The University and The New York Times

In an article today in the New York Times by a Professor of Religion at Columbia University makes several proposals as to how to change the graduate education in America. It proposes a six step program.

Before continuing let me make a short disclosure. In 1960 when I applied to Columbia, I thought that staying in New York would be worth while, I was denied admission because I went to a Catholic High School. Donald Barr the Associate Dean sent me a nice four page letter telling me that a school like Columbia was for open minds and not Catholics. I still have the letter! I read it every time I think of Columbia and their sense of superiority. MIT fortunately did not bar Catholics, Jews or even non-believers, Hindus, or Muslims. Columbia felt that it was so advanced in its thinking that only a select group not tainted by some black arts religion could prosper.

Thus a religion professor at Columbia is in itself an oxymoron. How could a school which abhors religion have a professor of religion. Oh well, the facts are always a bit cumbersome. Thus perhaps the author of the op-ed may have a problem which is not academically related but of a local origin.

Now to his points.

"1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural."

This is classic pan-culturalism. When Harvard educated physicians I hope that they still teach them the art and science of medicine. Understanding the patient is also important, but the key point is becoming an expert in your field. At MIT we still inculcate as much as we can in the time allotted. It is getting a drink from a fire hose. There are inter disciplinary departments but each student and faculty member brings their own expertise. Academics who have remained in the academy are perforce of the system narrow specialists. Rarely do they think broadly because of the fear that they may not get tenure. That is a problem of the system, but it is a way the system works to create some consistency in academics.

"2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water."

Wow, this is a good one! I can see this in say nephrology, water! How about a gastroenterologist as in networks. In the sciences, engineering, medicine, law, and even business, there are core bodies of knowledge and their related practice which must be acquired. You learn the basics, you learn to apply, and you learn to expand. The proposed new age curriculum is bizarre. There exists laboratories, centers, and the like which are supra departments, and departments are all too often administrative homes, but they department is often not a stranglehold on learning in a growing and active field. MIT has the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Research Lab of Electronics and on and on. They come and go as new knowledge requires new linkages. It works my good professor. Yet why would one ever suspect it would work at Columbia! Remember my letter! Religion does not fit there except as perhaps a basis for history.

"3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff..."

Distance education is starting to explode. MIT has had a distance program between Cambridge and Singapore for over ten years. It now uses Internet II and advanced video. It is for a Master's Degree program. Many other institutions are doing the same such as NYU. There may be some merit here for some core undergrad courses but on the same hand there should be a massive restructuring of costs.

"4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text."

The MIT Media Lab has been doing this for decades. Not that it is readily transformable to other fields. Various theses in the sciences and engineering perforce of what they do have multimedia content. I remember twenty years ago when I taught the first course in multimedia communications at MIT I spent a great deal of time educating the students on just what the concept meant. Yet in mathematics the dissertation may be all of 20 pages and if one looks at say Einstein's dissertation is is about that length. In my day the target was 200-250 single spaced pages. The thesis was a part of the process. It taught you how to collect and present your ideas.

As I did the thesis I also was finishing my first book, which lasted a lot longer than the thesis. My book was targeted at a market, it was written to get a job, the thesis was written to get a PhD. As Einstein did his thesis as a prelude to his real thinking, and he did it while in Bern not Zurich, and he did it independently, perhaps that is something we could see again. All too often having doctoral students is a means to an end for faculty who just want free help.

"5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations."

The graduate does not have to teach. We expect most physicians to practice medicine or at least do research. We expect PhD engineers to go into industry, develop new ideas, create new companies. We expect lawyers to practice law. Business School grads, albeit more of a sophisticate trade school education, go back to business. However if you study fine art, English literature, religion, perhaps you took the wrong major. There once was a time that high school students looked at the Sunday NY Times classifieds for jobs and chose their major on that basis. Physicists, Chemists, Biologists, are all needed in today's world. A PhD in the footnotes of Duns Scotus, or the analysis of the scholastic arguments of Aquinas, albeit an interesting exercise, do not get one a job. On the other hand, those studies are always of value to mankind, it is always good to have say 50 scholars around in that area at any one time. But educating a continual flow of them is useless, except for keeping the already dysfunctional faculty employed.

"6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising."

On this issue I agree but with a reservation. Tenure is process. It is a process whereby the non tenured faculty member must publish and get acceptance by their peers. It has become a quite complex issue. I remember forty years ago that almost all the professional papers in engineering were written by one person. You knew who did what. Now every paper looks like a NEJM article with ten to twenty authors and you have no idea who has done what. In addition forty years ago the paper was written and your credibility was determined by who cited it. You had to go out and promote yourself. If you did so then the cites came in if the paper was useful and this added to the pile.

The process of obtaining tenure is critical. There must be some way of vetting, there must be some rules that we all accept. Then there must be a reward at the end. The Academy is the most political organization in the world. The old adage, "Why did you leave Cambridge to go to Washington?...To get away from the politics." is spot on. Thus there are continuing intrigues because of collections of bright minds and tremendous egos. There may be no way to avoid that. Perhaps tenure is there as a way to buffer that. Perhaps tenure has a purpose despite its downsides. Or perhaps it is the cause of these problems. One does not know.

The bottom line is that the US professional graduate schools are the best in the world. hey are competitive, flexible, and productive. The problem is that the overhead has exploded. There are too many Deans, Associate Deans, Executive Deans, Associate Executive Deans, and the like. I am still amazed when I walk down the corridors at MIT which once held class rooms and I find more Deans. It is like a fungal invasion in Florida! Secondly, Federal Program mandates had massively added to the burden ensuring all the appropriate government mandates are met. Cutting the overhead from the undergraduate program is more essential than fixing religion at Columbia.