History of Higher Education: Transformation of the Enterprise at Port 80: Boardwalk

In order to understand the transformation of higher education in the 21st century, we have to understand its long past and where its features came from.

Of all our modern organizations, universities have the oldest continuous existence. They are far older than any for-profit company or national legislature, few of which exceed 200 years. Understanding this long past will help us understand higher education's resistance to any fundamental structural transformation.

Higher education started around 1200 A.D. in Paris. All of Europe had only a few thousand hand-written books, usually in churches in cities. Scholars gathered around the books. Students gathered around the scholars and paid them to read from the books. Lecture comes from lectus, Latin for reading. The books were hand-written on parchment, the stretched skin of a sheep or goat, and were too large to move easily and too valuable to lose sight of. They were often chained to the wall or to the shelf they sat on and were thus called catenati, Latin for chained.

Being loquacious, the scholars often paused and commented on the reading. The students took hand-written notes. The books, the reading, the notes, and the commentary were in Latin, which provided a sufficient barrier to entry.

The Paris model placed the professor at the center of the institution and enshrined autonomy as an important part of the academic ethos.

The business model illustrates the relationship of the stakeholders and the revenue stream. In the production model on the left, the faculty is clearly in the center. The knowledge (K) and values (V) pass through the texts (T) which are passed through the faculty orally (lower vertical arrow) to the students (lower horizontal arrow).

The classes, both room size and number of students, couldn't get any larger than the reader's voice could carry. The students paid the faculty directly and often rented the rooms. The faculty and students lived in the same neighborhoods and ate and socialized together. This is very important. From biographies and memoirs, it is clear that much of the education took place outside of the classroom in the university district, which came to be called a campus in the 1800's.

The earliest book list of the University of Paris, in 1286, names some one hundred thirty-eight different titles for rent. At Bologna and elsewhere every professor was required to provide the university ... with a copy of his lectures so they could be transcribed and rented or sold.

While that core concept not only survives but thrives today, it has been modified to also have the following features.

Printed books - after 1500

Early printers called their craft the art of artificial writing. Printed books were seen by many as the end of traditional oral values, just as Socrates had railed against writing two thousand years before. As Daniel Boorstin write in The Discoverers, "The learned community warned that popularizing books would vulgarize learning. 'More means worse.' 'Abundance of books makes men less studious.' Printing was a whore who ought to be excluded ... by law."

University faculty fought printed books for most of the 1500's. Nothing, they said, could replace an authentic hand-written manuscript, called "natural" writing. Perhaps professors feared that their oral transmission of knowledge would no longer be relevant. Encouraging printed books would be like giving away the store. Who would listen to a professor's lecture (reading and commentary) when they could read it themselves?

When it became plain that the press was a menace to the calligrapher's craft, the organized scribes and their conservative allies sought laws to protect their monopoly. ...

In the early decades of printing it was risky to commit one's livelihood to so new a technology. While scribes were devotees of an ancient, honorable, and remunerative craft, in those days printers had to be willing to take chances. How long would this new technology last? In fifteenth-century Europe innovation itself was an unfamiliar and suspect idea. ...

Printed books were doctored by eraser and paintbrush to give them the manuscript look, revealing the nostalgia of booklovers who were still irreconcilably attached to the "handmade" product. ... In this competition between the handwritten book and the printed book, who could predict which one would win in the long run?

The printing press, moveable type, cheap paper, permanent inks, and legible type faces brought affordable texts to all students. What made them popular was when Aldus Manutius reduced the paper size to a quarter of the traditional sheep and goat skin. Several books could be easily carried by one person. That may have been the first distance education.

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by the device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1836)

Cheap textbooks could have disintermediated the faculty. Knowledge and values could be directly transmitted to the students. However, as long as the faculty kept saying things in class that weren't in the textbooks, students continued to go to class and take notes, as they do today.

The production model on the right simply added an information channel, a text channel alongside the oral channel between the teachers (white ball) and the students (horizontal arrow). As long as there's a difference between the two, the students continue to perceive value. What happens now when students feel as though teachers are just "reading from the textbook"?

Vernacular languages -- after 1700

Higher education saw what the Bible in vernacular languages, especially Luther's German, did to the Church's power, authority, and control in the 1500's. When the vernacular crept into education to replace Latin (and Greek), this development was widely decried as the fatal blow that would fragment the university and lower standards beyond any acceptable level.

