Out with the Old! What Students Need Now

Cathy N. Davidson has been writing about her experiments in education for years (for example here and here and here). She brings to her new book deep understanding of the context, history, successes, and shortcomings of the dominant forms of higher education—college—and highlights several dozen approaches that are more successful. These are more appropriate, she argues, than the conventional forms, which have not changed in more than a hundred years, because they respect students’ abilities, teach them to employ the affordances of not only technology but also other people, and anticipate that the content of whatever they do in college will have only limited relevance in the future—so they need to focus on learning to learn. Conventional colleges have outlived their initial purposes, which were to train managers in a newly industrializing and urbanizing society, when books were scarce and simply ingesting information was challenging enough. They selected only top students and churned them through a disciplinary mill, certified by authorities.

That’s not what we need now.

Information is hardly rare. We need, rather, to teach students—all people—to find it, evaluate it, use it, as they ask real questions and prepare for an ever-changing career and cultural landscape. Davidson rejects the idea of a simple vocational focus for higher education, because no matter how quickly students will find a first job if they have narrow skills training, it is almost certain that this will not be their only job. So the purpose of higher education has to be to prepare them for flexibility.

The New Education derives its title through citation, exactly, of a two-part essay published in 1869 in The Atlantic Monthly, by Charles Eliot, the transformative president of Harvard. (Titles are not subject to copyright, FYI.) After earnestly scouring Europe’s educational systems, Eliot brought to Harvard and then to the rest of us the familiar forms of college, with their disciplines, majors, requirements, entrance exams, grades, and “scientific management” methods borrowed from Frederick Winslow Taylor and his time-and-motion studies in factory production. Though Davidson admires Eliot, who was innovative in his moment, she also makes sure her readers understand that his vision worked for his time, and that it is now the moment for a new rethinking of the purposes and processes of higher education.

All the illustrations she provides are inspiring and hopeful, going far beyond what are now ubiquitous “STEM” or “STEAM” or “digital humanities” or “interdisciplinary” innovations (and rejecting MOOCs entirely). The vision is radical, and has many dimensions. Some of the cases she presents, in some luxurious detail, include the following:

• LaGuardia Community College, whose president, Gail Mellow, believes that all students need to be nurtured rather than sorted and (some) discarded (pp. 59-63);
• Olin College of Engineering where Sara Hendren teaches by co-creating the course with her students, just as engineers have to be responsive to and creative about solving real design problems (pp. 156-161);
• The huge Arizona State University, under the leadership of president Michael Crow, now emphasizes inclusion and economic equity, tying classes to their location, reorganizing departments into integrated schools (pp. 141-152), and discarding “a narrow-minded ‘skills’ approach to higher education in favor of student-centered learning” (p. 151);
• Alexander Coward at Berkeley where he was fired for his unconventional learning-focused approach, despite his students’ success on “objective” tests—and passionate appreciation; maybe he made other faculty look too bad (pp. 193-200)?
• John (Jack) DeGioia, president of Georgetown, where The Red House aims to rethink higher education (pp. 227-246);
• Michael Wesch’s “The Anthropology of Aging: Digital Anthropology” course at Kansas State, in which students live for a semester in a retirement community (pp. 216-226);
• She provides a few examples of her own courses.

Davidson’s vision is not elitist. In the chapter on “Why College Costs so Much,” Davidson encourages greater public investment in higher education, claiming that the most successful “national business” of the United States in the last hundred and fifty years has been higher education (p. 187). Citing careful work by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Davidson shows how the states (using Wisconsin as her case study) have reduced drastically their share of support, resulting in life-destroying student debt (impossible to evade even through declaring bankruptcy) and a barrier to attendance and completion for many nonwealthy students and their families.

