David C. Paris

The Equity Imperative: “Two Nations, Separate and Unequal”

this year is also the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report that famously declared that the United States was becoming “two nations, separate and unequal, one black, one white.” Higher education was similarly unequal and inequitable then and, unfortunately, is now. There is more access to higher education, but gaps in completion/success remain wide and even growing. If anything, the situation is somewhat worse. The new groups of students seeking postsecondary degrees have joined racial minorities in facing lower rates of program and financial support, completion and job success, and higher rates of default. As I noted in my editorial, these gaps are simply unacceptable in a nation as rich as ours. They violate our basic moral and political commitments to equality and equal opportunity. They are against our national interest by failing to prepare all students for work, life, and responsible citizenship. Closing these gaps is a national imperative. The articles in this section explore the issues related to equity and offer ideas about how make higher education more equitable. Estela Mara Bensimon’s essay notes that the idea of “equity” is now widely embraced at the risk of diluting and/or distorting its proper meaning. She writes, “I would like to confront the whitewashing of equity and reclaim the use of the word with fidelity to its anti-racist roots.” Equity, she argues, does not mean embracing color-blind, rationalist approaches. Rather, it requires explicitly taking race into account. “The authentic exercise of equity and equity-mindedness requires explicit attention to structural inequality and institutionalized racism and demands system-changing responses.” These include a commitment to parity in outcomes, “being color-conscious in a critical sense,” and critically examining racism and racial identity in everyday practices. The meaning of “equity” needs to be reclaimed as “rooted in achieving racial proportionality in all educational outcomes and in critically assessing whiteness at the institutional and practice levels.” The essay by Freeman Hrabowski provides one positive example of achieving equity by acknowledging and dealing with racial inequities. The inequities he found as president of University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) were typical, e.g. “we could not find one African American who had earned an “A” in an upper-level science course in the history of the university.” He and the philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff created the Meyerhoff Scholars program to “produce African American men who would go on to become research scientists and engineers.” It succeeded, and in time was expanded to “men and women of all races.” The “four pillars” of the program, “setting high expectations; building community; cultivating a culture of engaged faculty and student research; and committing to ongoing evaluation” had their roots in racial awareness and a commitment to equity. He suggests that this program implies a broader approach, including community outreach, to close equity gaps and to improve higher education As Michelle Asha Cooper and Lee Leegwater point out in their essay, achieving greater equity requires changes in policy. “While institutionally-focused stakeholders often draw on the tools closest at hand in addressing equity ... it is equally important for them to join forces with other

More Evolution than Revolution? The Work and Workplaces in Higher Education

described in the previous section are truly interesting and exciting. At the same time, most change in higher education, now and in the future, will likely occur in the context of existing institutions, structures, and programs. Without dismissing the possibility of, and even need for, rethinking many our ways of doing business, improving the work of colleges and universities is probably more evolution than revolution. The essays in this section suggest many positive changes that have evolved in response to changing student populations, societal needs, and understandings of teaching and learning. Carol Schneider’s sweeping essay about the “practical turn” in liberal education describes a range of changes in how liberal education is understood and, more important, increasingly practiced in colleges and universities. The basic aims of liberal education, “powers of the mind, responsibilities to self and others, and empowering knowledge,” remain constant, she notes, but also change “as educators’ approaches to those purposes are constantly in flux and constantly, often fiercely, debated.” The trends she describes turn away from disinterested, disciplinary-based study and a rigid distinction between general education and the major toward practices such as inquiry-driven and applied learning, interdisciplinary study and civic engagement. Equally or more important, these practices are and should be part of all students’ experience, regardless of institution or area of study since “the next Change era must be a season of farreaching redesign, equitably, for all students.” The essays by George Kuh and Gwendolyn Dungy underline and illustrate the shifts that Schneider describes. Kuh suggests that the current emphasis on producing job ready graduates misses fifty years of an evolving understanding of holistic student development, “the inextricably intertwined cognitive/intellectual and personal/social attributes.” The decades of literature and research on holistic student development is congruent with the current “groundswell of interest by stakeholders in ... what often have been labeled ineffable, ‘soft skills,’ yet their affinity with holistic student development is compelling.” Colleges and universities need to promote experiences in and out of the classroom—especially through high-impact practices and experiential learning— that will equip students for the contemporary workplace, and for society and citizenship. Indeed, “the need has never been greater for educating the whole student by addressing one’s intellectual, social, emotional, ethical, physical, and spiritual attributes.” Gwen Dungy, Executive Director Emeritra of NASPAStudent Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, describes the evolution of the work of student affairs in contributing to the developmental project Kuh describes. That contribution has involved responding to changing student More Evolution than Revolution? The Work and Workplaces in Higher Education

