The End of Higher Education: A Discussion About Purpose

(Michael Wesch): .... Hey, hello everybody!

Welcome to the first connected course's live session.

I'm here with Randy Bass and Cathy Davidson

and we're going to talk about "The end of higher education",

both in that sort of gloomy sense of what's happening right now

and, you know, are things -- are we really coming to an end,

are we at a turning point?

But also about the "end" of higher education as in the "purpose" of higher education:

what should it be?

And if this is a moment of reinvention

maybe this is a chance to redefine who we are and what we're doing.

So, we have Randy Bass and Cathy Davidson,

two outstanding scholars and great thinkers in this area.

Randy is Vice-provost for Education and Professor of English at Georgetown University.

He was also the founding director of Georgetown's Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship

or "CNDLS".

Really a wonderful organization, and I had the pleasure visiting there once

and had a wonderful time:

this is a great space of innovation in education and pedagogy.

He has written many wonderful things; I'll just point to one that might be relevant to this:

in -- I think it was just maybe a couple of years ago --

"Disrupting ourselves - the problem of learning in higher education."

That's a great article that I think provides some good background

for some of the things we'll be talking about today.

And then also, we have Cathy Davidson here.

Cathy recently moved to the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.

She is now Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative there,

which is a program designed to train the next generation of college professors

and I saw once how many people you might be affecting.

It's tremendous, and I think we're all excited to have somebody like you in that position,

affecting so many people and possibly,

having a tremendous influence on the future of higher education through that role.

Cathy has authored a number of great books.

Recently she wrote "Now you see it"

which also offers some great reflection on her own life

and how she's learned over the years and,

and there's some great stories in there, I don't want to spoil it for you guys,

but you should all read it right from the beginning so you can

get a sense of how somebody can take their own life experience and

learn from it and create better learners.

So I'll leave it at that and we'll go ahead and get started.

The way we're gonna start out is, actually, I've asked them all --

each to reflect on the best class they ever taught, so we're gonna start there.

And, uh, Randy do you want to start us off with the best class you ever taught?

(Randy): Well, sure and this is, of course, in my own mind

not necessarily in the opinion of the students, but

thank you, Michael for inviting me.

It's great to be here.

Um, I would say one of the most rewarding classes I ever taught was

a course that I co-taught with an architect, Ann Pendleton-Julian,

it was called "The future of the university as a design problem",

so pertinent to our topic.

But we taught it as what we called 'the humanities studio'

and it was a blend of the kind of inquiry that you would do in a seminar

but rigorously taught like an architecture studio.

So we had what architects would call table crits or desk crits and wall crits

where students would pin up their work and

formal presentations of their work where we flew people in for their mid-term and

had guests at the final.

And after doing precedent work and reading theory and background

students spent most of the time working on their designs of

what the university would look like in 2030.

It really could've been any topic, the point was that in groups

they were working on a design-based concept that they made their own

and it was their own from beginning to end.

The rhythm of this, they were mostly working in drawings.

They would work for hours and then come in for critiques

and then go away with the 10% of their idea that was still live and throw away 90%.

I taught writing for 25 years as an English professor

I've never taught a class where people-- where the students became so

fearless of revision

in a way that just had them -- just -- just driven

for the idea.

It was an atmosphere of great student ownership.

They felt like they were working on a problem that mattered to them,

they were presenting to an authentic audience.

The two of us, as faculty, were really just bumpers or

scaffolds for them

and all my career I've really wanted to make the classroom

a place where people thought of it as a place to come to work,

not a place to come to listen

and that's really what the studio is.

It's a place for you to come to work on your own with your small group

and with your mentors.

So, so that was, I think, the most rewarding class I taught

and those are some of the salient features.

(Michael): Mmhmm. That's great.

How about you Cathy?

(Cathy): Um, I'm gonna mention one class that then

became the basis of a second class

and these are the last 2 years that I taught at Duke University.

One was a class on 21st century literacies

and we were doing -- it was students from Duke University, North Carolina

and NC State University.

I had to go away and give a talk at the Digital Media Learning Conference

and we were gonna be -- so my students helped prepare

and they were going to be virtual participants of that conference.

