ACTA's Must-Reads

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Erskine Bowles nails it

There was a very encouraging story in today's Raleigh News & Observer, detailing the University of North Carolina's efforts to cut costs. Each of UNC's seventeen campuses must make a ten percent cut to its budget, and system president Erskine Bowles is requiring that the cuts be taken from the administrative side. An e-mail of his speaks for itself; writing to individual campus chancellors, he said, "In the conversations that we will be having with you regarding your 10 percent budget reduction plans, we will be looking for absolute PROOF that you have focused FIRST on administrative reductions and solid evidence that you have taken steps to shore up our academic core." (Capital letters in the original.)

We couldn't have said it better. As the number of faculty as a percentage of total staff continues to decrease, and as program after program is established without eliminating those that are unproductive, it is incumbent upon administrators--and especially upon trustees--to ensure that the first thing to go is not academic quality. Bowles has it right, and we hope more university presidents will follow his lead.

Posted by Noah Mamis on August 31, 2009 at 04:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Informed citizenship and the core curriculum

Writing in the Peoria Journal Star, Phil Luciano hones in one of the key findings of What Will They Learn?, our latest report on general education requirements, and explains why it matters: "only two of the 100 schools require students to take a basic course in economics. That's horrifying in an era where the worldwide economy is falling apart, leaving many people confused as to the causes and possible solutions -- and ignorant as to whether our leaders are making solid decisions."

Democratic governance -- "government of the people, by the people, for the people," in Lincoln's words -- requires an informed citizenry that can understand the debates of the day. One need only look at the issues that have dominated the headlines in recent months -- the recession, the stimulus and now health care reform -- to realize the importance of having citizens who are economically literate. Not to mention citizens who understand how their governing institutions work and who are not afraid of numbers.

Posted by David Azerrad on August 27, 2009 at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Yalie speaks his mind

Our friends at Minding the Campus have published a Yale student's reflections on his education in New Haven. Matt Shaffer concludes his account of "Disorientation at Yale" by noting that for all its shortcomings, "the university still provides magnificent opportunities to those who know where to look to get a great education... It still provides an opportunity. But it no longer demands that its students become truly educated. It has other fish to fry."

Shaffer's closing remarks make a point that many critics of WhatWillTheyLearn.com fail to grasp. By giving Yale an "F" for only requiring one of the seven core subjects on which we grade universities, we are of course not saying that you can't get a good education there. The opportunity, in Shaffer's words, is still there. But the opportunity isn't enough. Universities have a responsibility to guide students and to make sure they don't squander the opportunity to get a solid well-rounded education.

That's one fish they should be frying.

Posted by David Azerrad on August 26, 2009 at 04:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"You know you are getting somewhere when..."

Over at Critical Mass, ACTA research fellow Erin O'Connor has written an excellent response to Stanley Fish's extensive post on his New York Times blog about WhatWillTheyLearn.com. It begins, "You know you are getting somewhere when even the people who make a point of disagreeing with you have to agree with you." Do read the whole thing.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on August 26, 2009 at 04:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

WhatWillTheyLearn.com hits U.S. News

A full-page ad promoting WhatWillTheyLearn.com -- ACTA's new college-guide website -- appears in the U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges issue, which was released today. Take a look:

ACTA's ad will also appear in the U.S. News college guide on which parents will be relying for the next year.

WhatWillTheyLearn.com has already received more than 20,000 visitors since we launched it last week at the National Press Club. The website and the accompanying report have been featured in newspapers across the country, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Daily News, and were also picked up by the Associated Press. Just today, two professors and columnists -- Stanley Fish of the New York Times and Walter Williams, who is syndicated -- wrote about it.

If you haven't had a chance to do so yet, go to WhatWillTheyLearn.com. You'll see why Mel Elfin, founding editor of the U.S. News rankings, called it "an invaluable and unique additional resource for parents."

Posted by Charles Mitchell on August 25, 2009 at 02:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The $35,000+ cafeterias

One of the most interesting findings in What Will They Learn?, our just-released report on general education requirements at 100 of the nation's leading colleges and universities, is the inverse correlation between costs and the rigor of the core curriculum. As a rule of thumb, the higher the tuition, the more likely it is that students are left free to devise their own general education.

The average tuition and fees at the 11 schools that require no subjects is $37,700; at the five that require six, it's $5,400. At the top U.S. News & World Report National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges, tuition and fees average $35,200, while the average grade is "F". At the state flagships, where the average grade is a "C", in-state tuition and fees average $7,300.

