Changes to Higher Education in America

Karen Kelsky’s fantastic education blog featured a guest post in August that exemplified a problem in higher education that has been a major source of irritation in my own academic career. While the results of what’s happening at Canisius College are horrible, I feel like there’s a bigger question that needs to be asked.

Why are THESE people in charge?

Canisius decided to get rid of a significant number of professors from their humanities department. The people making those decisions are President John J. Hurley, VP of Academic Affairs Sarah R. Morris, and the Board of Trustees.

President Hurley is a former bankruptcy lawyer with undergrad degrees in English and History. VP Morris is a zoologist with undergrad degrees in Biology and French. The Board features a cast of lawyers, corporate fat cats, and other members who share the same conspicuous absence on their CV that Hurley and Morris have.

Nobody has a degree in Education on any level. The closest I could find was board member Nancy Ware co-founding EduKids with a friend who had a Master’s in Early Childhood Education. That’s it. Not a single person with any formal background in any area of evidence-based educational theory or practice. Much like I said about K-12 education in the US, the entire system has been given over to people who have absolutely zero qualifications to make educational decisions of any kind.

How do we fix it?

First, a bit of an anecdotal example.

My job as an instructional designer covers four distinct nursing programs. Traditional, Second Degree/Veteran to BSN, RN to BSN, and Graduate. While there are different tracks within the Graduate department, they all operate under one specific level of leadership.

Of the programs we offer it’s irrefutable that our most successful, and most sought after by students, is the Traditional program. These are students who apply to be accepted after their sophomore year of college who are expected to finish their nursing requirements in 4 semesters and then pass the NCLEX test to become an RN.

It should surprise nobody that the program director for the Traditional program is the only one we have who has a degree in education in addition to her degree and background in nursing. Having someone who understands pedagogy goes a long way in establishing a good program no matter what field is being taught. Why that’s so difficult for universities to remember is baffling to me.

Second, viewpoint diversity is a must.

When the cries about higher education being a liberal cesspool first started gaining traction in the 70s and 80s, it was patently untrue. Today it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff cover this in great detail for part of their excellent book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

To offset that, several steps are being taken to reclaim diversity and conversation on campuses to counter the destructive callout/cancel culture of the moment. Shout downs and aggressive opposition like the incident at Evergreen State College (that led to a MASSIVE lowering in enrollment) are just as appalling as the “leadership” provided by Jerry Falwell Jr. at Liberty University (my alma mater for everything before my PhD program).

It should come as no surprise that neither George Bridges (Evergreen president) nor Falwell Jr. had anything even slightly resembling a degree in education. Neither was fit for any kind of academic leadership and neither institution has promoted any kind of honest intellectual diversity or disagreement under their reigns.

Finally, let’s embrace the gap year.

There’s a decent amount of research on this now, and we’re finding some interesting results. Gap years increase student performance over the full four years and graduation rates increase. 90% of students go to college after their gap year. The self-reported data matches the empirical data with students reporting a wide variety of benefits.

There is now a Gap Year Association that provides a wide swath of resources for everything from how to finance the gap year to what you can actually do with that time. There are a few books about gap years as well, covering things like the personal benefits and a robust overview.

Universities would do well to not only allow, but encourage, incoming students to get some real world experience before entering the higher education world. Many of the immature and delusional movements rising up today would likely be squelched as students realize they are indeed antifragile and capable of debate and discussion across a broad diversity of topics and viewpoints.