Greater Expectations and Learning in the New Globally Engaged Academy

Peer Review, Winter 2004 by Leskes, Andrea

The beginning of the twenty-first century is continuing to challenge the capacity of individuals across the globe to deal with change. Current wisdom holds that change is the only constant in our fast-paced, globally-interconnected, information-based society. Changes arise from and produce varied pressures. While the institution of the university has a long and distinguished history, individual colleges and universities evolve over time in response to both internal and external circumstances. Their histories tell fascinating stories of new directions, growth, retrenchment, and improvement, often related to the external environment. What have been the recent pressures on higher education, and how have institutions responded? What more revolutionary transformations might we envision in the very concept of the university?

At the most macro level, economic globalization, fueled by the transformative power of modern communications, reaches into every aspect of life. So too, do the new world order, the emergence of young democracies from the former Soviet sphere and in parts of the developing world, and a reshuffled balance of power leaving the United States its the single remaining superpower. No country can any longer exist in isolation, nor can its citizens ignore realities in other parts of the world. New diseases arrive by airplane, and global warming threatens us all.

While colleges and universities, like any societal institutions, are affected by changes of this order of magnitude, they also face more local challenges. The following are among the specific external pressures affecting American colleges and universities:

* The opening of college doors to more students, more highly diverse students, and differentially prepared students who now continue their studies after high school

* Chaotic attendance patterns as students stop out, change institutions, hold jobs, and attend to the needs of their families

* Technological advances leading to distance learning and a new concept of the classroom

* A quantum leap in the quantity of information available to individuals and a shift away from the university as the principal repository of knowledge

* The needs of a changing workplace that include higher-order thinking and practical skills, global knowledge, and the ability to adapt to change and work constructively in diverse teams

What changes have these pressures engendered on campuses? While some critics may argue that American higher education has stagnated and reinforced walls isolating it from the larger society, developments at many AAC&U member campuses suggest a very different picture. The stories in this issue of Peer Review illustrate the dynamism of American higher education.

The term "evolution" seems appropriate to describe the process of change in individual colleges and universities. We are not talking simply of generic change, but of adaptive change made over time in response to external pressures and changing environments. In this environment, learning itself is changing. Of specific interest, then, is learning-driven adaptive change, if innovations find their way into the heart of institutional functioning, such evolution can become transformational.

Greater Expectations

What sort of college education will most effectively prepare students for a contemporary world characterized by change and global interconnections? What should be the central aims of the academy, and how will changes affect structures and processes, institutional missions and identities? These questions led AAC&U, in 2000, to create the Greater Expectations initiative. The initiative's influential and widely distributed report, which resulted from the work of a national panel, was published in September 2002. Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College* scans the external pressures on higher education and describes the academy's responses. It proposes that the education most effective in preparing students-all students, no matter their aspirations, chosen careers, or fields of study-for the contemporary world is liberal education. However, far from being an ossified liberal education out of touch with reality, this is a contemporary liberal education reinvigorated by becoming both more practical and more engaged. Such an education celebrates its usefulness in the largest sense, and by doing so, helps everyone understand the power of rigorous, challenging higher learning.

The adjectives "practical and "engaged" refer both to the content and to the process of learning. Students in the New Academy described by the Greater Expectations vision would learn practical and intellectual skills that are useful for them individually and also useful for society. Colleges and universities would foster such learning in all students by employing teaching methods that actively engage them in their learning and with real societal problems. Classroom interactions would become enriched by complementary non-classroom experiences in the world of work, in the community, or in cultures around the world.