In short, at many of our best-known universities, students are not getting what they pay for. An education, it is worth remembering, is not simply about those who know more teaching those who know less. Educators also have a responsibility to direct those under their tutelage to the most important areas of knowledge -- especially in the contemporary university, where the number of disciplines and courses is overwhelming. By declining to do so, our universities have abdicated one of their primary responsibilities.

The cafeteria-style approach to the curriculum may be fun and may give the illusion of choice, but in the end, it will cheat many students of a sound, well-rounded education.

Posted by David Azerrad on August 24, 2009 at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A recent graduate's perspective

Yesterday, ACTA held a press conference at the National Press Club to launch our new college-guide website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com. One of our speakers was recent Yale graduate Michael Pomeranz, who is about to begin his tenure as an Urban Fellow in New York City. Michael, who was the 2008 Robert Lewit Fellow in Education Policy at ACTA, reminded the audience:

Students are often away from home for the first time, trying to adjust to that life and to make new friends, usually working to pay for tuition and, of course, working at the most rigorous schoolwork they have ever faced. To expect them to shoulder the additional burden of designing a curriculum is not only unreasonable; it is unfair.

We are pleased to republish here his most excellent remarks, as prepared for delivery. The other speakers, to whom Michael alludes, were Robert M. Costrell, a professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas; James A. Boyle, president of College Parents of America; and Mel Elfin, founding editor of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Michael also mentions the letter from former Harvard College dean Harry R. Lewis on WhatWillTheyLearn.com.

My name is Michael Pomeranz. I'm a recent graduate of Yale University. At Yale, I was fortunate to enroll in a program called Directed Studies. Founded just after the Second World War by faculty worried about the erosion even then of Yale's curriculum, Directed Studies has become a freshman-year-only, multi-course, writing-intensive, Great Books introduction to philosophy, history, politics, and literature. Each week, my classmates, professors, and I read three books, beginning with Plato and ending with Hannah Arendt. Each student wrote a paper each week. It was everything a general education should be: comprehensive, coherent, and introductory. It taught me to write. I still remember the first grade I received in college, on a paper about Herodotus and Thucydides: "79/C+/Organizational problems plague this paper." I improved, of course. I learned. That was the point of the class. It taught me. After a few semesters of choosing classes nearly at random from the course catalogue, my classmates would turn to me and say, "I wish I had done Directed Studies." We Directed Studies alumni knew we had something special. I attended a reunion of Directed Studies alumni at which Jose Cabranes, a federal appeals judge and a former trustee of Yale, among other things, called the choice to take Directed Studies the choice of the "thought-provoking over the merely self-affirming."

But self-affirming is what today's college curricula are. Every incentive on campus encourages students to deny the thought-provoking in stead of the easier, more comfortable, and, if you'll excuse the phrase, sexier classes. One that comes to mind, because it was offered with such fanfare every year, is the Yale history seminar "Shops and Shopping." That may be fine for an upper-level, narrow course on a specific subfield of the discipline, but it is not an essential foundation for learning. Further, because students who think they are "good" at history chose a course like this in lieu of, say, economics, they are not only allowed but encouraged when a conversation about how social security rewards and penalizes different workers differently merely to throw up their hands and say, "I'm not a numbers person." Professor Costrell elaborated on the particular problem of avoiding economics quite well.

What incentives pressure students away from a general education? On a campus where there are few or no general education requirements, a student taking a course outside of her familiarity -- that is, trying to learn something she does not know -- will find that most of her classmates are majors or specialists in the field. Her grades will suffer as a result. Her department will pressure her to take more classes in the department or in allied fields -- after all, the department will reason, she is not required to take these other classes, and the professors in the department quite understandably find their own subject much more interesting and relevant than wildly different fields. On a campus without formal general education requirements, the campus culture will articulate unofficial requirements. For example, parents and students will try to figure out which classes will best prepare the students vocationally, although President Boyle explained how that reasoning, if well meaning, is usually wrong. Similarly, students will attempt to catch the eye of employers and graduate schools taking a second or even third major or minor, stimulating a sort of arms race in subfields not appropriate for an undergraduate education. In short, schools that do not require a general education are not neutral in the question: they actually disadvantage students who "choose" a core.

The truth is that most students are no more likely to choose a general education in a cafeteria-style curriculum than we are to choose only leafy greens in our actual cafeterias. The first few semesters of college are difficult for any student, and especially for the 18-year old first-time, full-time students at the bricks-and-mortar colleges profiled in What Will They Learn? Students are often away from home for the first time, trying to adjust to that life and to make new friends, usually working to pay for tuition and, of course, working at the most rigorous schoolwork they have ever faced. To expect them to shoulder the additional burden of designing a curriculum is not only unreasonable; it is unfair.

