American higher education can and must be reformed. If we are genuinely serious about restoring higher education to its proper function, it will look little like it does today.
First, we need to restore full-time faculty to their role as teachers, and restore “general education” to the place it once held in molding adolescents into adults prepared to embrace their responsibilities as individuals and citizens in a complex society.
Today, however, with many faculty members focused on research (much of it of questionable value) and getting published (often in obscure journals of equally questionable value), general education has been gutted of its meaning.
Substantive core courses have been replaced with a smorgasbord of often unrelated offerings, many of which align with a professor’s research interests rather than the core courses undergraduates need for a well-rounded education and their post-college work lives.
Moreover, permanent faculty do less and less teaching. According to a 2017 Government Accountability Office study of public four-year institutions in several states, “contingent” instructors (part-timers and adjunct professors) were teaching more than half of all courses. To fix higher ed, we need increased emphasis on core coursework and senior faculty leading the discussion.
We also need to rethink who we want teaching our students.
When the G.I. Bill (1944) and the Higher Education Act (1965) universalized access to post-secondary education, huge numbers of new faculty were needed to staff our rapidly growing universities.
Especially during the 1960s, when the momentum of the civil rights movement was taken up by Vietnam War protests, young faculty combined with students seeking military-draft deferrals turned U.S. universities from places of learning into havens for social protest. This resulted in a generational shift in the mission of many faculty away from scholarly pursuit of the truth into the training of activists.
Higher education has doubled-down on this since then. As has been famously said, “Personnel is Policy.” Any deep reform of our universities will necessarily require changes in personnel.
However, the problem is that training a university professor takes a decade or more. There simply are not enough well-qualified individuals with a proper understanding of their vocation to replace even a small percentage of the current activist-minded professoriate with well-prepared teachers and scholars.
If we are serious about reform, we need to find ways to deliver higher education to the American public. That will require rethinking the use of technology, balancing in-person group learning with asynchronous personal learning, and finding ways to maximize the precious time of truly excellent faculty.
We can save American higher education. The question is: Do we have the courage and the will?
Frederic J. Fransen is the president of Amerion College in Huntington (W.Va.) and CEO of Certell Inc./InsideSources
