Crisis on campus: a bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities

160 Pages·2010·1.07 MB·English

by  Mark C. Taylor

ALSO BY MARK C. TAYLOR
Refiguring the Spiritual
Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living
After God
Mystic Bones
Confidence Games: Money and Markets in
a World Without Redemption
Grave Matters
The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture
About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture
The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the
Ends of Representation
Critical Terms for Religious Studies
Hiding
Imagologies: Media Philosophy
Nots
Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion
Double Negative
Tears
Altarity
Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy
Erring: A Postmodern A/theology
Deconstructing Theology
Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard
Unfinished: Essays in Honor of Ray L. Hart
Religion and the Human Image
Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship:
A Study of Time and the Self

For
Selma Linnea
and
Elsa Ingrid
All things are entwined, enmeshed, enamored.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Dedication
1. Reprogramming the Future
2. Beginning of the End
3. Back to the Future
4. Emerging Network Culture
5. Education Bubble
6. Networking Knowledge
7. Walls to Webs
8. New Skills for a Changing Workforce
9. Class of 2020
Acknowledgments
Notes
Permissions Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
1
Reprogramming the Future
American higher education has long been the envy of the world. Much of
the most important research that has contributed to the advancement of
knowledge and enrichment of human life historically has been
conducted in our colleges and universities. In the years following World
War II, increasing prosperity and enlightened government policies led to
rapidly expanding undergraduate programs that created new
opportunities for countless young people. But in the past four decades,
this situation has gradually deteriorated. The quality of higher education
is declining; colleges and universities are not adequately preparing
students for life in a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive
world. As emerging technologies continue to transform how we manage
information and acquire knowledge, students will need to develop new
skills and even learn different ways of thinking, reading and writing. The
accelerating rate of globalization will make it necessary for people to
learn more about other societies and cultures. These developments also
pose new challenges and opportunities for the organization and delivery
of higher education. Changes in how information is distributed and
knowledge communicated will both create more competition in higher
education and provide the occasion for new forms of cooperation at the
local, national and even global level. While many regard these
developments as a threat to the quality of American higher education, I
believe they offer the possibility of greatly expanding and enriching
educational opportunities for people not only in this country but
throughout the world.
Meeting these challenges will not be easy. Entrenched interests on
campuses across the country remain resistant to change and refuse to
accept that fundamental transformations are not only necessary but
unavoidable. The growing number of college and university faculty
members focused on their research and publishing careers has led to a
conflict between the preoccupations of professors and the needs of
students. As the interests of those faculty members become more
specialized and the subjects of their publications more esoteric, the
curriculum becomes increasingly fragmented and the educational
process loses its coherence as well as its relevance for the broader
society. If this trend continues, a growing number of young people and
their parents will begin to question the value of higher education.
These problems are compounded by mounting financial pressures that
are making it considerably harder for students to afford higher education
and for schools to remain on the cutting edge of research while at the
same time providing high-quality teaching to a new and quite different
student population. Parents, desperate to ensure their kids’ futures,
remortgage their houses to pay for college, only to have their young
graduates return home and begin their working lives in run-of-the-mill
service jobs. At the graduate level, universities are producing a product
for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do
not exist) and developing skills for which there is diminishing demand
(research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read
by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues). Many of our best
and brightest spend eight to ten years chasing unfulfillable dreams.
Graduate students who finally admit they have no future in higher
education are often in their thirties, deeply in debt, and face a difficult
challenge to reinvent themselves.
It is not only parents and students who are facing the prospect of
financial crisis: the education bubble is about to burst. There are
disturbing similarities between the dilemma colleges and universities
have created for themselves and the conditions that led to the collapse of
major financial institutions supposedly too secure to fail. The value of
college and university assets (i.e., endowments) has plummeted. The
