This blog post is part of AAC&U’s blog series on Making Excellence Inclusive.
The death of Trayvon Martin has sparked a national conversation on racism, the law, media, and ethics, and it is clear that Martin has put a face on the systemic problem of racial profiling. As an African-American man, I cannot help but think how easily Trayvon Martin could have been someone I know and love: a nephew, a cousin, a friend. In fact, I cannot help but wonder if it could have been me. I grew up in small-town Virginia, in a quiet, predominantly white community similar to the one where Martin was shot. And now, in Washington, DC, I live on a similar street, and I often walk to the corner market with the hood of my jacket shielding my face from the cold. All of this prompts me to ask what the AAC&U community and higher education can learn from this tragedy, how it might inform our work to foster the potential in all students—particularly men of color—as well as our efforts to build an informed, antiracist culture. Most of all, I wonder what is at stake if we as educators fail.
AAC&U aims to answer those big, complex questions through its national meetings, such as the March, 2012 Student Success conference and the upcoming Diversity and Learning conference in October, as well as through publications such as Diversity and Democracy. At the Student Success meeting, I attended a session facilitated by Norm J. Jones of Dickinson College and John Michael Lee, Jr. of the College Board. According to research from the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center, 51 percent of Latino males, 45 percent of African American males, 42 percent of Native American males, and 33 percent of Asian American males between ages 15 and 24 who graduate high school will end up unemployed, incarcerated or dead. I cannot help but picture Trayvon Martin’s face in those numbers, the faces of my nephews. For educators in a country that professes equality and democracy as its founding principles, these numbers and the dire portrait they paint are unacceptable. And they not only reveal what is at stake, but demonstrate that the stakes for these students are high.
In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications—intended and unintended—of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This fifth and final posting is by Hilary Pennington, former director of Education, Postsecondary Success, and Special Initiatives for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The latest issue of Liberal Education raises important questions about the so-called “completion agenda,” including concern that a more aggressive focus on helping students complete the degrees they start will degrade learning and quality in higher education. To me, the key question is how to move forward on both fronts simultaneously—reorienting the debate so that it is both/and, not either/or.
In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications—intended and unintended—of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This fourth posting is by Elaine P. Maimon, president of Governors State University.
The January 2012 edition of Liberal Education, devoted to the “completion agenda,” should be required reading for those concerned with improving student success in US higher education. In the lead article, Carol Geary Schneider cautions against defining degree completion as a mere accumulation of credits and urges policy makers to ensure that the degrees achieved are meaningful evidence of educational attainment. As a public university president, scholar of writing across the curriculum, and member of Team Illinois of Complete College America, I urge policy makers and funders to focus on the points of intersection of completion and quality. A degree must be more than a credential; it must represent an educational milestone. Without more underserved students completing college, demands for “quality” are elitist. Without quality, defined as meaningful educational attainment through high-impact practices, “completion” is empty.
In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications–intended and unintended–of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This third posting is by Paul E. Lingenfelter, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers.
Alexander Astin’s excellent comment covers a lot: “When you combine poor preparation with minimal engagement, you have the worst of everything, which helps to explain the poor completion rates of so many community colleges and public four-year colleges.” But it doesn’t tell the whole story. Institutions and the policy systems within which they live have embedded values and habits that conspire against more widespread completion. Failure to make improved K-12 preparation a postsecondary priority is one of those habits, and it needs a lot more attention. Colleges and universities should take advantage of the development of Common Core State Standards as an opportunity to work more closely with K-12 in improving preparation. (See www.corestandards.org) Many other problems, however, fall entirely within higher education.
In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications–intended and unintended–of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This second posting is by Terry O’Banion, president emeritus of the League for Innovation in the Community College and senior advisor on programs in higher education at Walden University
The Completion Agenda has emerged as the overarching mission of the community college in this decade. Never in the history of the community college movement has an idea so galvanized stakeholders—from the White House to the state house to hundreds of community colleges. Never has so much funding from philanthropic groups, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation, been more generously funneled into our colleges.
