Learning from low-cost private universities

Most people believe that private higher education is too expensive.  Their suggestions for reducing costs fall into two categories:

• cut unnecessary administrators and luxuries, and/or
• add very low-cost online courses.

These answers, though,are speculative.  No private institution has significantly reduced the cost to students through these methods.  In fact, it is from the most expensive and prestigious institutions that low-cost online courses are flowing.  Those schools seem unlikely to reduce tuition in the near future.

These speculative recommendations ignore the fact that there are many low-cost private non-profit institutions of higher education in the United States. The Department of Education's College Affordability and Transparency Center generates lists of the private institutions with the lowest tuition and the lowest net costs.  What do these schools share?

1.  Most have never had expensive administrators or luxurious campuses. 
2.  Few offer online courses.
3.  They have a clear curricular focus--usually religious--and generally offer a limited set of degrees.
4. They often are subsidized by religious bodies or in the case of Berea College, a massive endowment.
5. They are resolutely local (note, for example, the large number of low-cost private institutions in Puerto Rico).  Or put another way, few have national or global aspirations.
6. Instead, their aspirations are to serve a single population, or a particular sponsoring body.
7. Many are very small.
8. They tend to have very low retention and graduation rates.
9. Many are newly created.

A healthy discussion about the cost of private higher education would take these schools into consideration.  Their track records are not spotless--many teeter on the brink of collapse, others serve their students poorly by charging them so little.  

But four characteristics of theses schools are intriguing--curricular focus, local commitments, and recent origins.  All four flow against the trend towards offering more degrees, seeking global opportunities, and banking on the prestige that flows from venerability.  But education reformers who value private, non-profit higher education might bear these characteristics of real schools in mind as they try to craft the successful institutions of the future.

The best books I didn't finish in 2012, and what they say about how I ought to live

It has been six weeks since I posted to this blog.  I didn't intend to stop writing; this wasn't some sort of purposeful holiday pause.  I just found myself without anything much to say.

This is a sign in part of my feeling stymied and overwhelmed by work, which is the topic of much of my writing.  Enrollment management is a wonderful but tough business, especially in a time where demographics and economics and culture are all pointing to challenging times for small private institutions of higher education.  I'm confident that I haven't had an interesting thing to say about enrollment management for the past 6 weeks.

I'm wrangling Westminster's strategic planning process as the chair of the strategic planning steering committee.  We are in an early phase--drafting a vision narrative, kicking off a SWOT analysis, seeking feedback.  And because we are in an early phase we are in a time where silence makes more sense than essays do.

So in a holiday season (with lots of flu at our house), rather than write, I've been reading.  There are two types of readers--people who finish books and people who start them.  I start lots of books--many more than I finish.  Here is a list of stuff that I read but didn't finish in 2012; clustered by genre or topic, and then a few self-criticisms in closing.

Poetry
There are poets whose language is simply put but whose poems give me a feeling of being in the presence of something powerful and unspeakable.  In this, they are something like worship.  This year I've been reading three: Zbigniew Herbert, Mary Oliver, and Kay Ryan.

Religion
There is a type of book about religion that is at the confluence of community, ethics, and theology.  Some of the writing that sits in this location is liturgical, some of it is made up of essays, and some is personal narrative with religious overtones.  I'm currently reading these books: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Wisdom of Stability, Stanley Hauerwas, War and the American Difference, Shane Claiborne (and Wilson-Hartgrove), Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, Eric Elnes, The Phoenix Affirmations.

Civic Life
I'm working my way through these books about civic life.  (By civic life I mean that these are books about the civitas.  They touch frequently on politics, but it is not politics but the quality of public life in a particular place that is at the heart of their concerns.) Mary Parker Follet, The New State: Group Organization, The Solution of Popular Government, Robert Coles, Lives of Moral Leadership, James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play, and Roger Scruton, How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.


What does this list mean?  Clearly there are gaps between what is in my head and what is in my life. My intellectual interests are in local, small-scale responses to issues, especially those that draw on and build local associations, be they civic, cultural, or religious.  And just as clearly, if you looked at my life you probably wouldn't notice that fact.  I commute 70 miles round trip each day to work. I feel estranged from my own religious congregation (and perhaps religion) but can't find a new one.  My neighbors and co-workers think I'm on the political left; but if American conservatism had any Burke left in it I would be a conservative, or if there was a green libertarianism, that is where I would be.

What does your list of unfinished books say about you?

The Mormon Church's Massive Educational Experiment

There have been few bigger announcements in the past decade from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints than the one it made last Sunday--that young men could leave on missions at the age of 18, and young women at the age of 19. (The previous policy allowed young men to leave at age 19 and women to go at 21.)

The LDS Church made the decision in order to increase the number of missionaries and smooth their departure by making it possible for young men ( who make up the vast majority of missionaries) to leave on a two-year mission immediately after completing high school.

Time will tell whether this move increases the number of missionaries, and whether it has a positive impact on the number and quality of missionary work (though my bet would be yes to the first question and no to the second).  But the move also raises major educational questions.

