Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Chapter 2: A Faculty Encamped Just North of Armageddon

A Faculty Encamped Just North of Armageddon 2 This volume is predicated upon a simple axiom and its inconvenient corollary. The axiom holds that changing American higher education ought to be the business of the faculty. Although often used as a shield against those who want faculty to teach more, the truth is that: learning and research are joint products in which, necessarily, the former proceeds from the latter. Faculty teach what their research and disciplines have taught them. Faculty are content experts as well as pedagogues who teach by both example and precept. To be sure, some instructional models sever learning and research when a cadre of instructors, responsible for neither course design nor creation of course content, deliver the specified curriculum to their students. Many of the biggest and most successful for-profit higher education institutions have invested in this model by staking their future on creation of standardized courses centrally designed and monitored . Most e-learning programs similarly separate responsibility for delivering instruction from the design of course content. Even these efforts, however, essentially harvest the work of faculty at traditional institutions who see their research as the foundation on which the curriculum is built. If, as I am about to argue, changing American higher education requires a rethinking of how the nation’s colleges and universities 19 organize, and ultimately deliver, more efficient curricula, then changing American higher education is a faculty responsibility. Faculty own the curriculum just as certainly as each faculty member owns his or her courses and research. Faculty are, and are likely to remain, the essential workforce; in traditional institutions that focus on scholarship as well as teaching, there will likely be neither change nor reform without them. And yet, most faculty members do not believe that change is either necessary or inevitable. They are not yet committed to changing what they believe they do best—and that is the inconvenient corollary to my axiom on the necessary role faculty must play if change is to prove purposeful . Faculty are not oblivious to the changes that swirl about them. They know too many lawyers and physicians whose professional lives have been uprooted by the new electronic technologies and new forms of financial management; the faculty do understand the power of the currents reshaping what were once considered independent professions , akin to professorial appointments. They have seen public appropriations for higher education dwindle and in some cases slashed, and they have heard the political voices warning that the worst cuts are yet to come. Though faculty have increasingly come to see themselves as victims, most are not so much angry as they are doubtful—uncertain that the changes now being championed by that growing army of policy wonks and political operatives will do anything but lessen the academy’s value and independence. To their critics, faculty have responded as standpatters have always responded, by claiming that what is not demonstrably “broke” doesn’t need fixing. Where, they ask, is the proof that change is necessary? And above all, they ask, why now—why not when the economy is once again healthy, when the disruptions of the present moment have faded (as surely they must), and when there can be more certainty about the true value and sustainability of the fixes being so readily bandied about? Such faculty are encamped just north of Armageddon. They can look over the ridge and see the destruction that would await them, were they to be so foolish as to charge headlong in pursuit of change. Among the faculty there are those who believe something must be done to recapture the initiative and thereby ensure that the academy is not flattened. But most faculty simply worry about that which they cannot control, all the while saying with increased conviction, “I think I’ll sit this one out.” It is also the case that most faculty have long since become impervious to rant as well as to challenge. To be sure, faculty do not like to 20 CHECKLIST FOR CHANGE be disparaged. When attacked, they are more than capable of giving as good as they get. But language—no matter how elegant or bombastic— will not change the faculty: not the siren call of A Nation at Risk; not the insider’s indictments that Integrity in the College Curriculum so urgently pressed; not A Test of Leadership, the formal title of the Spellings Commission final report; not...