In January 2012, AAC&U published a special issue of its journal, Liberal Education, featuring a series of articles about implications–intended and unintended–of the Completion Agenda. We have invited a series of national educational leaders and practitioners to comment on the issues raised. This first posting is by Alexander W. Astin, senior scholar and founding director of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.
I enjoyed reading AAC&U President Carol Geary Schneider’s thoughtful lead article in the latest issue of Liberal Education. As government officials and foundation executives keep pushing higher education to increase degree completion rates, it is important to remind ourselves that in attempting to raise completion rates we should not ignore issues of quality.
This blog post is part of AAC&U’s blog series on Making Excellence Inclusive.
I am an adjunct faculty member who teaches sociology courses on gender and sexuality. Both of these topics speak broadly to social issues at the structural level and more specifically to students’ personal identities. Each semester on the first day of class, I openly identify as a lesbian to my students. I am intentional about this, because I believe that heightened visibility of LGBT faculty helps normalize difference in the classroom and fosters awareness and understanding of marginalized identities. It is a personal choice, and not one that I think is better than any other decision around coming out, but I am heartened that students in my courses have not seemed at all phased by my decision to openly share my identity with them.
My intention is to be a resource for LGBT students and their allies on campus, but there are limitations in my ability to fully engage with students due to my status as an adjunct faculty member. Like most adjuncts, I have very tight time constraints and I teach at the periphery of my home department. The New Faculty Majority has been making these and other issues related to the experiences of contingent faculty members explicit. These experiences, and the steps needed to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty, were the focus of the organization’s recently-held National Summit, sponsored at the same location and directly following AAC&U’s Annual Meeting. If conditions improve for the nation’s contingent faculty, conditions will also improve for undergraduate students in the classroom. Fair compensation, access to campus resources, and encouraged involvement in developing and advancing departmental learning outcomes and intentional curricula are just a few inroads toward better working conditions and better outcomes for students.
It’s good to start the new year with a posting on NOVA, the Community College of Northern Virginia. NOVA is a multi-campus community college, with seventy-five thousand full- and part-time students. It is the largest institution of higher education in Virginia, and the second largest community college in the country. Located on campuses and sites from Alexandria to Woodbridge in the greater Washington, DC, area of northern Virginia, NOVA faces many of the leadership challenges confronting large multi-campus colleges: How to keep faculty and staff on the several campuses and sites connected? How to manage communication when campuses and sites have different programs and serve different populations, including large numbers of international students? How to bring about shared work on student learning outcomes and student success? Among many things to admire about NOVA is their success in keeping the curriculum united. By that I mean uniting the liberal arts transfer and the career and technical education (CTE) programs—certificates and associates’ (AA and AS) and applied associates’ (AAA and AAS) degrees, all together.
Not to say it isn’t hard work. NOVA has made an investment in learning across the curriculum, in liberal education across the curriculum. They’ve made it a priority to “look both ways,” to work with local schools and with George Mason University through an innovative program called Pathway to the Baccalaureate. They see the AAA/AAS not as “terminal” because NOVA and the Virginia Community College System have partnered with a number of universities to create transfer pathways for students in CTE programs. They’ve been working for years with student learning outcomes for all programs. To keep things together, they’ve put responsibility and authority for the curriculum in one office, led by Sharon (Sheri) Robertson, associate vice president for academic services.
By: Rebecca Frost Davis, Program Officer for the Humanities, National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
Wednesday night Ken O’Donnell opened the AAC&U 2012 Annual Meeting by telling us that the road connecting civic and commercial activity is “collected work toward a common purpose.” He backed that up in part by citing the no. 1 answer on the National Association of Colleges and Employers survey of what employers are seeking: “ability to work in a team structure.” I’ve been promoting collaborative projects (usually between different institutions) for almost ten years now, and I routinely work in a distributed team with colleagues at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. But, after hearing O’Donnell speak, I wondered, how do we teach that skill to students?
This is not an idle query for me; in fact, it’s a homework assignment of sorts. I’m currently part of a working group (collaboration again) that is collectively brainstorming a curriculum for digital humanities pedagogy workshops, and collaboration is one of the topics we see as key. As those who attended the Digital Humanities for Undergraduates panel on Thursday know, collaboration is one of the practices that differentiate the digital humanities from traditional humanities studies.
