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.

Morning Edition Sociology

This isn't directly about teaching, but it is about making connections with the "real world". I recently read Peter Berger's excellent book Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. It's an intellectual autobiography that outlines how he came to some of the major perspectives in his approach to sociology -- perspectives that have changed the study of religion, and the sociology of knowledge and showed sociology to be what he called a "humanistic perspective" (not secular -- compassionate). Berger saw all sorts of applications the sociological perspective brings to our daily lives and, conversely, all the ways in which our daily lives illustrate sociological matters.

Listening to NPR's Morning Edition the last couple of days, I kept hearing things that resonated with my sociological background. I'd like to think that Berger sensitized me to this. Maybe returning to the classroom just makes me collect examples to use in future classes.

Tuesday morning, NPR ran a story on how some evangelicals are "questioning the existence of [a literal] Adam and Eve." You can read the transcript here. What caught my attention in the story was the way in which those who are Not Questioning maintain their position because of a logical premise. They argue that if Jesus is the Second Adam who defeated Sin, we have to have a First Adam. And so they will not consider any other perspective, seeing their faith as more substantial than science (more later).

Not surprisingly, my mind went immediately to sociology. For nearly half of the 20th century, a single theoretical view known as Functionalism dominated American sociology. Folks who went to grad school before the mid-70s were steeped in it. Folks, like me, who went after that were well versed in its critique. One of the central notions of functionalism, as best espoused by Talcott Parsons, was that social forms fulfilled functions. Those social forms must be necessary for society to operate smoothly (or else they'd go away). We could understand any past feature by seeing the role it played in the current stability of society. The critique came that this was a circular argument. Non-essential features got extinguished so if a form survived, it had to be significant. One of Parson's followers, Robert Merton tried to redeem some of the extremes of functionalism by introducing the notion of "functional equivalents" -- the idea that a variety of somewhat interchangeable forms might perform similar functions. While this wasn't enough to keep functionalism operating as the dominant approach in sociology, it does redeem the logical argument.

So when Albert Moeller and others argue that we must hold to our guns because without this one piece of scripture, everything falls apart, it reminds me of the functionalist argument. Isn't it possible that a solid creation story that defines the human condition as sinful still "works" in Pauline Theology? To argue that this One Thing is the hinge-point of all else is no more true in Biblical Studies than it is in sociology. [I do need to point out that as a Wesleyan, the suggestion that my faith will unravel if I "accomodate science" as Mohler says, is not consistent with Wesley's synthesis of scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Scripture is preeminent for Wesley, but reason is not to be denied and experience both in interaction with others and in the witness of the Spirit, allows for "functional equivalents".)

Yesterday, the Morning Edition host did an interview with Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor. Here's the transcript for that. It was one of the clearest, non-partisan analyses of our economic situation I've heard in years. In the midst of his consideration of unemployment, there was the following exchange:

Mr. ROSS: Well, I think there's several factors. Number one is we believe that unemployment is going to remain high. Virtually all companies we know of have learned to live with fewer employees per incremental dollar of sales than they ever had before. So we believe that part of the high unemployment is due, not just cyclical factors, but to structural change in the economy. And that's why corporate America is in much better shape than Mr. and Mrs. America.

INSKEEP: Just to make sure I understand that, when you structural change, you're saying that corporate America has resized or downsized the necessary workforce and it's just not as large as the workforce population in the United States.

Mr. ROSS: That's correct. The substitution of capital for labor has been continuing. I think that people have also restructured the way that they do business, all with an eye toward reducing labor costs. And you've seen those big gains in productivity. June was the first month where productivity didn't really go up, actually it declined a little bit. And that's the first month in many, many months where there hasn't been a big productivity gain. So I think that's a problem and it's going to be a continuing problem, partly because the American educational system is not producing people with the qualifications to do the jobs in the new economy. 

Right away, I realized that Ross had just clearly explained Karl Marx's theory of labor. This is the essential structural contradiction of capitalism -- owners must minimize labor costs but rely on consumers to purchase products while the consumer's buying power is shrinking. This doesn't mean revolution is in the offing -- just that this billionaire investor make a sociological argument that your Ivy League Tweed Wearing Marxist sociologist has been preaching to undergraduates for years.

One more example from yesterday, but it really needs more sociological awareness. In their second story about the riots in England (transcript), the Tottenham MP David Lammy, said: 

The majority of young people, obviously, in Tottenham and other areas similar to Tottenham are totally against this violence. But there are two or 300 people in areas like mine who are very much at the margins of society who have a different value set, and I'm afraid we are seeing those young people running rampage through the country. And to see people losing their lives now as a result of this is something I never thought I'd see. 

Prime Minister Cameron made the same "wrong values" argument. It is true that the rioters were not protesting the police shooting. But this is an example of classic collective behavior. Pent-up frustration, a trigger event, inadequate social controls, the deindividuation of anonymous crowd behavior, and disproportionate response. Sociologists studying incidents from the Watts Riot, Foreign revolutions, and the like show the same types of behaviors. Not surprisingly, all of those situations begin with leaders dismissing the behaviors as "not reflecting our values". The line between us and them is never as bright as we hope it is. And I can write that even before I see Rise of the Planet of the Apes.