Category: Higher Education

College and University teaching trends

Higher Education, Reflection

The Power of Collaboration

Missy Alexander

Universities and colleges are frequently (and accurately) accused of living in silos. From external accusations of ivory tower thinking to internal challenges to interdisciplinary or cross-divisional collaboration, we struggle to move ideas forward with any kind of unity of purpose. Even as we work together to agree on missions, visions, values, and strategic plans, the coordination of efforts can be elusive. There are good reasons for this: We are a culture of experts.

To start, every single faculty member is an expert in their discipline. Our doctoral degrees and their equivalents (MFAs, for example) are designed to build a depth of knowledge that no one without that advanced educational experience can possess. That depth of knowledge helps us see the world through our disciplinary lenses and forms the basis for how degrees are organized. At the same time, each of us engaged our discipline from the perspectives of our graduate institutions, and ultimately from the perspective we developed in our dissertations. These differences in perspectives can be wonderful, opening the door to research collaborations or exposing our students to deep debates in the field. They can also be the source of petty feuds.

We do honor some parallel experiences in professional fields because they are meaningful and often beneficial. We may recruit a successful artist, journalist, or nurse practitioner without a doctoral degree because we are committed to connecting what we teach to the world beyond the academy. Enriching our faculty in this way can lead to new approaches to teaching, new connections with the external community, and an increased sense of relevance in the material for our students. It can also be a source of disagreement about meaningful research or other university expectations that are largely defined by folks who have gone the academic rather than professional route to teaching. In other words, even within departments with shared expertise, there are real differences in ideas about what is important.

Universities are also made up of experts in student affairs. Leadership in these areas have advanced degrees from a variety of fields. Whether they focused on advising practices, socio-emotional development of students, approaches to academic support, or fostering student engagement, each one brings specialized knowledge and expertise to their areas. Just like faculty, student affairs personnel attend conferences to learn about emerging trends and interesting innovations. Their knowledge is an important part of student success at a university. Whether connecting students to the help they need at any point in their undergraduate or graduate experience, developing great activities and events to support a vibrate campus environment, or facilitating transitions into and out of the university, student affairs can be a wonderful partner to academic affairs. Or it could be left on its “side” of the university, without the opportunity to fully develop strategic priorities in partnership with academic affairs.

There are also professionals in admissions, registration, and financial aid. The specialized knowledge of this group is essential for the health of the university. They are charged with managing the intricacies of system, state, and federal regulations. They rely on input from academic and student affairs to maintain compliance with these regulations. They also identify local policy problems that trip up our students, keeping them from enrolling or graduating. This group has to keep a close eye on changes in academic programs in ways that faculty do not see. They are aware of internal logic problems (like inconsistent prerequisites) and external barriers to new programs like regulations about certificates vs. degrees. This group is incredibly important to the success of the university and can be a fount of information as we develop new programs, revise existing programs, or plan our student support strategies. Or they can be left out of the planning and asked to clean things up after the fact.

I could continue and remind everyone of the importance of the experts in facilities, information technology, human resources, and finance and administration, and so on. Every one of them matters in every decision we make. They need to be included in the development of strategic plans, to be sure, and they usually are. It is the coordination after the plan that is the rub.

The trouble with all the expertise is that it often keeps us from being good collaborators. To our credit, we are a culture with a penchant for individual initiative and problem solving. This inspires us to move forward on ideas that are immediately concerning or interesting, without looking at how it integrates with the whole. We tend to do our homework, planning from our specialized perspectives, which speaks well of our work-ethic. Unfortunately, it often leads to the duplication of efforts (at best) and undermining of efforts (at worst). It also tends to leave out important perspectives because, in our rush to solve a problem or move an interesting idea forward, we forget that our colleagues with complementary or just plain different expertise are there.

I love the diverse group of experts that shape universities. As provost, I am lucky to interact regularly with colleagues in every department and I learn from every single conversation. Over the years, I have tried to connect people across disciplines and divisions, with some successes. But it has not been enough. We are still operating in silos and they have outlived their usefulness.