schools are overleveraged, liabilities (debts) are increasing, liquidity is
drying up, costs continue to climb, their product is increasingly
unaffordable and of questionable value in the marketplace, and income
is declining. This situation is not only unsustainable, but at the crisis
point.
A vibrant educational system is essential for democracy to thrive and
individuals to prosper in our globalized world. When information is the
currency of the realm, education is more valuable than ever. The
accumulation and transmission of information are necessary but not
sufficient for the viability of higher education. Higher education, in my
view, has a responsibility to serve the greater social good, and in today’s
world this can be accomplished most effectively by cultivating informed
citizens who are aware of and open to different cultural perspectives and
are willing to engage in reasonable debate about critical issues. In an age
of vitriolic bloggers and contentious cable news shows, when even the
pretense of objective journalism is thought unnecessary by many,
colleges and universities have an obligation to provide an education that
will broaden students’ horizons, helping them to resist the temptation of
oversimplification and bias and to sift through misinformation in a
world that is ever more complex.
Having taught for many years at a distinguished liberal arts college
(Williams) and more recently at a leading research university
(Columbia), I have been worrying about the growing vulnerability of
higher education for more than two decades. As financial markets spun
out of control in late 2008 and early 2009 and most of the people who
run higher education continued to be oblivious to the turmoil swirling
around them, I published an op-ed essay in The New York Times entitled
“End the University as We Know It.” No article I have written provoked
anything like the response to this piece. My analysis of the current state
of higher education and proposals for change set off a firestorm of
discussion and controversy. Within hours the essay was everywhere on
the Internet—people were posting it on Facebook, and students reported
to me that it was all over the popular blog Gawker. It was the most e-
mailed article in the Times for four days and was on their top-ten list for
a week. Bloggers were also quick to respond; indeed, the Times had to
shut its blog when more than five hundred responses were posted on the
first day. There were also responses in major blogs, including those
sponsored by The Huffington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The
Atlantic and Harper’s. I received hundreds of personal e-mails, and the
op-ed was even translated and published abroad.
What struck me about the response was not only how overwhelming it
was, but also the difference between the public and private reactions.
Letters to the editor and comments on blogs—most of them written by
academics—were not only critical but quite hostile. Academics defended
their own interests, claiming that things are not nearly as bad as I
portrayed them and insisting that my proposed changes would destroy
higher education. The e-mails, by contrast, were from former, present
and prospective students, parents and people who had dropped out of
school or had been forced to leave academic life for some reason. These
messages were 98 percent positive.
Many of these long and thoughtful e-mails gave me a valuable window
into public perceptions that reinforced my sense of the widening chasm
between the ivory tower and the world at large. While countless
messages were moving, one in particular stands out. It was from a young
woman named Rita Sophie Bragiuli, who was a senior at Northwestern
University. She was interested in pursuing graduate work in the study of
religion but was encountering problems that unfortunately are all too
common.
I think your points for revision are obviously radical, but that many of them make a
great deal of sense. I also think it is time for the academic community to realize that
it must restructure itself. I certainly fear, though almost expect, that no one will
actually read my work, and that it will go for naught, even if there is real world
application to it. It seems to me as if universities as well as scholars are producing too
much literature, yet saying too little, with very little synthesis of ideas.
The course of study which I have proposed is inherently interdisciplinary, and I
can’t begin to describe how difficult it has been for me to explain this. I plan to study
religion through the lens of psychology, both experimental and theoretical. I’d like to
understand the impact religious specifics (texts, philosophies, rituals, etc.) through
history have on the mind of the religious individual today, and how that implicates
this person’s behavior (from belief to going to temple/church to conversion to acts of
violence). Though this study is extremely broad, and incorporates fields of religion,
history, anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, and psychology, the tools to
complete this study are out there, and can have real impact on how we understand
the modern religious mind. In addition, I want to eventually make this study
comparative. Both Harvard and [the University of] Chicago have told me that this
plan is interesting, but that I will have to pave the interdisciplinary path if I intend to
take from both major fields (religion and modern psychology) equally. Indeed, I still