News from Nairobi

For the last few days I’ve been visiting the United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya.  Faculty and administrators here are in the midst of writing their general education program review, which has become a blueprint for reform.  They asked me to read an early draft and meet with various stakeholders, giving them advice before they make the report final.

I’ve never been to Africa, and so jumped at the chance.  (You can see my gawky tourist snapshots here.)  Since getting here, my first impressions have corroborated what I knew of Africa from a distance.  Kenya has its share of challenges with wealth distribution, resource management, and government.  It’s doing better than some of its neighbors, with a shaky but visibly emerging democratic tradition after years of dictatorship.

Between meetings a couple of the administators chatted about a recent scandal involving Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza.  Last New Year’s Eve she was entering a shopping mall when the security guard there — also a woman — stepped up to frisk her.  The judge was offended, claiming that she was above such things.  It escalated until Baraza went to her bodyguard’s car, pulled out a gun, and used it to threaten the mall cop.

A couple of things I took away from this story:
- My hosts told it in a very funny way.  They grew up in a Kenya where high officials really were above the law, and so they’re inured to some of the scarier story points.
- Yes, this is a country where you get frisked going into the mall, and the judges — who face nothing like the threats leveled at their counterparts in, say, Mexico — nonetheless bring armed bodyguards to go shopping.

My hotel is a gated compound that hosts a casino, a few swimming pools, a nightclub, and eight restaurants, leaving me little reason to breach the perimeter.  The entrance to the university has five security guards, one with a mirror on a stick to check the underside of each entering car.  Yet the country feels safe.  At the end of each day we leave the enclosed university to walk back to the enclosed hotel, on the same road the students take.  The biggest threats are dust and swerving cars.

The country has set an ambitious course for itself called Vision 2030. The plan is supported by three pillars, one of them promimently featuring (surprise!) education.  Like another country I work in, Kenya wants more graduates.  It sees this as prerequisite to meeting challenges in the environment, social and economic justice, and its future material well-being and civic health.  So, same siren song, poorer siren.

My work schedule been the typical round of on-campus meetings, and the best (as usual) was with students.  USIU is a private non-profit, which by a quirk of history enjoys U.S. regional accreditation.  It draws a well-to-do enrollment, the great majority entering prepared for college learning.  Persistence and grad rates are high.  Curriculum is on the American model, with generous helpings of breadth.

Despite the fortress entrance, the community looks for opportunities to leave the bubble.  Many students live off campus, in apartments along that road we walk.  Some take a semester off to earn tuition, starting and running fast food businesses along the same corridor.  Service learning is required in every degree.  Their parents work for the civil service or NGOs.  Most of the students I met are business majors, and everyone worries about the employability afterward — faculty and administrators focus on it, the students worry about it.

Within this context, I learned from the students that USIU’s general education has made a poor case for itself.  Those who came in curious about the world like general education.  Those on a mission to get in and get out employable — or who just already knew what they like — didn’t see the need to take Classes in Other Things.  Some of them chose business because it sounded broad.  Two — TWO — expressed a passion for finance, and would have been happier with grad-school-style narrowness.

The more they talked to each other about the value of liberal learning, the more the skeptics came around.  I tend to cheerlead about such things, but tried to cast my questions as hypothetical (e.g. “what if you were convinced these courses improve your ability to innovate, and employers look for that?”).  I probably skewed the results by habit.  Hell, they were probably already skewed because someone flew halfway around the world to come hear about their GE, making it seem at least noteworthy.

But the upshot is this:  advocates and skeptics alike, the broadly curious and the narrowly dedicated, all said the GE courses needed to connect to the outside world, and NOT to the major.  That was my big lesson.

I think this generation lives with connectedness, growing up with interdisciplinarity like ours didn’t.  The business majors don’t need “English for Business Majors” and “Math for Business Majors” and “Chemistry for Business Majors.”  They came in knowing all these subjects connect in unpredictable ways.

But they do want relevance and timeliness.  They want their GE heavy on skills, and lighter on content, which they get from the web anyway.  Many said GE looks too much like a rerun of high school.  This group agreed that if we’re set on keeping content in, then we need to emphasize its usefulness and relevance.  As one put it, maybe oversimplifying to make a point — “don’t give me biology, give me first aid.”