There is plenty of evidence that supporting students requires collaboration across disciplines and divisions. From emergency funding to problematic course sequences to planning co-curricular activities, shared understandings, ideas, and interventions are the best way to create great educational experiences and improve outcomes. Sharing ideas and aligning strategies can help us avoid duplication of efforts and keep us from developing initiatives that end up cancelling each other out. It can also help us better understand how the ideas and expertise of our colleagues can inform and improve our own ideas and expertise. There is power in collaboration and coordination of efforts. It is time to re-imagine our processes so that the power of collaboration can be harnessed for a better future.

equity, Higher Education

The Cadence of We

Missy Alexander

The alignment of Martin Luther King Day with the start of the spring semester has always seemed fortuitous to me. For a communication scholar, whenever the world takes a moment to reflect on great speeches is a win. In the “I Have a Dream Speech” it is easy to see that the message is created from the words, the context, the cadence, and the messenger. It is a rhetorical work of art, and it never fails to inspire. But it isn’t my discipline that excites me about the alignment of new semesters and MLK day, it is the feeling of hope and unity that this day of reflection brings for me.

Today I am struck by what I would describe as the cadence of we. King builds his argument for civil rights with the language of history, the details of the present struggle, and the rhythms of the church. Drawing on the words and the presence of Lincoln, we remember our Emancipation Proclamation and the struggle for a just society so far. Invoking our Declaration of Independence and the stated inalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” he argues that undoing the ravages of racism and segregation is a debt owed to all oppressed people. Repeating the phrase “I have a dream” he builds a world that must reject the hideousness of Jim Crow, revealing a possible future where all people are truly free.

Every time I read the text I weep. How can I not? In a message that does not shrink from describing the horrors that flow from racist policies, practices, and prejudices, he helps us see a path forward. The call to action is meaningful and possible, empowering his audience to join this good fight. The dream he describes builds a world that is honest, wholesome, and just. It is a world that frees us from the cognitive dissonance that must arise if we take the promise of those inalienable rights seriously. And despite the terrible biases that we are still fighting today, many of the images that King describes have come to pass. Reading it today gives me the strength to persevere and the confidence that we can do better.

What I find most interesting is how King uses the “I” to create the feeling of “we.” This is a powerful strategy. In describing his dream, he describes people and circumstances that reflect the kind of just society to which all of us should aspire. By invoking our shared history and common documents, it is clear that his dream must be our dream, or we betray ourselves. The I becomes the we.

At this moment in history, finding that we seems incredibly challenging. We have gotten so good at finding distinctions between us that the path to common goals can feel impossible. Social media are sorting us with their (our) algorithms, and we are sorting ourselves into teams. Bumper stickers are frequently cruel, and flags have become weapons. Finding common ground seems impossible.

Ironically, some of these divisions are arising from our efforts to be more inclusive. As we discover the gaps in our histories, we see the differences between our experiences more clearly. This can leave us feeling that trying to draw throughlines that bind us is reductive at best. Seeking common ground feels like trivializing the important differences that we are endeavoring to understand. This is a conundrum to be sure.

I am happy that we have become more attuned to the ways in which the stories we tell often neglect important details about the lives and experiences of so many people. If we’re honest, the stories of my youth actually left out most people. The stories my children learned included more people, but there were still many who were missing. We are on to the next generation and have established a habit of discovering the gaps in our stories. This is a good thing. But we can’t just stop at identifying the gaps. We have to build new visions of a shared future, weaving our stories together. We must not lose the we.

So, why do I see the timing of MLK Day and the start of the semester as fortuitous? Because it is an invitation to think about how to transition from I to we, and the role education must play in that transition. In 1963, King delivered his most famous speech, the world was incredibly divided. King’s vision was for a better world than the violent and segregated spaces in which he lived. If he could see the better world in that context, surely, we can see a better world as well. Surely, we can find a path to the we again.