While the vernacular languages made knowledge more public, they also regionalized it. Not until the latter half of the 1900's did Latin finally disappear from university graduation requirements.

The true University of these days is a Collection of Books.
-- Thomas Carlyle (1835)

Industrial Revolution -- after 1800

Along with the science behind the development of machines and standards, this permanent shift from agricultural and rural to industrial and urban was seen as the end of traditional educational values and a fatal lowering of standards.

It's called a revolution because it's the point at which work became separate from home. If you want to roll back progress to recover traditional values, you should roll them back over two hundred years.

By that time, higher education had learned to live with printed books and without Latin. To preserve their craft from the next onslaught, industrialization, faculty had to establish two new traditions: academic freedom and tenure. It took more than a century for these new traditions to be institutionalized and to survive legal challenges. How long will it take higher education to adapt to the Information Revolution?

Academic freedom

Throughout the 1700's and 1800's, academic researchers were coming up with ideas, models, and the evidence to support them that challenged the ancient wisdom of religions and governments, which tried to suppress the ideas.

The narrow definition of academic freedom allows faculty to conduct research, no matter how crazy it may appear or how unpopular and threatening it may be to other faculty, administrators, the public, or the government. It also allows faculty to document, publish, and teach the results of that research. According to the American Association of University Professors' (AUUP) 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure:

Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.

The wide definition of academic freedom, the one often invoked as a knee-jerk reaction, allows faculty to say and do anything they want to, including nothing.

Universal education

To operate machines, to follow standardized instructions, and to record accurate information about industrial and financial processes, more people had to be able to at least read and write in a rudimentary manner. Starting in the mid-1800's, access to primary education was granted to the masses, including women, immigrants, and the poor. It later became compulsory. As society delayed entry to adulthood, secondary education became accessible to the more studious of these masses.

Higher education held out, maintaining standards. The Morrill Act in 1862 made public lands available for state colleges and universities. Since the faculty became state government employees, elaborate procedures were developed for professional advancement and tenure.

As recently as 1940, less than 5% of adults over 25 had a bachelor's degree. By the end of the century, about 25% did. How low, traditional educators wonder, can standards get?

Tenure

As you can see in the model on the right, the faculty might appear to be a pure white crust of academic freedom coats a cool mantle of tenure that completely protects and insulates the red-hot inner core.

In the 1915 "General Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure," the new American Association of University Professors (AAUP) proposed the linkage between academic tenure and faculty compensation. The AAUP's 1925 Conference Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure was endorsed by a body of college presidents who believed tenure was essential to preserve academic freedom.

Tenure's central purposes were written in the AAUP's 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.

Tenure is a means to certain ends, namely (1) freedom of teaching and research and of extramural activities, and (2) a sufficient degree of economic security to make the profession attractive to men and women of ability. Freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society.

Knowledge / information society --

In 1900 production workers out-numbered information workers by almost five to one, but by 1980 the information workforce exceeded the workforce which was sustaining the production base of the society.

It is difficult to accept that more than half of all our human resources should be going into an activity as abstract and ephemeral as the manipulation of knowledge -- that it should be engrossed in the virtual world of information rather than that of physical objects. ...

In the 1770s production tasks had begun to be automated in the English Midlands, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. Two centuries later, businesses were spending more on information about things than on producing the things themselves.

Sponsored research

Academic disciplines -- after 1900

From the beginning, "the Paris model ... enshrined autonomy as an important part of the academic ethos." As knowledge of nature and society expanded beyond one person's ability to learn it all in one lifetime, academic specialization developed. By the turn of the 20th century, it had created a soap-bubble curriculum in higher education. Faculty taught what they knew and it was up to the students to reconcile the contradictions and integrate the knowledge. Like soap bubbles in a dish, any one faculty member or course could be added or subtracted from the curriculum without affecting the others. No faculty member had to talk to another faculty member let alone integrate their courses. The courses could be and were taken in as many sequences as there were students. At most higher education institutions, no two students take the same courses in the same sequence. Only one or two courses are taken by a plurality of all graduates.

