Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education

12: Changing Strategies

Changing Strategies 12 The history of American higher education is well supplied with reform movements that have gone nowhere. Despite fervent calls for change most often issued by a commission with an impressive masthead, nothing much happens—or worse, the only visible result is a lot of hurt feelings and a further hunkering down by the college and university leaders on whom successful change ultimately depends. Higher education traditionalists will want to argue that is as it should be: higher education does not need reforming , it’s doing just fine as it is, thank you. Cynics and skeptics, lamenters and critics will once again shake their heads, having been reminded anew just how hard it is to change a Teflon-coated enterprise . The public, however, will hardly notice, having decided long ago that the nation’s colleges and universities, for all their importance, are beyond their understanding. That fizzled reform efforts are old should surprise no one, nor should the realization that the history of higher education reform is a story that involves a lot of proclaiming and very little action. My own take on this aspect of the enterprise boils down to three basic lessons. ■ Don’t vilify. Broad-scale attacks that are long on strong language and short on realistic prescriptions can only isolate those within the academy who promote reform. 203 ■ Don’t play games. Don’t ask a lot of busy as well as important people to participate in a process that is mostly charade. Most national commissions are staff operations in which the chair and a handful of consultants do all the work. ■ Start with a viable strategy for change. Within most reform movements there is too often a rush to judgment—an eagerness to tell the world what is wrong and to just as quickly specify how those wrongs can be righted, principally by someone else. No one ever seems to talk about the process of change itself or the need to develop long-term strategies that bring people and organizations together to develop common definitions and shared solutions. A Process Rather than a Commission Perhaps the underlying as well as the most important message is that reform, while possible, is very difficult. The task facing would-be reformers is daunting. They have to know what they want and what they are doing. They have to be genuine friends of the academy, agents of change whose proposals are widely accepted as improving the academy, as warding off a calamity that the academy perceives as a clear and present danger, or as responding to changes in the academy’s external environment. At the same time, the proposed changes cannot be list-like; rather, they have to grow out of a process that is both central to and centered in the academy. Finally, sustained change has to involve the academy’s principal funders and regulators, although these agencies cannot mandate their own prescriptions for change. Currently the best example of a successful effort to change higher education is Europe’s Bologna Process—an effort that began in 1998 when the ministers of education from Germany, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom issued the Sorbonne Declaration signaling their goal of achieving greater integration across European higher education. A year later, twenty-six European ministers of education followed up with a second, more inclusive communiqué spelling out their collective goal of increasing “the international competitiveness of the European system of higher education.” Given that “the vitality and efficiency of any civilisation can be measured by the appeal that its culture has for other countries,” the signatories to this Bologna Communiqué proclaimed, “We need to ensure that the European higher education system acquires a world-wide degree of attraction equal to our extraordinary cultural and scientific traditions.”1 The challenge these 204 MAKING REFORM WORK reformers tackled was a higher education environment that was too fragmented and too dependent on local customs to allow European universities to become major players in the emerging world-wide market for higher education. Two specific problems concerned those who gathered in Bologna in the spring of 1999. First, they wanted to ensure the comparability and transferability of university degrees across Europe; and second, they wanted company as each of their countries began experimenting with the increased tuition and fees that were becoming necessary to supplement, perhaps in the future supplant, governmental appropriations. The ministers of education put in place a process...