The Future of the University
In the 1960s, the American university boomed thanks to a huge population influx that democraticized the college experience and proliferated the expansion of satellite schools. Now facing budget crises across the country, huge deficits from overspending, and the growing specter of student debt, we are at a moment of hesitation in terms of how to modify the university to correspond to actual economic factors. In thinking about the future of the U.S. university, it would seem that we are faced with a spectrum of possibilities that fall in between two extremes: the low-tech pastoral vision of Deep Springs College and the decentralized networked model of the University of Phoenix.
Founded in 1917, Deep Springs is an extremely small (twenty-six students) all-male liberal arts college strategically located on a farm in the middle of the desert. The two-year program is meant to prepare students for entry into four-year universities and a life of continued service. The student-teacher ratio is 5:1, and faculty are required to live with students in an isolated setting forty minutes from the nearest town. The school places a strong emphasis on manual labor: the students are assigned a rotating set of daily tasks: cooking meals, cleaning toilets, milking cows, farming alfalfa. The students self-govern and are intimately involved in the creation of courses, curriculum development, and faculty hires.
The University of Phoenix, by numbers, is the largest university in the nation: 420,700 undergraduates and 78.000 graduate students taking classes on-line or at one of their 200 campuses located across the globe. Founded in the 1970s, the UP originated to fill a void in adult education by providing a flexible course schedule to full-time workers. The founder, John Sperling, has explicitly characterized the university as a corporation, apparently declaring "coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop...[students] value systems or go in for that expand their minds bullshit." Instead, the University of Phoenix is interested in disseminating its course material with maximum ease in teacher-student relationships that, enabled by the Internet, tend to remain virtual. Further, the 95% of the UPs faculty members, approximately 20,000, work part-time to supplement wages from other jobs. Students do not have control over university decisions.
These two schools each represent a model that responds, although not deliberately in either case, to the shrinking of the public university. In a post-industrial age where the decline of the manufacturing sector prompts the geographical re-distribution of populations and, often, the decline of previously available educational possibilities, these schools provide an opportunity for envisioning the future of the university. This is because, to put it quite simply, each school has very low overhead. Deep Springs offers a model of sustainability where the university operates as a working farm and the students provide their labor in exchange for class work. (In actuality, the school does have tuition, all students receive free education estimated to be worth $50,000 a year). There are no costs for staff as the students cook and clean for themselves. The school does, however, have to offset the cost of a very small cohort of faculty.
The University of Phoenix benefits from its primarily online structure, which significantly reduces the cost of constructing and maintaining buildings as well as paying property tax on physical sites. Further, by having the majority of its faculty remain part-time, it avoids having to pay full salaries and/or benefits. And unlike large American universities across the country, the UP does not finance an athletic program, does not cover the costs of student programming, and does not have to retain a housekeeping staff to clean up after its attendees. The UP does not require a large administrative hierarchy to micro-manage its affairs nor does it offer the various student services: counseling, career center, student health--that other universities provide. The university experience in this model is entirely boiled down to the exchange of information: what the University of Phoenix sees as the core of the educational process. What we have come to equate with a university experience, proves, in the UP model, to be entirely superfluous.
So the question is: if pushed to the extreme, which version of the U.S. university appears to be the most palatable? Entering into our decision will be our feelings about proximity and distance: do we as educators thrive in virtual settings or in face-to-face interactions? Do we desire the anonymity of the UP model over the extremely close encounter of Deep Springs? Does the geographical flexibility of UP offer the most realistic teaching option for faculty unable, for various reasons, to cloister themselves in the desert? And does the model of exchange: work for class, that Deep Springs exercises provide a clue as to how to make university education democratically available once again, without the onset of lifetime debt?
- Lisa Klarr's blog
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Something in between, but what?
Lisa, I think you have posed a very good question. As a striving/starving academic in the humanities (with a romanticized view of teaching that was destroyed within two weeks of my first TAship at a big UC) I would prefer to work or attend something closer to a Deer Springs model school.
That said, I think that the reality in the U.S. is quite different. I don't think the majority of people paying for tuition (parents or students) want anything more than a guaranteed job out of the whole deal. Now, I don't know how much of what my parents say is true, or if it's just nostalgic, but I get the impression that the purpose of university and university teaching used to be quite different 30-40 years ago. True, there are still many fantastic professors and great seminars, but it disturbs me to see the genuine lack of enthusiasm and interest from students in terms of learning -- not just regurgitating information, but actually thinking about something differently. I'm hesitant to blame anyone in particular or try to figure out which came first, the chicken or the egg. Instead, I think it's a systemic breakdown of enormous proportions, involving public education and other social, political, and economic factors in the U.S. at the most basic level.
