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 ...