Archive for November, 2009
Few jobs in higher education could be as challenging these days as that of president of a public college in California. As Mildred García, AAC&U board member and president of California State University, Dominguez Hills, recently noted, this year her institution “experienced the largest budget reduction in its history.” She notes further that “our social contract promising higher education for our citizens is being shattered.”
It is difficult to argue with this statement, at least in California. García, however, and many other presidents like her who have formed AAC&U’s new Presidents’ Trust, are working hard to stitch that social contract back together and especially keep a focus on what really matters—providing not just access to a seat in a college classroom, but access to a true quality liberal education. As García notes, her university community is responding to the current challenges as “a call to strategic action, with the goal of shaping a university that is academically stronger and more effective.” Her aim for Cal. State, Dominguez Hills is “to embody a new vision of liberal learning for the twenty-first century.” Read the rest of this entry »
Recently, there has been a flurry of articles and reports about higher education and the policy choices that will affect its future. As a communications professional, I would normally welcome the attention to higher education; the whole sector is underreported, in my humble opinion. However, this recent coverage has centered on the wrong questions and the wrong debates—and is diverting attention from some really important trends and problems.
Both the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times have recently published forums on the question, are too many students going to college? This is the kind of question editors love because it makes it easy for them to line people up on either side of a seemingly important debate. But the answer to this particular question is pretty clear-cut: for any individual student, going to college is clearly better than not going. This is why students are flocking to colleges of all sorts—two-year, four-year, for-profit, not-for-profit, public, private.
Recently, David Brooks wrote about two opposing views of character and conduct. In one view, character is stable, people act in accordance with a set of dominant character traits, and the quest for selfhood is really the quest for the “traits of character we need to become virtuous.”
The second view, informed by evidence that people act very differently depending on the circumstance, suggests instead that “we each have a multiplicity of tendencies inside, which are activated by this or that context.” Read the rest of this entry »