One way of measuring this is to compare state appropriations per thousand dollars of state personal income. In 1981, Wisconsin appropriated $10.18, falling in 1990 to $9.24, in 2000 to $7.52, in 2010 to $6.32, and in 2016 to just $5.00—so it has fallen by half (pp. 170-171). Another way to look at this is to note that even private colleges’ tuition used to be affordable. Yale’s 1970 tuition of $2500 could be earned by working 4.8 hours of minimum-wage ($1.45) work a day; in 2014 the $45,800 tuition would require 17 hours a day at minimum wage ($7.25)—an obviously absurd proposition. (Davidson ignores here the point that most students don’t actually pay the “sticker price” but rather the “net price”—and the finances of financial aid are another miasma, like airplane tickets…)

In addition to challenging the enormous expense of higher education, Davidson fascinatingly argues against both technophobia (fear of new technology) and technophilia (belief that technology is the cure-all). She compares slide rules and calculators (I’ve done this too) and looks at MOOCs Massive Open Online Courses (The New York Times declared 2012 “the year of the MOOC,” a fashion that came and went fast), which essentially reify the old elite lecturer model. Linguistic anthropologists will savor this nuanced approach to investigating the ideologies as well as the actual practices surrounding various media.

I love the affection and respect Davidson demonstrates for the students currently being allowed to work on more complex issues than simply mastering an old, tired syllabus. The most exciting sections of the book are when she shows the successful implementation of new approaches.

Davidson herself exemplifies the constant reinvention we anticipate for our students.

She began as a professor of English, studying in part the cultural, historical, political, and technological contexts of the American novel. One of her first creative detours was 36 Views of Mt Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan, written following four stints living in Japan; if you are looking for a gift, this book would satisfy many readers. She did a book with a photographer about the closing of a century-old furniture factory in North Carolina. She taught at several universities and other educational institutions, where she grew interested in the mismatch between what students seemed to need and want, and the established expected curriculum (“Freshman Composition”), with its term papers and five-paragraph essays.

At Duke, she began to achieve public prominence and became Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies. In her role as a campus leader, she cofounded HĀSTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory), the “interdisciplinary community” claiming 14,000 members, aiming to “change the way we teach and learn.” There she developed a sophisticated understanding of the potential and limitations of new media-building on her nuanced understanding of how such earlier new media (printing press and affordable books) had influenced literature and politics. She moved to the Graduate Center at CUNY in 2014, where she is Distinguished Professor and Director of the Futures Initiative, to influence a greater number of students, with greater diversity. Many of the cases she details stem from the institutional partnerships among HĀSTAC, Duke, CUNY, ASU, and Georgetown

The New Education is a clear, compelling account of a truly dire situation.

Anthropologists might wonder about some dimensions, but these do not diminish the power of the presentation. Davidson states, as if there is no possible dissent, that “We all know that college has never mattered more” (p. 187) as she challenges it outrageous contemporary costs. This may not be the case; arguments about the economic benefits of attending and finishing college show that probably not everyone knows, or accepts, this.

Davidson’s baseline is that our world is “postindustrial and post-Internet,” that “the boundaries between work and home are far less distinct, work itself is more precarious, wages are largely stagnant, automation is expanding and becoming more sophisticated, democratic institutions are failing, professions are disappearing, and the next shock to the economy is on the horizon, even if we can’t see it yet” (pp 3-4). In this context, she sees college as having to do better. One might agree with her generalized, timeless present assessment of “the situation,” and still challenge its overly generalized conclusions: Some people do work in industry; some people (wind turbine service technicians, for example—the fastest growing category of jobs) may separate their work and home lives.

Davidson is driven in part by a vision of equity, and social class is a constant theme.

I was pleased to see John Mogulescu, dean of the School of Professional Studies at CUNY (pp. 63-71), point out that having an associate’s degree in and of itself won’t guarantee a middle-class life; that is society’s responsibility. Wages paid for all work should be living wages, so that jobs are justly compensated.

“We can do our part—we can give them a good education, we can ensure that they graduate. But if the jobs they are going into are paying several dollars an hour, then that’s not the fault of higher education. That’s the fault of a greedy society” (p. 70).