For institutions in Utah, the big question is where they will go to replace the freshmen who would have enrolled in college before leaving on a mission under the old policy, but who will now go directly into mission work from high school.  Some schools (like BYU and UVU) will lose massive portions of the men in their freshmen classes.

For learning though, the questions are even bigger.  The experiment that the LDS Church has undertaken is this: will young men who serve missions be more or less likely than before to go on to college?  And, will those young men who go to college be more or less successful as students if they skip two years of education between high school and college?

There has been almost no discussion of this matter in the press.  The only nod to it came in the Salt Lake Tribune's sports section, where coaches and student athletes both agreed that going on a mission first would make student athletes more successful as athletes.

Setting aside the tiny handful of LDS young men who are college athletes, I expect that we will see the following impacts of this policy:

1. Top students who are also active members of the LDS church will be fine in college after serving a mission.
2. Decent students who are serious about their futures will also do well in college--the maturity that they gain on a mission will bolster their self-management skills and help them do better in college.
3. Mediocre students, and those in the new college-going demographics, will be slightly less likely to go on to college, and among those who do go to college, more likely to struggle in college.
4. Students who would not have gone to college before the change will not go to college after the change either.

On number 3 above, the recent report from College Board about the levels of college preparation of SAT test takers is instructive. Only 43% of SAT test takers are prepared to succeed in college.  This means that 57% of SAT test takers, (and presumably a higher proportion of those who don't take the test) aren't ready to succeed academically in college.  Among that number will be many Mormon young men, who, if they serve missions, will have let at least 2 years pass between graduating high school and entering college.

The gamble the church is taking is that mission service will help young men develop positive personal and educational maturity that outweighs the losses in learning and focus that come from spending a substantial time out of school after leaving high school.  That seems unlikely.  But if it is the case that taking two years off from formal education makes young men more likely to succeed once they return to schooling, then the world of higher education should take notice.

On administration, vocation, and going over to the dark side

At least since 1977, it has been possible for faculty members to "go over to the dark side."  This phrase is always directed (in jest or in anger) toward former faculty members who have become administrators.  As such, it betrays a great deal about some faculty--that they see administrators as impediments to faculty governance, or as a sign of administrative bloat, or as highly compensated power-seekers, or simply as representatives of the meetings, task forces, committees, reports, studies, regulations, rules, and procedures that are the most visible manifestation of administrative work.

There is undoubtedly some truth (and falsity) in each of these characterizations.  But they miss what is a bigger temptation in administration--that upon going over to the dark side, one will gradually replace belief in something bigger than the institution with loyalty to the institution and the techniques that make it work.

I describe this as a temptation, because it is technique far more than power or regulation that provides pleasure and reward to administrators.  It is the ability to solve problems, to work out conflicts, to find funding, to enroll students, to entice donors, to serve the institution and make its infrastructure stronger that brings satisfaction.  And after a time, a good administrator develops an entire repertoire of tactics that get this stuff done.

Let me be clear--getting this stuff done is good work, and institutions without a good dark side are likely to be short-lived.  But let me be clear also that becoming a technocrat can erode one's sense of vocation, of filling a higher purpose in work.

Vocation erodes for three reasons.  (1) Administrative work is generally non-reflective, and as such one can go very far down a path without thinking about the path's meaning. (Note that I am not saying the path itself is bad, simply that it is unexamined.) (2) Administrative work is busy, and as such it creates an energy, a motivation, that emerges largely from activity, rather than from purpose.  (3) Administrative work lacks a way to act out a sense of vocation, and educational institutions rarely reward vocation in administrators.

Let me say a bit more about point number 3.  Earlier this summer, while taking my first week-long vacation since I became an administrator ten years ago (see points number 1 and 2 above), I read Chris Anderson's Teaching as Believing.  It is an incredible book and wise both about how learning takes place and how the professor's vocation aligns with that learning, even in a secular setting.  Anderson is a Catholic deacon and an English professor at a state university, and his effort to give meaning to academic freedom by bringing his sense of vocation into the classroom was inspiring.

I was hard-pressed, though, to imagine what a book with the same spirit as Anderson's, but written about administration, (call it Administration as Believing) might say.  It is certainly the case that many administrators act ethically because of a set of religious or philosophical commitments to what is right.  And it is true that religious institutions often bring the religion's faith commitments to bear on administrative practices.  But it is also the case that administration rarely feeds one's sense of vocation, which instead gets built outside of work, or through relationships that exist at work, but outside of the real work of the organization.

By saying all of this I mean simply to say that institutions and administrators would be better off if going over to the dark side did not mean slowly losing the sense that one's work was about both earthly things (solving problems, launching initiatives, etc., etc.) and things that have meaning outside and beyond the institution that sponsors it.  Faculty members and students are encouraged to seek that level of vocation.  Administrators ought to as well.

Should service make things better?

The notion behind a typical service project or service-learning class is that acts of service, civic engagement, or activism take a flawed reality (homelessness, poverty, hunger, discrimination, etc.) and tries to move it towards an ideal (justice, equity, access, peace, etc.).

But consider these lines, from Shinso Ito, a master in the Shinnyo-en branch of Japanese Buddhism:

By channeling your energy into acts of service, you transform the ideal into the real.