King describes the promise of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as a promissory note, a debt that must be paid. Education can help us pay that debt. It is the place where we should build shared understandings, even as we challenge the status quo. It is a place where we must learn and unlearn our histories, broadening our understandings of how our values and our institutions differentially impact communities. It is a place where, as we uncover the things that we’ve overlooked in science, in art, in economics, and literature, we do not leave discouraged, but inspired to solve problems together.

Education promises a path to freedom for the individual, while building a better understanding of the experiences of the many. Those new understandings must serve as a call to action, revealing possible paths forward so that all of us are truly free. I have a dream that education can create a new sense of we, helping us rise above the divisiveness of this moment in history, and inspiring us to collaborate for a better future for everyone. Let’s make it so.

Dialogue, Free Speech, Higher Education

Embracing Discomfort

Missy Alexander

It is election eve and all the pollsters and news outlets are busy predicting outcomes. Well not really. The margins of error seem large this year, with predictions so hedged as to appear meaningless. Issues (or single issues) seem to have taken a backseat to strategy, power, and control. We wait with bated breath, uncertain about the future but certain that we want something to change.

What is that change we crave? Well, of course, most of us have a few specific issues about which we care deeply. We care about the future of our social programs, how we fund education, access to healthcare, and the state of the economy. There are concerns about energy and transportation infrastructure and the impact of international relations on how we live. Everyone cares about the supply chain, even if the complexity of it all eludes most of us. There are plenty of specific issues to attend to in this election. But, I don’t think that any of these are at the heart of the something we’d like to change. It’s a change in the discourse that we crave.

I see it in myself. Like all elections, as we near the finish, the coverage is “horse race” coverage. There is no new information, just a kind of gamblers’ commentary as we bet on winners and losers. I’m no gambler, so I switch to music instead of the morning news. But even before the final weeks of the campaign, I have been wanting to switch to music, because I could see no honest conversations taking place. Everyone has staked out their corner, ignoring all chance of finding common ground.

Honest conversations? Common ground? What on earth am I thinking? I know, I know. The politics of running for office is always about those corners. People are playing margins and stirring up discontentment on purpose. This is the only way that candidates seem to be able to differentiate themselves. This is how they win their seats. But this conforms with only one definition of politics “the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government.” It has nothing to do with the other definition of politics “the art and science of guiding or influencing government policy.” (Thank you Merriam Webster).

I admit that you need some of the control to have the influence. Nevertheless, I’d like to see the path to that control more concerned with the substance of what that influence would mean. I dream of conversations that are less focused on winning the margins and more on the lived experiences of our communities. I know from my own experiences, that those conversations are sometimes very strained as we try to listen to those with whom we disagree. But they can also be extremely rewarding, because we often find that we are far closer together than those strident yells to (from?) the margins would let on.

I was struck by this today as I read “What a 1960s Housewife Can Teach Us about Politics in Higher Ed” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article details the ongoing debates on the rights and responsibilities of faculty to speak freely about controversial issues. It is a timely story that helps me think about the “conversations” we are having about twitter posts that offend some sensibilities, potential and actual policies banning discussion of Critical Race Theory, and the complexities of discussing Roe v. Wade, or other cultural flashpoints in the classroom. I say “conversations” because the arguments about what to do are mostly happening in the same manner that our political “debates” are happening – at a yell, often decontextualized, and without nuance.

At the heart of the Chronicle story is the notion of “indoctrination.” This word is invoked whenever a teacher or professor, school or university brings forth ideas that contradict widely held beliefs. The adoption of evolution in the science curriculum was a moment when educators were faced with accusations of indoctrination. So are those moments when things get uncomfortable in our discussions about religion, economic structures other than capitalism, political structures other than democracy, civil rights in total, and examinations of power structures in total. Questioning the status quo is often politicized as indoctrination. But according to Merriam Webster, to indoctrinate is “to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion.” To my way of thinking, then, to not discuss alternatives to commonly held beliefs is indoctrination. To discuss them is what I’d like to call education.