The Future is Calling (Now)

The previous essays described the decline in political, economic and cultural support for higher education over the past fifty years. At least some of the more recent criticism of higher education is directed at what are seen as rigid and irrelevant structures, programs, and pedagogy. The image of the college graduate with a low paying (or no) job living at home with high debt is common. And even students often wonder why they are taking this or that course or doing what they do in those courses, especially in relationship to getting a job. Many of these criticisms have attempted to shift the focus of the purpose of college to make employability primary. Many of these criticisms are overstated and unfair. College graduates fare well, especially in the long term, in the job market and generally in life, regardless of major. Immediate employability, and even direct training, are not the only or even the primary purpose of college. At the same time, there are legitimate questions behind these criticisms about how colleges and universities organize and pursue teaching and learning. The credit hour, the major, the lecture, disciplinary departments, and many other practices and customs seem to some to be disconnected from the needs of students and society. The articles in this section imagine and describe efforts to rethink and restructure higher education, efforts both inspired and supported by digital technology. Paul LeBlanc describes what he sees as the imperative for change in a “VUCA” (volatile-uncertain-complex-ambiguous) world. We need to shift “from our largely one-size-fits-all model of industrial education to curated and customized learning finely tuned to what a learner needs at the time of engagement, robustly supported by technology.” Institutional leaders need to see how IT can transform higher education, create safe spaces for innovation, emphasize outcomes rather than inputs, and look to other sectors as sources for inspiration and innovation. Doing these things will help us “reclaim the role of higher education as a driver of social mobility, equity, and source of answers to the daunting questions posed to us by our VUCA world. “ In a similar vein, Arthur Levine argues that what he labels “just in time” education “ignores established time standards, uniform course lengths, and traditional credit measures.” Moving toward this kind of education will respond to the fact that “Americans will need upskilling and reskilling throughout their lives. This is a very different brand of education than colleges have historically offered.” It involves, at a minimum, new kinds of credentials, competency-based education, and more targeted and customized offerings, all enabled by technology. Levine raises the questions of who will provide this kind of education, who will pay for it (and how), and how it will affect access to a changing educational environment. “Every college needs to decide what role it wishes to play in that education.” One of the more interesting efforts in realigning and restructuring the university has been the creation and success of Wester Governors University, developed in the 1990s. Sally Johnstone and Denis Jones, the principal architects of WGU, describe how they sought to create technologyenabled, high touch, competency-based programs that are more aligned to workforce needs and provided at lower cost. WGU, they argue, “encourages innovation in practices that can be tracked for success and altered to accommodate emerging technologies and advances in learning science.” What was initially created as a “proof of concept” has become a successful university involving institutional innovation and flexibility, high graduation rates, long term student success, and lower costs. They conclude, “In a world where the old higher education model is becoming less sustainable, universities and colleges will be forced to look at new models,” like WGU.

The Future is Calling (Technology)

In anticipating such major changes in higher education explored in the previous articles, all agree that technology is playing and will play a significant role. How should we be thinking about this role? The essays by Randy Bass and Diana Oblinger provide overlapping yet different perspectives on how technology’s role should be understood. Bass’s view is animated by a broad reconceptualization of integrative, inclusive education aided by and focused on technology. Up to now, he suggests, “educational technology” has involved “technosolutionism” involving a fairly narrow agenda—using technology driven advising, data analytics etc. to achieve specific goals, for example, “improvement in courses with high D/F/W rates.” We may be reaching an “inflection point” where this “narrative” gives way to an alternative, a broader and more radical approach emphasizing human-machine “complementarity.” This approach uses technology “to significantly improve how we educate—especially in the context of how we help humans get better at being human.” This includes re-bundling, using “the capacities and strategies of technology-enhanced education in the service of an integrative vision of learning” as part of a new set of priorities to promote liberal education for all. In a similar vein, Oblinger’s essay acknowledges technology’s importance while offering a more historical and contextualized view on how to understand its effects. Looking at the evolution of technology in student learning, student success, and research and discovery, she notes that in each phase in each area, the technology itself was less important than how it was applied in the area at hand. Like Bass, she sees the future challenge as how “to consider how networks, big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and wide-scale collaboration might influence the substance of education.” She concludes, “Students, faculty, and staff adopt, adapt and innovate with IT. As it evolves, so do our options, expectations and responsibilities. But no matter what its future form, we must remember that it’s not just about the technology—it’s what you do with it that counts.”