I will not mention how trustees and administrations might use What Will They Learn? and its website, other than to say that I am a proud graduate of Yale, despite her grade; that I am very proud that Yale requires advanced foreign language, and rightly so -- although I found my language courses very difficult! -- because a proper understanding of another culture is impossible without familiarity with that culture's language; and that just as my grades went up from my initial C+, so I assume Yale's grades will go up after this initial evaluation.

I do want to say a few words about how What Will They Learn? and, in particular, the website can serve as a tool for students. First, for those students already in college, it makes a compelling case that the first few semesters should include survey courses in literature and American history or government, a thorough education in a foreign language and composition, and a college-level introduction to economics, mathematics, and physical or natural sciences. As Mr. Elfin pointed out, What Will They Learn? will become another important ranking system in the college education process.

Let me remind any of you who has not been recently an 18-year-old searching for a college, or the sister, grandmother, uncle, or nephew of an 18 year old searching for a college. The comparison tool on the website is an especially great function for comparing two or three or five or eight schools that a high school student might be considering. It compares graduation rates and tuition, all useful data, but first and foremost it considers the general education requirements. The things we use to compare colleges change: Student centers are unfunded, new groups founded, favorite courses have professors move on or are over-enrolled, freshman-year passions fade three weeks into class. But course requirements answer for the student the very sensible question she might have before choosing a college: What will I learn?

Finally, let me remind you all what may have been lost in the very interesting remarks by my three fellow panelists and in my remarks to this point, to wit, why students want a general education. A general education affords students a common language. When my chemistry major, pre-medical student, and engineer friends talk about even their most basic course work or technological interest, because I only really took one physical science course, I strain to recall high school biology and chemistry to keep up with what they're saying, and the truth is that in high school chemistry I was as often thinking about baseball practice as I was about covalent bonds. I have a friend who spent his entire college career avoiding writing papers for credit and, predictably, was totally lost when the discussion turned to any sort of argument advanced over a dozen pages. A general education allows us to talk to each other. A general education also introduces us to a field, which I was trying to get at earlier with my remark about Shops and Shopping. It may be an excellent course for someone familiar with popular history, but my friends in the engineering department really required a survey introduction to American history first. Finally, as Dean Lewis knows, the sort of enquiring young minds that seek a college education want a broad understanding of the world, and don't want their colleges to penalize them for seeking it.

In short, we want college education worthy of the name. What Will They Learn? helps us find it. Thank you.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on August 20, 2009 at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

What the rankings won't tell you

With the launch today of our college guide website WhatWillTheyLearn.com, ACTA gives parents and students information on colleges and universities that they won't find anywhere else. The website grades universities based on their general education requirements: the core courses students need to become informed citizens who can participate successfully in the global marketplace. WhatWillTheyLearn.com cuts through the verbiage of course catalogues and allows anyone to simply look up a university or college and find out whether it's making sure its students are learning what they need to know.

In short, we're looking at education -- not reputation.

The accompanying report What Will They Learn? makes clear why parents and students need the website: at most of our leading colleges and universities, the "do-it-yourself" approach to the curriculum prevails, and students are graduating with a thin and patchy education. Of the 100 leading universities from the across the country that we surveyed, only two require economics and only 11 have an American government or history requirement. Nearly half allow students to graduate without taking a single math class.

Posted by David Azerrad on August 19, 2009 at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A broader focus

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on new orientation programs for faculty at the University of Minnesota and other institutions. This passage is particularly striking:

"The emphasis during my orientation really came down to what I need to do to fulfill my responsibilities to the department," says Kirt H. Wilson, an associate professor in the department of communication studies, who came to Minnesota in 1996. "The old orientation was far less about, What is the university? What are some of its unique characteristics? And why should you be proud to work at this institution?"

That kind of feedback moved Minnesota to a major orientation overhaul. Hours scattered here and there now have become a three-day event that covers a wide variety of topics, including teaching and learning, diversity, mentors, governance, conducting research responsibly, and promotion and tenure. The program's mix of large lectures and small group discussions, which began three years ago, is designed to give all new tenured, tenure-track, and contract faculty members a sense of the institution's scope, while helping knit together a universitywide support network of seasoned and junior professors across disciplines. This year's orientation begins on August 25.

The article goes on to note that "at the University of Washington, new scholars can participate in a 'faculty fellows' program, a five-day event that is packed with sessions on many aspects of teaching."

