A Commitment to Mission:
The Future of Higher Education
There
has been a lot of talk lately about the future of higher education. Dan Butin, writing in Inside Higher Education, suggests that part of the problem is that everyone seems to be focused on the
impact of technology and, thus, wants to organize around “the next big thing.” However, he notes, “Higher
education is changing dramatically, from the “new student majority” of
demographic shifts to the changing nature of faculty work and contingent
faculty to the disinvestment of public higher education and the debtification
of an entire generation of low- and middle-income students. But these are not
problems that have been caused by or will be solved by technology. These
changes have been thirty-plus years in the making.” He argues that we need to have a clear view that technology
is about transmitting information, leaving it to the university to help
students learn to transform information into knowledge. “This,” he writes, “would require a fundamental
rethinking of what faculty do, of what students learn and how
they document such learning, and what goals we want them to accomplish through
such learning.”
Earlier
this year, in The Chronicle Terry Eagleton described “the slow death of the university as a center of
humane critique,” which he saw as being largely rooted in the university’s
capitulation “to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.” One symptom is the death of traditional
academic governance, where the faculty determine the curriculum and academic
policies. With the creation of academic administration as a career, he notes, “professors are transformed into
managers, so students are converted into consumers.” Addressing the longstanding tension between the University
as a “public good” versus a “private good,” Eagleton writes:
Education
should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is not the same
as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. In fact, you
would tackle society’s needs a great deal more effectively were you to
challenge this whole alienated model of learning. Medieval universities served
the wider society superbly well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers,
theologians, and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and
state, not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might fail
to turn a quick buck.
Noam
Chomsky sounded a similar note in 2014
when he
described the emergence of a business model within higher education that
created layers of professional, career administrators while making faculty more
vulnerable by increasing the use of adjuncts and, at the same time, keeping the
student body burdened by debit and, thus, less likely to repeat the student
activism of the 1960s.
Chomsky
describes two basic models of higher education that have been discussed since
the Enlightenment. One is what he
calls the “empty vessel” approach of knowledge transfer, what we might today
call “teaching to the test.” The
other, which, Chomsky notes, was the preferred model over the past three
centuries . . .
.
. . was described as laying out a string along which the student progresses in
his or her own way under his or her own initiative, maybe moving the string,
maybe deciding to go somewhere else, maybe raising questions. Laying out the
string means imposing some degree of structure. So an educational program,
whatever it may be, a course on physics or something, isn’t going to be just
anything goes; it has a certain structure. But the goal of it is for the
student to acquire the capacity to inquire, to create, to innovate, to
challenge—that’s education.
Higher
education has suffered over the past two decades due in part to the disruptive
change that technology and globalization has inspired around the world. Certainly, one reason is that American
public colleges and universities—their mission and their products and
services—are a product of the Industrial Revolution; it is only natural that we
should refresh the vision of higher education to meet the needs of this new
social and economic context in which education operates and, at the same time,
protect it from dangers in this new environment that threaten the fundamental
purposes of higher education.
Public
higher education emerged as a response to a complex societal need in the 19th
century: to facilitate the massive
immigration and urbanization that accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and to
provide the new skills that society needed to succeed in the new environment. Among the results:
·
A national network of teacher colleges
·
New undergraduate and graduate programs in
professions like engineering, science, and business
·
New disciplines—sociology and social psychology
among them—that produced new knowledge and professionals to address social
issues arising from urbanization and the new community dynamics brought about
by immigration and industrialization.
·
A commitment to social engagement, reflected
most obviously in the Agricultural Extension movement in every state but also
including “general extension”—also called continuing education, outreach, and
engagement—that addressed ongoing educational needs of communities and the
professions.
·
Distance education—originally in the form of
correspondence study—designed to make rural life more sustainable and to help
improve agricultural production to
support urbanization.
·
A broad commitment to practical, applied
research across all disciplines.
·
New degree programs—ranging from associate
degrees to professional master and doctoral degrees.
The
questions today are: (1) What new societal needs are arising from the
Information Revolution? And (2)
What must higher education do to address these new needs? Some thoughts follow:
New Social Needs
The
Information Revolution is making several significant changes to society, which
should drive planning for colleges and universities. Three issues
stand out as being at the same scale as those that defined the university in
the industrial period:
1. Technology
has changed the nature of “community” itself. In the agricultural and industrial ages, “community” a
shared physical proximity was basic to the definition of a community. Community was the shared
inter-relationships of people who share a physical space. Today, however, technology has
reduced—and in some casers eliminated—physical co-location as a requirement of
community. We maintain work and
social relationships with colleagues who live far away. We work from home offices. We purchase essentials online. We are just beginning to comprehend how
this new social structure—a combination of physical and virtual
communities—affects the individual’s role as a member of political, social,
professional, and spiritual communities. The supply chain for many products is now international. Even the help desks that we call when a
product doesn’t work may be in India or elsewhere. In the industrial era, immigration drove the economy, and this
drove educational change. In the
information era, people need not necessarily move to the United States in order
to participate in what is now a global manufacturing economy. The need for American workers and
professionals in the new economy is to be able to work effectively with
colleagues from multiple cultures who remain in their own culture. The
implications cut across the three-part mission of higher education.
2. Our
citizens are living longer lives.
We need to train citizens for their “third act”—to make constructive
contributions to their communities, both local and global. Higher education must not focus solely
or even primarily on high school graduates, but must be there to help them
through all three stages: first
professions, career changes, and the often voluntary contributions that retired
adults can make to their communities.
At each stage, we also need to ensure that education is not just
vocational training, but helps students at all three stages find satisfaction
in individual and community roles.
3. We
are at the threshold of major climate change in our world. The coming decades will see dramatic
impact on coastal communities and on worldwide agriculture. Just as our land grant universities
helped to support industrial urbanization and immigration by focusing on
agricultural production in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, we now need
to conduct research and prepare society for the implications of climate
change. Those implications include
massive migrations within and between nations as populations move away from
coastal flooding; significant changes in agricultural productivity that could
lead to large-scale food shortages; and the need to find new sources of
energy. In the process, climate
change will put stress on national and international social and political
institutions and processes and will require new social service professionals. Higher education’s response
to climate change will require new emphases in research, the development of new
curricula to prepare professionals and the population as a whole to deal with
migration and other issues, and new partnerships between institutions to share
faculty, and to conduct collaborative research across political, social and
climate frontiers. Increasingly,
international institutional partnerships will be needed to help institutions
address issues that affect their local communities.
Ultimately,
however, the future of higher education rests in accepting the fact that higher
education institutions are not
corporations. Colleges and
universities are not companies.
They are complex social organizations that have developed to meet the
needs of the societies in which they operate. They depend on a commitment to ideals, like shared
governance, to ensure that the delicate balance between individual faculty
expertise and organizational commitments is maintained so that the institution
can serve society.
Universities cannot allow themselves to become simply the training arm
and private laboratory of commercial interests. Their commitment must be to the broader society.
Only
this commitment—supported by the effective use of technology to engage
communities and facilitate collaboration across institutions—will allow higher
education to translate goals that both Eagleton and Chomsky describe into
practice in the Information Society.
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