But it isn’t that simple, because to do this well is to be able to navigate fairly a lot of discomfort. We are comfortable in our world views and we experience discomfort when they are questioned. This discomfort is one of hardest things we navigate in education. If one believes we are a Christian nation, then questioning that will cause discomfort. If we believe that capitalism is the right economic structure, then we will experience discomfort if alternatives to that structure are discussed. If we believe that “normal” families look a specific way, we will experience discomfort when discussing alternatives to that definition of normal.

Responses to that discomfort are often feelings of anger, shame, and a sense of being diminished in some way. Indeed, one definition of discomfort acknowledges the experience of grief or distress. I might describe this as a feeling of loss, and that sense of loss can be profound indeed. That sense of loss can drive people to the extremes of a subject, defending rather than listening. Discomfort is often what convinces people that rules against these conversations are reasonable. They are not.

What is evident to me in all of this is that higher education is in the business of discomfort. Our job is to ask questions about what we do/know/believe, how we came to do/know/believe those things, and how they might be understood differently. It is also our job to try to navigate the discomfort these conversations inspire in ways that allow people to recover from feelings of anger, shame, or disempowerment they may cause. This is hard work, indeed, but it is imperative that we do so, because there is no other social structure designed to support these honest and difficult conversations.

As we approach election day, I see clearly that higher education must play a vital role in helping people move from discussing the horse race and the politics of power to discussing the paths to a better world and the politics of policy development. It is in our classrooms and our research that we can take the time to sort through the jolts to our worldviews and explore the potential for common ground. We will find ourselves deadlocked over some things, to be sure, but I think we’ll also find that those things are far rarer than we imagine. That discovery alone is worth the effort of cultivating difficult conversations in our classrooms.

Higher education must continue to cultivate these difficult and, one hopes, intriguing conversations. It is how we prepare people to become productive participants in the governance of their towns, schools, states, and the nation. It is our job to get folks used to engaging ideas that challenge their worldviews, and by extension, people who do the same. Those people are usually our neighbors, classmates, and colleagues with whom we must find a way to co-exist. Limiting the scope of our conversations will never achieve this.

Engaging dissent, disagreement, and differing worldviews is the most important job we do in higher education. It is the best way for us to support a productive democracy. It will never stop causing discomfort. But, perhaps, with practice, we can learn to embrace that discomfort in the service of finding more common ground.

Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies, Reflection

What is College for?

Missy Alexander

When you transition from faculty to administration, you tend to go to conferences focused on institutional questions – assessment, retention, general education, equity, and so on. It is not often that a dean or provost has the opportunity to attend a conference in their discipline, so it is wonderful treat when we do. This past weekend, I spent some time with friends old and new at the annual conference of the Institute of General Semantics, and thoroughly enjoyed the thinking it provoked.

General Semantics is one of the roots of the development of the field communication. It focuses on how language shapes our realities and how a more precise use of language might improve our understandings of all that we encounter. Inspired by Alfred Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, general semantics asks us to consider the frames our words are setting (and therefore what is outside of the frame), the level of detail we are choosing (and therefore what details we will ignore), and the impact of time on what we are defining (noting that people and things change from time 1 to time 2). There’s much more, of course, but at its core, this is an optimistic field; there is an assumption that we can improve our circumstances, relationships, and experiences through a more precise and thoughtful examination of the words we use.

IGS attracts an eclectic group of artists, philosophers, mathematicians, and communication scholars. Making sense of the myriad ideas and arguments presented is often a challenge because of that diversity. I enjoyed the presentations by people most closely aligned with my field, particularly Gary Gumpert and Susan Drucker’s observations about the links between flashmobs and the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Drucker’s expertise in law and language was particularly compelling. I was also intrigued by the work of Eva Berger as she explored ideas about the ways in which ideas of the self are reshaped (erased?) by the focus on the performative self (selfies and TikTok). Her arguments evoke the work of Marshall McLuhan in the linking of our media not just to cultural practice but to the development of the biological self. But as I endeavored to understand the work presented by the scientists, mathematicians, and artists there, I found myself leaping to the institutional questions that are my focus as an administrator.