For now, USIU’s solution is to connect faculty, and strengthen shared intellectual experiences like community service, the First Year Experience, and capstone courses.  With an enrollment under 5,000, they can go for more unity and consistency than we can in the CSU, where we enroll over 400,000 and our GE is taught mostly in the community colleges.

So I don’t think we’ll have their emerging brand of unity on a large scale.  But that relevance thing stuck with me.

direct democracy

To prepare for address I’m making at next month’s Annual Meeting of the AAC&U, I’ve been thinking about the different ways through history that people have collaborated — by means civic or commercial — to get us where we are today.  I agree with those who ascribe our gains not to our abilities as individuals (however prodigious), but to our “collective intelligence,” our knack for pooling what we know and passing it along to our issue.

By this perspective, opposable thumbs and upright walking get their due, but are eclipsed by speech and culture.  And then by our different means of propagating them:  cuneiform, moveable type, the internet . . . each epoch seems to bring the planet closer to functioning as one massive neural network.

This can stoke some optimism.  If the settled village trumps the nomadic clan, and connecting villages into city-states is even better, then surely the global village commons is the best yet?  Maybe together, across the range of human cultures and ways of knowing, we’ll finally tackle some of the big problems?  That is, now that we have Facebook and containerized shipping, can social justice be far behind?

Well, not so fast.

In my home state of California we have a particularly blunt instrument for collective governance, “direct democracy.”   Half a million people can put anything they want to referendum, and the rest of us decide it.  Our ballots can get enormous, dense and arcane.

In this world, the well heeled have little trouble advancing their interest by hiring signature-gatherers to block shopping malls and grocery stores.  So, rather than harvesting our collective wisdom — I think of it as a Progressive-era anticipation of Wikipedia — it instead adds to the concentration of influence, and then hitches a ride on our collective folly.  We legalize pot but then stuff our prisons on the three-strikes law.  We limit taxes, we grant ourselves entitlements, we race to insolvency.  The ballot initiatives approved by California are a window into our shortsightedness, ignorance, and greed.

I was musing about this last week during one of the meetings I don’t much enjoy attending, between the head of the California State University system and his 23 campus presidents, when I realized the big guy was fulminating on this very subject.  He referred his chief execs to a recent Daily Show interview with John Burton, head of the state’s Democratic Party.  It’s a good interview, appropriately angry and pretty funny.

Liking Burton’s point is easy; knowing what to take away, as we build a better future out of a dizzyingly connected world, is harder.

In my high school civics class I didn’t know why we needed an Electoral College, but that was before I moved here.  Now the authority of the E.C. has all but atrophied, while elsewhere our decisions would clearly benefit from some mediation.  But whose?

protesting arithmetic

Last month I attended an opening of the Civility Project at UC Davis, which included a documentary theater piece called (un)civil (dis)obedience.  Students re-enacted their peers’ responses to hate crimes committed around the UC system the year before.  It was well written and well performed, in part because it was so clearly personal.

Afterward, the performers stayed for a Q&A with the audience.  We heard that in gathering the material, interviewers learned that the hate crimes now shared emotional space with the recent hike in UC fees.  They were surprised to discover that the fee outrage went beyond the predictable response of people asked to pay more for the same thing.  The student interviewers I met noticed a deeper connection.

This turned out to be prescient, of course.  Last week the fee unrest — subsequently a sit-in — ended with the notorious pepper-spraying incident that was caught on video, went viral, and now threatens the university’s top leadership.

We’re seeing sit-ins and protests in the CSU, where I work.  Like education itself, setting tuition rates seems to go all the way to students’ sense of themselves.

Admission to a university hinges on a summary of your academic life to date.  “We’ve looked at who you are, and we think you’re worth investing in.”  It can feel more like a marriage proposal than a business proposition.  When the Davis students learned their fees were going up, some said they felt lied to.  Those passages were some of the best parts of the performance.

California students protest fee hikes regularly, in undulations matched to the state’s political and economic tides.  The shouting and picketing can puzzle spectators like me.  (We are a fiscal mess, without public resources to redirect.  What exactly are people protesting?  Arithmetic?)

Last week I was in Washington when back at my office a crowd interrupted a meeting of the CSU Board of Trustees.  There were several injuries and an estimated $30,000 in property damage.  It was a big deal but off-key.  For one, these weren’t just students.  For another, it wasn’t just about education; many held signs criticizing banks, making the action feel trumped up, or at least misdirected.  Compared to the sit-in at UC Davis, this action was a harder incident to report on, or react to.