On the other hand, before I give everyone the impression that I think the whole system is doomed, I do think the UP model could work on many levels. For one, students are already online almost all the time. Has anyone else been watching what the iPhone revolution + free wifi has done the last two years in classrooms? I think the U.S. is very unique in this. I've lived in Western Europe and East Asia and I can't think of any other place that has as many free wifi hotspots. I also can't think of a place where students are so (almost permanently) connected to the web via iPhone or other device. So before someone chooses to dismiss this as a distraction and complete waste of time, I think we should instead consider incorporating what's happening here with what's happening in the UP model.
So, let's think about this more. Many students and parents have a simple goal when it comes to public universities: find a job (to support my claim, read the disparaging comments posted to Judith Butler's article on the UC crisis: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/sep/30/californi...). Why not let them sign up for online classes? Or have them take online classes (if it's optional I'm inclined to say most of them will choose online), then attend the university campus only for the last two years, or only on occasion for certain classes. It would certainly lower the teacher/student ratio in classrooms, which all of us at large public universities would embrace. Additionally, I think it would create a situation in which those who really, REALLY want to attend a university for a more academic experience can do so.
As for my own experience and why I think this would work, I have TA'ed for several history classes in the UC system and am currently sitting in on an upper level undergrad course. I know that so many undergrads will almost never have an actual professor reading their papers or remembering their names due to class size. I've TAed for classes of 120-180 students, and a "smaller" one of 66 students. Right now, I'm sitting in on an upper level "senior" seminar of 30 students and am appalled. I think it's such a shame that several (or many) intelligent and enthusiastic students (the same 8-10 who always read, discuss, etc) must sit in the same classroom with at least 6-8 students who admit to not having done any of the reading meanwhile checking their iPhones every two minutes. Instead of complaining about them, why not give them the option of never going to a classroom?
I would really like to hear what other people think about this issue and models that we might think about. Dividing time between online and classroom? Separating those who want the classroom experience from those who just want a job? My parents went to public universities on pell grants in the 1970s, but they went for academic reasons and not because of parents or societal pressure to conform (which I see many students doing today), or because one needed to have a college degree to get a job. Why not save the full university experience for people like my parents instead of those who don't care?
Virtual Teaching: Links to the Service Economy?
Amanda,
Your idea about allowing students to choose between having physical and virtual collegiate experiences is interesting. I worked one semester as a Writing Studio tutor where we had exactly that choice in place: students could sign up for fifty-minute face-to-face conversations or they could send us their drafts via "E-Tutor" and receive comments within the hour. This was a revelatory experience on my part in terms of how these two different modes of interaction impact the instructor. The face-to-face meetings tended to be more difficult: they would almost always take up the entire fifty minutes and there was more opportunity for two-way conversations, emotional reactions, and misunderstandings. The E-Tutor did not have this two-way feature: I simply disseminated my comments on the draft and that was that. In fact, the E-Tutor appointments almost always took much less time since conversation had been eliminated. They were easier. But the face-to-face interactions were much more rewarding in terms of receiving positive feedback from the students. The E-Tutor was cold, emotionally speaking. Further, I could imagine how a Writing Program could, if converted completely to an E-Tutor system, turn teaching/tutoring into a service model, akin to outsourcing McDonald's drive-thru workers to other states. I could imagine sitting alone a desk in front of computer for eight hours a day, sending feedback on Freshman Comp papers to students in other states whom I would never see. This fantasy left me somewhat de-moralized.
An Interesting Dichotomy
I think you've hit right upon two possible expressions of the benefits of distributed learning provided by the connectedness of the modern age. As someone who was simultaneously studying at a new campus under construction, with limited faculty and surrounded by pasture while also being part of a larger public university system (The University of California) I was keenly aware that one no longer needed to be at an enormous and established campus to be connected to a wealth of academic resources. Once upon a time, you needed huge campuses to leverage resources, such as libraries, specialized faculty and archives, that can now be accessed at much lower costs. With distance learning and on-line journals having reached a mature phase, this seems anachronistic. There will always be benefits to face-to-face communication between academics (Just as modern software firms, even those heavily invested in outsourcing, maintain such contact between developers) but the possibility for a University of Phoenix or Deep Springs College to exist and maintain some level of competitiveness with traditional institutions is undeniable.
