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 drines.

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 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 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