Category Archives: academia

how a university “covers” the world

Leave a reply

(Philadelphia) Here are the baker’s dozen Tufts faculty who are Tisch College Fellows for 2015-16. Their work involves active citizenship as a topic of study, a research method, or a mode of teaching. I work with a group like this every year; about 100 alumni of the program are still on the Tufts faculty.

Listening to the 2015-16 Fellows introduce their projects last week, I realized that the faculty of a research university resembles a global open-source intelligence service or a nonprofit news-gathering organization to rival a major newspaper. One of our fellows both studies and supports Muslim women leaders in the West African region where Boko Haram makes headlines by suppressing education for women. Another fellow spent this summer conducting detailed ethnographic research in Ferguson, MO. A third is inside the homes of elderly Somerville residents who have mobility problems.

These scholars investigate topics that may also appear on the cable news or the front page of The New York Times. Their methods are more systematic and deeper than those of reporters, although their products also tend to be less timely and (with some exceptions) less accessible. I don’t consider scholarship better than excellent reporting; we need both. But we also need ways to make more public the kinds of knowledge collected or created by scholars. The Conversation is one fascinating and promising effort to marry “academic rigor” with “journalist flair” by employing professional journalistic editors to solicit and edit articles by scholars. That begins to tap the tremendous potential of the academy for public knowledge.

See also Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

thoughts on the College Scorecard

Leave a reply

collegecost

The College Scorecard began as a promise/threat to rate US colleges and universities, but for now, it offers some digestible nuggets of information on more than 3,500 institutions. The results for Stanford are shown to the right, as an example.

I like some things about this. Mainly, it tells a prospective applicant’s family not to be put off by the sticker price. Tuition plus room & board at Stanford costs $64,477, but the average student pays much less than that, graduates quickly, and earns a lot of money. That makes it a good deal (in strictly economic terms) for most people who can get in. In contrast, Cambridge College costs an average of $23,792 and yields an average salary of $36,500 for those who graduate–who represent two percent of those who enroll.

I have three main concerns. First, the average cost overstates the relevant price for a lot of students. Stanford completely waives the parental tuition contribution for families with incomes up to $125,000 a year and waives the whole cost for most families earning below $65,000 (which is about 60% of US households). The average cost is $15k because a lot of Stanford undergrads come from families in the very top tier of the income distribution. If you have a median family income, Stanford will probably be free.

Second, this kind of presentation can mislead about the business model. It can suggest that the real price of a Stanford education is $64k, but thanks to alumni gifts, the university subsidizes attendance for needy students (who, in this case, may be upper-middle-class). I think the following is closer to the truth: there are a lot of highly academically proficient students whose families can easily pay $64k and want to go to Stanford. Their kitchen counters cost more than a year’s tuition. So Stanford charges that much and uses the income to help subsidize all the operations of a research institution. It uses a sliding scale, however, so that all of its students aren’t rich. I don’t necessarily think this is wrong: it depends on how much public good comes from the research. But the numbers give a somewhat misleading impression of the financial model.

Third, the measure of “salary after attending” is very problematic if we see education as a public good. The lowest-paid majors for recent college graduates are “early childhood education ($39,000); human services and community organization ($41,000); studio arts, social work, teacher education, and visual and performing arts ($42,000); theology and religious vocations, and elementary education ($43,000); drama and theater arts and family and community service ($45,000).” A college that produces a lot of preschool teachers, clergypeople, and community organizers is going to score a lot lower on the measure of “salary after attending” than Stanford does. The average salary for recent Hampshire College graduates is $30,800, much less than half as much as Stanford’s figure, but it would be misleading to infer that Stanford offers more value than Hampshire.

when a university is committed to democracy

Leave a reply

This is a page from the 2013-14 Rector’s Report of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, an institution that I visited this summer. (Click the image to open the PDF.) The page is headed “A Revolution of Dignity,” and it describes various political–even revolutionary–activities by the university or its members. The next page shows profiles of activists from the university, including a lecturer who was shot to death. It is an interesting combination of American-style glossy PR and strongly worded political commitment.

UkrainianCatholic

I would not hope for a comparable stance from an American university. For one thing, this brochure comes from a country with a war on its own territory and ongoing political crises. We shouldn’t wish for that level of strife here, even if it elicited more political commitment from higher education.

Besides, one can critically assess the position that the university has taken. I’m on the same side, but this position is debatable. Universities contribute to the public discussion by being fair and open to a range of perspectives and by demanding standards of evidence and reason from all participants. When a university commits itself strongly to a cause, it can undermine its ability to be an open forum for debate. It also acquires strange bedfellows–people on the same general side of the political issue who may be quite unsavory.

On the other hand, neutrality is impossible and is the wrong objective. Universities exist to promote free thought and substantive dialog and inquiry, which are incompatible with censorship, oppression, violence, and rampant corruption. Scholars also need intellectual freedom and public support in order to do their work. So universities are closely tied to social justice. They must leave space for a debate about what defines social justice, but they should not pretend that it is other people’s business.

US universities tend to respond to political threats and crises by staying clear of them, at least as official institutions. The Ukrainian Catholic University demonstrates what it looks like when an institution leaps into the fray. The Rector writes in his introductory message “we declared civil disobedience against the government and the president,” which is not what you’d expect in an annual report from a US college or university. He adds:

It’s difficult to summarize the last year, for most of the processes have only begun and are now continuing. We are still experiencing the ‘Revolution of Dignity.’ We are still fighting an external aggressor and internal problems. … From the first days of the revolution we clearly understood what we were fighting for. We were not distracted from running the university for a second. But we also supported our students. …  On December 11 we declared civil disobedience against the government and the president, who used violence against his own people. ….

We should work for victory and for reconciliation. Our weapons are truth and peace. We should already be thinking about what will happen after the war, how to heal physical and spiritual wounds, how to strengthen the country. In addition to the external enemy, Ukrainians need to conquer internal enemies: corruption, anger, hatred. I expect that the spiritual and educational life of the university will help our students handle these challenges.

what should a college do to improve teaching pervasively?

Leave a reply

Here are five potential answers to that question, each of which depends on a different premise.

  1. Teaching would be better if the conditions improved. For instance, class enrollments should be smaller, and teaching loads should be more reasonable. (Premise: faculty/student ratio is too high.)
  2. Teaching would improve if professors went through specific recommended experiences, such as short courses on designing curricula or classroom visits from peers. To make those experiences common, provide them–along with incentives or mandates. (Premise: these experiences reliably improve the actual outcomes of students.)
  3. Teaching would improve if faculty focused more on teaching. That would happen if they were rewarded for good teaching outcomes or possibly penalized for bad ones. This implies changes in tenure and promotion criteria and the like. (Premises: motivation is a core problem, and the impact of teaching can be reliably assessed so that the right people are rewarded.)
  4. Teaching would improve if we employed better teachers. Some people are just better in the classroom than others, and we could marginally improve outcomes if we altered whom we hired and retained. One subtle version of this strategy would involve moving talented teachers into a track where they are responsible for more students, and untalented teachers into a research track where they can teach less. (Premise: talent for teaching is measurable and fairly invariant.)
  5. Teaching would improve if faculty collaborated more and held each other accountable for excellence. Students should also be part of the conversation. (Premise: such collaborations can be made widespread.)

I buy #1 for campuses with very scarce resources; I don’t think it applies at the higher end of the scale. I am philosophically most friendly to #5 but don’t know how you make it happen more than it already does at most campuses. Options #2-4 seem to rest on insecure assumptions.

notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service

Leave a reply

On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

  1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
  2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
  3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
  4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
  5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
  6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
  7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

  • Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
  • Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions