interact with peers and fellow professionals. While class-time is important, it may not be as important as learning this social lesions, whether they are learned in a fraternity, an internship, or in a senior seminar. I am not sure if reducing college from four years to three years will help in this professionalizing function of higher education.

WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?

Critical thinking tends not to provide a clear answer. It does however offer us a clearer sense of strengths and weaknesses of a particular issue.

Higher education is expensive and there is not a clear sense of how to contain costs. Shortening the official time to degree might or might not accomplish that goal, especially as the number and depth of majors expand and the range of student gets bigger each year. Universities are being asked to do more but charge less, especially as folks want to spend less government funding on education. The end of education, unlike many other goods, is not efficiency or an economical price, but the development of skills, the attainment of knowledge, and creating the next generation of leaders.

I suspect that the debate about the length of college is really a debate about how much should the public fund higher education. It seems (after writing this post) that higher education is facing a number of crises and simply changing the length of a degree probably cannot remedy all of them. In fact, it may make some of the problems discussed above even worse. But, it does offer a compelling and persuasive rhetoric.