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.
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