The Instructional Paradigm

The values, attitudes, and biases inherent in the instructional paradigm are predicated upon an industrial model of human learning. This factory model of education values quality control, which is ironic since higher education is currently under such intense scrutiny to be accountable for the quality of graduates. Concern over the business/factory influence on higher education is certainly not new. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1909, “The men who stand for education and scholarship have ideals of business men. . . . They are, in truth, business men. The men who control [universities] today are very little else than businessmen running a large department store which dispenses education to the millions” (quoted in Lucas, 1994, p. 192). Most of the critics of the growing bureaucracy in higher education admitted that it could not be eliminated, but still decried its current form which had a tendency to “dehumanize collegiate life” (Lucas, 1994 p. 193). A more recent criticism in a report issued by the American Association of University Professors (2008) placed the factory analogy in contemporary perspective as U.S. colleges and universities “are embracing the operating strategies of for-profit corporations with growing fervor. . . . [C]olleges and universities increasingly conceptualize higher education as a commodity and attempt to provide it at the lowest cost. They do so by reorganizing themselves as ‘knowledge factories’ in which a variety of internal functions (for example, dining services and facilities maintenance) are outsourced to for-profit contractors who pay their workers minimum wages and in which the central teaching and research functions are outsourced to legions of poorly paid nontenure-track adjunct faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students” . Similarly, Dolence and Norris (1995) described the transition from the industrial age to the information age, noting that the factory model that characterized education in the industrial age was insufficiently flexible and focused on outputs and processes rather than on learning.

In this factory model, students’ potential is determined by ACT, SAT, HSGPA, and sometimes other quantifiable measures. Depending upon our institutional standards, students are deemed to be the acceptable quality of raw material for our product. Quality control is especially evident in the freshman year, during which the weaker material is sorted out. The Wingspread Group on Higher Education (1993) charged that “Our education system is better organized to discourage students—to weed them out—than it is to cultivate and support our most important national resource, our people”. Students are directed to take a prescribed collection of courses in a prescribed sequence in order to assure quality control over the exiting product, our graduates. This model devalues the individual. In the mass production mentality that this model represents, students assimilate information at equivalent rates with equivalent responses, thus creating like products. This assembly line of education presupposes a sameness to individuals, so that regardless of prior learning, individual differences, or extracurricular experiences, each student following a like path will emerge from the assembly line like all the others.

A Perfect Storm

These variables affecting higher education are not new. Fifty years ago, Clark Kerr, then president of the University of California system, coined the term multiversity to describe the transformation of the university to become increasingly responsive to market demands. In referring to the challenges facing academic leaders as a result of the explosion of knowledge and rising market demands of business, government, the military, and other groups, Lucas (1994) writes, “Too harassed to lead, university administrators had become mediators among competing interests, trying to balance contradictory demands, treating students like consumers, knowledge as a factory product and course offerings as supermarket wares”. The intensity of these challenges has not abated in the past fifty years, but intensified.

Each of the converging challenges seems like overwhelming in its own right, but like a perfect storm, the confluence of these five challenges generates a condition or circumstance that is far more powerful. Together these five challenges have created a perfect storm, a perfect opportunity to innovate on various fronts; they have created a sense of crisis that makes innovation more likely to be accepted by those who might otherwise resist change. Academic leaders can seize the opportunity to meet these challenges and, rather than react to them, take a proactive position and use the challenges to transform higher education.

The challenges facing higher education are serious, and they will test academic leaders to be innovative and creative in moving their institutions away from the status quo. This will be achieved not through incremental change but through systemic change. Many institutions are currently implementing isolated innovations to address some of the changes discussed in this chapter. These actions, although successful on a small scale, are not addressing systemic issues. The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), the largest of the regional accrediting agencies, both in number and type of institution, provides a good gauge of the efficacy of these individual efforts. Steven D. Crow, the departing president of the HLC, noted at the 2008 annual meeting that while institutions have been working diligently to figure out what their students should be learning and whether they are, in fact, learning, it is not clear whether all the individual efforts are adding up to much (Lederman, 2008,p. 1). Institutions are employing a wide variety of approaches, many of which are very small in scope, as they address individual challenges. Instead, leaders need to see the confluence of the challenges. Academic leaders need to assess the current situation from a comprehensive view and assume the risks required to chart a course through this perfect storm.