The ability to make sense of ideas and arguments developed in diverse contexts from varied perspectives seems to me to be the fundamental purposes of education. We start with our children, explaining that there are clusters of ideas called history, science, literature, religion, and so on, and those ideas explore different questions about the world. In teaching them that these are distinct categories, we put a frame around clusters of learning, helping to organize paths to understanding within those frames.

We also (inadvertently) erect the barriers to connecting ideas across fields. It is rare that we make the space for our K-12 educators to bridge the divides between fields, as we have organized them into class times devoted to each topic. On occasion, a school will coordinate learning in a connected way – by selecting literature, history, and religious texts of the same era across classes. A very creative school might also find a way to weave science into this strategy, but mostly, we separate science from this kind of thinking. We quickly discover that we have not just organized clusters of ideas, we’ve established things called disciplines.

In higher education, we follow the same pattern, dividing things by discipline and major. We are exceedingly proud of ourselves when we manage to link the topics in two courses together, but most of the time students experience their education in course-based structures, occasionally making connections to other courses. This habit of dividing up the learning territory is deemed a necessary element of education, in order to give adequate attention to detail in one’s area of expertise. Surely there is an element of truth to that need, but as I worked hard to draw connections between ideas at the IGS conference, I wondered if we were overdoing those divisions.

Higher education has been reflecting on those divisions of late, most often under two conditions: interdisciplinarity and austerity. These conditions are not mutually exclusive. Interdisciplinarity of subjects seems to be emerge fields evolve. At WCSU, we have a relatively new degree in Digital and Interactive Media Arts, which draws together expertise in film and video, graphic design, and computer science (three separate departments). Professions associated with digital media evolved in such a way that these disciplines had to collaborate to better serve our students. We also have a degree called Interdisciplinary Studies that allows students to make connections for themselves. A student in Justice and Law Administration, for example, may wish to reimagine their degree with connections to history or literature. These new combinations may help us see the emergence of new areas of expertise or just demonstrate the eclectic ways that ideas can come together.

Under conditions of austerity, we see waning interests in long established disciplines driving thinking about new combinations of ideas and disciplines. This change is more disconcerting than those that come when we see new patterns of interest. The apparent loss of interest in any discipline is disheartening at best. I won’t try to pretend that it is easy to move from that loss to invention; it is not. But in those losses there is the opportunity to remind ourselves that all disciplines have emerged from other disciplines, and all have changed over time. Perhaps, we are not so much at a moment of loss, but instead, we are undoing the borders (walls/silos) we have created.

What would be even more exciting, though, is not just to engage in the slow process of realignment of ideas and expertise into new combinations. That is exciting, to be sure, with lots of room for interesting collaborations. But perhaps this moment is an opportunity to be more bold and try to reorganize college around the connections between ideas, instead of separations.

I think that connecting ideas might be what we wanted to have happen in the first place, but we got distracted by the names of subjects and structures of departments. K-12 did the work of establishing the broad categories of learning, the map of knowledge if you will. College is the opportunity to help our students understand just how far those categories are from the lived experience of trying to understand anything at all. Experience always reveals that a single disciplinary perspective will help us solve nothing at all.

Those useful maps of disciplines that allow our partners in primary and secondary education lay a foundation for learning are not very useful after those foundations are in place. Just as the alphabet must disappear if we are to achieve fluency as readers, so should the disciplinary boundaries disappear if we are to become fluent thinkers. Maybe college is where we can learn that the map of knowledge we have encountered so far, is not the territory in which we live and learn at all.

Higher Education, Return on Investment, Workforce Development

The Details: Education & Employers

Missy Alexander

A series of events last week led me to participate in several conversations about the alignment of our university’s program offerings with Connecticut’s workforce needs. These conversations are not new, nor are they surprising. Since our founding in 1913, WCSU has been responding to the needs of the region by growing our program offerings, assessing their quality, and evolving as new discoveries and career paths emerge. Our professional programs align with industry standards and our more broadly liberal arts offerings provide ample opportunity for students to explore the many paths open to them, through research, internships, service learning, and so on. Call it workforce development, career preparation, or access to the American Dream – this is what we do.

