[Infowarrior] - End the University as We Know It

[Richard Forno]

April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?pagewanted=print

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate  
programs in American universities produce a product for which there is  
no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and  
develop 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), all at a rapidly rising cost  
(sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into  
sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for  
decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation  
of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the  
Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content  
of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor,  
so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public  
teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to  
separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever- 
increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example,  
we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little  
overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become  
more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee  
not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too  
often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague  
recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his  
dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational  
system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate  
those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own  
pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these  
students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid  
graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,  
universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing  
undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still  
encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper  
to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as  
little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full- 
time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard  
for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the  
illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical  
presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there  
will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are  
self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review.  
While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight  
responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To  
complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted  
tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for  
the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own  
departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century,  
colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be  
rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to  
make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin  
with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and  
proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The  
division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must  
be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex  
adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become  
cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who  
had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never  
considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the  
world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate  
understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines  
are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on  
questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology,  
sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in  
comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is  
restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be  
transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education,  
and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving  
programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one  
should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly  
changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around  
which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law,  
Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and  
Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water  
will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity,  
quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific,  
technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political  
and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be  
adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical,  
religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as  
much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts,  
social and natural sciences with representatives from professional  
schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work,  
theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple  
perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and  
unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not  
need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to  
form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be  
able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong  
department in French, for example, and the other a strong department  
in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can  
be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have  
already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the  
Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities,  
where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a  
market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more  
footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses  
continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly  
certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press  
print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is  
less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many  
years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not  
write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats  
from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate  
students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in  
alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students.  
Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they  
are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare  
for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new  
approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life  
issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit  
organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate  
in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly  
changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended  
to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with  
little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once  
tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor  
to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to  
assume responsibilities like administration and student advising.  
Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the  
programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This  
policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers,  
scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive  
while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather,  
take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never  
imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is  
that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency  
and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia,  
is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere:  
Reflections on Dying and Living.”