Some More Thoughts abou Majors and the Future

The Canon of College Majors Persists Amid Calls for Change

The more academe changes, the more the list of majors stays the same, even though some experts say a radical reorganization of disciplines is needed.




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On Getting Scooped : TEOTUAWKI*

They closed the comments on Mark Taylor's OpEd "End the University as We Know It" before I could get one in, so I'm posting it here. I often tell my students it's a good thing when you find out that your favorite idea has already been written down by some famous philosopher since that means you were on the right track. I am telling myself today that seeing something you have been thinking about show up on the NYT oped page is similar.

Like many of the other comments, mine amounts to a mixed review. Taylor, to my mind, conflates several issues relevant to the state of today's universities and thereby reduces the punch of the piece. I'm with him on the university as an enterprise in which it is far too easy to continue business as usual. But he may be overgeneralizing from his experience in a religion department in some of his other criticisms.

The point with which I resonate most strongly is that our course/major offerings are too department/discipline-bound and insufficiently dynamic and responsive to the needs of the world around us. In this blog and elsewhere I've argued for uncoupling undergraduate majors and departments as a solution. His suggestion that departments be abolished and programs reformulated around topics and then "sunsetted" every seven years is provocative and worth thinking about. I think, though, that it's not quite the right approach. Why seven years? How worthwhile to rebuild the administrative apparatus on a regular basis?

I think something more dynamic and dialectical is called for: Maybe keep departments, but abolish majors (or maybe leave the majors but create set of collaborative and cross-disciplinary majors on the fly). We faculty should have to reformulate "majors." We might, for example, cook up a program in sustainability or in institutional disruption or innovation. We'd have to really think about what portfolio of the courses we currently offer could be mixed with courses we ought to be offering to put together an educational curriculum that would have both currency and staying power. We'd force ourselves to get beyond the usual departmentally-self-serving horse-trading (I'll require one of your courses if you require one of mine). We'd stop thinking of requirements in terms of the education we wish we could have had 20 years ago and start thinking about what insights are likely to be the building blocks of how people are thinking and solving problems 20 years from now.

Most importantly, we would have to "sell" these programs to undergraduates on the basis of evidence and argument about why a particular curriculum constitutes good preparation for the world to come. And we'd develop the majors with knowing that would be our ongoing task. We would have to be not only inventors of new majors, but innovators who learned from what we were doing to make the operation a going concern in a dynamic structure that was not protected from change by decades of disciplinary convention. In short, we'd build curricular R&D into the very fabric of the university, bringing to higher education a function it's really never had.

*A variation on one of my favorite acronyms "TEOTWAWKI" = the end of the world as we know it.

Idea for a Seminar

How about an ongoing faculty/student seminar reading latest books on "new economy." Meets every two weeks for 2-3 hours. Discussion. Main thing is to get folks reading/talking about same topic and one that generates, over time, a shared set of references that can become a scaffold for ongoing conversations both in and outside of classes.

Could even offer books at half-price or ten dollars to faculty (which ever is more), ten dollars to students, subsidized by a grant. If we assume 20 (5 faculty, 15 students) total participants and seven books at average cost of $25, we'd need about 5x7x12.5 + 15x7x15 = $2000. Easily doable.

Stay tuned for a suggested reading list.

Majors and Departments

Why are something like 90% or more of our majors bound to departments and disciplines?

Answer: lots of reasons, some of them good ones. But the biggest one is probably the simplest one: because that's the way it's been for a long time.

But is this list of concentrations built around disciplines really the optimal menu for the students we are training for the coming century? Should I, as a professor at a liberal arts college, design my undergraduate curriculum around the question of how I best train a sociologist? Only a tiny percentage of the students who major in sociology will become sociologists. And few who do will be trained in rigorous graduate programs in which they'll more or less repeat every discipline based course they'll take while studying with me.

Of course, a student can always put together a "custom major" of her own design. But are we really producing the best product we can if we leave it up to the least experienced members of our community to come up with new ideas about majors? Shouldn't I be thinking about that? All the time?

Where's the R&D in Higher Education?

A February 26 NY Times article that carried the title "Now Is No Time to Cut Research" starts out thus:

Steve A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, says hard times are no time to cut back spending on research and development.