Still, I was struck by the confluence of initiatives coming from all corners, so I spent a few hours reading a recent report from the Chronicle of Higher Education titled, Building Tomorrow’s Workforce: What employers want you to know. In this compilation of interviews with business leaders and career development professionals in higher education there were some important observations about the complexity of aligning education with what employers say they want. There were also some important gaps in the conversations. Those gaps reflect some important details that we all need to understand.

First, not all workforce needs are equal and conflating them is not satisfying for anyone. In our region of the country and elsewhere, there is a pressing demand for an expanded workforce in healthcare. At a four-year university, the pathways to much of this work is through the nursing degree and allied health programs. At two-year colleges, there are opportunities to become Certified Nursing Assistants, phlebotomists, EMTs, and to earn the first level nursing credential. Each of these paths are great opportunities for students and all of them will lead to employment. They are appropriately tiered in terms of the return on investment, with a relatively low-cost for CNA, phlebotomy, and EMT, and somewhat more for the two-year degree, and more for the four-year degree. All of this makes sense in terms of opportunities for graduates and meeting regional workforce needs.

But we can’t keep up with demand. CNAs move on quickly so there is a need for constant replenishment. EMTs are only compensated in some scenarios, so there is some instability there. Nursing programs are working hard to educate as many students as they can, but there are limits on the number of clinical sites, which slows the pipeline. In other words, the education we provide is aligned with the regional workforce needs, but a combination of factors external to higher education is making it hard to keep up with demand.

Then there is the ever-present need for people who understand all things related to computers and the internet. From coding, to cybersecurity, to web development, the demand is clear. The shortfall in appropriately skilled people has led to boot camps, free online programs, the dropping of degree requirements in favor of tests of competence, etc. These short paths to entering reasonably compensated positions is not a bad thing. The industries making these moves are supporting the preparation necessary for entry level opportunities that can be good for the people who take advantage of them.

But, then they want the rest of what we offer — the maturity, the critical thinking, the collaboration and problem-solving skills, and even the understanding of the nuances of cultures — and those short-term credentials don’t get students there. Employers also frequently need the more extensive education in computer science and cybersecurity that we provide. Certainly, those more robust skills and understandings are the path from entry level to more advanced positions. Without them, those short-term credentials may ultimately limit opportunities, rather than grow them.

Universities and colleges do revise and adapt as quickly as we can, but in technology fields new things emerge at a pace that is breathtaking. The short-term paths may be good opportunities for our students, if the employers will also create paths to the rest of the educational opportunities we provide. Support for continued education for those who come through those boot camps would be a great place to start.

What about the degrees we offer that don’t neatly align with a single career trajectory? Well, most jobs require combinations of skills and attitudes that are not aligned with particular majors and a plethora of studies about “what employers want” keep identifying the essential learning outcomes of a liberal arts degree. We do that well. Still, there are some components of positions that a specific course or two might address. For example, there is a high demand for graduates who can support social media sites, so some grounding in how websites work and how to analyze interaction within them might be useful. Many places need people who are able to interpret and communicate about basic quantitative data, so a statistics class is in order. Then there are the many jobs that ask for employees who are adept at interacting with diverse populations of people (in the workplace and in the community). Those skills can come from any number of courses and experiences in our classrooms and in the internships we hope that many organizations will provide. We can be more intentional about promoting these combinations of skills to our students; we hope that employers will make these skills visible in their recruitment language.

The popular perception that higher education is somehow averse to supporting workforce development couldn’t be further from the truth. But supporting the workforce needs of a state is a collaboration. Employers need to understand the barriers we face in meeting their expectations quickly. Limited opportunities for clinical placements make it difficult for us to increase the desired educational pipelines (healthcare, mental health, social work, etc.). Financial realities often make it difficult for students to take advantage of internships. The pace of technological development makes it difficult to re-imagine curriculum quickly. We are not being obstinate; we just face some practical challenges.

These are the kinds of details that need constant attention as we strive to provide the best opportunities for our students and for our region. They are tricky details, but not insurmountable. We are happy to partner up and sort them out. Let’s talk.