Anthropologists of education might want a little more in-depth study of the actual workings of all these experiments, however. Davidson tends to consult with the leaders and to make a quick visit, talking with a few students. In the LaGuardia Community College case, for example, she shows that all colleges could learn from the student-centered approach. I concur. (In fact I’ve decided that if I donate money to educational institutions, they will be to community colleges, which educate about half our students.) She quotes President Mellow, who spoke admiringly of “students who walk from Flushing to take one class and then walk back to get to their part-time, minimum-wage job… That’s ten miles each way. They are determined to get an education no matter what. You tell me we aren’t training our future leaders!” (p. 61). But what of the ones who stop walking, even if they do get a subway card?

What of the failures? Are all educators in these schools on board? Who resists? Colleagues frequently lament to me students who resist efforts at radical pedagogical transformation: A math teacher at a community college brought in all kinds of creative connections to the world, but his students wanted “real math”—worksheets and algorithms—rather than concepts. I have heard that not all faculty at Arizona State embrace the reorganized “schools” and that the actual results are not always as radical as the conception. This would be an ideal topic to investigate ethnographically.

But that is for another scholar to undertake. Davidson has significant strengths and access, and she need not write a two-thousand-page multidisciplinary study. (She rejects trans-, multi-, cross-disciplinary because she rejects disciplines entirely.) She has written an important book.

This book is easy to read, with profiles of inspiring individual transformers; it is a model of how to convey detailed and complex material accessibly and without jargon. The overall approach is informed by deep understanding of class (not so much gender, race, sexuality), focused on the United States in historical context. The author has both theoretical and practical understanding, and is critical in the best sense, providing alternatives and positive suggestions, not just tearing down a deeply flawed system. She strongly promotes a system of higher education, but not in its current form.

The concluding short appendices are for current college students and current college faculty who are not in a position to undertake radical transformation; they are reminiscent of James Lang’s Small Teaching (and of my own contributions in this vein). These are the kinds of advice that tend to be provided by teaching-and-learning centers on most campuses: practical, working within constraints.

As an anthropologist I may be missing a little broader, and international, context, but as a writer (and frequent reviewer of manuscripts) I am sympathetic to the notion that other people should not be trashed for failing to write the book I wish they had written. And this book has an excellent point of view; it builds on careful study; it is well presented.

Read it.

And change the world! If you are an academic or a student or an administrator, begin with college.

— Susan D. Blum, Department of Anthropology, The University of Notre Dame.

Blum’s substantive argument is straightforward. Everyone complains about college (Ch. 1), even though no one can agree on what it is for (Ch. 2); therefore we should take a step back to question the underlying “paradigm” of higher education (Ch. 3), which is based on a decontextualized form of “real-fake learning” and a culture of (easily gamed) obedience (Ch. 4). This leads to a culture where grades are fetishized (Ch. 5) and students, largely turned off by formal education, end up feeling more energized by non-academic activities than by their classroom teachers (Ch. 6). This leads Blum to ask how human beings learn in general, outside of school settings. She sketches a standard anthropological image of human beings as social, affective and embodied creatures; she then uses that image to draw out a contrast between the practical and imitative ways that humans learn “in the wild,” and the deliberately impractical (“Cartesian”) ways that humans are asked to learn in college (Chs. 7-8). Finally, she concludes with some notes on how education might better promote “intrinsic” motivation (Ch. 9), happiness and joy (Ch. 10), and ultimately a “learning revolution” that takes us beyond the factory model of schooling (Ch. 11).

There is a great deal that one could say about the different moments of Blum’s argument, which I can unfortunately only evoke in very broad strokes. I am happy to report that several of the chapters could work on their own as general introductions to larger bodies of critical research. The chapter on grades (ch. 5), above all, could work well in a teaching context, given its rich ethnographic corpus and its many piquant observations about grading culture. “The reified sign becomes internalized,” she quips in a section on how grades induce “anxiety and fear” (127-128). Blum’s best chapters blend ethnographic data with anthropological analysis, or synthesize others’ research into her own personal critique of college culture; as such, I recommend them to fellow teachers who want to teach about teaching.

