Since I just attacked undergraduate education at big-time sports universities in
the United States, a fair question is: what could be done to solve the problem?
My answers are an elaboration on those suggested by Murray Sperber in his Beer
and Circus and those outlined in a highly influential report on what works and
doesn’t work in American colleges, known as the Boyer Commission report.
Modest proposal 1: Big-time U’s should slim down by thousands of
undergraduates until the student body is of a size that can be handled by the
faculty. The only other alternative is to increase the size of the faculty by an
order of magnitude, which is much more inconceivable.
Modest proposal 2: Universities should separate undergraduate teaching from
the graduate training and research activities. Here I part company with Sperber
in that I do not propose having a few universities devoted exclusively to
research and many more to undergraduate education, though that is certainly a
viable model. But it is time to stop hiring faculty on the pretense that they be
good teachers when everyone knows that they are tenured and promoted because of
their research and in spite of their teaching. Let’s hire good teachers to do
the teaching and good researchers to do the research. If a few individuals can
do both, so much the better.
Modest proposal 3: Hire at least some faculty whose research is in pedagogy.
It is astounding that a lot is known about how the brain learns, and on what
works and doesn’t work in teaching, but that most faculty and teaching
assistants are wholly ignorant of this field of work. Having at least a few
colleagues who know what they are doing might actually help.
Modest proposal 4: Abolish passive teaching methods that turn undergraduates
into zombies: no more lectures (with or without PowerPoint™) and increased
emphasis on inquiry-based learning, small class discussions, open-ended research
projects and the like.
Modest proposal 5: Raise the standards of acceptance into four-year colleges:
require a minimum (high) score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test or equivalent
exam. Despite the fact that standardized tests have their limitations, scores on
college entrance exams actually correlate much better than grades with students’
abilities at critical thinking because of rampant grade inflation. We need to
acknowledge that while equal opportunity to go college is a right, acceptance
into university must be based on readiness. Community colleges exist to bridge
the gap for those whose performance indicates that they would not be best served
by the university experience.
Modest proposal 6: End athletic scholarships. They encourage the exploitation
of athletes, cause resentment among other undergraduates who had to work harder
to get where they are, and in general defeat the whole point of a
“scholar”-ship. It is not by chance that the Ivy League universities do not
award athletic scholarships and prohibit their teams from playing bowl games.
Modest proposal 7: Shut down the NCAA. We don’t need an organization whose
only purpose is to exploit youths through the encouragement of a beer and circus
atmosphere (March “madness” comes to mind as an example) and that does
absolutely nothing to further the only legitimate goal of a university:
providing the best education possible. Playing sports is a great thing and
should be pursued at colleges, but intramurally as a recreational activity and
extramurally only as a relaxed pastime to which no high stakes are attached. Let
the professional teams pay to raise their future stars, as in every other
civilized country in the world (did you realize that in 2000 the NCAA was
looking at allowing athletes to seek loans based on future professional
earnings? Do these people have no shame?).
Modest proposal 8: Treat coaches as regular faculty, with tenure track and
salaries comparable to those of any other faculty in any other discipline. And
tell them they are lucky to get that much, given that their job is far less
important than the one done by the rest of the faculty.
Modest proposal 9: Educate university administrators that the university is
not a for-profit business, it is a community service. Ergo, it makes no sense at
all to call in business marketers to improve the school’s image or to devise
strategies to increase the “customer” base, while the true needs of students
(and, by extension, their future employers) go unmet. Schools that provide a
good education don’t need to present a spin-doctored façade.
Modest proposal 10: Vote only for legislators who pledge to provide
acceptable levels of State funding of education at all levels, including
college. Education, together with health care, is among the most important
rights that Americans still have to fight for, which are taken for granted in
other industrialized countries.
Is all of this going to happen? Probably not, unless the current demographics
and economics change significantly, or a grass-roots movement takes hold to
really take our schools back. I give it a chance in a thousand, which is not
much worse than the likelihood of getting a good education at a big-time U
anyway. Think about it.
