The role of the faculty in institutional development - Featured Topic

Liberal Education, Fall, 2003 by Susan Traverso

PERHAPS WE'VE HEARD TOO MUCH about the "new challenges" facing higher education. In point of fact, American higher education has been in a state of transformation since its beginning. New curricula, new ways of learning, new groups of students, new types of institutions fill the pages of every history of American higher education. From the introduction of the scientific method in the nineteenth century, to the influx of first generation college students with the G.I. Bill of Rights in the 1950s, to the present, colleges and universities have been in a constant state of remaking, reforming, and transforming. The history of perpetual experiment and change has assured a wondrous heterogeneity in American higher education. We have public and private research universities, liberal arts colleges, comprehensive institutions, community colleges, and now even opportunities for distance education. These various sites of learning respond differently to change, but the responsiveness of American higher education to change reflects the values of freedom and opportunity that we cherish. It assures vitality. It produces new ideas. It is a reflection of our democratic society.

Despite the long history of "transformation" in higher education, we hear all around us a call to consider new challenges of a world in transition. And to what end? As with pronouncements of transformations in earlier periods, the claims and the conferences about imminent change are producing anxiety about how we might or might not be able to keep up with the change around us, uncertainty about how to prepare for "the transformation," and insecurity about institutional viability in an increasingly competitive world. These responses are sometimes strong enough to make a nonbeliever into a believer of "the doctrine of imminent change," but I'm not convinced that conversion through fear and loathing should be our goal. As the learning experts and our own experience in the classroom tell us, no one learns much in an atmosphere of fear and dread. My approach, therefore, to this conversation is to be reassuring, as only an historian can, that higher education has undergone change many times before. Those who went before us somehow moved with the transformations of their times. We, too, will survive the "paradigm shifts" of our times.

How to meet change

Having said that, I do think that the way we meet the "challenges of a world in transition" matters. It matters in terms of our values: our commitment to intellectual autonomy as well as our belief in the importance of vital academic communities. I am less interested in techniques, methods, and new tools for staying relevant--though I seek them out and employ them--than I am interested in how new tools, new programs, new types of institutions, and new groups of students prompt us to reflect upon our values. Times of transition, like the one we seem to be experiencing, can help us clarify our understanding of academic freedom and academic community, not only to strike a balance between freedom and community but to recognize the dynamic relationship--the synergy--between academic autonomy and community engagement. Our commitment to the values associated with academic autonomy and engaged communities will assure the continued vitality of learning and scholarship in times of change, but it needs to be a shared and deliberate commitment by faculty and their institutions if vitality is to be the outcome.

My reflections here grow out of my experience as a faculty member, relatively early in my career, at a private comprehensive college--North Central College in metropolitan Chicago. However, my ideas are rooted in ray participation in the Faculty Work Project of the Associated New American Colleges (ANAC). The Faculty Work Project gave me a unique opportunity to consider, together with faculty and administrators from other comprehensive universities, pressing issues in higher education. With the help of scholars and consultants in the field of higher education, we contemplated topics related to faculty development, institutional governance, and faculty work. The project was a chance for me, as a faculty member at a small school, to "see the forest and not just the trees." A monograph about our work, The New Academic Compact (2002), was the result of our conversations.

The New Academic Compact, edited by Linda McMillin and Jerry Berberet, sits nicely next to similar reports, for example, AAC&U's Building the Faculty We Need (2000), CIC's Reconsidering Faculty Roles and Rewards (1999), the American Association of State Colleges and University's Facing Change: Building the Faculty of the Future (1999), and AAHE's Heeding New Voices: Academic Careers for a New Generation (2000). These studies address the role of faculty in the "transformation" of higher education. All make recommendations regarding faculty work; they tell us to employ faculty development that is sensitive to phases of a career, to keep tenure but implement post-tenure review, to evaluate and reward faculty work in terms of their work's relationship to student learning, and to reform governance.