This instructional paradigm views knowledge as a quantifiable commodity that can be isolated, identified, and controlled. In the traditional division of units, departments, and colleges according to academic discipline, the knowledge is owned by the discipline. Tagg (2003) writes that faculty as the core of educational institutions have been replaced by departments and that their influence on student learning is exercised through academic departments: “At most colleges, academic departments hire faculty members, and academic departments in the Instructional Paradigm college derive their power from their role as depositories for classes. Administrations, to the extent they are involved in undergraduate education, are largely structures for organizing and channelling the activities of departments” .
This ownership of knowledge dictates various processes within the university, among them hiring, promotion and merit, and curriculum development. The very concept of shared governance has at its roots ownership of discipline knowledge.
The core belief of shared governance is that faculty, because of their academic expertise and their long-term commitment to individual institutions (as opposed to academic administrators and governing board members whose terms at institutions are often relatively short in comparison to that of faculty), should govern the academic functions of their institutions, including the regulation of academic standards and curriculum and the hiring of faculty and staff. The purpose of shared governance is to maintain academic integrity by preventing political or commercial interests from influencing institutional decision making. One of the safeguards against outside pressure is the individual academic’s responsibility to maintain standards set by his or her discipline-specific professional organizations. The adherence to academic standards established by discipline, rather than by individual institution, was intended to provide balance and integrity of standards across institutions. While we would never argue against the importance of shared governance, shared governance within the instructional paradigm has contributed to a mindset that has fostered unnecessary divisiveness and fragmentation. As Vartan Gregorian writes, “Schools should not be treating each other as isolated silos, because the strength of the university is in its totality” (quoted in Hersh & Merrow, 2005, p. 94).
We can see the effect of this belief that knowledge is both owned and distributable in the curriculum review process; in some instances, professors are asked to delineate how many minutes per semester will be devoted to individual topics within the course out line, or accrediting bodies ask for the number of hours per semester devoted to specific knowledge. Tagg (2003) referred to this as educational atomism: “In the ‘educational atomism’ of the Instruction Paradigm, the parts of the teaching and learning process are seen as discrete entities. The parts exist prior to and independent of any whole; the whole is no more than the sum of the parts, or even less. The college interacts with students only in discrete, isolated environments, cut off from one another because the parts—the classes—are prior to the whole. A ‘college education’ is the sum of the student’s experience of a series of discrete, largely unrelated, three-credit classes”.
This view of knowledge and education cannot keep pace with the incredible rate of change in the twenty-first-century workforce. Many fields now cannot accelerate the transfer of information to students fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in the knowledge of the discipline. It is estimated, for example, that by the time engineering graduates walk across the stage with their diplomas, nearly half of the knowledge of their discipline is obsolete. When the focus is on knowledge rather than on learning, obsolescence is inevitable.
This ownership of knowledge dictates various processes within the university, among them hiring, promotion and merit, and curriculum development. The very concept of shared governance has at its roots ownership of discipline knowledge.
The core belief of shared governance is that faculty, because of their academic expertise and their long-term commitment to individual institutions (as opposed to academic administrators and governing board members whose terms at institutions are often relatively short in comparison to that of faculty), should govern the academic functions of their institutions, including the regulation of academic standards and curriculum and the hiring of faculty and staff. The purpose of shared governance is to maintain academic integrity by preventing political or commercial interests from influencing institutional decision making. One of the safeguards against outside pressure is the individual academic’s responsibility to maintain standards set by his or her discipline-specific professional organizations. The adherence to academic standards established by discipline, rather than by individual institution, was intended to provide balance and integrity of standards across institutions. While we would never argue against the importance of shared governance, shared governance within the instructional paradigm has contributed to a mindset that has fostered unnecessary divisiveness and fragmentation. As Vartan Gregorian writes, “Schools should not be treating each other as isolated silos, because the strength of the university is in its totality” (quoted in Hersh & Merrow, 2005, p. 94).
We can see the effect of this belief that knowledge is both owned and distributable in the curriculum review process; in some instances, professors are asked to delineate how many minutes per semester will be devoted to individual topics within the course out line, or accrediting bodies ask for the number of hours per semester devoted to specific knowledge. Tagg (2003) referred to this as educational atomism: “In the ‘educational atomism’ of the Instruction Paradigm, the parts of the teaching and learning process are seen as discrete entities. The parts exist prior to and independent of any whole; the whole is no more than the sum of the parts, or even less. The college interacts with students only in discrete, isolated environments, cut off from one another because the parts—the classes—are prior to the whole. A ‘college education’ is the sum of the student’s experience of a series of discrete, largely unrelated, three-credit classes”.
This view of knowledge and education cannot keep pace with the incredible rate of change in the twenty-first-century workforce. Many fields now cannot accelerate the transfer of information to students fast enough to keep up with the rate of change in the knowledge of the discipline. It is estimated, for example, that by the time engineering graduates walk across the stage with their diplomas, nearly half of the knowledge of their discipline is obsolete. When the focus is on knowledge rather than on learning, obsolescence is inevitable.