Why? Because faculty are responsible for their teaching, not for student learning, and they can't agree on much. Entombed in their sub-disciplines, they hardly speak the same language, anyway. Biologists work on biology problems. Historians work on history problems. Except when they come to blows over the history of biology, the two faculties lead predominantly autonomous lives.

The students use this model to fragment their learning. When they finish their philosophy course in logic, they chalk up the credit, dust their hands, and say, "Well, that's over. I don't have to worry about logic anymore." This makes plenty of sense, because an inference that the philosophy teacher found logical may threaten the accounting teacher and the student can get into big trouble for carrying one over to the other.

I had a teacher in advertising who told us, "Forget everything you learned in English class about writing. What we do here is the real writing."

Teachers ... are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbor may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own. In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up all together even the pretence of teaching.

This observation was made by Adam Smith over two hundred years ago. It was the kind of observation that turned him away from an academic career and led to his writing the capitalist bible, The Wealth of Nations, in 1776. To him, higher education was an inefficient, unproductive, parasitic industry.

Objective testing and grading systems -- after 1920

Until World War I, testing and grading as we know it did not exist. The modern "objective" measurement of human beings as though they were objects or machines began with Frederick Taylor and E.L. Thorndike, who developed standardized tests.

Standardized testing [is] aligned with modernist, philosophical assumptions that are based on, �the point of view that all nature (including human nature) is governed by invariable laws and that these laws can be discovered and unerringly applied by means of science�. ...

Educational theorists intended to bring their version of �science� into their respective models to reduce uncertainty in order to ensure a standardized product and create more efficient educational institutions. ...

For the first seven hundred years of higher education, there were three summative "grades": A few students were given honors, some were asked not to return, and the rest just kept studying.

One of the books I read twenty years ago that helped shape my thinking is The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. It's out in an expanded and revised edition, which I recommend. While Gould focuses on the racism and sexism inherent in IQ tests, he's showing where today's testing and grading systems originated in the 1920's.

As best I can tell (which means I don't have a ready reference), our A/B/C/D/F grading system originated at West Point after WWI based on the Army Testing Program of Robert Yerkes.

It was "the difference between a relatively unscientific procedure and one which is striving to fulfill the essential requirements of the scientific method." These scores were then converted into letter grades from A to E. An A indicated high officer potential whereas an E signified someone unqualified for regular army service.

The arbitrary number of 65 was established at the cut-off for flunking out because the military did not think it would need as many officers in a world without wars. The standardized bell curve reinforced this pseudo-scientific notion, now run amuck.

the steady stream of requests from commercial concerns, educational institutions, and individuals for the use of army methods of psychological examining or for the adaptation of such methods to special needs.

Earlier, Gould had quoted the concerns of Alfred Binet, one of the developers of psychometrics, about the faculty's use of testing to sort students:

They seem to reason in the following way: 'Here is an excellent opportunity for getting rid of all the students who trouble us,' and without the true critical spirit, they designate all who are unruly or disinterested in the school. ...

It is really too easy to discover signs of backwardness in an individual when one is forewarned.

Binet's purpose could now be circumvented because a technology had been developed for testing all pupils. Tests could now rank and stream everybody.

There might be some validity to this grading of people like eggs or widgets if the assessment instruments (the "tests"), the assessment procedures (the "testing") and the processing of scores were done scientifically. In fact:

it is only through considerable expense that the national standardized tests have been able to survive legal challenges to their validity.

routine testing is done by faculty who are largely innumerate and are amateur test-makers.

Faculty make little attempt to create tests that are valid (does it measure learning? or teaching? or test-taking skills? or short-term memory? what does it predict?) and reliable (does it eliminate measurement error?). Faculty do little item analysis, nor do they test for the effectiveness of distractors (wrong answers).

Faculty then draw inferences (course grades) that are not logical. Even if tests were valid and more or less reliable, the difference between, for example, an A- as a "90" and a B+ as an "89" is not supported by the standard error of measurement.

The schools then compound these statistical errors. It is not hard to construct a set of numbers whereby a student could get the highest grade in every single course he or she took yet graduate at the bottom of the whole class of students.

In a 1983 article, "Grades: One More Tilt at the Windmill," (in Bulletin, edited by A.W. Chickering. Memphis State University Center for the Study of Higher Education), Paul Dressel attacks grading as:

an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by biased and variable judges of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite material.

