"Public reason has plunged into a state of emergency. Dishonesty, non sequiturs, and distortions of fact (the president prefers the term "truthful hyperbole") are the disorders of the day. As under the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, the key institutions of public enlightenment — higher education and journalism — are impugned as 'elitist,' 'enemies of the people' that transmit hoaxes and 'fake news.' Truth is condemned at the wave of a tweet.
"This virulent state of affairs calls for a revival of democratic life, but also a course correction on the part of higher education. The university cannot content itself with the sort of cultivation that takes place in walled gardens. It must also engage with the miserable state of public reason. When reason is itself so besieged, the university cannot be content to marinate in defensiveness and self-pity. It is in a fight for its life. It needs a forward strategy."
In 1852, Father John Henry Newman called the university "the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation."
Today, Harvard's Clay Christensen, guru of disruption theory, warns of the end of higher education as we know it. He also suggests ways that we can adapt to the new era of disruption.
Presently, the private sector of higher education in particular is experiencing a "rationalization," as economists euphemistically refer to the phenomenon of weak competitors going out of business. This disruption and restructuring come at a bad time in light of the challenges outlined above. The temptation for many of us, whose institutions are in an existential struggle to stay solvent, will be to focus all our energies on recruitment, retention, fund raising and auxiliary enterprises.
The centrality of the full-time, tenured faculty is at best being sharply questioned, at worst being denigrated and denied. To some extent, many faculty have brought this on themselves. Too many tenured faculty in my experience are nowhere in evidence on our campuses when they aren't required to be in class or at a department meeting or office hours. Four, three and even two-day workweeks on campus are all too common in my experience. This phenomenon contributes to inflated costs of instruction and skepticism in the eyes of both higher ed's critics in government and business, and among more savvy students and parents.
In an earlier age of barbarity, the knights of the round table were said to gather annually to renew their vows. Something like that renewal is required now.
As we labor to improve student recruitment and retention, raise funds, and find creative ways to make our campuses profitable, we must remember that we are tax exempt because we are chartered to serve our society and its citizenry. I use that word "citizenry" deliberately. While employability is an essential attribute of a student's higher education, citizenship is of equal importance. In focusing on the former, we mustn't lose site of or commitment to the latter. They are not incompatible. They are an essential combination for the future of our republic.
Faculty, too, must recommit. The quest for ever-lighter teaching workloads, course releases, and online teaching assignments... all of which contribute to the phenomenon of the absentee prof... must be sacrificed to a philosophy of engaged learning.
This advice presumes a population of students who still crave a multi-dimensional college experience as opposed to two years of community college commuting, supplemented by a menu of distance-learning experiences online. And this in turn presumes we are still capable of providing the traditional college experience in an affordable context.
And all of this presumes that the search for truth is a collective enterprise, as is democracy itself. "The university cannot content itself with the sort of cultivation that takes place in walled gardens." Nor can we content ourselves with cultivation exclusively in cyberspace. We know now --- if there ever was doubt --- that social media facilitate shouts and echoes... but not meaningful dialogue... not meaningful discourse... in other words, not the quest for truth. The campus as forum... the faculty as guides and mentors... all of us in higher ed as partners with our students in the engaged-learning enterprise... all of us as truth seekers and truth speakers... will justify our continued existence in this new era of disruption within and beyond our institutions.
No comments:
Post a Comment