Symbol and Substance

Change • January/February 2018 Iwas in a meeting and the conversation turned to the fall’s set of campus controversies, especially around the names of buildings and the placement of statues and monuments. I was a little surprised to find the group, certainly liberal politically, was somewhat unsympathetic to the protests and dismissive of the controversies. The thought occurred to me that their sentiments sounded like those of elders of previous generations offended by campus protests. But given their more general political sympathies, I thought a bit more deeply about the conversation. What I think was driving their reaction was a sense that these protests were largely symbolic, with the real issues or results not in proportion to the expressed outrage. Building names and statues, it was suggested, are relatively minor in the scheme of things, and perhaps protest efforts should be focused on more important and substantive issues, on campus and beyond. That in turn called to mind Murray Edelman’s classic book The Symbolic Uses of Politics. Edelman argues that most of political life in a mass democracy is symbolic rather than instrumental. Voters generally are attracted to and believe in leaders and causes that they loosely connect to some concrete desires or resentments they might have. For the most part, people don’t know whether in fact there is any instrumental connection between their allegiances and their needs; indeed, they know little about policy at all. Thus, much of political life and debate in a mass democracy, Edelman suggests, involves “condensation symbols that . . . condense into one symbolic event, sign or act patriotic pride, anxieties, remembrances of past glories or humiliations, promises of future greatness: some one of these or all of the above.” (Edelman, 1964, p. 6) Some may see many current campus controversies as fitting this description, and perhaps that is what was troubling the group that I was talking with. The notion that these protests are mainly symbolic has some validity. But it should be put in context in two ways: first, by relating it to the further degradation of political life under Donald Trump; and, second, by clarifying what colleges and universities can do to produce healthy responses, symbolic and otherwise, to this degradation. First, Trump has taken symbolic politics to a new extreme. His positions on policy are ever shifting and self-contradictory. For example, he talked about universal health coverage, but the bills he favored would almost certainly have thrown millions off insurance. Likewise, the tax reform labeled as a middle-class tax cut is, as of this writing, largely symbolic, with little connection to reality. Condemning anthem protests is perhaps symbolic politics in its purest form. In doing this, what Trump has done is present himself as the condensation symbol for a host of resentments, from economic dislocation to racial animosity. It does not seem to matter whether what he proposes actually follows any policy logic. The only real question for him and his base is whether he “wins.” This narcissistic approach means that whatever he says is not bound SYMBOL

The Equity Imperative: “Two Nations, Separate and Unequal” (Community Colleges)

Any steps we take in the direction of greater equity will involve community colleges playing a major role. They have disproportionate shares of racial minority, low-income, first generation, adult, and immigrant students. The essays by Gail Mellow and Thomas Bailey describe how community colleges are taking on the challenge of equity, often successfully, and what’s needed to do this at scale. Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, argues that community colleges are “are the largest disruptive force in higher education of the past fifty years.” Their open access makes it at least possible to realize “the vision of universal, equitable higher education.” That vision, of course, has not been realized because of many interconnected factors, including eroding financial support and ideologically-based attacks on higher education. At the same time, she describes the incredible, Hesburgh award winning achievements of LaGuardia, despite the broader national “insidious effort to undermine what we in higher education, and particularly in community colleges, do and the support we receive.” She recommends greater advocacy efforts, especially from higher education leaders across the board, for greater support for community colleges and recognition of their critical role in achieving equity. Thomas Bailey, President of Teachers College of Columbia University, notes that community colleges have always had a dual role, providing vocational training and credentials, on the one hand, and preparing students for transfer to bachelors’ degree programs, on the other. There has always been some tension and tradeoffs between these two roles and now greater pressure on both—for “bachelor’s degrees for all” and for job-related “short-term and sub-baccalaureate awards.” All this while the community college “disproportionately enrolls students who face the greatest academic, social, and economic barriers to their success ... [and] spends the least money per student.” Though there are arguments on both sides of the debate, Bailey indicates some important advantages to the transfer function—if completion rates can be raised. He suggests a number of strategies including increased financial support, stackable credentials, pathway programs to increase completion, increased student services, and community partnerships to support these efforts.

