One key reason people want to go to expensive schools, of course, are all the intangible benefits: the connections you make, the name recognition, etc. I agree that the cost seems way out of sync, but it also gets you some tangible benefits as well. At an exclusive SLAC, you won’t have a class larger than 40 or 50 people (and those are the lecture classes). Most classes will have 15 or so people. That means your opportunities for engaging in class discussion, for the teacher knowing you and keeping an eye on your progress are vastly increased. Your faculty will be from “better” schools (they cost more as a result, though their pay is still less than other professionals). The faculty will also be more available for one-on-one consultation and in theory, will also be more focused on teaching and learning rather than research (though this is debatable). Even at schools like Harvard and Yale, one could argue that having the opportunity to work with the great minds of our time is a privilege worth paying for.

There’s also a lot of learning that happens between classes, a point made back in the 70s by William Perry in his landmark study of Harvard students, Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme.  I have argued for using blogs, wikis, and other online tools to enhance and expand that learning even in face-to-face classes.  While I think that it’s possible to create the kind of community and environment in which this kind of informal learning and development can happen strictly online, I think that it takes a certain kind of student to do that, and it would take a lot of work on someone’s part to make that happen (the faculty member, usually).  Virtual worlds like Second Life show promise in helping to do this.  There’s just something about seeing a representation of people.  But we are a long way from virtual world learning being mainstream.

I do think there’s a market for a get in and get out kind of online course.  Heck, there are some courses I’d like to take like that rather than spending a whole semester online or offline trudging through material.  But I still there’s a value for being physically present on a campus at least for part of one’s college life.  Human connection is still important to learning and not all that connection is possible via the Internet.  As someone who’s shifted to working at home and having the Internet as my main way of connecting to people, I can tell you that I miss the face-to-face life of the office at times.  I do hope that the existence of online courses and social software more generally causes universities to think differently about how they teach and how they organize curriculum, but that doesn’t have to be strictly by putting courses online.  Collaboration, multimedia literacy, writing for an audience, finding research, critical thinking are all things that can be enhanced by considering what’s going on on the Internet, whether one chooses to use technological tools to explore these ideas or not.  I hope that universities will take up those and more topics.  I hope that universities change, not disappear.

In the New York Times today, Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard, worries out loud about higher education becoming too practical, focusing on providing a workforce rather than also focusing on research and on providing a broad liberal arts education to its students.  While I agree with much of what she says, that universities can and should be places where discoveries are made and where students can be exposed to many different subjects, it seems to me that she is a bit myopic herself.  First, not every institution of higher learning should be a place where discoveries are made.  Too many schools try to be like Harvard and require their faculty to do similar kinds of research with much less time and fewer resources.  I do think original research has a place even in a teaching-focused school, but in many of those places the tenure requirements don’t reflect the teaching focus, instead following a research-oriented pattern.  Any kind of school can focus on “the big questions” with or without research.  Second, not all research is created equal.  While I definitely think the humanities (it’s my field after all) is truly important to a college education, I don’t think that we need 20 more books on Shakespeare (or almost any other author).  We might need more funding for exploring how to teach the humanities or how the humanities can inform the sciences, etc.  In other words, in fields where we might not be making new discoveries, we might get creative about what counts as research instead of doing the kind of research that people have been doing for 50 years.

As for having curricula that encourage students to focus early and not take a broad view of life, I agree that this happens too often.  I’ve been in institutions where students declare a major before they arrive and advisers put them on a course where they barely look at a literature class (or a science class if they’re humanities majors).  There are a couple of things that I think might help here.  Changing the curriculum to require courses that look at broader issues, that include courses in philosophy or history or literature, is one way to alleviate this.  And I’d suggest not allowing students to “get those out of the way.”  Taken later in their college career, as students become more mature, might make these classes more meaningful.  Offer classes that appeal across disciplines.  The Gender and Technology class that I co-taught in the spring is one such example.  It’s a good thing for computer science students to think about gender and it’s a good thing for art history students to think about technology (and many of them said so in their final evaluations).  When planning courses, chairs could think about what courses in other disciplines might benefit their students.  Ethics for business majors (and CS majors, too.).  The chemistry of art. The art of physics. Having conversations with colleagues in other departments about their course offerings might lead to some creative ideas, even co-teaching opportunities.