We'd been using lots of collaborative tools throughout the course.

It didn't seem like a problem to be gone.

The virtual panel worked great.

I came back and the students had mutinied.

And I, uh, used learning contracts for my classes.

We'd created class constitution, they'd thrown everything out

and they didn't want to do that

which is the fear that many academics have about peer-led, student-lead work.

Except, instead of them trying to get away with something

what they decided was they loved what we were doing so much

they wanted to write a handbook about it

for the rest of the world.

They rewrote their contracts saying if on final exam time

they did not deliver a completed book manuscript,

with each of them doing a chapter,

and they'd already done the 'table of contents' and everything,

they would all fail the course.

Now, as an academic I would never fail everybody for not working collectively

but they were willing to put their reputations on the line.

I don't know what I would have done if they hadn't done it,

but here's the book.

We did a physical book, it's also up on Github,

it's on Haystack, it's been downloaded 16,000 times

just from the Haystack website.

I don't know what the numbers are from other sources.

The following year I then taught a MOOC on 'The history and future of higher education'

where we used this as our textbook for 18,000 students.

I had 18 face-to-face students again from Duke, North Carolina

State and University of North Carolina, undergraduate, graduate students from

computer science to MFA students

and the students were the -- used the MOOC as a chance to think about MOOCs.

It was kind of what we called it the 'meta-MOOC'

and the Chronicle for Higher Education asked us to,

asked me, actually, to write a column each week on it

and I said "Well, that would be hypocritical if I wrote the column"

so each week my students wrote the column and we, again,

self-published it into a little book up there 'Columns each week'

on what they were learning from co-teaching the MOOC

and our final project,

partly inspired by what Randy and Ann had done,

I was working closely with Ann during the year,

was, um, project of creating higher ed from scratch.

We had 3 different design teams where we asked probably 200 questions

about what is an education for

and then did business plans models, CAD drawings

of 3 very, very different kinds of institutions.

Fascinating.

Also, as Randy said, it was a situation where I came in and listened

more than -- far, far more than I taught.

It was an amazing experience.

The downside was with the MOOC students were awake

24/7, literally.

The endless cycle and my students were so engaged

they were saying they weren't sleeping at all.

They were up all night typing to people.

There was a group in Otago, New Zealand.

There was another group in India, there was another group in Thailand

and there were several groups in Europe and in Latin America

and they were up all night talking about assessment.

New plans for assessment and new ideas for assessment

and other kinds of topics relevant to 'the history and future of higher education'.

So, the upside: engagement, the downside: insomnia.

So, but it was an incredible experience.

(Michael):Yeah, I mean, I, I can relate to that.

I guess the favourite class that I pull out

is a very small class, it's 10 students

and every year we've been kinda pushing the envelope

of how authentic it gets, I guess.

So, it's a methods class and

in this case, anthropology methods

and so I'm just trying -- getting them to do anthropology.

And so, my favourite class -- this last year they actually got to move into

a retirement community and

live there for the whole semester
(Cathy: Wow!)

so it's very, um.. y'know

in many ways we were disconnected from the wider world

in terms of-- like we weren't leveraging internet like we normally do,

but it was really special and I think we still, like,

hit a lot of these things you guys have been talking about.

I mean, the sense of ownership,

the fearlessness of revision

and all of that came, I think, because

we were studying problems that matter.

We had this authentic audience we were working for.

All these things that you guys mentioned just now

and I could go on and on, these are --

you guys hit on some really great stuff.

Cathy, you mentioned the contract

and not only the contract but also the rewriting of the contract

and that was, obviously, emblematic of this intensive engagement

which, obviously, got -- almost went too far, right?

Uh, so we have all these different elements and I think

these classes that we've each described

in many ways, describe something special happening

when people come together to learn together, right?

It's something that can't happen just in learning on your own.

So that then gets that -- the next question I wanted to approach

and that is, what is this education all about?

What can higher education be for?

When you hear a lot of the rhetoric now

about how education is changing

and these apocalyptic visions of the end of higher education,

do you guys hear any, kind of, assumptions about

what the purpose of higher education is, in those different visions

and are there visions that concern you?

Are there people who seem to be suggesting that education is, kinda, for something

that's maybe not as complete as the experiences we just described?

(Cathy): Sure, uh.

Should I go ahead, Randy? Or do you wanna go ahead?

(Randy): No, go ahead.

(Cathy): Well, I have a number of thoughts.

One, I actually think that the gloom and doom about higher education being over

is premature

and to paraphrase Twain, as we all do,

one thing about MOOCs, Massive Online Open Coursework,

is clearly if we are willing to offer the products of higher education and specialised learning

for free and in a way people can assess it,

millions of people want it.

So, for awhile, I would say 5 years ago, that rhetoric was 'higher education is over,

nobody is interested, it's a bunch of fuddy-duddys doing their own navel-gazing,

there's no engagement with the world'.

Well, guess what?

You put it online for free and millions and millions of people around the world want it

and the demographics of MOOCs are the

same people who are part of the 'Bored at Work' movement.

Y'know, 30 years old, you already have a degree,

you're not doing this for any other reason but that you really want some kind of

intellectual, emotional nourishment in the world.

So, I think higher education is more validated now than ever.

The cost is a real problem

and the cost is because of 50 years of defunding of public education

and of research.

The part, that to me, is the end of higher education in the negative sense is

people who see higher education as being a gold mine and a profit-mine.

That's for things that have nothing whatsoever to do with education,

but only have to do with

what I literally mean in the historic sense of profiteering,

which is a quasi-legal set of structures that make it possible for somebody to get

too much money with too little effort,

with too little competition among other sources

and for reasons that are different than the mission of education.

So that, to me, is the big thing to worry about right now.

Higher education itself, I think, has never been more vital and never been more needed.

At the same time I do believe, and I say this a lot, if we can be replaced by computer screens we should be.

And by that I mean if we're not doing something amazing

in our classroom and taking this very precious thing we have

of the opportunity to interact with one another,

whether it's on-screen like this or face-to-face.

If we're not figuring out a better way of doing it then sitting up there like a robot

yabbering at people who are reading the newspaper in those classrooms that

that abolished laptops as if that's gonna solve the problem,

then we should be replaced by computer screens

and I think it's a challenge to us to be as meaningful and urgent

and relevant and connected to people's lives and connected to one another as we possibly can

and to make the educational system experience

something that truly is life-changing.

And if it isn't life-changing then sure, go to a degree mill and do whatever you have to do

to get your education, but, uh that's my polemic.

(Michael): Yeah.

(Randy): Well, I, I completely agree and

I think that

what it is that we believe

that is different about higher education from

other modes of learning

is not necessarily what has always been a reality.

So, I think that we believe in the values

that it can be life-changing, it can be transformational,

it can be holistic.

Of course, the reality is that for lots of students who pass through

very traditional looking universities,

they're not actually getting that kind of education.

So, I think part of what, I hope that the

apocalyptic wave -- those 2 or 3 years where we all went extinct

according to the front pages of the media

and then we all came back to life
(Cathy laughing)

are when MOOCs went extinct and now we're back and everything's OK.

That is putting pressure on us to ask the questions

about how effective-- are we really doing the things we're claim we're doing?

I think that we haven't done a particularly good job

at the evidence of what difference it makes to go through this kind of an education-

versus getting your learning somewhere else.

Nor have we always done a very good job across higher education

for a really diverse, broad, equitable population,

of thinking about the design of the overall education,

and to what extent the entire education is really tending toward this transformation.

I think a lot of people have enjoyed the luxury that somehow the whole package-

the milieu of the campus, finding that exceptional relationship with the professor,

the opportunity in the co-curricular experience.

That ends being transformational.

With a lot of time spent in courses that are not inspirational or transformational.

A lot of other activity that feels like you're just moving through requirements or checking boxes.

So we're far from having designed this system that's really optimized

for the kind of learning that I think we all believe that the institution can provide.

(Michael): I think the people who are here with us today

are coming up at this in two ways, right?

One is they are thinking about how to change the structure a little bit,

and they are thinking about leveraging Internet and creating informal networks of learning,

and so on that could merge with formal networks of learning.

So they working on that element.

And then I think most people listening in right now are also teachers in the traditional sense. (16:53)