Here, Ito is arguing that the "ideal" is that thing floating in our heads--some notion about how things are, or should be.  But since all is impermanence in Buddhism, that ideal in our heads is really getting in the way of our ability to perceive things as they are.  Service, he suggests, can strip away the falseness, both because it gets us out of the conversations running in our heads (in the way that meditation aims to do) and because it introduces us physically to a reality that does not get experienced otherwise.

So what are civic engagement practitioners to learn from Ito's argument?  To be humble in the face of reality.  To trust that when service leads someone to say they have been changed in ways they cannot describe, they are telling the truth, not being superficial. And to be skeptical of efforts to respond to abstract problems in abstract ways.  "Service" does not help "homelessness." But people can work together in ways that helps them see the world real, and as they remake that world, remake themselves as well.

Introversion, active learning, and the need for deep reflection

Susan Cain's new book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking,  argues that the current fascination with group-work and charismatic leadership is both a historical phenomenon and one that ought to be viewed with some suspicion.

This is particularly the case for educators, who, if they take Cain's work seriously, now must balance the benefit of active learning (which often draws on group work and values outgoing-ness) with the knowledge that such forms of learning have a politics to them--one that values extroversion over introversion.

It would be a mistake to think that old modes of learning--the lecture, the multiple-choice exam, etc.--were better for introverts than is active learning.  But it would also be a mistake to think that active learning, as is typically done, works for introverts.

Instead, teachers and learners alike ought to be paying much more attention to deepening the reflective and contemplative component of learning, for introverts and extroverts alike.  Reflection as is currently practiced in higher education is hardly reflective at all.  Writing an essay after service-learning that explains what you learned is no more reflective than writing a book review.  And that act hardly sustains the contemplative practices that lead both to learning and to a deeper sense of how one fits in the world.

For reflection to be meaningful, it must be regular, habitual, and tied to a philosophy of living well in the world.  These things were once a part of some types of colleges and universities.  Today they rarely are part of the core of the educational experience.  Some students experience such things, it is true.  But most students do not.

So Cain's book ought to remind us that reflection is more than an assignment at the end of a class. It is a way of being in the world, one that is good for one's health, and better for the health of our societies.

Campuses and congregations; friendship and learning

Given the implications of his findings, you might think that the student engagement world would have given Robert Putnam's recent work on friendship and religious congregations some attention.   In it, Putman and his co-author Chaeyoon Lim find that the more friends an active member of a religious congregation has in the congregation, the happier that person is.  Neither the number of non-church friends a religious person has, nor that person's religiosity have the same effect on the person's sense of well-being.  For this reason Putnam's advice to religious leaders is to pay more attention to church suppers than to the sermons offered before those suppers.

Putnam and Lim do not offer a hypothesis for why church friendships are "super-charged friendships" for actively religious people.  But it would be simple to theorize two explanations: friendships cement one's feeling that one's chosen religious setting is the right one' and friendship reinforces the teaching in all major religions that  loving relationships between humans exemplify the loving relationship between humans and their gods.  These theories also explain why friendships and religious practice have much less influence on well-being for people who are only moderately religious.

I read about Putnam's study the same day I got a series of texts from one of my daughters saying how lonely she is at college.  For her, the absence of meaningful friendships exacerbates the uncertainty she feels about her majors, the goals of her education, or the course of her future life.  When you are uncertain about the path ahead and feel like you have few friends, loneliness is an impediment to learning.

Colleges and universities talk frequently about the interaction between people in different roles, but we pay almost no attention to the connections between friendship and learning.  We tout, for example, small class sizes, the student/faculty ratio, research assistantships, group work, learning communities, as if interaction leads to learning and well-being.  But interaction and friendship are not the same thing.  Interactions are exchanges in one form or another--faculty member X shares information with student Y, who uses it in her research.  But friendships are characterized not by interactions but by a certain sort of emotional connection--common interests, empathy, patience, humility, unguardedness, forgiveness.

We know relatively little about how those emotional connections relate to learning and well-being.  But Putnam's study suggests that we ought to care.  For there are meaningful relationships between being in the "right" place, friendship, and well-being.  For educators who are concerned about retention, student engagement, learning, the discovery of vocation, and the creation of meaning in the lives of students, the question of how to identify, foster, and prolong friendships ought to be an important question indeed.

Can "community," not curriculum, be higher ed's best response to poverty?

It is a given among the policy classes that higher education is essential for economic improvement because people with college degrees earn more money than those without.  This view, while true as far as it goes, turns discussion of the value of higher education in two directions--cost and curriculum. So if a degree can be completed inexpensively, and in a field where there are employment opportunities, higher ed will have done its job by preparing students for economic well-being.

Ross Douthat's recent review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart makes a point that higher education leaders ought to consider in light of our increasing obligation to be engines of economic well-being.  Douthat writes that:

"Even acknowledging all the challenges (globalization, the decline of manufacturing, mass low-skilled immigration) that have beset blue collar America over the last thirty years, it is still the case that if you marry the mother or father of your children, take work when you can find it and take pride in what you do, attend church and participate as much as possible in the life of your community, and strive to conduct yourself with honesty and integrity, you are very likely to not only escape material poverty, but more importantly to find happiness in life."