I agree with Faust that economic pressures often cause us to put blinders on and think narrowly about jobs.  But most employers, even now, are still saying that what they need are creative people who have the ability to think critically and learn new things.  Any narrow focus, whether it’s on literature or business, can prevent more creative and thoughtful approaches.  Instead of hitting the panic button and generating more business majors to make money, colleges should seriously consider their own purpose (not Harvard’s or Yale’s), and consider how they can make the most out of their faculty and students.

Dean Dad takes on the suggestion that departments be eliminated. He describes the administrative nightmare this would cause, and wonder who the hell would do all the work of developing the curriculum for these programs. I think he’s thinking it will be him. At the SLAC’s I’m familiar with, some of this interdisciplinary work is being done informally, either by individual faculty or by “centers” or programs. The course I’m currently teaching is cross-listed in 5 different departments and programs. We’ve read materials in sociology, computer science, literature, film theory, psychology, cultural studies, and philosophy, to name a few. We brought in guest speakers and the work the students were required to do involved both traditional papers, blog writing, and a multimedia project. And let me just say, the planning alone was a buttload of work. So I see where DD is coming from. But I also see what a fabulous learning experience this was for students. I could envision parallel systems here, where students are required to take courses that are interdisciplinary, but still have majors. And these courses could be centered around a common theme, so that there’s a common language for the students, but it would be good to have the math majors talking to the English majors.

Finally, although Tim Burke agrees with much of what Taylor proposes, the online collaboration bit seems suspect to him. I think that the idea is actually a good one. The problem is many schools do not have the infrastructure necessary to make this possible, even expensive schools like the SLAC’s in my area. I like the idea, however, of less specialization, of feeling the need to cover every niche of every discipline. Maybe there’s a faculty member at another school who teaches a niche that no one at our school does and technology could facilitate having that person teach some of our students. Granted, smaller scale tools like Skype and other web conferencing tools can be used in some cases. But would those work for a large class? How many support staff would you need to support this kind of work if, say, 25% of your courses are taught this way? How would the distant students get access to the materials? Would they need accounts on certain systems? Most schools are not using something like OpenID or even any kind of open tool where students can just sign up for their own accounts, so unless the course is on the open web, there’s some overhead there for getting students access to the course. And then there’s the administrative overhead of figuring out the curriculum or at least approving it. Around here, we have around 100 colleges within a 50-mile radius. There are clusters of collaborations already, both formal and informal among the schools that have similar missions and/or are close to each other. Could these collaborations be expanded? Yes. Can technology help? Yes, but IT departments would need to shift to a different model on the academic side to make this work. Lock-down mode doesn’t work when you’re trying to collaborate across institutions.

My own feeling about the article is that I do want something to change. I don’t know if the elimination of departments works, but what about merging departments? What about creating a real interdisciplinary infrastructure instead of just giving lip service to it?

I especially like the idea of eliminating the traditional dissertation (oh, what I would have done if I could have used video!) and providing expanding opportunities for grad students. I would love to see career fairs for grad students where corporations, think tanks, museums, and other institutions who value the experience of Ph.D’s would come and recruit students. Instead what happens is graduate advisers, who only know the academy, tell you what schools to apply to. A Ph.D. who then takes a job outside the academy either does so because no academic jobs were forthcoming or feels like a sell-out.

Whatever we think of Taylor’s argument, I think there’s a general feeling that the structure at most colleges and universities is not serving the needs of the students (this may not be true at CC’s). The training that students receive, even at SLAC’s, is mostly training for an academic life that most won’t have even if that’s what they want. A broader, more interdisciplinary education has the potential of creating more knowledgeable citizens, who are better prepared to solve the world’s problems. There will still be some who choose to become faculty (and we will need them), but wouldn’t it be great if being an English major didn’t mean that you knew nothing about physics?

Cross-posted at Geeky Mom

Here are some articles that have addressed this issues.  I don’t think I’ll come to any major conclusions by May when I give my talk, but I do think that it’s important to have the conversation:

• Getting Serious about Research Online–looks at how to legitimize online scholarship
• Print Goes out of Style–discusses the MLA’s decision to not privilege print in it’s citation guide
• Unread Monographs–IHE article about Mark Bauerlein’s call to reduce scholarship in literary studies so that faculty can focus on teaching
• Professors in the Production Line–Bauerlein’s article referenced above

Do you have thoughts about this issue or other articles that might be worth reading? Please let me know in the comments!