Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
I can feel the capital letters and italics. Davidson is a person who is entirely sincere about the need to Innovate and Revolutionize and Engage higher education with 21st Century Challenges. She sees big looming problems ahead for colleges, which haven't been substantially reorganized in centuries. However, to meet these problems all she has are good wishes and a handful of anecdotes.
The book begins cannily enough, with the story of a wealthy college graduate unprepared for the tough job market following a financial collapse. This isn't some Millennial, rather she begins with Charles Eliot, a young man who in the wake of the Panic of 1857 would seek to reform higher education as a long-serving president of Harvard, essentially inventing the modern university of departments, majors, standardized testing, and courses designed to filter unprepared students. Her history of the university basically ends with the Industrial Revolution, with only cursory overviews of the research revolution and academic-military-industrial complex of the Cold War, the university as a center of resistance during Vietnam, and pretty much anything that's happened since 1980s, aside from austerity driven budget cuts.
Davidson decries higher education as it exists today, a system that burdens students with debt and has a shockingly high amount of failure, one that serves to insulate the 1% rather than drive an engine of economic mobility. She's right that the conventional set of assignments; tutorial driven problem sets, content-recitation multiple choice questions, and essays to be read only by the instructor. She's right to note that the increasing adjunctification means that the most youngest and most connected teachers have little incentive to rock the boat.
But beyond that? She points to some stuff that her CUNY school as done to improve graduation rates from an abysmal ~10% to a merely mediocre ~50%. And she points to innovative units at Kansas State, ASU, and Georgetown as new models. But ultimately it's just a reiteration of "we need flexible and engaging curricula", while glossing over the fact that real learning is often hard. Incorporating new modes of thinking, new facts, new skills, into your personal repertoire is one of the hardest things imaginable. I strongly believe that the best classes don't require any sort of exotic standards. Can you read pdfs? Do you have someone to talk about them with? Do you have something to write with? Okay, let's go. If you're willing to do the work. Enthusiasm is no substitute for effort. Knowledge is cumulative, and without an approach that balances the "why" and the "how", you either get appliers who know how to find an answer without understanding what it means, or people who invent the universe from first principles to bake an apple pie.
There are opportunities for solid, data driven work in this space. I recommend Arum and Roska's Academically Adrift for having both a better thesis, and better evidence.
The book begins cannily enough, with the story of a wealthy college graduate unprepared for the tough job market following a financial collapse. This isn't some Millennial, rather she begins with Charles Eliot, a young man who in the wake of the Panic of 1857 would seek to reform higher education as a long-serving president of Harvard, essentially inventing the modern university of departments, majors, standardized testing, and courses designed to filter unprepared students. Her history of the university basically ends with the Industrial Revolution, with only cursory overviews of the research revolution and academic-military-industrial complex of the Cold War, the university as a center of resistance during Vietnam, and pretty much anything that's happened since 1980s, aside from austerity driven budget cuts.
Davidson decries higher education as it exists today, a system that burdens students with debt and has a shockingly high amount of failure, one that serves to insulate the 1% rather than drive an engine of economic mobility. She's right that the conventional set of assignments; tutorial driven problem sets, content-recitation multiple choice questions, and essays to be read only by the instructor. She's right to note that the increasing adjunctification means that the most youngest and most connected teachers have little incentive to rock the boat.
But beyond that? She points to some stuff that her CUNY school as done to improve graduation rates from an abysmal ~10% to a merely mediocre ~50%. And she points to innovative units at Kansas State, ASU, and Georgetown as new models. But ultimately it's just a reiteration of "we need flexible and engaging curricula", while glossing over the fact that real learning is often hard. Incorporating new modes of thinking, new facts, new skills, into your personal repertoire is one of the hardest things imaginable. I strongly believe that the best classes don't require any sort of exotic standards. Can you read pdfs? Do you have someone to talk about them with? Do you have something to write with? Okay, let's go. If you're willing to do the work. Enthusiasm is no substitute for effort. Knowledge is cumulative, and without an approach that balances the "why" and the "how", you either get appliers who know how to find an answer without understanding what it means, or people who invent the universe from first principles to bake an apple pie.
There are opportunities for solid, data driven work in this space. I recommend Arum and Roska's Academically Adrift for having both a better thesis, and better evidence.