End The University as We Know It
A very interesting op-ed in today's New York Times, by Mark C. Taylor.
Taylor explains that the 18th century model of mass-production university education we inherited (from Kant) "has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization."
He proposes six major steps to a complete restructuring of American higher education...
1.. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural... There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.
2... Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs... Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.
Point #4 is of particular interest to our very own iMAP program:
Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.