Some of you may recall our conversation with Johann Neem in Episode 54 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast. In that episode we talked with the Western Washington University historian about his book What’s the Point of College. It is a book I return to often.
Today I want to call your attention to Neem’s piece at Public Books titled “Walking Among the University’s Ruins.” It covers three new books on higher education: Ronald Daniels’s What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald Musto’s The Attack on Higher Education: The Dissolution of the American University, and Arthur Levine’s and Scott Van Pelt’s The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future.
Here is a taste:
Students, Levine and Van Pelt write, want “the same kind of relationship with their colleges that they have with their banks, supermarkets, and internet providers.” Today’s students—especially adult learners—are not seeking the deep transformation that comes from spending time in communities of learning. That’s inconvenient and expensive. That’s why students seeking “a stripped-down version of higher education are prime candidates for consumer-oriented, anyplace, anytime instruction.”
I object. That is not okay. While universities must find ways to reach nontraditional students, the answer is not to treat education like banking. We do not ask banks to change people’s hearts and minds. And because education is not like banking, universities must resist. Yet, Levine and Van Pelt might respond, students want convenience. That is also why professionals have a responsibility to understand the nature of their service. This is true even for bankers. Bankers should serve people, not hurt them. When companies like Wells Fargo offer customers easy credit even when they are aware that it will harm some of the most vulnerable Americans, we know that they have behaved immorally and irresponsibly, even if their customers wanted the money. When we learn that Wells Fargo targeted minorities, we also call this racist. But when Levine and Van Pelt invoke [Arizona State University online, Southern New Hampshire University, Western Governors University] they want us to call it innovation.
Levine and Van Pelt’s predicted future looks back to the distant past. It’s as old as the displacement of artisan shoemakers in early 1800s Lynn, Massachusetts, or the textile mills that would dominate the 19th-century New England countryside. This factory model doesn’t meet any of the intellectual, civic, or economic needs of today. Instead of bringing people together to think creatively, they offer canned curriculums made easy to complete and assess. It’s mass production, not innovation. If Charlie Chaplin were alive today, he could remake Modern Times using ASU, SNHU, and WGU as models. The setting is already there: staff at SNHU’s College for America are housed in an old mill. You can’t make this up.
The biggest irony is that somehow these new models are labeled innovative. How do intelligent people fall for this?
Read the entire piece here..
I think Neem’s critique of online learning and education for convenience is on the mark. This kind of education (if you can call it that) is little more than an economic stopgap to keep the doors of universities open. This cash cow approach leaves the university spinning its wheels. The primary goal of such a university is to cash checks, pay an ever decreasing number of tenure and tenure-track faculty and staff, and keep the institution alive. It works against the kind of deep learning that takes place over time in face-to-face intellectual communities. It favors short-term certificate programs over four-year experiences that immerse students in a particular discipline or way of seeing the world. It thus privileges professional programs over liberal arts learning.
Neem’s critique of the university is not new. It was also around two decades ago when I got my first tenure-track job. But I always believed that liberal arts colleges–and particularly, in my case, Christian colleges–might provide a bulwark of resistance to this consumer-driven model of higher education. I no longer believe that.
John, I teach philosophy at a community college in Northern California (granted, not a small liberal arts school), but was a skeptic about “online learning” (an oxymoron?) when I put my first course online in 2004. That semester I noticed three things. Everyone “talked” (since discussions had to be posted)–not just the eager five in the front row!–and students who needed more time to compose a response or reply had days, not seconds, to do so.
And students had to reply more on themselves to read and process the texts we studied. One student wrote in an open forum that he had to read the selection three times before he began to understand it. Yes! (A delightful contrast to looking forward to a great in-class discussion of the assigned reading only to discover most students had just given up and were waiting for me to explain all.)
I became less of a skeptic and more a believer that some of what Neem is talking about could be achieved online. Most students do best in a face-to-face environment, sure, and we’ve all read about or experienced the tremendous mental health toll of “remote learning” (another oxymoron?). But the disruptions many have experienced have, perhaps paradoxically, made the online college alternative the only choice. My goal, then, is to make my courses the best second best that I can.
But an online program is no panacea. While the success gap between online and f2f courses is narrowing, retention and persistence are still big challenges. We who live at our physical keyboards do recognize we’re not typical of those who live on their virtual keyboards, but it’s still difficult to design a course that draws students in and keeps them engaged. Yet I’ve seen LEDs go off in students (used to be lightbulbs, of course) in enough online semesters that, for all their shortcomings, online courses can (sometimes) serve students and not hurt them.
Yes, some schools do look to their (vast) online offerings as a way out of financial insecurity, and the quality of online courses certainly does vary. But I guess I’m trying to add a bit of nuance here so online programs are not simply dismissed as incompatible with liberal education.
Bottom line, while online courses are “convenient,” they’re not necessarily “education for convenience.” They actually require more discipline on the part of students (if those students want to succeed) and can offer engagement with classmates and the instructor that’s actually more personal and detailed–though missing the human-to-human physical contact. At least at the community college level, with care and attention to our online offerings, students can be ushered into a virtual community of learning (not an oxymoron, at least in my experience) which produces more than just technically savvy consumers. That, at least, is my prayer.
Dan: I saw some benefits of online instruction as well during COVID. I do think students can learn online. My issue is with universities using online instruction to undermine the traditional face-to-face culture of the university. Usually online courses are farmed-out to adjuncts and this justifies universities cutting tenure-track lines. Moreover, online courses prevent the creation of campus cultures. I have worked at a small residential college where history is taught best in an immersive face-to-face experience as students grow in their historical thinking skills through community, regular interaction with faculty, and over time–hopefully four years. I don’t see that world as ever coming back. This is why I am not sure how much longer I can stay in such a setting. I made a deliberate choice to devote my career to a professorship in this specific kind of environment. I really have no interest to be part of another kind of academic institution. So I wonder every day whether it is simply time to get out of the business. It is my students and my love for classroom teaching that keeps me going, but of late it has become much more of a kind of “me and my students” mentality than a “me and the mission of my institution” mentality.