Relevancy

What on earth do we think we are doing?

Just because colleges and universities have always run in one way doesn't mean that they always have to run in the same way.

The world around us has changed. More people are going to college, and tuition is very high. This means that students have to work in order to avoid going into a completely crippling amount of debt before the age of 22.

What students need to know has changed drastically with technology. Being able to use a computer is now as important as being able to read, write, and compute. At the same time, knowing particular facts is less important; being able to find information and critically assess its quality and value has become extremely important. Yet right now we have a bunch of young people who have passed a bunch of tests and who don't know how to tell the difference between an authoritative web page and one that is a sales pitch.

Textbook companies have gotten onto the "let's make as much money as possible from students" bandwagon. They have many professors going along with them by having the teachers write textbooks (that royalty income is a really nice little supplement to a professor's salary) and through providing free textbooks to professors in hopes that those texts will be adopted.

Yet given the robust possibilities with multimedia through technology, textbooks themselves are an anachronism. [Note: I love reading a real book as much as anyone--yet textbooks are a genre designed only to impart information that is presumably to be memorized and regurgitated back on some test based on questions the textbook company provides to the professor--few textbooks are written with any kind of artful, inherently interesting prose. Textbooks are texts for a captive audience, bestsellers only in the sense that if you don't read the textbook, you may have wasted whatever tuition dollars you spent on the class in addition to the $150 book.]

Do we want a university degree to simply be a "union card?" Or do we want it to mean something?

If what we do is to be meaningful, we need to drastically reassess what students need and provide it for them. This means recognizing the financial position students are in and accommodating that position, e.g. through on-line courses that allow students to learn around their work schedules and recognizing that expecting students to be on campus five days a week is not realistic. It means understanding the world into which students will enter and connecting learning to that world--making university activities relevant. It means having the creativity to give students something new by building bridges from where they are to where we would like them to be. If we believe that a particular course is good for a student, let's help them to understand how they will benefit from that course in the world.

Finally, college students are in a transition in their lives whether they are 18 years old or 50 years old. Transitions are exciting but also scary. If we are to help students to make the transition in the most intellectually promising way, then we need to know who our students are and what their needs are--not just in terms of our little subject area, but in terms of their lives. The foundation of teaching is the relationship between student and teacher.