Traditionally, colleges and universities have concerned themselves with some of the behaviors that Douthat cites above. But that attention has diminished over time, particularly as it has to do with making long-term commitments, finding fulfillment in work, attending church, and foregrounding values like honesty and integrity.  That higher ed should care about these things ought to be obvious from our roots in helping students to become something.  And it should be assumed in higher education's commitment to civic engagement.  But if we needed any additional impulse to favor these behaviors, let it be that they also contribute to economic well-being.  And inasmuch as the programs that attend to these concerns reside in the co-curriculum, then it is the co-curriculum--the site of community-building on most campuses--that deserves as much attention as the curriculum.

The future(s) of religious higher education

I have an ongoing interest in the intersection between religion and higher education for many reasons that readers of this blog might have noted--I'm religious myself (or perhaps religiously confused might be more accurate), I'm convinced that some spiritual practices have great potential for secular higher education, and I'm beginning to suspect that faith-based institutions do a much better job on institutional vision and the development of students than their secular counterparts do.

To these reasons let me add one more:  that current and historic practices in the creation of churches might provide some insights into ways to respond to challenges facing higher education.

Carol Howard Merritt's post "Ten Church Models for a New Generation" neatly summarizes emerging practices among people wanting Christian churches to flourish.  There are five themes that run through them.

• First, the church, like higher education, has moved away from the needs of its congregants, either by succumbing to the temptations of largeness and prominence or by remaining complacent while the world changes around it.  
• Second, that successful innovations are coming in small settings, where the trappings of religion--big buildings, formal worship services--are less important than building a sense of common purpose among those who are participating.  
• Third, that these new forms of congregations have, in many instances, developed new funding models as well, where the congregation is funded by proceeds from a coffee shop, say, or where the pastor is an entrepreneur.
• Fourth, these newly successful congregations emerge from the efforts of a few people who plant a new congregation and nurture it while it grows into something sustainable.
• Fifth, while in some new versions technology plays a central role, in most technology is secondary to the broader mission of the organization.

In this list one can see suggestions for institutions of higher education.  Particularly intriguing to me is the possibility of college-planting, where institutions of higher education select a couple of people to open what is essentially a store-front version of the home institution, dedicated to the particular needs of the people  who live nearby.  In a higher education landscape where even small colleges have hundreds of students, and where campuses are nearly always set off from their surroundings, store-front schools would be a place both to reach new participants, to innovate in education, and to build the sorts of relationships between learners and teachers that result in powerful learning.

Given that the trends that Merritt summarizes are emerging from the church, it may be that church-affiliated institutions are the first to move in the direction of small, emergent colleges.  But no school should overlook the potential of emergent churches to suggest ways to reach new communities of learners, explore new models of revenue, and reinvigorate the human relationships (and the understanding of those relationships) that were once at the core of what it meant to be an educated person.

In memoriam: Dorothy Day

The Catholic social activist Dorothy Day died 31 years ago today. We usually don't celebrate the 31st anniversary of anything, but there are at least four good reasons to pay attention to her legacy today.

1. For the impact she had during her life, Day is one of the least-remembered social activists of the 20th century, even among civic engagement professionals, and this in spite of her impact as an organizer and as a thinker.
2. Her approach to civic engagement--which blended deep religiosity, a passion for community, clear-eyed views of human nature and the complexity of solving social problems, and skepticism of the power of government--is a good match for American culture today, where mistrust of government is rampant.
3. Her response to poverty, racism, and inequity--the creation of houses of hospitality and the Catholic Worker movement--would be important examples to both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement if they wanted to turn their frustration into a positive program.
4. Her political philosophy rooted in Catholic social teachings of distributism, subsidiarity, and solidarity should inspire thinkers and activists interested in local solutions to economic, community, and family challenges.

The best entree to her life and work is her autobiography The Long Loneliness  and Robert Coles' biography Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion.   A bit of my own thinking about how her legacy could influence contemporary city planning is here.

Can learning outcomes be Good?

Having learning outcomes is better than not having them, and if they are measurable and agreed upon, a set of learning outcomes significantly improves a student's learning.  By this I mean simply that a course or a curriculum designed to help students towards certain ends--the ability to think critically, or communicate well--is better than one that aims simply for an increase in knowledge, or understanding of content.

But I sometimes hear the value of learning outcomes put more starkly--that they make it possible to create an education that focuses on what a student can do, not what a student knows.  Here I have two concerns.  The first is obvious.  Education is about both what a student knows and what a student can do.  Learning is not content-neutral; communicating well in one discipline does not mean that a person can communicate well in all disciplines, in the same way that being smart about philosophy does not guarantee that you are also smart about biology. This objection is largely, I think, about the rhetoric of the learning outcomes movement, not about its actual approach to education.

My second concern is this: that learning outcomes may make an education more practical, more demonstrable, and better.  But they may not make it Good. Education, at least in its traditional sense, is not only about what a student knows, or does.  It is ultimately about what a student becomes.  And if a school is interested in its students becoming something--engaged citizens, moral human beings, disciples of a god, whatever--then learning outcomes aren't enough.  The school needs a mission, and a culture, that talk about the ultimate value of education, about what is Good, not simply what is good.