Think Globally, Act Locally

The purpose of this paper is to pass along common-sense suggestions for conservation actions that individuals can take to practice conservation in their daily lives. Practicing conservation improves one’s efficiency in resource usage, helps to create and sustain a healthier environment and can diminish one’s contribution to the build-up of greenhouse gases and global change. Each action described in the paper has direct benefits that practically serve those who undertake them. So even if you are not interested in conservation for the sake of conservation, or if you are not interested in reducing your contributions to global warming and global change, then simply consider the following information as a list of alternative actions that might help you better enjoy life while treating Mother Nature more respectfully.

Having Lunch (Breakfast, Dinner?) with Culture

Change • November/December 2017 T his maxim is sometimes invoked to remind people about the importance of organizational culture. A new way of organizing work, a new vision for an organization, new processes, or any other attractive idea is unlikely to succeed unless it becomes part and parcel of the everyday attitudes, thinking, and norms of those who must implement it. It’s hard to deny this. I explicitly embraced it in an article I wrote about what I called “the Tinker Bell Effect.” I noted that many different kinds of K–12 schools had achieved success with wildly different philosophies ranging from strict, even rigid pedagogy to much looser, child-centered approaches. Contrary to appearances, what they had in common was a culture of belief, “the Tinker Bell Effect.” In Peter Pan, Tinker Bell drinks the poison intended for Peter, and her light is fading. Peter turns to the audience and tells the children if they clap really hard, Tinker Bell will live. They do, and she does. I suggested that the success of these very different schools reflected the faith the adults had in their approach and their ability to get students to buy in and “clap” (read: “work”) really hard. However, when you look up the saying “Culture Eats...” you find that it’s unclear what it says and who said it. Sometimes Culture’s meal is Strategy; other times, it’s Structure. Sometimes the meal is lunch; other times, it’s dinner or breakfast. It is often, perhaps typically, attributed to Peter Drucker, but it may have been somebody else, and that someone might have said “Beats.” One might be tempted at this point to shrug and say, as they do these days, “Whatever.” We know what it means, and we get the point. However, the inexact phrasing and hazy provenance perhaps indicate some deeper issues than who exactly wrote or said what. Perhaps this saying, like most of its kind, gains pith and impact at the expense of nuance and clarity. Yes, culture is important, indeed critical, to organizational success. But institutions like colleges and universities do not exist in a vacuum. There are structural and strategic considerations of all kinds that demand attention. These can include internal constraints beyond the reach of cultural transformation and certainly include external, environmental factors that affect the possibilities for reform and success. The articles in this issue, as many articles in this magazine do, give organizational culture its due, but also a number of them remind us of the importance of attending to strategy, structure, and process, and to the larger environment. In the former category, Elaine Maimon’s cover article describes the “Culture (B?)Eats Strategy [Structure?] for Lunch [Breakfast, Dinner?]”

