WAYS TO CHANGE UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

 

The concept of integrated education requires restructuring both the pedagogical and the integrative aspects of the research university experience. The Boyer Commission recommends the goals that follow in order to meet the obligations of the university to all students, as expressed in the Academic Bill of Rights. 

 

One caveat: we believe that research universities must be willing and able to break free from the traditions that have thus far governed budget creation and budget approval in order to think creatively about goals and techniques for reaching those goals.

 

University budgets are now based on the principle of departmental hegemony; as a result, important innovations such as mew approaches through interdisciplinarity are often doomed for lack of departmental sponsorship. Departments necessarily think in terms of protecting and advancing their own interests, defined in terms of numbers of faculty, courses, and majors. Initiatives for change coming from sources outside departments are viewed as threats rather than opportunities. New decisions on distributing resources must be carried out at the highest levels in the university, and they can be expected to meet little enthusiasm from those whose interests are protected by existing systems.

 

Academics have long believed that research universities require large lecture sections combined with study sections run by teaching assistants in order to teach many lower division courses. Yet technology will unquestionably change the nature of pedagogy. We believe that faculty time is best invested in classes in which interaction with students is normal and integral. Used creatively, electronic communication techniques can also be uniquely effective for certain kinds of courses, for example, some of those that have been taught in large lecture sections. Students are able to fit course materials into their own schedules and repeat material as often as desired. Technology provides an alternative context for learning, a context universities need to use. It is also increasingly providing a channel of asynchronous communication between faculty members.

 

Universities have a special responsibility to develop educational technology that offers students unique opportunities for learning. At the same time, technology cannot be a substitute for direct interactions between human minds. Definitions of teaching load usually revolve around either how many hours a professor spends in the classroom or the total number of students being taught. However, if guided research becomes an important component of undergraduate education, the professor may well conduct research and class simultaneously but in a very different format. The old definitions of workload will have to e replaced. Time-worn assumptions and practices cannot be allowed to prevent needed change in undergraduate education.

 

Conventional economic assumptions gave governed administrative as well as instructional costs. Universities usually behave as though administrative costs are capable of change in only one direction. It is in the nature of bureaucratic structures to grow, and unrestrained growth again and again absorbs resources that could support academic creativity. Growth in size does not necessarily mean increased usefulness. Universities must be willing to reexamine and re-evaluate every administrative function and pare away everything that cannot demonstrate its value. There must be a willingness to see how functions can be streamlined, combined, or eliminated in order to provide some of the resources that new educational initiatives demand.

 

We believe universities must recognize the urgency of addressing misdirections and inadequacies in the undergraduate experience, sharpen their own plans and timelines, and move quickly beyond the realm of interesting experiments and innovations to that of the institutionalization of genuine reform. Our recommendations include both general statements in issues of particular importance and specific suggestions for achieving the improvements recommended. Together they envision a major overhaul of baccalaureate education and consequently significant shifts in the balance of relationships of research, graduate, and undergraduate education.

 

 

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