In the absence of that, learning outcomes become techniques or skills.  They are useful things to be sure.  But highly skilled people without a sense of what is Good have done a lot of damage in this world.  And college campuses, for all their rhetoric about making a better world, developing leadership, and transforming learning, are no better than the communities that surround them.  In some ways, they are worse.

Can civic engagement build community?

For years my goal as an educator has been to help students become civically engaged.  It is easy to measure that engagement. If people do something--serve, run for office, protest, vote, start a non-profit, sit on a board, write to the editor, blog, tweet--to help the civic realm, then they are civically engaged.  And that civic engagement would ultimately build community.

In thinking like this, I was not alone.  The bible of the civic engagement movement--Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community--is built around the notion that a decline in civic behaviors leads to a decline in public life.  And the principal product (at least in higher education) of this view--the civic engagement center--measures its success by the number of volunteers, hours donated,  and service learning classes.  The goal of these sorts of organizations, then, is to get programs set up that lead students, citizens, and neighbors to do civic acts, and by so doing them, build community.

I have felt uncomfortable about this assumption--that doing is the goal of civic engagement--for a while.  And my discomfort has grown in the past month as I have had the opportunity to keynote two conferences about civic engagement.  In each conference--the annual Utah Chapter of the American Planning Association meeting, and the Utah State Board of Education's Social Studies and Civic Education in Utah's Schools event--I ended up arguing that the important thing is not doing (though doing is essential) but developing what William James called "the civic temper." It is the civic temper that leads to community.

The phrase comes from James' essay The Moral Equivalent of War in which he argues that a civilized society needs to eschew war but create something like military service to develop in its citizens "toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible...strenuous honor and disinterestedness;" the hallmarks of the civic temper.

According to Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell, James was inspired by the way that citizens of San Francisco responded to the earthquake and fire of 1906.  Without being governed, driven, or told what to do, they began to feed each other, care for the sick, and build a community from the rubble of the city.  Their actions, inspired by a sense of empathy, love, and sacrifice, were thwarted by the army and the city government, which moved in and destroyed their efforts in favor of a centralized response to disaster.

That story requires us to ask whether centralized, planned programs can create civic temper, or whether they are more likely to create compliance. (This concern is echoed in Barry Schwartz' Practical Wisdom which argues that rules and incentives--the main tools in the quiver of planned programs--limit the wisdom of people who are driven by them.)

Two of the leading activists and thinkers of the 20th century--Jane Addams and Dorothy Day--suggested that the goal of civic efforts should be to develop civic tempers, not build programs designed to get people to behave civically.  Addams' Hull House and Day's Catholic Worker movement were both built around hospitality, communal work, and the development of deep connections between people who have deeply different backgrounds but profoundly similar needs.

Out of the stories of Addams and Day, a set of priorities emerge, which I suspect lead to the creation of a civic temper, and thus to community.  They are:

• reliance on the moral will of people, not on rules and incentives
• aspiring to lead lives of common responsibility and mutual trust, not lives based around doing certain tasks ("service" for example)
• the development of formal organizations, not permanent organizations
• a focus on replicable outcomes, not scalable inputs.  In other words, there are many local ways to get to the goal of community. 
• Prefer the concrete over the abstract, and the story over "data"
• And, finally, seek for love (or what Addams called "ardor"), over anger

All of these virtues do two things--they help people avoid becoming settled in a program or a rigid approach to public life.  And all of them contribute to a sense of community among human beings. Let me close by saying a final word about love.  In their day-to-day lives people speak about love all the time--of place, of people, of jobs, of a higher power.  It is, in key ways, essential for community.

None of this is to say that doing is useless.  But doing is most effective when it both aims towards and comes from the civic temper.

Institutions with vision

Over the past couple of months I've written several times about problems with the vision of  American higher education.  Here I noted that strategic planning seems to drive institutions to look more like each other rather than helping them distinguish themselves, here that the thirst for prestige gets in the way of a serious focus on learning, here that too often campuses try to differentiate themselves on superficial grounds, and here that colleges and universities are not well-situated to respond to the big challenges facing the world today.

On this last point I should note the growing number of colleges that have realigned themselves to respond to climate change and the challenges of sustainability.  The College of the Atlantic has been hard at this work for quite a while, as have, in less visible ways, schools like Sterling College, Unity College, and Northland College. All of these schools are doing great work.  All of them are also quite small, but all of them have a powerful vision that helps shape the curriculum, learning, and environment of the schools.

I am deeply interested in the resurgence of religious mission in higher education (see, for example, Naomi Riley's God on the Quad, George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship , and Budde and Wright's Conflicting Allegiances) and with it the possibility that colleges and universities will return to serious education about the big issues in human existence.  If this effort interests you, take a look at the vision statement for Houston Baptist University.  HBU right now is a small but serious college about the size of Westminster.  But in their vision statement they aim for nothing less that creating a world-class protestant university, one where all the efforts of the institution serve bigger ends--helping students lead meaningful lives, merging the best of secular and religious learning, and setting the example for other religious universities to follow.

