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Todd Suomela

Author discusses new book about how American higher education has always been 'a perfect mess' - 0 views

  • The typical university is in constant tension between autonomous academic departments, which control curriculum and faculty hiring and promotion, and a strong president, who controls funding and is responsible only to the lay board of directors who own the place. Also thrown into the mix are a jumble of independent institutes, research centers and academic programs that have emerged in response to a variety of funding opportunities and faculty initiatives. The resulting institution is a hustler’s paradise, driven by a wide array of entrepreneurial actors: faculty trying to pursue intellectual interests and forge a career; administrators trying to protect and enrich the larger enterprise; and donors and students who want to draw on the university’s rich resources and capitalize on association with its stellar brand. These actors are feverishly pursuing their own interests within the framework of the university, which lures them with incentives, draws strength from their complex interactions and then passes these benefits on to society.
  • The biggest problem facing the American system of higher education today is how to deal with its own success. In the 19th century, very few people attended college, so the system was not much in the public spotlight. Burgeoning enrollments in the 20th century put the system center stage, especially when it became the expectation that most people should graduate from some sort of college. As higher education moved from being an option to becoming a necessity, it increasingly found itself under the kind of intense scrutiny that has long been directed at American schools.
  • The danger posed by this accountability pressure is that colleges, like the K-12 schools before them, will come under pressure to narrow their mission to a small number of easily measurable outcomes. Most often the purpose boils down to the efficient delivery of instructional services to students, which will provide them with good jobs and provide society with an expanding economy. This ignores the wide array of social functions that the university serves. It’s a laboratory for working on pressing social problems; a playpen for intellectuals to pursue whatever questions seem interesting; a repository for the knowledge needed to address problems that haven’t yet emerged; a zone of creativity and exploration partially buffered from the realm of necessity; and, yes, a classroom for training future workers. The system’s organizational messiness is central to its social value.
    • Todd Suomela
       
      The idea that colleges should be valued for their organizational messiness is also quite interesting. Where does this messiness fit into Bucknell?
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The American system of higher education emerged in a unique historical setting in the early 19th century, when the state was weak, the market strong and the church divided. Whereas the European university was the creature of the medieval Roman Catholic church and then grew strong under the rising nation-state in the early modern period, the American system lacked the steady support of church or state and had to rely on the market in order to survive. This posed a terrible problem in the 19th century, as colleges had to scrabble around looking for consumers who would pay tuition and for private sponsors who would provide donations. But at the same time, it planted the seeds of institutional autonomy that came to serve the system so well in the next two centuries. Free from the control of church and state, individual colleges learned to survive on their own resources by meeting the needs of their students and their immediate communities.
Jennifer Parrott

Why Some Colleges Are Saying No to MOOCs, at Least for Now - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    Why Amherst College rejected a partnership with edX
Leslie Harris

What's Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph : Planet Money : NPR - 0 views

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    Interesting visualization of college majors (for BAs) from 1970 to 2011
Todd Suomela

Rejecting Test Surveillance in Higher Education by Lindsey Barrett :: SSRN - 0 views

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    "The rise of remote proctoring software during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the dangers of surveillance-enabled pedagogy built on the belief that students can't be trusted. These services, which deploy a range of identification protocols, computer and internet access limitations, and human or automated observation of students as they take tests remotely, are marketed as necessary to prevent cheating. But the success of these services in their stated goal is ill- supported at best and discredited at worst, particularly given their highly over- inclusive criteria for "suspicious" behavior. Meanwhile, the harms they inflict on students are clear: severe anxiety among test-takers, concerning data collection and use practices, and discriminatory flagging of students of color and students with disabilities have provoked widespread outcry from students, professors, privacy advocates, policymakers, and sometimes universities themselves. To make matters worse, the privacy and civil rights laws most relevant to the use of these services are generally inadequate to protect students from the harms they inflict. Colleges and universities routinely face difficult decisions that require reconciling conflicting interests, but whether to use remote proctoring software isn't one of them. Remote proctoring software is not pedagogically beneficial, institutionally necessary, or remotely unavoidable, and its use further entrenches inequities in higher education that schools should be devoted to rooting out. Colleges and universities should abandon remote proctoring software, and apply the lessons from this failed experiment to their other existing or potential future uses of surveillance technologies and automated decision-making systems that threaten students' privacy, access to important life opportunities, and intellectual freedom. "
Todd Suomela

We Have Been Here Before | Easily Distracted - 0 views

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    A useful review of the past 60 years of controversy over college speakers.
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    For those interested in following the political correctness debate from an historical perspective.
Jennifer Parrott

What Can Higher Ed Learn from Libraries? | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    libearal arts colleges and libraries
Leslie Harris

Are College Lectures Unfair? - The New York Times - 0 views

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    This article summarizes various studies that show that active learning if more effective than the traditional lecture, particularly for women and students of color.
Leslie Harris

Ph.D.s Embrace Alternative Dissertations. The Job Market May Not. - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

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    More colleges are allowing dissertations to take digital or other nontraditional forms, but students need to prepare for the career consequences.
Todd Suomela

the mass defunding of higher education that's yet to come - the ANOVA - 0 views

  • I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. And the GOP has already shown a great knack for using claims of bias against academia, particularly given the American yen for austerity.
  • But his critics can’t see something that, for all of his myopia, he always has: that our political divide is increasingly bound up in a set of class associations and signals that have little to do with conspicuous consumption and everything to do with a style of self-performance that few people ever talk about but everyone understands. It is the ability to give such a performance convincingly that, in part, people buy with their tuition dollars. That this condition makes egalitarian politics a part of elite class formation has gone little discussed in my political home, the radical left. I have been excited to see a recent groundswell of young left-aligned people, and many of them are bright and committed. But almost none of them seem aware of the fact that their ironic Twitter accounts and cultural references and received opinions on all manner of political issues are as sure a sign of their class identity as a pair of wingtips and a blazer once was. And until and unless they understand how powerfully alienated the great mass of this country is from their social culture, we cannot hope to build a mass left-wing movement and with it do good things like defend public education. I agree: it’s the economy, stupid, and we must appeal to them by making the case that things like universal free college are good. But if recent political history tells us anything it’s that no economic policy, no matter how sensible, can win if its proponents refuse to grapple with the politics of resentment. The left, broadly, has not done a good job of that. The professoriate? My god.
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