Between the two, I would overwhelmingly favor the Deep Springs model. As caught up as we are in the gloriously conceptual knowledge available at our fingertips every day, the value of hands-on education has not decreased. I've taught a couple courses on environmental history at UC Merced, with a focus on agriculture, and despite being surrounded by the heart of California farming culture, my students have no concept of the administrative, physical and technical requirements of agriculture (Modern or pre-modern). Though it exists just beyond the fences of their campus, a wall has been erected between Universitas and Agricultura. And this isn't simply the case with activities we would typically count as techne, but also with the hands-on creation of culture and society, seen in your description of Deer Springs' emphasis on self-administration.
By contrast, The University of Phoenix could be seen to sell bottled water. It is doubtful that UP would be so popular if degrees from accredited universities were not seen as tools for professional growth (Though in this aspect, most traditional institutions could be equally criticized) and so they reflect a rather arbitrary market for a product that is freely available to most of its customers (Hence the bottled water analogy). Of course, that's only if you're considering the product to be knowledge/education/information, which it really isn't, what UP sells is none of these things but rather a piece of paper proclaiming such things. I shiver to think of the results of a hypothetical poll of university students who are asked "Would you rather receive your degree without having to attend a single class or continue the current system of attending class and being graded?" and, likewise, a poll of lecturers wherein a similar question is asked "Would you rather be paid your salary and only be required to give out a series of arbitrary grades, or would you prefer to teach your classes?"
The amount of scholarship available to the public, especially in the technical fields emphasized by universities such as this, is currently enough for a motivated self-learner to teach themselves accounting, calculus or business administration. As projects like Wikiversity continue to grow, the availability of such resources will only increase. The ideal university environment (And here I will plainly state that I think the university as conferrer of certificates is a corruption) is no longer a place one needs to go to find information, but rather a collection of scholars who help students to understand and contextualize that information, thereby turning it into knowledge. This has a better chance of taking place in a smaller environment, connected to non-traditional means of understanding important processes, than in a detached, anonymous one.
Of course, I went to a Jesuit school, so YMMV.
Digital Resources
Elijah,
You make a good point about how our digital era has lifted the burden of resource-management, at least in its physical, concretized form, from the shoulders of the university. The centralization of the academy during the 20th century, paralleling the centralization of many other sectors of U.S. culture, reflects a now outdated model that was precipitated by the need for physical proximity: of books, of researchers, of teachers, of students. The digital era does liberate the university from this centralized mode, and I think we are in the process of de-centralization (which, as the manufacturing sector knows, can be just as painful as growth). So now perhaps our task becomes one of "creative downsizing," of figuring out how to re-allocate resources (and how to minimize those ridiculously huge freshman seminars!)
an interesting question
This poses a very interesting question and I think one that strikes at the core values of academics and aspiring academics. I think that a publicly supported, comprehensive university education can be provided to the majority of our population--it's just that as a society we've made different choices, and those choices reflect the extent to which the UP model of education as a private consumer good became naturalized, likely long before a University of Phoenix existed. Given that we're facing a period of retrenchment and more corporatization of the university, though, I think the dichotomy you propose is going to resemble our coming reality somewhat uncomfortably. And, if forced to choose between the two extremes, I would find the Deep Springs example preferable.
The question that stuck out at me the most in your comment was whether we desire the anonymity of the UP model over the proximity of Deep Springs. I think that graduate education and the professionalization of young academics might contribute to such a preference for anonymity. In a few obvious ways, of course--the incentives to prioritize your own research over supposedly public avenues such as teaching and service. But in deeper ways, too.
I'm in my fourth year as a graduate student in a humanities program at a major public university. The whole time (except this semester) I've been teaching, primarily my own classes but occasionally as a TA/discussion leader. And I've found myself wanting more and more distance from my students--in part because of the institutional structure and the desire to prioritize my own work--but I think there are other reasons as well. There is a kind of seductive comfort into turning teaching and learning from an educator/apprentice model into a capitalist model (just to be clear, I don't think those are the only models available). Services are exchanged (indirectly) for a salary or stipend, each party moves on after the semester or quarter is over.
I think this model is inequitable, a disaster, and should be resisted at all costs. But I think it is gaining not only because of institutional and economic pressures but because it provides a certain measure of comfort and security to all parties involved. We seem to have internalized the moral logic of capitalism even when we are ostensibly resisting it.