Think what you will about HBU, or about their mission.  But the ambition of the school, not for prestige for its own sake but to remake American higher education and American culture, is a big thing.  Something all schools should think about as they seek to create authentic visions that stretch them beyond prestige, financial sustainability, and the latest trends in higher education.

Hospitality is the thing that we've lost

Events like September 11th are almost impossible to write well about.  So today will be a day of failed blog posts, where writers struggle to say something meaningful knowing all along that  nothing can really be said.  It is a day for silence and contemplation.  More 4'33" than Beethoven's 9th.

Let me just observe, then, that the thing we have lost in the aftermath of 9/11--the thing we miss the most--is hospitality.  You see its absence in airports, where goodbyes now have to be said and welcomes made far away from the point of departure.  You see its absence in the stiffening of rules and regulations, in the limiting of options, in the officious way we relate in public capacities.  It is there in the decline of our public life, our inability to negotiate or be with people who differ from us.  It is in our schools, where the notion of home room is antiquated and the most important thing are outcomes.  It is in the stiffening of religious belief.  It is in the closure of parks, the need to eke every bit of capacity out of tax dollars, and time, and investments.  It is in the privatization not just of public services, but of the suffering resulting from unemployment, and loss, and fear.

So ten years on from 9/11, and in the ongoing fallout from the economic collapse, and in a nation where public life has become a zero-sum game, the thing I'll seek is a renewal of hospitality--sharing food, leaving the door open, welcoming people in, and remembering to accept those gifts from others.  I'll go to festivals, and parties, and host some myself.  I'll look for fear, my own and others', and see if there is a way to replace it with welcome, and comfort, and perhaps something that looks a little like love.

Civility, tragedy, and silence

Two days before the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, one of our MBA students, Julie Ann Jorgenson, was killed in an auto accident.

Representative Giffords' shooting has elicited endless comment and discussion, most of it asking whether immoderate rhetoric leads to immoderate action.  The debate itself has become an emblem of the question, with all sides claiming the right to be aggrieved and highlighting the flaws in their opponents positions. The President is compelled to speak.  All sides agree that the question is something we ought to talk about.

Julie's death was a tragedy--unexpected and unfair.  Her funeral was two days ago.  There were tributes to Julie, but little talk about the questions raised by her death--is life fair? who is to blame? what can be done to ensure it never happens again?  Instead, the funeral was a tribute to her faith, and a time to express sadness and loss in song, and in prayer, and in silence.

In the Book of Job, within a few verses Job, a "perfect man", had every earthly thing taken from him--his wealth, and his children, and his health.  His wife urged him to curse God and die. Then he scraped his boils with a potsherd and sat in the ashes.

Three friends heard of his suffering and traveled to be with him.  "And when they lifted up their eyes afar off, and knew him not, they lifted up their voice, and wept; and they rent every one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads toward heaven. So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great."

Once the seven days passed Job's friends interrogated him and Job responded with courage before them and before God.  But  those friends sat with Job in the ashes for a week, saying nothing in the presence of his grief.

Silence is an under-rated civic virtue.  It is one that pays tribute to tragedy, that acknowledges the inexplicable, that reminds that words are insufficient for most of the most important things in life--love, joy, pain, awe, suffering, sadness, transcendence, and death.

I know that there is some sort of civic duty that compels journalists and politicians and pundits and public servants to speak about public tragedies, to offer an opinion on everything under the sun.  But there is an equal human duty to fall silent before the suffering of others and rather than explaining, sit in the ashes and bear witness to grief.

Risk, failure, and the relationship between student and teacher

A couple of weeks ago my friend Bryce Bunting argued that risk is essential for learning on his blog Musings from an Amateur.   Bryce's point is well-taken.  Risk often heightens learning because it demands greater focus from students.  And it is true that schools often avoid risky moments and so limit student learning.

It is worth wondering why schools are risk-averse, avoiding moments where students are held up for public scrutiny.  (Public scrutiny is a key part of risk in Bryce's formulation.)  I think there are two reasons: first, risk entails the possibility of public failure, and second, most students lack the sort of relationship with peers and teachers that make risk and failure into ways to learn.  In the absence of these relationships, failure leads to humiliation or to punishment.

As I was thinking about risk and failure, I came across this article at Tricycle.com. There, Bonnie Myotai Trace argues that:

In order to work with a teacher, there needs to be a student. We often skip over this: It’s easy to waste time going through the motions of entering the room for a face-to-face teaching, but to not really be a student—to just be someone who wants to debate, or to prove something. Often, a real spiritual meeting is not available even though the bows have been made. Yet once a student develops, it is inevitable that a teacher will appear in their life. They create each other.


This is an interesting notion--that students create their teachers by the level of preparation, focus, and practice they bring to the learning setting.  A poorly prepared students creates a teacher who focuses on that poor preparation.  A well-prepared student gives rise to a teacher who can guide and shape that student.

Of course the relationship works the other way as well--a prepared teacher can help create a prepared student.  So what does this imply for the possibility of creating risk that results in learning?  That teachers and students must both be practicing risk, and that that risk-learning must be done in public.

