Ubi Justin

The paradigm shift in Higher Ed can be expressed as a change from the accumulation  of knowledge to the translation  of knowledge. Up until the end of the 20th century, professors provided students an archive of knowledge and tested how well they had digested it intellectually. The goal was mastery of  a subject-area, and once "mastery" had been certified, students were told they could now go off into the world and do something with all that information. Or not. This typically meant that at your graduation party, some great-uncle or another recommended you get into plastics, Plastics!,  before you jumped into the swimming pool still wearing your clothes in existential despair. The 21st century HEI must be oriented to communicating knowledge into action beyond the walls of the institution, prior to graduation. This may have to do with the fact that the archive of knowledge and its categorical subject-areas can be now be automated to a large extent, such that the int...

I'm a firm believer in building change from the bottom up. If the first thing a university does is hire an external consultant, you can be assured that the institution will not be able to adapt to any change it's facing. The second-worst option is to form a large  ad hoc  committee of faculty and administrators to tell departments and students what to do. Sometimes this approach is necessary, but in the preponderance of instances, top-down change in a university is ineffective. At least from my perspective (which is usually from below looking up). Most faculty (myself included) will merely ignore the top-down decision, and ride out the situation until the next top-down decision is made by a consultant or large committee. Meanwhile, the students will have no idea what's going on and will continue on their way. With respect to the "sea-change" I described in my last post, there are any number of external and internal factors producing the paradigm shift in Higher ...

Judging by my email over the weekend, it appears that every foreign language department in the SUNY system is in the same boat as my own. I'm receiving numerous emails advertising courses that can be taken online, and asking me to tell the students here at UB about them. The SUNY system has begun to push online education in a major way, largely through OpenSUNY and #sunyonline . My understanding of the effort is relatively vague, but it appears SUNY wishes to centralize online offerings and has set up new protocols through which a student at one SUNY campus can enroll in an online course at another with relative ease.  I don't think I'm off-base when I suggest that everyone on this Same Boat is under the same gun. From the very top of SUNY Central administration in Albany, down to the smallest of its 64 universities, colleges, and community colleges, everyone seeks to boost enrollments (and hence budget allocations) by expanding online education. No duh. There are only...

My perspective on this blog is shaped entirely by my current professional experience. As Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), my mission is clear: I am charged with spreading democracy throughout the world by educating global citizens who are not only fluent in multiple languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and sometimes Portuguese and Catalan, in the case of RLL), but also culturally conversant in the history, art, literature, and civic life of societies that speak these languages. No really, that's what I do for a living! My primary way to achieve my mission, however, is anything but idealistic: Butts in seats. Our viability as a department depends on generating revenue for the College, which of course is determined by the number student butts land in our classroom seats. Accordingly, we have to adapt programs and curricula in order to attract more students paying the highest tuition rates: namely, paying MA students ...

A recent study conducted by the Modern Language Association found that institutions of higher education across the United States eliminated a whopping total of 651 foreign language programs between 2013-16. One might imagine that these closures arrived in the wake of the 2008 financial market collapse, although for myself I do not necessarily see a direct correlation between the Great Recession and the "Great Extinction of Foreign Language Programs." The very same MLA study, for instance, reports that between 2009-2013 there was only one program closure. That is, in the years of greatest budgetary crisis among states and localities, foreign  language programs appear to have continued much as they had in years prior: Most likely starved of resources just like every other department on campus, but certainly not under threat of extinction due solely to diminished tax revenues. This brings me to the foundational premise of this blog. Higher education is not in crisis, it is in...