Transforming higher education will require innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurship. As the political, social, economic, and technological environment continues to change rapidly, more attention must be given to the role of innovation and entrepreneurship in addressing those changes. Leaders who accept this challenge will be the learning entrepreneurs, the leaders who will lead dynamic change. Drawing on an agenda put forth by Mintrom (1997) in defining policy entrepreneurs, we define learning entrepreneurs as those individuals who identify problems, shape policy, and move their institutions away from the status quo.

Recognizing that there is no single remedy or solution to the complex challenges facing institutions of higher education and that each institution has unique characteristics and features, the framework that we provide is just that, a framework, a scaffolding that will support independent investigation, an agenda to guide leaders as they take actions to innovate and redefine higher education. The comprehensive framework that we propose is predicated on the belief that in order to transform higher education, we must analyze the paradigm that we operate within. We will then call for a shift to a new paradigm, the shift toward learning-centeredness that was introduced by Barr and Tagg in 1995.

Changes in Perception

The second area of potential opportunity identified by Drucker is changes in perception. The public perception of higher education is changing, thus creating a climate conducive to change. Once heralded as the finest educational system in the world, higher education in the United States is now perceived to be falling behind other countries and not producing qualified graduates. John Doerr, considered one of the top technology venture capitalists in the world, called education “the largest and most screwed-up part of the American economy” (quoted in Carlson & Wilmot, 2006, p. 267). Similarly, Peter Drucker said, “Thirty years from now [1997] the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. . . . Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis” (quoted in Carlson & Wilmot, 2006, p. 267). These and other leaders in business and industry have chimed in on the emerging public outcry for accountability in higher education. Education professors Terenzini and Pascarella (1994) called into question some of the basic tenets of American higher education. They found that educational quality did not correlate with an institution’s reputation or standing. Similarly, they questioned the assumption that good researchers are good teachers, calling into question education techniques, in particular the lecture method.

In an open letter entitled An American Imperative: Higher Expectations for Higher Education, the Wingspread Group (1993) charged that “some faculties and institutions certify for graduation too many students who cannot read and write very well, too many whose intellectual depth and breadth are unimpressive, and too many whose skills are inadequate in the face of the demands of contemporary life”. They conclude that “A disturbing and dangerous mismatch exists between what American society needs of higher education and what it is receiving. Nowhere is the mismatch more dangerous than in the quality of undergraduate preparation provided by many campuses”.

In support of this claim, a National Adult Literacy Survey conducted in 1993 found that large numbers of graduates were unable to use basic skills including reading, writing, computation, and elementary problem solving (Lucas, 1994, xiii). A decade later Brown University conducted the Futures Project, a four-year examination of the major forces affecting the future of higher education. The Futures Project investigated the impact of competition and market values on higher education, targeting three specific areas: autonomy and accountability, responsibility for student learning, and access and attainment. In the report on the project, The Future of Higher Education (Newman, Couturier, & Scurry, 2004), the authors called for institutional responsibility with regard to student learning, claiming that at most institutions “there is an unspoken, comfortable conspiracy between faculty and students not to bother each other too much; mediocrity reigns”.

A similar claim was made in Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (Hersh & Merrow, 2005), a collection of essays accompanying a PBS documentary, which exposed a lack of accountability for student learning and an unhealthy focus on research and athletics as well as other prestige factors that had little to do with educating students. Even more candid was Lewis’s (2006) indictment of undergraduate education, in which he claimed that universities have forgotten their purpose, namely, creating educated adults who will take responsibility for society. In the same vein, Bok’s (2005) critique of higher education’s shortcomings focused both on the failure of universities to prepare citizens and the need to improve teacher quality because not enough attention is paid to pedagogy.

This is not the first time, of course, that higher education has been deemed as disaster. Lucas (1994) identified three common themes among commentators from 1965 through the 1990s: (1) professionalization of scholarship in higher education was a factor contributing to fragmentation; (2) the tendency to view knowledge as a commodity contributed to the confusion of what constituted a relevant liberal education; and (3) the structure of the university itself was a root cause of the decline. “Such allegations had been heard before, of course,” said Lucas. “But they were given new clarity and force in analyses of the apparent decline of liberal educational values” (p. 268). The many critiques of the state of higher education have clarified the issues creating external pressure for changes in higher education.