Limits and Possibilities

Change ● July/August 2016 I t is unfortunate that Lyndon Johnson is remembered as much for the Vietnam War as for the Great Society. His vision of an expanded federal role in fighting poverty, defending civil rights and countering racism, and expanding the social safety net was as bold and admirable for its time as Roosevelt’s New Deal was a generation before. A crucial element in Johnson’s vision and program was an expanded national commitment to education, pre-K-college. The two quotes from Johnson illustrate a common, perhaps rhetorical, aspiration and a more sober view of limits and possibilities. Reading the first quote one might simply say, “Well, no, not really.” We may hope that education might help eliminate poverty and lessen inequality, create a more responsible citizenry, and promote mutual understanding, but it is unclear and even doubtful that education is “the answer.” Inequality is a function of many things, including public policies and market forces. Educational efforts to promote civic virtues and respect for diversity often exist in a hostile environment—see campaign 2016. By the same token, our education system ought not be tasked with or blamed for doing things it cannot do. For example, the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” predicted dire economic consequences if our K-12 schools did not perform better. In 2006, the Spellings Commission made similar claims about colleges and universities dragging down the economy. And yet, three decades after the first report and a decade after the second, the United States remains the most powerful and innovative economy in the world. This is not because of some dramatic change in our schools, which are performing only a little better if at all, rather it has to do, again, with a host of other political and economic factors. The schools are neither the primary cause of our economic performance nor the cure for economic woes. Johnson’s second quote provides a better, more sober sense of limits and possibilities. Although neither the answer nor the cure to our problems, education can help us deal with them. If education cannot eliminate poverty, it can provide greater opportunities for students of all ages and backgrounds to be better prepared to enter the job market. If education cannot rid us of incivility and intolerance, it can stand in opposition to them in the hope that we will eventually have a more humane politics and culture. If education is not “the answer,” it is at least part of the answer. But this partial answer requires us to do our jobs well as educators. Fulfilling even the most modest promise of education cannot happen if we don’t fully engage our students in their work and growth. The articles in this issue suggest there is a lot we can do better in this primary task, from more ground level class and course changes to broader ways about how we think about what we do and organize ourselves to do it. They offer commonsensical, even obvious (though not practiced) ideas for improvement at several levels. The lead article by Charles Blaich, Kathleen Wise, Ernest T. Pascarella, and Josipa Roksa makes a compelling case for one seemingly simple improvement in classes and courses. Using evidence from the longitudinal Wabash National Study of Undergraduate Learning Outcomes, Blaich and colleagues found, “one good practice that had a powerful effect on many important learning outcomes was clear and organized instruction. Unfortunately, almost half of the students in the study did not experience high levels of clarity and organization in their classes.” And, as the article by Michael S. Palmer, Lindsay B. Wheeler, and Itiya Aneece persuasively argues, at least part of being clear and organized is having a “learning focused syllabus,” as opposed to the more “traditional, content-focused” syllabus. A learningLIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES

The Man in the Mirror

As part of a sabbatical leave many years ago, I started looking into how research on policy, programs, and teaching in the K–12 system might be applied to improving higher education. Before too long I was a bit surprised to discover, mirabile dictu (or, in more recent lingo, “OMG” or “Get out!”), that there was a lot of research on higher education that was worth exploring. Ok, I am embarrassed (still) that I that I did not think of this at the outset. Of course, colleges and universities that research everything from the basic physical elements of the universe to the grand philosophical questions of meaning and justice would also study...colleges and universities. When I mentioned some of the material I had encountered in a subsequent committee meeting, I received another surprise. Some of the reactions included elitist dismissal, with one colleague saying that those were the kind of things community colleges worried about. There was also skepticism— everybody knew that most educational research was not very good. And there were also worries about academic freedom—that this material might lead administrators to try to direct how, and even what, faculty teach, just as in the K–12 system. To be fair, things are much better now...I think. There is a lot of conversation about evidence-based improvement. The National Survey of Student Engagement and other surveys can provide both background and usable data about students. The identification of high-impact practices and increased interest in assessment through rubrics and portfolios can likewise inform what we do. There seem to be more widely recognized ideas and data, tools and technology that provide opportunities for being more systematic and effective—professional—in what we do. And yet it also seems that taking advantage of these opportunities and engaging in collective reflection about our work, ideally based in research and evidence, is still not commonplace in higher education. For example, in a previous issue Charles Blaich and colleagues pointed to data that showed that clarity and organization in courses and classes was valued by students and increased their engagement. However, a substantial proportion of students reported that they often were not provided with clarity in instruction; worse, many faculty resisted the notion that they should do more in this area. More important, and more generally, it does not seem that institutions are routinely involved in looking into and reflecting on how well they are doing the primary task of teaching and learning, let alone using evidence and data to drive improvement. If we truly want to change to improve our colleges and universities, what is needed is a greater level of professionalism—in seeking and using evidence, in thinking in terms of building a community of shared norms and practices, and in creating relationships with willing partners in the larger society. The articles in this issue illustrate some ways how a more reflective professional community can be developed on several levels, from programs to departments to institutions, and out to broader community. Beginning at “home,” so to speak, the article by Sean A. Valles and his colleagues at the Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State describe a long-term effort to build a professional community that self-consciously bridges the “two cultures” humanitiessciences gap. They suggest that creating administrative structures and support that encourage such bridge building is essential and that there should be some widely shared norms—in their