• Get a generous sugar daddy/mommy to pay the full freight for every student
• Hire a really good PR firm and be on the brink of media over-exposure
• Expect the venture to falter after 3 years
• Try to link yourself with an already prestigious brand

…at least that’s what this piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed implies.  That’s odd, I didn’t read anything about having a great faculty…

One of the hottest topics within higher education these days is virtual learning.  Almost every institution is exploring how to integrate electronic learning into their programs.  There are many reasons for this not the least of which is financial.  However, does physicality matter for the various aspects of education?

For instance, should students be forced to physically move for a number of years to a campus in order to study?  Should conferences be held via the web instead of renting out convention centers and vast numbers of hotel rooms?  

Personally, I think physicality is vitally important to almost every aspect of education and research.  I think there are certain courses that can migrate online but personal, physical interaction is a huge catalyst for creativity.  Students having the ability of interacting with professors in person during a class session–but more importantly, chatting over coffee or something outside of class hours–is a tremendously productive thing.  Meeting together for the various conferences is incredibly beneficial not necessarily because of the presentations, although there are a handful of presentations that I find valuable every year, but the conferences are the best way to make personal relationships and explore tentative ideas with other experts over lunch or dinner.  

As much as telecommunications and IT technology have helped and will help education, the most effective learning environments are physical learning communities.  

A blog on The Atlantic has a very fascinating post about creative clusters in the music industry.  Even though it would seem that the technology exists to create music from any location with a high-speed connection, LA, NY, and Nashville are still the places to be if you want to be in the music business because they posses the infrastructure and the community that facilitates creative expression.  Similarly, this is why physical campus education remains so important.

What do you think?

If there weren’t impractical classes computers would be ugly and Apple might not even be in business.  My advice–take some impractical classes; there’s more to life than accounting and chemistry.  But, don’t take it from me, take it from Steve Jobs (Stanford commencement address 2005):

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Tim Bulkeley has a rebuttal to my reflection upon open access scholarship.  He has some very good points especially with his analysis of the costs of electronic storage and distribution.  His first post is on research and in general I agree with him (however, I still like physical books, I dislike doing real reading from a computer screen).  I am looking forward to his second post in which he will discuss open source teaching.

While we’re on the subject, see David Hymes’ reflection upon open teaching.  I think this might work on a limited basis (my videos on the Nineveh paper I wrote might fit into this), however, institutions will probably resist full-blown open teaching–afterall, they do have bills to pay.

I write this post with a bit of trepidation.  Personally, I really love the fact that so much academic material is now distributed free of charge: the Oriental Institute is offering their treasure-trove of publications gratis, lectures on every conceivable topic from thermodynamics to Thermopylae are available on institutional sites as well as iTunes U, free online journals have arisen, and individual scholars are putting their work on their websites.  This is great.  I love it.  I’m a downloading fiend and I make full use of these free offerings.  However…

Is scholarship really free?  What subsidizes these free offerings?  Some of them, like the iTunes U offerings  and insitutionally hosted lectures (as well as MIT’s OpenCourseWare) are really teaser products.  They offer just enough to whet your appitite to get you to contribute or sign up for classes.  I have no problem with this.  It makes sense.

Other instutions have large endowments and they can pay researchers to do their thing all day long and not have to worry about a thing.  Offer stuff for free, no problem.

But then, there’s the rest of us.  How do we provide our research?  We could just research in the evenings and weekends and get a “real” job so that we can distribute our stuff for free.  Also, what about the vast majority of institutions that rely on tuition for their operating budget–can they really offer everything they produce for free?  Can high quality research be sustained this way?

How about publishers?  How can they make money under this scheme?  Lest we think we can cut them out of the loop, where is the editing help going to come from?  The printing?  Okay, let’s say we distribute it for free electronically–who’s going to host the publications and pay for bandwith, select and format the material, and market it so people actually find out about a publication?

Scholars are all behind giving their work away (at least their scholarly monographs and articles which they don’t make money from anyway, but tell Bart Ehrman to distribute his best selling books for free and I bet you’d get some resistance) because it gets their name out there which lands them more lectureships and more writing gigs which gets them more prestigious appointments.  Of course scholars (including me–I have a website for goodness sakes!) like getting our name out there; building our personal brand.