I remain more ambivalent about Blum’s effort, in the later chapters of the book, to ground her critique of traditional college pedagogy in a necessarily very general theory of human nature. It seems to me a sufficient indictment of old-school pedagogy to observe — as Blum rightly does — that many students don’t learn much from it and feel alienated by it. Is it really necessary to claim also that it is contrary to our species being? Surely one could make a compelling counter-argument that boredom, inauthenticity and alienation, however regrettable in the abstract, are an irreducible part of the human experience — and in that sense, traditional lecture pedagogy may be just as representative of “human nature” as its progressive counterparts.

But that is trivia; the important point, it seems to me, is that Blum’s book is organized by two competing desires: one more theoretical, another more therapeutic. On one hand, Blum has an understandable academic desire to theorize, to produce conceptual closure. She aims to be able to state definitively, “here is why college, in general, doesn’t work.” And she does eventually sum up her explanation:

The quintessential college situation [doesn’t work because it] has students without genuine responsibility being force-fed, not allowed to let their curiosity guide them, presented with reason and logic over emotion or passion, being assessed individually, and lacking any physical or practical activities. (189)

There is much to be said for this view, which derives, as Blum acknowledges, from a long heritage of educational criticism dating back at least to Rousseau’s Emile. It also has a number of problems, notably the seeming implausibility of actually bridging the gap between a bad present and an idealized possible future, and the corresponding risk of reducing a complex set of present institutional realities to the simplified image of a common “paradigm.” Blum is well aware of this risk, but she tries to avoid it by treating Notre Dame’s affluent, largely white students as representative of a “quintessential college situation.”

This leads, occasionally, to some unacknowledged undertones about race and class. At one point Blum offers examples of “practical skills”:

You need to learn to operate the new dishwasher, or you need to program the home theater that you spent thousands of dollars on. You take yoga classes, or Italian lessons, or cake decorating. Your boss sends you to learn the new software that will reimburse employees for their professional expenses. Factory workers may be sent to accumulate modules related to their precise needs. (77)

Here, “you” seems to interpellate the reader as someone who does yoga and has expensive tastes, whereas “factory workers” appear as the other, voiced in the third person plural. The working classes thus get somewhat marginalized in Blum’s image of educated subjects. A few pages earlier, Blum also remarks:

Granted, generalizations are always dangerous. Students growing up in a two-professional household with a taste for classical music and organic food will not be the same as adolescents raising their younger siblings while Mom is in jail. (60)

I thought that Blum could have been more direct here about structures of race and class difference, and about her own invocation of stereotypes about those structures, since her comparison, I thought, has clear racial overtones in the North American context. Of course, Blum’s examples tend to reflect her own elite institutional context, but for this very reason, I found that her book raised major questions about method.

Blum effectively takes the culturally dominant image of college (the 4-year American elite experience) as if it were also the analytically central image of American higher education. Personally I incline towards the structuralist view that there are no “quintessential” situations, since the analytical heart of a cultural system consists in a system of organized differences between cases, rather than in a single quintessential example. If all social essences are differential and relational, then a general “anthropology of college” in the United States would need at a minimum to contrast elite with non-elite institutions, in a way that Blum systematically resists doing.* And as a comparative scholar of higher education, I also felt some qualms with the implicitly national framing of the project. I wonder whether Blum would consider the very category of “college” to be a specifically American cultural construct?

But there is a less theoreticist way of reading Blum’s book which I highly recommend, which gets us to the other major desire animating her project. I found that the book can be read less as a comprehensive anthropological theory of “college” in general, and more as a therapeutic intervention for reflective, self-aware university teachers. As a very inexperienced university teacher myself, I was most moved by Blum’s ongoing efforts to process her own strange experiences as a teacher — to make sense of those weird genuine moments where something happens affectively that breaks through the screen of classroom ritual and affects us, the supposed authority figures.