The article goes off in other directions, eventually, but does make an important point: during economic slowdowns, some companies lose their taste for speculative projects, but they do so at their peril.

The current economic crisis is, I believe, sending us a message about fundamental changes in the way the world works. Yes, a lot of the crisis is due to faulty regulation and ill advised behavior on the part of players with very large footprints, but we need to be sure not to miss the signals that are buried in this thunderous noise. Those signals are about structural re-adjustments. We've been fond, for the past decade or two, of saying we are living in a new world. What we haven't done, though, is a whole lot of rethinking of the institutions (higher ed, for example) that world depends on. The signals are there, but how will higher education listen?
Will higher education make the mistake of cutting back on R&D at just this critical moment when real innovation is called for?

The answer is easy: NO. Higher education can't cut back on its R&D because it doesn't have any.

Now, if you google "higher education and R&D" and variations thereon you will stumble across a few programs at schools of education (mostly focused on K12 pedagogy) and a number of references to research and development for industry that happens within universities. Of $324million in department of education budget under the heading "R&D," 231 is for education sciences, 86 for special education, and 7 for post-secondary education. And the latter is down 12.5% from the year before (AAAS).

Nobody, I suspect, would argue with the claim that the new century demands new ideas and practices in higher education. But where in our system would you find the higher education innovators? Ours is a system pretty much designed to prevent any innovation at all from disturbing the status quo. What experimentation and invention does occur is, for the most part, the work of individual faculty members tweaking their courses or taking the initiative to invent new ones. Added to this are initiatives here and there to change the way a whole department offers its courses (see, for example, "At MIT, Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard"). But at the end of the day, ours is not an industry known for wowing the world with any "next big things."

Even when we do get it in our minds to make changes, often as not it comes in the form of "curriculum reform" and the first thing we do is form a faculty committee. Just for a minute, imagine GM having a conversation with the White House:

WH: So, we expect you to be innovative, to adapt what you are doing to new realities…

GM: Righto. We have formed a faculty committee. Can we have the bailout money now?

WH: Fuhgettaboutit!! (to assistant offstage) Larry, get out the nationalization protocol!

At my own school, Mills College our mission statement says that the school "encourages openness to experimentation in the context of established academic disciplines." But what does that mean? Is there any structural support for innovation? What's the closest we have to an analog of the department at, say, GM that's developing electric cars or the one at Google that's working on new products? And if we don't have a separate department, where's the material or structural expression of that "encouragement" that would have faculty all over the college trying out new ideas?

It wouldn't take a whole lot, I don't think. Mostly, the faculty and administration need to build a procedural infrastructure that gives the faculty room to try new things and to set a tone that welcomes out of the box thinking. The latter is not simple – lots of administrators say "we want your ideas and input" and never get any. I'll put forth some concrete suggestions in future posts.

An Information System We Could Use

Like most colleges, ours invests on an ongoing basis in administrative software for tracking students from admissions, academics and finances. New tools are invented to help administrators track course enrollments or for the registrar to get students registered for classes. Only exceptionally are innovations driven by our core business: teaching and advising undergraduates.

What if we had a system that students and their advisors could use to sketch out long term curricular possibilities. A sociology adviser, for example, might sit with a student and talk about how she could do a sociology major with a focus on things urban along with doing the pre-requisites for admission to the MBA program after graduation. The system would actually have built in a number of faculty-thought-through templates that would describe coherent constellations of courses built around different themes or emphases, but she'd be free to mix and match according to her interests.

The system would then query the database as to when various courses were currently expected to be offered over the semesters the student has left at the college and suggests her scheduling options.

Either based on the initial expression of interest or in response to a tentative checking off in the scheduling options, the system records the interest so that instructors and department heads have a prospective pre-pre-enrollment count. This information can be used to project staffing and/or to develop PR strategies (e.g., no one seems to be thinking about taking economics next year -- maybe we should talk it up, advertise, put our best teacher in the intro class).

Additional features would be links from course listings to commentary from past/present students, curricular maps of alums along with descriptions of what they are doing now and perhaps commentary from them about how they wish they'd structured things, commentary from advisers as to WHY various constellations of courses make sense, and so on.

The specs for a system like this grow out of the real experience of teachers and advisers rather than the needs of administrators so it will probably never be built. Like most systems, though, just thinking through how it might work is a useful organizational exercise.