Thinking About Rethinking: Part Two

My last post summarized what I found interesting about Keeling and Hersh's argument in Losing our Minds. I really think this book struck a chord with me. In some ways, it brings me back around to ideas I was exploring in the very first post on this blog.

In that post, I discussed the importance of two books -- What the Best College Teachers Do and Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Returning to the classroom after all those years in administration, I have the freedom to re-imagine my pedagogy and think about what I really want to see happen in the classroom. It's a very different approach than where I started 31 years ago. While these books and the others I mentioned on Monday are all influential, there's something about how K&H present their argument that clarified a number of things for me. I'm seeing implications everywhere I look. I'll list a few here. I'm certain this list will grow.

1. The book has helped me articulate something I've been toying with all year. If we aren't focused on learning, where is our focus? I'm thinking that the enemy of learning is COMPLIANCE. We set benchmarks, deadlines, rubrics, processes, measures, and the like and substitute those for Learning. What does a student think when seeing the Intro to Soc assignment about writing a paper on Sociology and Christianity? "I have to write a paper by May 7th. It has to be this long, and is supposed to cover the questions in the handout that Dr. Hawthorne handed out. It says in the syllabus that this paper is worth 10% of my final grade. So I have to write something." Honestly, I wasn't thrilled with the papers. Too many of them failed to deal with the rubric questions, took the easy way out, or were basically rush jobs. I take the blame for that in that I didn't do a good job of setting up the assignment initially or devote enough time to it early in the semester. But if what I wanted was for students to engage the question, why did they not do that (even at a Freshman level)? Because it was a task on their to-do list that had to be cleared so they could move on to the next thing. What's the alternative? I think it will require me to be more upfront about the purpose of assignments, articulating the value I think they hold in terms of learning, and require personal interaction around the assignment (even e-mail would help). My own conversations about a paper assignment need to move from "what do you have to do" to "why this is of value". This morning I ran across this wonderful piece by John Warner in Inside Higher Ed. He illustrates how he lays out his course to focus on student learning (and references What the Best College Teachers Do in the process). I don't know if I'll write my syllabi this way in the future, but I want to devote more time to elaborating the pedagogy that I've done to date. By the way, the focus on learning also deals with faculty to faculty interactions or dialogue between administration and faculty. We also need to focus on the value of shared learning and not on simple deadlines, rubrics, or avoiding being the last one turning in the catalog copy.

2. A focus on learning shifts our measurement strategies away from grades to something more important -- change over time. One of the common concerns on college campuses is about grade inflation. We had that conversation at Spring Arbor in one of our last faculty meetings. Here is a nice piece from last summer that gives an overview on grade inflation nationally. It examines the impact of the Vietnam draft on the initial burst of grade inflation. Other articles highlight the impact of a consumer culture, a focus on retention (because we can't afford to lose students), the general pattern of grading in secondary education ("I've always been an A student"). Add to this the data on how little time students spend studying outside of class. The argument against grade inflation is that if students aren't doing work but are getting good grades, then our standards as faculty must have collapsed. But that argument seems too similar to the data on hating congress and liking your particular representative ("Some of you out there aren't holding to standards"). But K&H make me think that we'll never be successful chasing the statistics. It's not the grades, it's the learning. If the vast majority of my students are demonstrating learning, they should receive appropriate grades (actually it would be better to not have grades, but that's too far even for me). Think of the unemployment rate. We don't (shouldn't) pursue policies that lessen the unemployment rate. We should pursue policies that strengthen the economy in ways that indirectly lessen the unemployment rate.

3. It matters what we talk about. I ran across this nice tribute to the work of Walter Kimbrough, new president of Dillard University in New Orleans.  The author, Marybeth Gasman, is a professor higher ed at Penn who specializes in HBCUs. She has a list of ten significant accomplishments that Kimbough attained at his previous institution and offers them as a model that other presidents could emulate. It's a good list that many administrators would admire. I've focused on some of these myself in past administrative settings. But I realized that none of the these ten good things spoke directly to student learning. Colleges should be using the bully pulpit of administrative speaking to address goals for seeing enhancement in learning. Marybeth told me in an e-mail exchange that Kimbrough has spoken and written on learning and I'm glad to hear it. But we need to over-communicate on the importance of learning gains. Every year, the Higher Education Research Institute surveys incoming freshmen from across the country. One key question they ask is "why did you come to college?" Here's their summary for Fall 2011:

The thing that strikes me about this is not the data over time but the the questions. Are these really the things we expect out of higher education? (And do 60% of students really put general education as a key goal?) There is a key component of the college experience that involves emerging adults coming into their own, moving out of their safe environments, and learning who they can be and the vast amounts they can accomplish. One of the things I love about teaching is being able to track the growth of a student from the point of arrival to the verge of commencing forth. That a story we have to focus on because at the end of the day it's the measure of our stewardship as educators.