Rethinking Our Current Challenges The Context for Change

In this chapter we will discuss the challenges in higher education that are currently creating a climate conducive to change. We will look at our opportunities for innovation through the lens that Peter Drucker (2002) offered in relation to conditions that make change possible. Drucker outlined seven areas of potential opportunity which can support innovation. Five of those are apparent in higher education today: new knowledge, changes in perception, demographic changes, industry and market changes, and process needs.

The Time for Innovation

Before we outline our strategy for undertaking this monumental task of shifting to a new paradigm, we need to make the case for making this shift at all. One of the many points that we debated as co-authors was whether it was absolutely necessary to recount the litany of stresses currently affecting higher education. Since everyone reads every day about the technological, societal, market, and political pressures on higher education, we questioned whether more discussion of these pressures would be informative, repetitive, or simply depressing for the reader.

After much thought, discussion, and coffee, we realized that we were thinking about this question from a habitual way of seeing the issues, in part because we too have read so often about these issues as problems. Instead of viewing these issues as negatives, the high winds and hard rains of the perfect storm intent upon sinking our ship, we reminded ourselves that storms are not solely forces of destruction but natural events that generate great power, that usher in a new weather system, that clear debris and refresh our environment. Our goal is to demonstrate how the forces that we read about and discuss on a daily basis are, in fact, power to be harnessed, opportunities for change. In Clark Kerr’s 1994 analysis of the history of higher education, a history that he says gets more glorious upon reflection while fear of the future gets more dreadful, he poses the question, Why are we always so happy looking backward and so unhappy looking forward? We will undertake the challenge of looking forward, if not with complete happiness, at least with cautious optimism.

If we analyze the evolution of higher education in the United States we will see strategic junctions and times of significant challenges. In each era, academic institutions responded and took action, and higher education, subsequently, was strengthened. The calls today to reevaluate higher education are consistent with that pattern. We are at a strategic junction in which many internal and external variables are leading to questions and concerns about the relevancy of higher education, its current status, and its path to the future.

As a result, many universities, organizations, accreditation bodies, governments, and researchers are engaged in efforts to innovate. Their goal is to find ways to assure that, despite the significant challenges higher education faces, it will continue to be relevant, a key contributor to advancing knowledge and educating people for productive and successful lives. This role of higher education is necessary for sustaining a prosperous civic society. The study of the current challenges will be benefited greatly by examining colleges and universities as open systems, dynamic organisms,shaped by and shaping the environment. It is the unique structure, mission, role, and value of each university, understood in the context of the changing environment, which will allow us to address the challenges, maximize the opportunities, and also develop an enhanced vision for higher education. While there are general features and challenges common to all institutions, each institution also has unique features and challenges; there is no one-size-fits-all challenge or solution. With that in mind, we will discuss general and significant threats all institutions face, large or small, public or private. It is a time of great opportunities for those who have an interest in shaping the future of higher education, for those who, like Ernest Shackleton, maintain optimism in the face of extreme challenge.

Research on innovation and entrepreneurship demonstrates that in times of crisis or economic hardship, the opportunities for innovation increase, for the sense of crisis creates motivation for change. For example, the skyrocketing cost of gasoline in 2008 created a sense of crisis for individuals and businesses, thus creating a climate conducive to innovation in the area of alternative fuels. The sense of crisis creates a willingness and an interest in these innovations on the part of consumers and innovators, who if gas were one dollar per gallon would most likely be disinterested.

Innovative change is greater than incremental change because it results in a new condition that is measurably different from the status quo. Innovation may be achieved through the introduction of new or different policies, regulations, or practices and procedures. Our definition of innovation includes changes and processes that expand and reconceive the scope of higher education.

Management expert Peter Drucker (2002) suggests that most innovations “result from a conscious, purposeful search for innovation opportunities, which are found only in a few situations” . He identifies seven sources of potential opportunity through which systematic analysis and knowledge can support innovation. Some are internal to organizations, for example, process needs and market changes. Others are external sources of opportunity, for example, demographic changes, new knowledge, and changes in perception. We will look at five of these innovation opportunities which offer the greatest potential for stimulating change in higher education. These forces are converging to create a climate conducive to innovation and subsequently to transformation. Drucker explains that at the heart of successful entrepreneurship is innovation: “the effort to create purposeful focused change in an enterprise’s economic or social potential” . This is achieved through “a commitment to the systematic practice of innovation” . The future of higher education depends upon innovative entrepreneurs to lead this purposeful and focused change.