Thus we encounter here a bad sexist moment where a male student tries to intimidate Blum, and get her fired for giving him a bad grade (30-31); a perplexing moment where her student wrote that “I don’t think Professor Blum likes college students” (7); and a flattering moment where one of her advisees comes to name her daughter Susan (30). We find frank disclosures about the ways that teaching comes to affect teachers, making them cry, laugh, traverse joy and despair. And we see that teachers, in the person of Blum, can indeed occasionally get closer to self-consciousness.

True to her own theory of human beings as social, emotional beings, Blum has a social and emotional stake in her project. Its strength is precisely that it is not an abstract piece of Lévi-Straussian cultural analysis. And the psychodynamic heart of the project, I thought, was its critique of teachers’ overidentification with their students, demanding comparison with my teacher Lauren Berlant’s (1997) study of feminist pedagogies of intimacy. Blum’s psychodynamic story about teaching runs something like this (I’m paraphrasing): “I used to be mad at my students because I thought they were failures if they were not good students like me; but finally I learned that it was impossible for them to become me, because they are driven by their own imperatives, which are not about being good students; and so I began to rethink my pedagogy without my desire to overidentify with my students, which had wound up creating so many insoluble antagonisms.”

In this sense, the book is a powerful work of anthropology not because it meditates on human nature or advances a comprehensive theoretical synthesis, but precisely because it tries to grapple with otherness: it discovers the rationality of the other. In the end, what Blum discovers is that her students, far from being bad versions of herself, are acting rationally in irrational situations.

Only the most naive would fail to be strategic… If one of the goals of education is to learn something… students are instead mastering techniques of looking like they are learning something. (36)

Here I must insert a bit of pedagogical autobiography, which seems in keeping with Blum’s own project. In my teaching last year in California, I found that my students generally were good-natured, affable, and good-intentioned. But they also were quite disinterested in academic knowledge and ritual for its own sake; they tended to want good grades without wearing themselves out in the process; they were largely attuned to non-academic parts of their lives (sports, extracurriculars, working-class jobs); they expected a contractual, fairly hierarchical classroom experience (you ask us for X, we provide Y, and our exchange is done); and they were highly responsive to incentives or disincentives.

For instance, if I planned something as open-ended as a general discussion of a given reading, most students opted strategically not to read — hoping, I suspected, that a minority of more dedicated classmates would pick up the slack and facilitate group discussion. And in the end, I often went home frustrated by the incompatibility between my desire to have a relaxed, nondisciplinary classroom that still included learning, and my students’ desire to find paths of least resistance.

Having just had that experience, I learned a great deal from Blum about processing the classroom. It’s validating to read that other teachers sometimes go home and have nightmares about odd classroom moments. Or that other teachers have those funny moments where “the spirits are happy” and “it all comes together to work” (256). Of course, I was already convinced before I started reading this book that traditional pedagogy is authoritarian and at best fundamentally limited. And I was already convinced as well by the point — often repeated here — that since education partly mirrors society, an irrational and unjust society is unlikely to welcome a utopian educational system. Social change cannot be accomplished by schooling alone. And indeed, Blum herself has no special program for university reform: she seems content to generally work within the existing system and make it, in a small way, more humane. But the point of the book is not to have a program. It is more about amplifying our capacities, as teachers, for self-knowledge and self-critique.

In the end, I recommend the book above all to younger teachers like myself, or in any event to teachers who are not too set in their ways. I Love Learning, I Hate School gives us a vast bibliography for further reading about teaching and learning; it models an admirable project of subjecting our own fantasies about teaching to critical scrutiny; above all, it makes space for the mixed feelings that teaching inevitably elicits. While there are moments where Blum aligns herself with today’s not-really-very-revolutionary proponents of a “learning revolution,” fundamentally she knows that revolutionary rhetoric is just rhetoric. Revolutionary practice, if there is such a thing, would be a much slower, harder process.

* I have elsewhere argued for a more radical skepticism about this project (Thorkelson 2015), suggesting that it is downright impossible today to produce any truly general analysis of U.S. higher education, because in short, different institutional actors are unable to really understand each other’s positions, being systematically blinded by their own positions in the system.