But days later we’re still going to work past boarded up doors and broken glass.  It’s a reminder that money can be personal, measuring not just the worth of education, but also the depth of our commitment to each other.  Yeah, it’s simple arithmetic, but arithmetic that expresses our values.

the dang funding model

On Friday and Saturday I joined nine CSU teams at a workshop of the Council on Undergraduate Research, held at Cal State Los Angeles.  Of the high impact practices, undergraduate research is both vexing and particularly promising.  Its potential is to rescue GE from a losing race with content:  instead of trying to run our students through an exponentially widening pool of Intro To Everything, we may be able to walk them through the ways knowledge is created and tested in various kinds of inquiry — literary, scientific, etc.  Students might graduate better equipped to continue learning on their own, effectively picking up the content that keeps outrunning our courses.

Yet lower-division courses are hard to teach this way.  It’s one thing to conduct research with the hotshots who survived into your capstone; less typical to explore unanswered questions in the opening survey course, including everyonein the work , including those at risk of dropping out.  Yet the apparent value for persistence and gap closing could mean it’s worth figuring out.

At the end of the two-day workshop a participant from Monterey Bay — himself a kind of celebrity of CSU undergraduate research — asked representatives from the chancellor’s office how we might better support a research culture in a system of universities that has historically put teaching first.  We didn’t really have an answer.

The following day I left for the Provost’s Teaching and Learning Summit at UW Oshkosh.  A faculty leadership team there spent last summer developing a new GE curriculum, and this year’s summit — unlike its predecessors — had a political purpose mixed in with the faculty development:  to introduce the broader campus to the proposed new framework.

Over lunch with the leadership team, I learned they’re being careful with the roll-out.  As on the CSU campuses recently revising GE, Oshkosh reformers want to stay with design principles for as long as possible, building buy-in and getting as close to consensus as they can before letting the discussion turn to “implementation,” and the scramble for FTES.  I was there with fellow guest speaker Robert Zemsky to hold the focus on larger, national issues up to the last minute, the day before roll-out of the new model.

The proposed changes at Oshkosh are exciting:  as a Wisconsin campus involved in Give Students a Compass, the university is considering many of the same innovations on deck for the CSU.  I’m glad their effort benefits from realpolitik.

Yet, like the brain-teaser about supporting undergraduate research, I find the need to defer implementation — read, faculty competition — hard to address.

Shouldn’t we be eager to unleash the innovation of individual faculty members?   In well functioning markets, success is its own reward.  Create a tablet computer that people want, or a cure for arthritis, or a chain of attractive coffee houses, and that’s that.  You’re ready to roll it out, and don’t have to cool your jets first, while policy makers like me try to downplay everyone else’s incentives first.

But in higher ed, it’s apparently not enough to advance knowledge in your discipline while simultaneously improving undergraduate success, nor enough to create an updated, coherent and engaging general education curriculum.  Creative, cutting edge improvement is only half the job.  The other half, for now, is persuading colleagues it’s worth donating their effort, even if it costs us all a little more, and earns us the same or less.

news from North Dakota

This week I attended the Reflecting on Teaching Conference at the University of North Dakota.  Faculty and administrators there are part of a statewide effort to reform general education and transfer, and their thinking has a lot in common with ours.

For one, their state’s GE transfer curriculum is already in pretty good shape.  What they call the General Education Requirements Transfer Agreement, or GERTA, is a lot like our IGETC.  It’s just as efficient — carving the lower-division common core into discrete, interchangeable areas of coursework for maximum portability — and just as prone to downplaying the engaging, integrative, and purposeful aspects of education that may help us keep our students enrolled.  We spent much of our time together focusing on ways to preserve transferability while deepening the learning.

For another, people in North Dakota are considering the same changes we are:  wider incorporation of “high-impact practices” like learning communities, civic engagement, and undergraduate research, and use of a tool like Lumina’s Degree Qualifications Profile to focus educators and students alike on the goals of higher education.

There are a couple of striking differences from California, too.  For one, as the Association of American Colleges and Universities noted in a recent issue of Peer Review, North Dakota is unusual for inviting the whole spectrum of institutions into the conversation — private and tribal colleges as well as the easier-to-convene publics.