All of this brings to mind a 2006 Chronicle Review piece by Stanley Katz, which began this way:

The new environment for higher education has created a situation in which professorial worlds are multiple, complex, and conflicting. I think I am not simply being nostalgic (though I "grew up" professionally at the end of the earlier world) when I assert that we have lost something along the way. We have lost a sense of commonality as professors, the sense that we are all in this together -- "this" being a dedication to undergraduate teaching and not just specialized research. We have lost a belief in the relevance of teaching undergraduates for the health of our democracy. We have lost confidence that what we do in teaching and research is inherently good, and not primarily a utilitarian occupation. We have lost the conviction that we have a calling, that as professors our duty is to profess.

We have also, manifestly, lost our sense of belonging to an ascertainable and manageable community of teacher-professors. Along the way, we have lost our commitment to the particular universities in which we work: We have become superprofessionals, committed to our research disciplines and organizations rather than to local teaching institutions. Of course, all of the commitments and values I have identified exist among today's professors. But they are not the norm.

Obviously, we don't know all the details on these new programs, but these schools appear to deserve credit for addressing the kinds of issues Katz rightly raised. They might also profitably include professional standards in teaching and scholarship, something Washington and Lee University covers in faculty orientation sessions, if they do not do so already.

Posted by Charles Mitchell on August 06, 2009 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Whose mess is it?

The August issue of Vanity Fair includes an in-depth feature on the economic woes facing Harvard. As the author, Nina Munk, succinctly concludes:"Harvard is in trouble." The endowment has plummeted to $26 billion from a high of $37 billion just a year ago, the debt is now at $6 billion -- on which Harvard pays $517 million a year in interest -- and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences faces a $220 million deficit. Anonymous sources predict the future will bring fewer professors, TA's, and support staff, less money for research, travel and books, the down grading of junior varsity teams and a range of other cutbacks.

According to Munk, "the inevitable recriminations and backbiting have started." Yet no one, it seems, can decide who is really to blame for this debacle: "Invariably, somebody else had the 'ultimate fiduciary responsibility.'"

And who would that be?

Presumably, the university's two governing boards: the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the latter being the body that former President Charles W. Eliot insisted should always "manifest an attitude of suspicious vigilance towards the Corporation." We do not know whether or how either one is engaging the momentous issues before Harvard, but we have no reason to believe that they are engaging in the kind of oversight that any good board should undertake. In fact, when Harvey Silverglate and Robert Freedman, two petition candidates for the Board of Overseers, started raising serious questions about the status quo, their efforts were met with a low-key but unmistakable get-out-the-vote campaign to sideline them.

Concerns about the status quo are surely in order. And no less relevant a source than Harvard Magazine offered a series of questions on governance in 2006 that bear directly on current events.

The editors aimed to analyze how Harvard was governed by posing the following questions: "Might the Corporation be more transparent about its work, and if so, how? Beyond choosing and evaluating the president, should the Corporation participate visibly in the making of or communication about major University decisions or priorities... ? How can a relatively small governing body which operates informally and through personal connections maintain good sources of information and perspective when its members increasingly come from farther afield and have other important duties to fulfill -- and when Harvard itself has grown vastly larger and more complex in recent decades?"

These questions are eerily prescient and, sadly, remain unanswered. Yet, if they are not thoughtfully addressed, recent events suggest that no amount of money in the world will ensure Harvard's continued prestige. As one unnamed member of the Harvard Management Company wailed in the Vanity Fair article: "This is a matter of leadership. This is not about money."

Let us hope that buck passing stops soon.

Posted by Anne D. Neal on August 04, 2009 at 04:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Welcome to the new UDC!

Today's Washington Post reports that the University of the District of Columbia will look very different this fall, following president Allen Sessoms' plans to restructure and revive the struggling urban public university. Among other reforms, UDC will be split into two separate entities, an open-enrollment community college and a four-year "flagship" campus with tighter admissions standards.

President Sessoms and the UDC Board of Trustees deserve credit for making tough decisions in favor of academic excellence and accountability. ACTA supported the plans when they were announced earlier this year and looks forward to seeing the fruits of this promising reform.

Posted by Sandra E. Czelusniak on August 04, 2009 at 03:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Replace the trustees -- not the governance system

In the Chicago Sun-Times, ACTA's president Anne D. Neal explains why the ongoing admissions scandal at the University of Illinois does not require a change to the current system of gubernatorial appointment of trustees: "better governors and better trustees -- not different governance systems -- are the key to change."

On Friday, the Illinois Admissions Review Commission, the state panel investigating the admissions abuses, voted to recommend that all nine of the governor-appointed trustees resign.

Posted by David Azerrad on August 03, 2009 at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack