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

thankyou, Michael for inviting me.

It's great to be here.

Um, I would say one of the most rewarding classes Iever 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 your 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