This is a rare thing in the classroom--faculty often take risks, but much more frequently in writing or among peers than before students or in the classroom.  So how do people who care about student learning create a learning environment that favors risk?  Is there anything to be learned from religious practice (the student-teacher relationship in Buddhism is the context of the quote above, and the rest of the article has plenty of suggestions about spiritual practice and learning)?  From innovative corporations? (WL Gore and Associates, the namesake of the Gore School of Business, celebrates failure as a key component of innovation.)

Can colleges teach happiness? Can students learn it?

My college-age daughter visited Utah a couple of weeks ago. Her women's lacrosse team played Westminster's in a tournament. She had some challenging times in her first semester. She seemed much better. I said to her, "you seem much happier." She said, "Of course. I have friends now."

Happiness is a burgeoning field of research (my favorite book in the genre (of which I have read very few) is Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness) that is providing some counter-intuitive results about the roles of money, education, prosperity, and consumption in promoting or limiting happiness. The gist of many findings, at least as summarized in this recent New Yorker book review is that while much of our public policy is at least publicly committed to building happiness by limiting poverty, providing access to services, spreading justice equally through society, etc. many of those things are unlikely to bring about happiness.

Happiness studies are trickling into the curriculum (at Westminster mostly through an increased emphasis on positive psychology in intro psych courses) and much of our work in student support and retention is devoted in part to helping students feel happy.

I wonder whether it is possible to teach happiness. I suppose at one level it is simple--just offer a class on happiness in the way you would on history or child development or accounting. Students would learn a lot of interesting stuff about happiness; some may become happier.

Plenty of faculty would be opposed to such I course, I would guess, because the subject smacks of the sort of stuff served up on Dr. Phil and checkout counter magazines. Full-time jobs in higher ed (especially for faculty) have many of the trappings of happiness--good pay, good benefits, low stress (at least when compared to law enforcement, business, or customer service) and significant autonomy. But campuses can be home to a lot of unhappiness--dissatisfaction with work, poor relations with colleagues, grudges borne far too long.

And in the same way that teaching ethics courses doesn't necessarily improve the ethical behavior of students, should we expect that a course on happiness would make students happier? My daughter's experience brings me up short, as do the reports of increasing unwellness among college students. She is at school on a Christian campus with all of the trappings of student support, prosperity, and support systems favored in higher ed. But none of that, in her telling at this point, helped make her happy. Having friends did it.

A small center affiliated with Stanford University, the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education is taking a different approach, by teaching not happiness but compassion and the skills (especially meditation) that in theory bring it about. Their work is based on Buddhist views of the sources of compassion; they are now developing a curriculum on altruism. One of their hopes is that learning altruism will lead both to compassionate acts and to happier people.

So maybe the pathway to happiness in higher ed is to come at it sideways--don't teach a course on happiness, but do focus on altruism, and compassion, and satisfaction as goals. And find ways to understand and highlight the benefits of these things, many located in the co-curriculum, for the overall well-being of students, staff, and faculty.

Should we be doing this? Is it our responsibility to teach happiness? To help students learn it?

Thanksgiving week odds and ends

I've been away for the past week, visiting California and my oldest daughter who is 2/3 of the way through her first semester. A few thoughts piled up. Here they are, in no certain order (and without any promise of value):

1. Disneyland and the first-semester of college can have the same impact on teenagers. We spent two days at Disneyland along with about 20 members of my wife's family. Disneyland is an amplifier. It heightens things for good or ill. Food costs more, crowds are more crowdy, fun is funner, anxiety is more troubling. Everyone knows this. But being there with my college-age daughter, and talking with her about her feelings about college, reminded me that college, especially in the first year, does exactly the same thing. Disagreements escalate, uncertainty becomes paralysis, confidence becomes certainty. What should colleges do with the amplification?

2. Faculty need to make more mistakes. Neil Postman suggested in The End of Education that faculty could improve student learning by making mistakes on purpose when teaching. Students would learn by truth-testing their faculty. Just before break I gave my students an assignment but with the rubric for another assignment included. Interesting responses from my students--a couple tried mightily to fit their assignment into the wrong rubric. A couple pointed out my error. But most went along with the assignment as if nothing was wrong...

3. Student evaluations of faculty may become obsolete. As faculty focus more on student learning, student evaluations of faculty may make less sense. This is especially the case when faculty use student-centered pedagogies--problem-based learning, collaborative learning, etc. The student evaluation hardly touches at all on the work faculty do in these settings.

4. Gratitude is much more important for learning than we credit it for. Or perhaps more correctly, ingratitude impedes learning. Ingratitude locates obstacles outside of the learner--I can't learn because of the teacher, or the course, or the subject, or the school--and because those external obstacles can't be controlled, learning dies.

Thanks to all of you.
gary

Do we provide students a morally serious education?

A couple of thoughts on the eve of Veteran's Day, wrapped around a question on the moral seriousness of education.

My father-in-law, Klem Schneider, grew up poor in rural Idaho. He knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted out of Lewisville. He saved money from working in potato fields to go to college at Utah State University. At first he wanted to be an engineer, then a doctor. He and my mother-in-law, Linda, married while they were in college. Then my wife, Kristine was born. Klem decided that to become a doctor with a small family would cost nearly everything. He enlisted in the Army, which paid for his medical school and then sent him to Vietnam. He spent a year there, doing public health and general practice. He sent line drawings of water buffalo home to his kids.

