Is Higher Education an 'Industry' That is Evolving?

Oh, no! You won't be getting a printed SCUP–45 Preliminary Program in the mail this year. Instead, SCUP is going green and regularly updating this digital version (PDF), which you can download at any time.

Check it out! You don't want to miss higher education's premier planning conference, and your one chance this year to assemble with nearly 1,500 of your peers and colleagues: July 10–14, Minneapolis.

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SCUP Link

Paul Kim examines some of the implications of looking at higher education as an industry and whether or not, as an industry, it is under external pressures to evolve:

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed in The Origin of Species that living organisms adapt and evolve through natural selection (survival of the fittest). In the same vein, Charles Fine claimed that when industries face new challenges or environmental pressure, they must evolve or adapt in order to avoid extinction.1 In addition, scholars such as Takahiro Fujimoto2 viewed competency-building competition as part of industry’s evolutionary process, while Ki-Chan Kim and Hi Sook Kim3 viewed “feed forwarding” as an important survival and growth instinct in industry evolution. Although some in higher education might consider such ideas nonsensical when applied to colleges and universities, we can adapt some of these views in trying to make sense of today’s higher education ecosystem.

Listed as key takeways from this article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly:

• To survive and thrive, living organisms, industries, and institutions — including higher education — must evolve or adapt to changing environments.
• The slow evolutionary clock speed and failure to adopt contextualized open interfaces in the higher education ecosystem may threaten its continued survival in the face of new environmental pressures.
• More effective and efficient knowledge creation and distribution can increase the evolutionary clock speed and fuel successful evolutionary changes.
• The higher education ecosystem has produced some projects demonstrating an evolutionary shift in approach that could fuel further successful evolution.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• April 5–7, San Diego, CA - "Smart Planning in an Era of Uncertainty"
• April 7, Houston, TX - "Sustaining Higher Education in an Age of Challenge"

New Book, Globalization's Muse: Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World

Globalization's Muse (407 pp) is subtitled "Universities and Higher Education Systems in a Changing World." It is edited by John Aubrey Davis, C. Judson King, and Irwin Feller, and is the printed result of a series of events on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley that "focused on higher education refoorms throughout the world."

If you purchase this book by following any link on this page, SCUP will receive a small percentage of your purchase price, which is not increased by doing so.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

New Book: 'The Marketplace of Ideas'

If most new problems were once solutions to old problems, then it would be helpful to look at the old problem and how it was solved. In The Marketplace of Ideas, Luis Menand sees what he considers academic professionalism as a problem. So he takes a look at the problem that the current Academy solved. Quite interesting. Buy the book here and SCUP gets a small percentage. You can also read this review by Gideon Lewis Kraus, in Slate.

In reviewing the book, Lewis-Kraus, notes:

Eliot's most "original and revolutionary idea" was to require a college degree to enter professional school. This established the educational model that still obtains: liberalization first, then specialization. Universities assumed the role of credentializing professionals, and the professoriate was on the way to becoming a guild.

This transformation gave the professoriate a new autonomy, but at a price: If professors wanted academic freedom, insulation from the demands of the commercial marketplace, they had to start thinking of what they did in nonvocational terms—as the pursuit of specialized knowledge for its own sake.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Will Higher Education Ever Change as It Should?

Writing in the Chronicle, Robert Zemsky muses about the potential for radical transformation of American higher education. Could any group of appropriate actors ever get together and work out something, systemwide, that would effective change everything? He posits three potential "dislodging events" which might be the kind of things that would motivate enough stakeholders. One possibility: "A simple rule could differentiate the strictly commercial from the educational: All dividends, interest, rents, and realized capital gains would be taxed at current rates, but the money owed the IRS would be reduced by the amount of cash an institution withdrew from its endowment to support educational and research programs. In years when the money spent exceeded the growth in the value of the endowment, a credit would be awarded to offset future taxes."

I Smell the Death of Education Approaching?

This article by Scott Jaschik covers a recent address by Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee to an ACE audience. It's interesting in and of itself, but even more so because of the many interesting comments by readers posted in reaction to it. The first comment starts out, "I smell the death of education approaching," and it gets even more interesting in later comments. From the Jaschik article:

Noting that the United States created land-grant colleges in the middle of the Civil War, E. Gordon Gee told his fellow college presidents Sunday evening that the current economic crisis is no reason not to consider bold and far-reaching reforms of the institutions. “I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge,” Gee said here at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.

The choice for higher education, he said: “reinvention or extinction.”

Gee didn’t dispute the seriousness of the economic crisis facing colleges, calling it an “ever-worsening fiscal quagmire.” But he said that higher education must resist the “first instinct” of such situations, “to hunker down, hide out, take refuge in the fox hole, and wait for the storm to pass.” The situation is sufficiently dire, he said, that colleges need to “reconfigure ourselves,” rather than simply trying to restore lost funds.

Specifically, Gee suggested that colleges abandon their traditional devotion to disciplines, rethink the way faculty members are hired, and embrace a more central role for community colleges in higher education.

Michael Oakeshott and Educational Change

Twenty years downstream of Michael Oakeshott's publications of The Voice of Liberal Education, British-born conservative thinker Andrew Sullivan has published his 1989 dissertation, about Oakeshott, titled Intimations Pursued. In this blog post, Alan Contreras writes about some of Oakeshott's ideas, reflected upon in the realities of 2009:

The notion that students can ever again work their way through college at public colleges is entirely unmoored from the facts. At Oregon public universities, with which I am familiar, a student who could earn a year’s tuition by working 20 hours a week in 1965 would have to work 46 hours a week all year today to cover tuition. How, exactly, can students who spend all their time working or worrying about how and where to borrow more money be expected to focus on learning?

Yet there will be no more state subsidies sufficient to reduce the cost of public colleges. That era has been fading for fifteen years; in another fifteen it will be of interest only to academic historians. It is not that our elected officials lack good will: here in Oregon good will, and good decisions by elected officials, are easy to come by, even exemplary in recent years. Resources, however, are not easy to come by, and never will be again. The parents of today’s students are shocked at the cost of college, but the children of today’s students will live with it from birth and their parents, in school today, will have no illusions whatsoever.

We need more colleges of quality that are committed to offer their programs for very low fees, with an endowment that is designed to allow this forever and trustees who are committed to build and maintain such an endowment to that end. We need to recognize that government financial aid in meaningful amounts is over, as an effective large-scale policy. Governments are not going to have the money. That means that students will have to borrow increasingly onerous amounts or not go to college. Student loans in the amounts now required are not financial aid, they are financial oppression.

Developing Leadership Skills [in Academia]

This excellent article from Academic Leadership: The Online Journal, is by SCUPer Gerald H. Gaither of Texas A&M Praire View.

In today's climate of balancing competing constituency interests, financial contraction, growing student populations, and abundant public criticism, it seems clear that the higher education community needs to hone and apply its skills to better meet the strident leadership demands of our time. It is the purpose of this paper to build upon previously learned precepts of leadership and provide practical guidance to assist interested individuals with this process.

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