But how do all the scholars who do not work for the 1% of insitutions that are fully-funded through endowments and grants distribute their work for free?  Well, its subsidized by their insitution because the institution’s brand is built up when individual professors’ brands rise in prominence.  However, these institutions face a balancing act of giving away enough to entice people but not enough to ruin their revenue stream.  Which means that open access can never reach the levels at which we hear many people clamoring for.

This brings me to my last point.  I understand the desire for open access, I desire it too.  But, isn’t scholarship worth something?  If it has value, how do we pay for it?  Should we expect to consume it for free?

I wrote a post a bit ago about some aspects of the Finnish education system that a contributor to the Wall Street Journal highlighted. The Finnish approach has been studied fairly extensively since high school students perennially perform well in international testing, however, so do Dutch students. Open Education has a four-part series of posts that are worth checking out concerning education in the Netherlands:

Education in the Netherlands: Another High Performing Country

Education in the Netherlands: Testing, Tracking and Results

Dutch Secondary School Options: A Model for the US?

The Netherlands: A Proper Emphasis on Vocational Education

One of the biggest figures in the study of the prophets in the late 1800′s/early 1900′s was Bernard Duhm. In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s the guy who separated Isaiah into the major collections of chapters 1-39, 40-55, and 56-66. Before his commentary on Isaiah in which he presented his arguments for the division of the book, in 1875 he wrote a theology of the prophets entitled, Die Theologie der Propheten. However, he did not publish ANYTHING, not even an article or short note, for 17 years until the first edition of his Isaiah commentary came out.

So, do you think Duhm would get tenure today? Probably not. Maybe we need to rethink setting page count minimums and such in tenure reviews. Sometimes good ideas need time to percolate. Furthermore, I think there are too many writings of bad quality constantly being churned out–this might be partly explained because young scholars are fearful of falling short of publishing minimums and they put out stuff that they might not otherwise.

So, what would change with tenure reviews?

How did the world’s best institutions rise to the top of their fields?  The stories are probably varied and include a good bit of “luck.”  However, there are some commonalities that I think higher education could learn from (however, the academy has plenty right because in many respects business are patterning themselves after university structures–how many business headquarters are called “campuses” and Google gives employees time to pursue their own interest, i.e. research time).  One such institution is the world’s largest hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, which has about $35.4 billion in assets and has a very nice track record of returns substantially higher than even top-notch funds.  The firm is understandably unwilling to talk specifically about what makes them so much better than the competition but an article in Bloomberg Markets posits several things:

•  The hedge fund is run by scientists.  Why?  Because in order to get outsized gains the fund has to take a different strategy than the average fund.  Business schools are very conservative by nature and they don’t teach students how to think creatively or differently (I am a business school graduate). From the article: “I’ve always said Renaissance’s secret is that it didn’t hire MBAs,” says Berlekamp [guy who runs the fund], who blames the herdlike mentality among business school graduates for poor investor returns.  Therefore, want a great department?  Hire professors that don’t slavishly follow the prevailing fads.
• Great organizations know that greatness is expensive.  Things that contribute to the greatness of an organization are not expenses–they are investments that under the right conditions will produces outsized returns.  From the article:  Programming and modeling are treated as the heart of the firm’s advantage–not an expense. “If you needed a lot of computer power, the decision was based on whether you needed it, not the budget,” says Peter Weinberger, former chief technology officer at Renaissance and now a software engineer at Google Inc.  Therefore, university/college admins: professors are at the core of your mission, great ones are scarce and you’ll need to pony up to get them.  Might I make an outrageous proposal on how to do this.  Spend three to five times more on the development personnel than you do right now.  If your college currently spends $60,000 on your head development person maybe consider creating a new position that pays $180,000 and letting the current development head apply for it (and if you want to hire another person, keep the current employee on as an assistant at their present salary).  With a top-notch fundraiser, this will help you raise professors salaries and provide fellowships for top-notch students.  One other radical suggestion: cut half of the support staff positions of the school and double the salaries for the remaining positions.  I think you would see that the school would run much better–academic positions are normally priced at below market averages and this would help balance this equation.
• From the article: Decisions are made quickly and feedback is constant. “One of the things about Renaissance is that there’s a feeling of urgency,” says Frey, who left to teach applied mathematics and statistics at Stony Brook in 2004. “We always believed that there was a wolf at the door, that somebody would get there before we did.”  Academic institutions are known for slow changes and slow decision making.  Some aspects of this are good but when really important decisions need to be made–they need to be made, not endlessly debated in committees.  
• Departments need to create environments in which people can fail.  Failure is okay as long as it is fixable and you learn from it.  Failure makes you better.  This involves creating an environment in which open and honest discussion is valued.  No one is perfect so swallow your pride–it’s greatness we’re after.  From the article: the company encourages openness, whether it’s about market signals that show where a security might be headed or about technology or trading. Simons says new employees are encouraged to troll computer files detailing Renaissance’s past strategies, successful or not. 
• Get rid of rigid hierarchies and create an open and transparent organization.  From the article: “If Simons’s door was open, you could walk in,” Weinberger says. That would go for everyone from secretaries on up.
• Professors need to be rewarded when the school/department succeeds.  The rewards in academics are largely individual (book deals, editorships, endowed chairs, etc.).  Schools/departments should set goals and when they are attained staff and faculty should be rewarded.  Furthermore, staff and faculty need to be included in setting these goals and the operation of the school so that there is a feeling of true ownership and professors don’t just feel like employees.  From the article: Simons says he’s proud of Renaissance’s low personnel turnover. The firm is owned by 80-85 employees. From managing directors to cleaning staff, everyone receives a percentage of the profits, Simons says. It’s compensation for what he expects them to contribute over the long term. The notion of paying someone based on a single year’s performance makes no sense in an environment where some projects take years to complete, Simons says. “We want everyone to want everyone else to do well,” he says.

Think my suggestions are too crazy?  What do you think would make for more successful academic departments/schools?

The New York Times has recently published a number of pieces on higher education that are worth checking out.

This morning they published an article that explores ways in which some PhD programs are trying to shorten the length of time required to complete the degree. Here are some figures from the article: avg. time to get a PhD is 8.2, in education more than 13 years; average age at commencement for PhD grads is 32; 12% of PhD graduates have more than $50,000 in debt.

The New York Times Magazine put out its college issue this past weekend. Here are some highlights:

• An interview with Lloyd Thacker who is leading the charge of colleges refusing to participate in US News and World Report college rankings. He talks about the fallacy of colleges trying to be #1 by argueing that really colleges are just about making a good fit for the right students. He also talks about why colleges are getting so expensive.
• “Academic Business” discusses the darker side of the slide to a corporate mentality that is spreading through colleges. Here is a juicy quote, “Like hospitals, colleges have generally got the benefit of the doubt on the question of why they cost so much, and many people still regard them as selfless institutions above and beyond the self-serving rules of the marketplace. But their reputation for probity and virtue is deteriorating fast.”
• Two articles describe how two institutions are completely rethinking how they educate their students. In these cases the educational experience is quite unique: Olin College rethinks how to train engineers by integrating business/entrepreneurial skills, team building, and hands on projects into engineering curricula and New St. Andrew’s College tries to recreate a distinctly British curriculum from the 1600′s by focusing on reading the “classics.”

Christianity Today has an article about the rise in distance and online educational offerings from seminaries across North America.  While I think it is wonderful that seminaries are able to provide these opportunities, I still think that by far the best way for people to learn is in physical communities.  The article quotes Timothy George, the dean of Beeson Divinity School, and I agree with his comments: “Our philosophy is that studying for the ministry is best taught and is best done in a setting where people know one another and interact with one another, can rub souls with one another.”

However, George also admits that Beeson has a fat endowment so they are not dependent upon tuition for operating income.  What do you think about new educational models?  Are they as effective as traditional one-campus schools?