For another, they’re — well, they’re smaller than we are.  Lighter on their feet.  Even when they include schools from outside of their public system, they can get everyone into a room.  With room to spare for a tourist from California.

The inaugural meeting of the North Dakota General Education Council overlapped intentionally with the Reflecting on Teaching Conference.  Officers were elected, and it was hard not to get the sense of a newborn organization standing up for the first time.

What I came away envying the most was the sense of adventure.  They are leaving no assumptions unexamined.

Worth keeping an eye on.

workload, incentives, and Academically Adrift

I had the chance at lunch just now to talk to our faculty chair, Jim Postma, about this question of workload and deep learning.  In the “Academically Adrift” zeitgeist, one could wonder whether the CSU even has the capacity at this point to do more than skim.  Sure, we want the experiences of deep learning, of high-impact practices, of meaningful faculty-student interaction toward shared educational goals.  But at the sheer volume of students we serve, is that remotely within reach?

He took the point, and added that the CSU’s growing section caps (maximum enrollments allowed in one scheduled offering of a course) are recent.  In one budget downturn faculty are paid more to teach extra students, realizing efficiencies for the physical plant; and the next downturn the extra pay goes away but the classes stay big.

He added another wrinkle, connected in particular to our hopes to embed deeper learning and “high-impact” educational practices into lower-division GE:  those courses are disproportionately taught by adjuncts, who are spread even thinner.  It’s hard to imagine them having any more time-per-student to devote.

And, so the observation goes in Academically Adrift, that reduced bandwidth-per-student creates an incentive for an inadvertent, unspoken deal between the teacher and student:  don’t expect too much of me, and I’ll return the favor.  So that’s grim.  If we’re going to go all-out for high-impact practices, do we first need to re-engineer the business model?

The silver lining came with a discussion I had yesterday on this with Wayne Tikkanen, who directs the CSU’s Institute for Teaching and Learning.  He knows of a CSU campus that wanted to adopt “writing across the curriculum,” assigning (and therefore reading and grading) routine writing assignments into more courses, not just those in English departments.  To incentivize that, they created prestigious certificates for faculty trained in writing-intensive teaching.  Certification qualifies you for courses with lower section caps.  Cool, huh?

Jim liked that idea.  I was wondering if we might also eventually certify in other high-impact practices, like undergraduate research and service learning.  Among other benefits, the act of certification could provide structure for ongoing faculty development.  Say it expires every two years.  That gives you the chance to check in, maybe norm some rubrics, have faculty across disciplines talk about what they’re doing.

That’s the update on the workload and incentives front.

preparation for citizenship

One of our missions in higher education is to prepare the next wave of citizens — hence the title of this blog.  TJ and friends were aware they were making a high-risk bet on the everyman when they gave us a national democracy, and counted on robust formal education to prove them right.

As we think about changes in our civic mission since the 18th century, it’s worth remembering that the very idea of the nation-state hadn’t taken off until just a few centuries before our revolution.  Until around 1500, most of the world lived in villages, city-states, or tiny kingdoms.  With notable exceptions (e.g. China), few had the civil-bureaucratic skillset to play on a larger stage.  That changed around the time the old world discovered the new, when developments like the printing press, large standing armies, and the public finance of exploration made consolidation look smart.  And even then Europe itself hosted some prominent laggards; Germany didn’t finish until 1871.

Given nationalism’s relative recency, and given its lengthy, sputtering roll-out, we shouldn’t assume the game is over.  What’s next?  Or, like the man sang, Imagine there’s no countries.

I think it could happen sooner than we think, at least in many ways.

National borders have lost much of their relevance within living memory.  Communication is the obvious example; we still print stamps one country at a time, but wonder if we need a post office.  Commerce and human migration are another, poignant case:  cultural distinction is starting to feel like biodiversity, as we all sort of mix into ubiquity.

There are detours and setbacks — Greece may leave the Euro, for example — but we saw that with the consolidation into nations, too.  The trajectory of history, the one we’re supposed to be pointing our students to meet, seems headed toward something different from the civic paradigms we grew up in:  more murky, collective, and dynamic than humans have seen before.

In such a context, the best recourse seems a return to core principles:  behave ethically, cultivate versatility, pitch in where appropriate.  Hang on tight.