He was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and as a result got cancer--Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma--for the first time while Kristine was a senior in high school. After two more bouts of cancer and chemo, he died at the age of 61, 7 years ago. I took his oral history while he was in remission. He was a serious man, and he made a morally serious decision about education while still young--that he would get enough education to ensure his family was never poor. If that meant signing on for a tour of duty in Vietnam in order to go to medical school, so be it. He never regretted his military service, not because he was particularly patriotic, but because it got him the education he wanted, needed.

C.S. Lewis fought in the first world war. On the cusp of the second he preached a sermon at Oxford on the topic "Learning in Wartime." This was his question--

As students, you will be expected to make yourselves, or to
start making yourselves, in to what the Middle Ages called
clerks: into philosophers, scientists, scholars, critics, or
historians. And at first sight this seems to be an odd thing to
do during a great war. What is the use of beginning a task
which we have so little chance of finishing? Or, even if we
ourselves should happen not to be interrupted by death or
military service, why should we -- indeed how can we --
continue to take an interest in these placid occupations
when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are
in the balance? Is it not like fiddling while Rome burns?

Lewis' answer was to put war into context. He told his listeners,

The war creates no absolutely
new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human
situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has
always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture
has always had to exist under the shadow of something
infinitely more important than itself.

The United States have been involved in big wars for 19 of my 44 years, and in little wars (Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada) for a chunk of the rest. More than half of my academic career has been during wartime. I wonder by what acts of denial I (by which I mean most of formal education) have managed to ignore the aggravation of the permanent human situation caused by these wars.

Last year I had 3 young veterans in my history class. One had recently been deployed in Iraq. They were no better students than the rest of the class. They shared the weekend binges and late semester declines with the rest of their classmates. But on big issues--the role of government, the purpose of authority in society, freedom, justice, race, and war--they spoke with conviction and complexity--that their classmates could not match.

Pointing to the weaknesses of higher education is a common practice today. It costs too much, it isn't accountable, students don't always learn, etc. etc. Let me add one to the list, on the day before Veteran's Day. Many students, most perhaps, don't get a morally serious education. Or to use the language of the previous post, they get very little to help them choose to pay the price of experience. Perhaps this is OK--a degree and a vocation and some personal growth are good things. I wonder if it is enough.

Politics in school: pandering, fear, and the need for hospitality

My junior high school daughter brought home a letter from her principal last Friday. In it he laid out the school's response to the Obama education speech today. Some teachers would show the speech in their classes. Students whose parents didn't want them to see it could opt out. Students who wanted to see it but whose teachers didn't show the speech could watch it during flex time.

At the end of the letter he added a bit of boilerplate about the importance of schools in training citizens in a democracy. Pleasant Grove JHS takes its responsibility to teach about democracy seriously, he wrote. because it does so he encouraged parents to teach their students about the importance of civic engagement. Or, seen in light of the school's waffling on the speech, "teach your kids about citizenship because you've made us so afraid that we won't do it."

Politicians have a long history of using schools to spoon out pablum about the value of education. In the 80's Reagan Administration officials visited schools on Martin Luther King Day (once it passed against their wishes) as if that somehow marked his legacy meaningfully. The recent President Bush was in a classroom in Florida when airplanes hit the twin towers. First ladies have spent countless hours reading in elementary schools. Candidates hold stump speeches in high school auditoriums all the time.

What do all of these instances suggest about the power of politicians talking to students? That they have almost no influence because their message (always some variant of "work hard in school--you are our future") is so weak that everyone suspects it to be a front for some secret nefarious hidden goal--to gut public education through NCLB, or to undermine the radical power of the civil rights movement, or, today, to establish socialism.

In other words, I'm suggesting that the educational pandering of politicians and the fear of educational conspiracies are tied together in an endless feedback loop. More pandering leads to more fear which leads, of course, to more pandering (at least on those occasions when a political leader manages to end up in a school).

How do we break the cycle? Probably not through more teaching about democracy, which is only a step removed from hypocrisy at the outset. And not by avoiding the subject by keeping controversy at arm's length. (This is Utah's speciality, where we value "nice" above nearly any other virtue.) Instead, I would suggest renewed attention to educational hospitality.

By hospitality I mean "welcome of guests." But I mean it in a deeper sense than merely opening school doors. I mean that schools (K-12 and HE) need to develop a commitment to welcoming outsiders (be they politicians, immigrants, community members or other outsiders), listening to them, and breaking bread with them. This commitment must be part of a school's DNA--built into their recruitment of students, their sporting events, their educational programs, their learning goals.

For as start down this path I would recommend Elizabeth Newman's essay, "Hotel or Home? Hospitality in Higher Education," in Budde and Wright, eds. Conflicting Allegiances: The Church-Based University in a Liberal Democratic Society. Newman's title suggests her argument--that schools are like hotels, keeping students, their parents, and matters of import at a pleasant arm's length. Instead they need the grittier engagement with other people who are at once strangers and fellow-citizens in the community of school.