Thinking about Rethinking Higher Education

Today I finished We're Losing our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education by Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh. Of all the books on higher education I've read over the last twenty years, this is one of the best. It's also the most difficult to implement.

Keeling and Hersh manage to brush aside all of the simplistic arguments about reforming higher education. They explain why three-year degrees and online solutions are inadequate in terms of our intended outcomes. Simply put, they argue that the failure of American higher education is entirely due to our inability to truly focus on student learning.

The book isn't perfect. At times it seems to suggest a "golden age" where learning predominated and we've lost our way. But most of the time, they point the way to what it would look like for us to seriously 1) act like seeing students learn was at the core of what we do (instead of all the things that dominate our academic conversations), 2) organize our systems around that understanding, and 3) see that goal as appropriate not just for the best and brightest of our students.

Too much of the critique of higher education in the popular press aims at lazy faculty members, bloated administrative positions, lack of vocational programming, student debt load, biased professors forcing their views on students, and athletics. These articles all suffer from a similar style -- a few isolated anecdotes supported by egregious examples that don't reflect the vast majority of the 3000 institutions of higher education in America, a little bit of feigned outrage, and a demand that things must change. But since the criticisms are so far off the mark, they create dis-ease without providing any way forward.

But Keeling and Hersh center their analysis on the thing that got us all into this business in the first place. If we aren't providing value-added learning that prepares students for the future, what business are we in? What does it mean if a student completes 124 credit hours, appropriately distributed across the curriculum, with a minimum grade point average of 2.0 (2.5 in the major)? Is that where we base our claim to fame? Such a focus on the commodities of higher education eliminates the heart of what we do. That's actually what Marx referred to as the alienation resulting from the means of production. Why would we not recognize that it is just as soul-damaging in higher ed as he said it was to workers?

In today's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson argued that we've created a bubble by expecting too many people to go to college when we should encourage more folks to look at trades. First, that argument fails to recognize the structural shifts across employment sectors. A quick google search on "jobs without college" yielded lists of jobs that have been hit by government shrinkage, the housing downturn, or the service sector with limited mobility. But the larger problem is the assumption that there is a direct linkage between a college degree and jobs.

The linkage is more indirect. It comes from students who could engage course material in honest and robust ways, bring their understandings to bear on the learning of those around them (especially their professors), articulate how they've grown during the unique experience of a college lifestyle (curricular and co-curricular), write and speak effectively, entertain alternative viewpoints without becoming wishy-washy, and solve problems unlike any they've seen before. That's what leads to initial jobs but more importantly to vocations that change the world.

For all the talk about college costs, and we do need to figure out how to modify our cost structures, we really need to be talking more about the priority of changed lives. That will come because we take learning seriously, organize our priorities accordingly, and build a culture that makes learning normative instead of optional.

This semester, I've challenged students with  insights from Keeling and Hersh as well as Arum and Rosca's Academically Adrift. While the response in my sociological theory class was more profound than that of my intro to soc class, I was pleased that my students "got it". They recognize that they run through a maze of short-term learning to meet course expectations to get grades to earn credits. One of my advisees pondered aloud what school would be like if she could just read sociological theory because she thought it was interesting and not because she was learning it for an exam. It made me realize how complicit I am in what Bush's speechwriter Michael Gerson called "the soft bigotry of low expectations". That's not just about race or class -- it's about the heart of what we do.

Keeling and Hersh's argument falls in line with many other sources: Derek Bok, Kenneth Bain, the AAC&U, Parker Palmer, and many more. We know what we believe in. We just cut ourselves short.

I realize in writing this that I'm acting like new insights have been opened to me. I think it's more like hearing the prophet Nathan confronting David and getting exactly what's been wrong all along.

In their closing chapter, Keeling and Hersh write the following: "We need to rethink higher education. There is nothing easy or incremental about what must be done. Rethinking higher education means questioning the entire plethora of assumptions, principles, priorities, values, organizational structures, reward systems, and usual and customary practices that are the common foundation for undergraduate programs. It means starting from the position that nothing that currently is assumed or in place about undergraduate education, from faculty roles and responsibilities to general education curricula and community service programs, is exempt from a comprehensive reexamination and revision in the interest of learning."

It's a huge agenda they put forth. But it's one that we ought to embrace. If we fail to address the gap at the heart of our enterprise, we'll be nipped to death by all the critics out there writing silly articles about what professors do for a living or why for-profit schools are the wave of the future. We don't put those arguments out of reach because the only way to do that is to admit where we've fallen short throughout much of the history of American higher education.

I've got a lot more thinking to do about how we can begin to take the Keeling/Hersh argument seriously in our institutions. I firmly believe that smaller private Christian institutions ought to be at the forefront of such a movement. After all, we believe in change.

If only we're brave enough to follow our convictions.