The Pros and Cons of Typical Grading Practices from the University of Washington points out that the faculty's grades:

are easy for faculty to calculate and students to understand

are consistent, which gives the illusion of fairness

are based on fixed scales, which are arbitrary and thus meaningless

constrain curriculum development by forcing exams and assignments into an easily calculated point system

miss student abilities and achievements because they do not provide feedback as to actual content mastered by students

discourage collaboration and encourage competition

Research shows that grades bear little or no relationship to measures of adult accomplishment.

However, grades are effective for sorting people by providing a rationale, however irrational, for flunking out students who don't get high grades. For some reason I don't comprehend, students attach their self-worth to grades. "I'm an A student" means "I'm an A person." In my experience, the fear of low grades is the single greatest impediment to learning.

All the power is in the hands of the grader, who can adapt the grades any which way he or she wants to. The students have no input or influence. The grader then hides behind a unitary number that rank-orders the students. This is psychologically destructive and mathematically indefensible. It doesn't do a thing to help the students learn.

Gould concludes his discussion of "two deep fallacies ... reification and ranking" (pp. 59-61):

Quantitative data are as subject to cultural constraint as any other aspect of science, ... they have no special claim upon final truth. ...

We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life ... by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within.

Direct service to the economy through vocational training

The MBA (Master of Business Administration) is the most common graduate degree, followed by the social workers' MSW (Master of Social Work), the teachers' MSEd (Master of Education), and the lawyers' JD (Juris Doctor). When was the last time someone "read" the law before passing the bar exam?

These degrees entered academia as a direct service to the economy. To the extent that these degrees certify the oral transmission of a body of knowledge measured by objective testing, they are training, not education. Training scales well; at the elite MBA schools, classes often have a hundred or more students.

By design, graduates arrive at Commencement (a "beginning") with a dim memory of what to do and little knowledge of how to do it. This predicament gives rise to the derision of "book learning" and to the phrase "it's academic" to mean "it's useless".

Education, as opposed to training, is a messy process of exploration and discovery measured by repeated failure. Watch a five-year-old at play. The typical MBA program is not designed for education. Many traditional educators decry these vocational programs as a fatal lowering of standards.

Vocationalization has been an important trend in higher education change in the past two decades. Throughout the world, there is a conviction that the university curriculum must provide relevant training for a variety of increasingly complex jobs. The traditional notion that higher education should consist of liberal nonvocational studies for elites or provide a broad but unfocused curriculum has been widely criticized for lacking "relevance" to the needs of contemporary students.

Students, worried about obtaining remunerative employment, have pressed the universities to be more focused. Employers have also demanded that the curriculum become more directly relevant to their needs. Enrollments in the social sciences and humanities, at least in the industrialized nations, have declined because these fields are not considered vocationally relevant.

Summary

The model on the left shows the accrediting organizations and revenue sources (set of four parallel horizontal arrows) driving the faculty (white sphere) in a hierarchical relationship to the students who have temporarily emerged from society (set of four gears) to be improved.

The faculty transmit knowledge (K) and values (V) to the students in written texts (T) and oral lectures. Underneath run the wheels of family, employers, civic society, and MRO (supporting) industries such as food service and textbook publishers. Note that their gears don't mesh. The students, sponsored by their families and employers, for a time become the product of this business model, the raw material that must be improved and have value added to them. The orange line starting at the left edge of the model -- the student -- broadens and sharpens to a point after it passes under the faculty.

The higher education industry's basic production model -- oral transmission of a fixed body of knowledge by autonomous faculty -- has survived the above challenges over the last eight hundred years. Five challenges stand out:

Higher education has survived these threats by holding steadfast to its models and by creating a superlative customer-service culture centered around the faculty. This culture is characterized by:

The research process is well-established. The experimental or scientific method developed in the 1600 and 1700's has been refined and it has been adapted to the social sciences. Its success has been remarkable in terms of knowledge and its industrial and commercial application.

Let's examine more closely another of the core processes: teaching. The fancy word is pedagogy.


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modified: February 15, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/boardwalk/history.htm

Percentage of Americans 25 and over with at least four years of college
1910	2.7
1920	3.3
1930	3.9
1940	4.6
1950	6.2
1960	7.7
1970	11.0
1980	17.0
1990	21.3
2000	25.6

History

Higher Education: Where teachers meet learners

Driving Forces