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A Particularly Open Letter to the Faculty from
the Provost on the Occasion of the Closing of _____ University's Doors
Forever
May 2010
You are all aware of my deep regret, my personal sense of loss on this
occasion. I've been with this institution for 22 years, and it's a small
enough place that I know all of you personally. So enough of the
official talk of declining enrollments and bad investments and
infrastructure debt overload. I owe it to all of you to explain more
particularly why we are closing our doors after a century and a half, and
why this demise is taking place on my watch. Friends, we have failed.
We have been followers in a world that demands we be first. With
hindsight our missteps seem clearer and the signposts to the
road to success are better illuminated. But only with hindsight. So with
these remarkable optics of hindsight, I give you a litany of what we
should have done.
- When Newt Gingrich was elected president a decade ago we should
finally have seen the permanence of the stand Congress had taken several
years earlier: that the new concept of public support for higher
education had less to do with funding for student loans or universities
than with opening up the "learning market" to new, leaner competitors who
could deliver the specialized training programs corporations were looking
for. And that Gingrich's tongue-in-cheek promise of "a laptop in every
lap," coupled with his appointment of Al Gore as Digital Information
Czar, meant that the government itself was ready to do business with the
CD-ROM makers and the edutainers because they could deliver skills
training at low-cost and high-glitz. We should have recognized that the
digital age was overtaking us.
- When this university gave Bill Gates--a dropout--his eighth honorary
doctorate, we should have recognized who in this digital age was
overtaking us, and we should have listened to what he told our graduates:
"Insist with both fists that your education put you at the gate to your
career." We should have remembered that in our age the prey always
invites the predator to come give a talk.
- Gates's focus on being career-ready should have been our focus a decade
ago when the Univeristy of Minnesota offered the first "guaranteed for life"
degrees--life-long learning contracts that warranted students would be
kept current in their field. Instead we looked skeptically and decided
this was something only professional schools could sell. But we
underestimated both the drop in the life span of a college degree and the
price students would pay to have that degree renewed again and again.
Now Princeton, of all places, has had great success providing this
"maintenance ed" to its graduates through its for-profit Princeton
Professional Institute. We should have had a more accurate appraisal of
the value of the degree we offer, for we have discovered too late in what
low esteem it is held.
- When the Gingrich administration pushed through Congress its voucher
system for K-12 education in this country, we should have realized that
economism was so rampant there was no reason to expect higher education
to withstand the buffeting intact. Competition and choice became the
buzz words in education--from Idaho's tax credits for home-schooling to
the Nation of Islam's dominance of urban education. We couldn't have
predicted that Tennessee would close its state universities and buy its
higher education from a Southwest consortium, but we should have foreseen
that such closings and failures lurked in the dark just ahead. We should
have understood that the stakes were that high.
- When ETS and Stanley Kaplan won in court the right to offer
competency-based certification in medicine, we saw yet another sacred
function of the university fall to the barbarians. What we should have
foreseen was what a damn good job the barbarians were to make of it.
Their online exams can be taken anywhere in the world by anyone who
wishes, and they've teamed up with suppliers of various online and CD
medical-education programs to guarantee student success. No longer
do you have to go to medical school; instead you have to diagnose pixelated
patients and dissect digital cadavers. We should have better appraised the
quality of our competition and met them head-on.
- When those pixelated patients first became available in the 90s--and
I remember my 12-year-old daughter conducting simulated surgery, mask and
all, on those ADAM and EVE anatomy programs--we should have simply sat
down and spent some time with them ourselves. We would have seen how
completely engrossing they were and that they actually did teach,
a mixture we as professors struggle mightily to achieve in the
classroom. We would have also noticed that their interactive,
hyperlinked, and multimedia nature allowed the student to learn at her own
pace and in her preferred style--visual, textual, aural, whatever. Had
we taken a closer look, we might have foreseen that most calculus classes
in this country would today be taught in one semester instead of
two--that the Newton's Whimsy program would let students approach the
subject in the manner they found most efficient. And we might have
anticipated the interdisciplinary multimedia chairs that are now being
endowed at so many universities. We might even have dreamed up
Microsoft's announcement last week that it was endowing a Nobel prize in
multimedia education. Our greatest failure on this front was our failure
to realize that freedom of choice was something the American collegiate
population desperately desired. So now Motorola-Apple University--a
university run out of an old warehouse in Hoboken--dominates multimedia
education, and our beloved ivied walls are about to become barracks for
our state's pettiest criminals.
- Finally, when I compared the recent college experience of my son Aaron
on this campus to the college experience of his girlfriend, Julianna, it
was already too late. Aaron's experience was much like my experience 30
years earlier. But Julianna's . . .. She decided to live at home because
the thousands she saved on room and board allowed her to accept admission
to a more prestigious university. She took most of her courses in her
family's den: broadcast courses, online courses, and interactive
multimedia CD-ROM courses--what we once disparagingly called
"edutainment." She passed exams given online by a company that used to
be involved exclusively with SATs. Her Big Ten university, three-
fourths of whose student body of 100,000 were distance-learners like her,
gave her degree credit for this work. When she signed up for Physics 110 she
was of course hooked into Rensselear's gold mine--Physics 110 Online, now
the introductory physics course for the majority of our nation's
undergrads. (I suppose the fact that ours is one of the few universities
in the country that hasn't lost half of its physics faculty to
Rensselear's course is now a moot point.) She majored in chemistry,
spending eighteen months as an apprentice to a government researcher who
worked halfway across the country and who freelanced as a student
mentor. Aaron also majored in chemistry. He attended lectures, took
notes, performed experiments in antiquated labs under the tutelage of
TAs. Julianna had unlimited access to the Big Ten Digital Library. No
doubt you're aware that my son's university paid millions of dollars to
the Big Ten consortium to give him access to the world's largest virtual
library. When Julianna graduated in 3 1/2 years--now the national
average for undergrads--she turned down three job offers so she could
continue her research as a graduate student. Aaron had spent too much
time in classrooms and was eager to do "real" work, as he called it. He
had a hell of a well-rounded education behind him, but the only work he
could find was as a lab assistant. I realized then that we had failed
him and his fellow students, for all of the above reasons but also
because we had failed to notice that a new form of literacy had arisen,
a form in which text was only one in an array of media to be mastered by
the educated person. I realized that we were no longer graduating
literate students, and that realization has brought me to the
greatest sorrow of my life: the realization that perhaps it is best we
close our doors. To finish off the tale and make it mean more than it
should, I'll add that Julianna is now a post-doc working with DuPont and
the University of Maryland on photoactive molecules. Aaron has returned
to school. He is working toward an MS/MFA in scientific visualization at
Wisconsin. I may follow him.
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