St. Lawrence University: President

One of the things I love most about being St. Lawrence’s president is the chance I have to watch and appreciate the proposal, testing, assessment, and sometimes implementation by the faculty of visionary new ideas for transforming the teaching and learning environment here so that we better and better achieve our student learning objectives. The St. Lawrence faculty are hardly a settled, staid, complacent, bureaucratically resistant group. They build on the tried and true in a culture of continuous quality improvement.

So imagine my bristling when I read this from the recently-released report of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education—the so-called “Spellings Commission,” convened by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings: “American higher education has become . . . increasingly risk-averse, at times self-satisfied, and unduly expensive. . . . We recommend that America's colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement by developing new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies to improve learning, particularly in the area of science and mathematical literacy.”

“They sure haven’t visited St. Lawrence,” I said to myself and anyone within earshot.

Indeed, the word “faculty” appears just once in the entire report: “Faculty must be at the forefront of defining educational objectives for students and developing meaningful, evidence-based measures of their progress toward these goals.” In a report filled with hard criticisms of higher education in America, some deserved, and recommendations for our improvement, that the single most critical resource for accomplishing higher education, our faculties, receives no direct attention is astonishing. How, in a report meant to outline the kind of education students will need to succeed in and contribute to the complex world of the 21st century, and to recommend how we can provide such an education, can it be that the nature, training, status and commitments of the teachers is not a strategic issue?

One clue is that the report does not provide any serious and coherent guidance on what a high-quality, 21st-century higher education should be. So it is impossible to imagine what kinds of teacher/scholars one would need in order to make it happen. There are only brief suggestions that reading, writing, critical thinking, problem-solving, and mathematical and scientific literacy should be important learning higher education outcomes. In contrast, much space is devoted to the need to reduce barriers to transferring credits from one institution to another or from for-profit institutions to traditional colleges and universities, even as those institutions are criticized for low rates of retention to graduation. The vision of higher education that this suggests is of a cafeteria, a “grab and go” system about as far removed from intentional, serious, dedicated, demanding study as one can get—the kind of education that does not require us to think of faculty as a hugely critical strategic resource.

The Spellings Commission seems to be advocating a higher education that is narrowly tailored to training labor for a free global market. It is highly flexible, quickly adapting what is taught and learned to the changing needs of the moment in the world economy. Workers must be prepared to keep going back for more education to ready themselves for the next thing the economy needs them to do, and so higher education must develop the capacities necessary to educate older students in response to the narrow needs they have for preparation for the next job.

The greatest danger, if the Spellings Commission report is taken seriously, is liberal arts colleges’ resistance to total capitulation to the most narrow requirements of the global free market being seen as mere “risk aversion” for the “self-satisfied” purpose of preserving our high prices and relatively comfortable lives.

Liberal education requires teacher/scholars of a very special kind, we are producing way too few of them, and the number being produced each year is declining. Working with students in a project of engaged learning requires faculty who are not only educated and trained to share existing knowledge and to create new knowledge; they must also believe in human potential and see their work as a vocation, not just a job. Such faculty members, no matter their discipline, must take seriously the big questions a liberal education tries to help its students learn to address at the same time as they help students acquire the skills and specialized knowledge that are directly useful for specific jobs.
We see described in the Spellings Commission report a higher education system that doesn’t value or reward idealism, precisely when the education our students need most for the 21st century requires it. What’s missing in the report is a strategy for building the pool of teachers, from kindergarten through college, who can make a more broadly-based and accessible liberal education happen for students in America. It is a very serious flaw.

We at universities devoted to excellent liberal education must commit the necessary time and energy to sustain our successful efforts to help students achieve it; we must commit to continuous innovation, curiosity and the search for ways to affect our students more deeply and efficiently; we must constantly question our understanding of what it is important to teach and to know; we must model, individually and in our behavior as a university, a defensible vision of the good life and the good society so that our students become thoughtful and self-reflective about those matters; we must commit to sufficient assessment of what we do to ensure that we never become the self-satisfied kind of institution the Spellings Commission thinks it sees everywhere in America; and we must seek the resources necessary to sustain what we do over the long haul, for there will never be a time when a liberal education is irrelevant, despite what the Spellings Commission would have Americans believe.

I can tell you without hesitation that this is what we are about at St. Lawrence, and I feel a powerful partnership with our faculty in this work. I am proud to be working with them here.

U.S. Department of Education, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education. Washington, D.C., 2006, ix.

ibid, 23.