Beyond Affirmative Action: Reframing the Context of Higher Education

8. Reframing the Cultural Context of the Academy: A New Infrastructure for Teaching, Learning, and Institutional Change

8 Reframing the Cultural Context of the Academy A New Infrastructure for Teaching, Learning, and Institutional Change Graduate education in America is now a little more than a century old. It has received much less searching attention, many fewer proposals for real reform, than undergraduate education. In my experience, it is the most bureaucratized, lockstep, and unimaginative sector of the university. Since it’s clearly in crisis, let’s apply to it some imaginative rethinking. Peter Brooks, “Graduate Learning as Apprenticeship” A deep interest in reforming higher education simply has not caught fire with most faculty and administrators. Despite the efforts of some of the best educators in the country, supported by the best-led organizations at the National Center for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., reform has yet to begin. To be sure, numerous educational institutions around the country have recognized and rewarded the efforts at One Dupont Circle, but among teaching faculty at large research universities, our nation’s “faculty factories,” little has changed. Reform has not caught on because no incentive for instituting fundamental change exists. My primary objective here is to plant a theoretical model that will help build a more inclusive learning community, one that involves everyone in higher education without dismantling the successful infrastructures. This reframing process begins by examining the principles of organizational cultural change associated with four specific questions: Why should academic cultures change? Which components of higher education need to change? How can the transformation of higher education occur dynamically and effectively? What is an appropriate model for higher education? Why Should Academic Cultures Change? The call for changing higher education has been eloquent and persistent for decades, but the response from academics has been less than enthusiastic. Growing concerns about changing socioeconomic and political conditions have also failed to push higher education to institute reform. Even the sometimes fiery president of George Washington University, Stephen Trachtenberg (1997), stirs little interest among academics when he advocates developing new educational opportunities to attract the aging baby-boom generation. Franklin Raines, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB), warned research universities in 1997 that they need to redefine their missions and change their public image. If they continue to focus only on research, which directs the creation of knowledge, and ignore the other core functions— teaching as well as the integration of that knowledge in society—Congress will increasingly perceive them as just another economic sector seeking to increase their consumption from the public trough. If they are treated like all other business enterprises, the result could be fewer federal research dollars (Metheny 1997). Levine (1997) offers one explanation for the perception of higher education as intransigent: its new status as a mature industry. Considered a growth sector throughout the twentieth century, higher education has matured and a certain lethargy toward change has set in. Not surprisingly, then, the impending demographic changes associated with minority population growth, also called “Tidal Wave II” in the California State University systems, are generating await-and-see response from academics. Meanwhile , political groups and factions across the country are scrambling to dismantle civil rights–era programs in order to establish what they would perceive as a new kind of equal rights. The increasing number of Latinos entering higher education today hides the fact that their ratio to total LaReframing the Context 223 tino population growth is becoming smaller and thus generates little concern among college and university administrators. The prevailing argument remains: creating diversity in U.S. institutions is the right thing to do. However, the rationale for building a diversified campus—that is, one that promotes multicultural awareness and understanding in society—has come under direct attack by those who believe that European American culture is the only standard that “can hold our society together and keep us a competent nation” (Bork 1996, B7). “Mission Creep” The late Ernest Boyer frequently spoke against “mission creep,” the growing trend of smaller liberal arts colleges and universities to emulate the missions and visions of our larger research-driven universities throughout the country by emphasizing research over teaching and service. This was, in fact, a central thesis in his now classic book, Scholarship Reconsidered (1990), and his warning call for reform was directed at that growing imbalance. As described in chapter 5, Boyer tracked the historical growth of the Germanic research model in graduate education as a major...