Thoughts About Change

I posted some thoughts about change in higher education on Carnegie Mellon’s website.  I wrote it as a comment on their news page http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/society/2014/winter/world-economic-forum.shtml.  The page contains information about their prescence at Davos.

I have been reading a book on governance and found it interesting with respect to how universities might be changed.  I talked about this in my comment.  Here it is.

“While some U.S. universities like Carnegie Mellon and MIT (and others) are doing a great job of educating their students, there are far too many others (some even touted as “elite”) that are much more focused on taking, as advice, what David Riesman meant as a warning:

“…advantage can…be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions..Like any other interest group, the student estate often does not grasp its own interests, and those who speak in its name are not always its friends…the “wants” of students to which competing institutions, departments, and individual faculty members cater are quite different from the “needs” of students”  (From “On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”.  1980)

Once a university takes this as advice (and thus, to paraphrase Robert Maynard Hutchins, sells its soul), no amount of work on methods, or anything else, will help students learn.  That is because universities that follow this path are only looking to take advantage of the naivete of their uneducated “customers” (once quaintly called students).

The lack of scruples that exists in some of higher education is a cancer that has metastasized throughout our educational system.  For example, granting doctorates to clearly unqualified candidates in order to get a “national need” grant results in unqualified professors at many regional state schools.  These professors don’t give their students the training they need.  Many of these students go on to teach in high school.  Thus, the cancer reaches all sectors of the educational system.

What is needed to stop this is the political will and the intellectual power to develop methods of governance that will prevent schools from becoming institutions solely interested in “prestige” and revenue.  It seems to me that the home of Herbert Simon would be a good place to start the intellectual part of the endeavor.  He certainly would have understood the difficulties of the governance problem – which I see as essentially an agent-principal conflict, big time.

For a real world example of the dynamics of how Riesman’s prediction works in today’s academic world, readers can go to my blog  www.inside-higher-ed.com and read A Tale Out of School – A Case Study in Higher Education.”