April 18, 2016

Dispatches from the HLC Front.

I am currently spending my second full day at the Higher Learning Commission annual conference in Chicago.  Our two keynote speakers have been from (kind of) outside of academia: Author and t.v. host, Fareed Zakaria, and actress/comedian Maysoon Zayid.   Such escapes into the world of mass media are rare in the world of higher education.  Heck, the conference is so hip that the doors to Zayid's presentation didn't open until 15 minutes before her time slot, leading a charge of conservatively dressed, briefcase-carrying academics to rush the room as if at a late 70's Who concert.

Zakaria was especially inspiring in reminding us that the U.S. higher education system is still the predominant post-secondary system in the world.  He noted that our (or at least politicians') pessimism about the country is misplaced.  The United States, Sweden, and Israel consistently come up as middle of the pack or bottom of the pack on standardized testing, and yet all the key indicators about entrepreneurial impact, economics, and mobility are highest in these countries, the inverse of the situation in countries, such as Singapore, where students are doing the best on standardized exams but face no upward mobility or entrepreneurial opportunity.

Zayid, between jokes about being the lost Kardashian, challenged us to consider the disservice we are providing to the largest minority in the world, the disabled. In a setting where "accommodations" remind all of us just how much of our professional development budgets are drained by over-priced hotels and over-priced meals, we are stung by the idea that back on our own campuses, our accommodations for the disabled are pitiful.  Students with disabilities that aren't obvious (invisible disabilities, Zayid calls them) have to repeatedly announce their disabilities in the hopes of getting help, living in fear that the announcement of the disabilities will only lead to faculty and administrators telling them that they can't succeed in college. 

A third keynote presentation that I didn't attend (but later saw in a more intimate breakout session) involved what must be our academic rockstar model, Terrell Strayhorn, the Director for the Center for Higher Education Enterprise, at The Ohio State University.  (Oh, how I hate to write the "The" for The overly sensitive state schools that seem to dominate The American higher education landscape.)  Professor Strayhorn's research reminds us that the American higher education cultural sphere is a fairly small one.  We are failing students by the thousands by not being "cultural navigators" for the host of of students now coming to our campuses from populations that never came before, especially from low-income families.    As Strayhorn points out, we talk about credit and registrars and "first generations" to a vulnerable student population too confused and scared to ask for clarification.  His best example is the "office hour," which is often done neither in an office or for an hour (or, at huge institutions that demand "the" before their name, even with the faculty member). Some of these students come from primarily collectivist communities, and yet we force them to adapt, without much guidance, to the individualist culture that is school (grades given to show who is smarter than whom).

However, we will never be the Hip Learning Commission, until we hear what these speakers are saying and commit to being true Higher Learning Changers.  Maybe it will be a couple of years before these ideas trickle down to the breakout sessions provided by my peers.  For now, I had to decide which of three sessions entitled "Beyond Compliance:  _____" I might want to attend (turns out it could have been none).  You can also get more unappealing "ass" (as in assessment) here than at, probably, Chicago's skankiest strip clubs.  Presentation titles promise innovation, but one wonders if any presenters know what that word means.  

I hope my colleagues remember the message delivered by the keynote speakers: higher education needs to correct some practices that are detrimental to students and to society.  We need to preserve our product but refashion it to meet the needs of today's students.  Zakaria noted how Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg took technology and made it relevant to a huge customer base by providing a psychologically safe space for people to use and enjoy that technology.  How do we do that with higher education, ignoring the simplified reasoning that we are trainers for the more sophisticated reasoning that we are developers of talent?

That was ultimately Zakaria's point: our students may be working in a decade at a company that doesn't exist now in an industry that doesn't exist now.  Thus, a liberal arts education is the best development tool to prepare those students not for their first job out of school, but their third or fourth one.  However, he also hinted at the industry-change that may mirror the Jobs and Zuckerberg examples: education may be unbundled and pieces sold individually through online.  It was at that moment when you could sense the crowd shifting, as if an undesirable had shown up at a Trump rally. Zakaria has experience in the journalism field (anyone remember that field?) to warn us that we better change.  As with Time, in time, higher education better figure out how to adapt to a new model.