April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate
programs in American universities produce a product for which there
is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist)
and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in
subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one
other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising
cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems
into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for
decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation
of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the
Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content
of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor,
so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public
teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to
separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-
increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for
example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with
little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication
become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the
trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge
that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A
colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his
dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational
system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members
cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to
their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of
these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid
graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,
universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing
undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still
encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper
to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with
as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire
full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard
for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the
illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical
presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that
there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are
self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review.
While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight
responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To
complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted
tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for
the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own
departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century,
colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be
rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to
make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin
with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and
proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. 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.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists
who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had
never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of
the world today, this is a significant oversight. 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.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on
questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology,
sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in
comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is
restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be
transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education,
and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving
programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one
should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly
changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around
which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law,
Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and
Water.

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.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts,
social and natural sciences with representatives from professional
schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work,
theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple
perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop
and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not
need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to
form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be
able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong
department in French, for example, and the other a strong department
in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects
can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I
have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the
Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. 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.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students.
Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they
are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare
for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new
approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life
issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit
organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate
in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly
changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended
to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with
little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once
tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a
professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or
her to assume responsibilities like administration and student
advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which,
like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or
renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward
researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain
productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and
skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather,
take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never
imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is
that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their
complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive.

Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia,
is the author of the forthcoming “Field Notes From Elsewhere:
Reflections on Dying and Living.”

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