This is part two of my interview with Fredonia Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Terry Brown. In part one we discussed the crisis of funding in American public higher education.
Ryan Maloney: How do you think about the quality of teaching in the college classroom?
Terry Brown: So there are three fundamental values of the academy. One is academic freedom. Another is shared governance. And the third is peer-review. It was an implicit bargain we had made with the government. We said, let us as institutions of higher education police ourselves. We will be accountable to ourselves, we will have accrediting agencies that aren't federal. Agencies that are peers of ours. A team of about five people come in from institutions all over the country, and they review us.
RM: I didn't know that.
Brown: That was one of the deals we made, and that's being challenged right now. People think that we haven't been good enough at holding ourselves accountable.
RM: When you say people, do you mean the general public?
Brown: I would say the general public, and I would say legislators.
RM: Who are funding the state system.
Brown: Yes. Now, the federal government invests more in higher ed than states do. That only happened a few years ago. How is the federal government doing it? Through financial aid. States fund the operating budget, and the federal government provides the federal financial aid. And so the federal government is now spending more, so they want more control now. I think that's very, very dangerous.
RM: In terms of how you operate?
Brown: Yes, the way we operate. I'll give you some examples. The federal government is telling us that if we want to continue to have funding we have to celebrate Constitution Day on September 17th. I'm not opposed to it, but what other days might they tell us to celebrate? What if they dictate something that goes against our values? According to the federal government, we have to list the textbooks of each class. Now you start to get into academic freedom, and faculty are concerned about having the federal government tell them about what goes on in their syllabus. It becomes very uneasy.
RM: It seems like you're a martial artist trying to maneuver in the middle of everything.
Brown: That's how it feels.
RM: So what do you do?
Brown: You focus on what you can control. You have to constantly be doing this, finding the things you can control. Most importantly, I can make sure that as the chief academic officer I am able to demonstrate to the public that we are ready to be held accountable for delivering the highest quality education to the citizens of the state of New York. I have to be able to show that we're doing everything that we can to see it remains affordable. When I have to engage the campus in this conversation about reducing costs, I believe we can do that and maintain our quality. But it means making difficult choices. We may not be able to offer numerous degree programs. We may have to become more focused in the degree programs that we're offering, but preserving the quality.
RM: I came into graduate school as an interdisciplinary studies major because I wanted to combine exercise science, psychology, and biology together to create my own degree. I thought this was a wonderful idea, until my adviser told me I had to take biostatistics. I thought, "no, I don't want to take biostatistics." It wasn't until after I took it that I realized I wouldn't have been able to understand my field without it. I needed that class. I needed more guidance than I ever thought. So there's this two-sided tension between, "I want more choice," but I also need guidance.
Brown: Oh my gosh, you just hit it. If you look at the trajectory of consumerism over the last fifty years, and look at the value placed on choice ... I know it sounds absurd to say it, but there's an idea that students want more and more choice, and that students are consumers, and we should give them the kind of choice that they would get in the pickle aisle of the grocery store. That has had an influence on our curriculum.
RM: Here?
Brown: Fredonia, yes, but across the United States. Universities over the last thirty years have only added programs and rarely removed programs. The curriculum has gotten more complex. If you read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, you see that there's a diminishing return on choice. There is such a thing as students, at age 18, having too much choice. And so what we have are majors, sub-majors, tracts, and sub-tracts. I know all these things were added for good reasons by the faculty, believing that students want more choice, that it would even be a recruitment tool. But now it's become too costly to maintain all those degree programs, and minors, and tracts within minors. There was a benefit in some regard in allowing students to find their way through this jungle of options, but the faculty really do know better. Your adviser told you you needed biostatistics, and he knew better than you. There are some classes I never would have taken unless someone told me I had to. And I'm so glad someone told me to.
RM: I was just reading an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education that American University brought in a consultant from Wegmans to see how they could improve the student experience.
Brown: Yes, yes.
RM: Which seems great, but at the same time...
Brown: How far do you go with that?
RM: And I imagine you're dealing with that question all the time.
Brown: It's not a mystery why a student chooses a university and why they stay. One of the top reasons is the academic program and the academic experience. They stay because they feel they belong. They stay because they feel someone knows them and cares about them. That's not a mystery. We also know why they leave. Some of the reasons they leave are within our control, and some are not. I will be content when I feel we have addressed every one of those reasons that are within our control.
RM: Which I imagine will take a long time.
Brown: It's going to take a long time. But I hear the remarkable things that our faculty are doing within their departments to answer this question about why our students are leaving. And what they're doing to intervene. It could be that a student doesn't need to be here, but they shouldn't just leave because nobody helped them, or they didn't get the right help.
RM: Let me shift gears a little bit. In terms of technology, it's going to change a lot of things in education. If you were to look forward fifty or a hundred years, what might we be looking at?
Brown: [long pause] You know, I have to say that in fifty to one hundred years, if we're on the same course, this planet won't be the same planet. The impact that we will have had on the environment and our natural resources will change everything. If you had asked me on a shorter trajectory, say five years, I could talk about higher ed, but when we get out fifty to one hundred years, we're talking about our existence. We have to be talking about this. The issue of the human impact on the environment should be center in our curriculum. We're going to be teaching people strategies for survival. It's very difficult for me to imagine what it is in fifty years.
RM: You just changed the conversation on me there. I was expecting you to talk about how technology is going to change higher ed. How do you make the environment central to a curriculum?
Brown: Here's a book you -- Geek Heresy by Kentaro Toyama. He's in information scientist at the University of Michigan, and his argument is that technology reinforces and amplifies inequalities that are already in place in a society. If we don't address both income inequality and the environment, and trajectories continue as they're planned, technology will only make it worse.
RM: Can you give me an example?
Brown: Well, one thing with technology is that we're constantly throwing it away. It's not sustainable. There is an environmental impact of technology that we don't talk about. We only talk about how liberating technology can be for people. I see positive ways that technology can augment learning, but there are ways in which technology is also a huge distraction. I think we have to help students manage cognitive overload. How do we practice concentration? There's so many distractions now. I don't think technology will liberate us unless we address the big issues around us.
RM: And you've said that there's hope. What are you hopeful about?
Brown: When I was a kid in the 1970's I was a little environmentalist. It was the first Earth Day and I heard about one of these huge lakes called Lake Erie. I heard that it was filthy and unswimmable. It broke my heart at 11-years-old. In 1970 they said it would take 100 years to clean it up, but it didn't. Just last week I was swimming in it! To me, this is hope.The ozone layer has been repaired to a certain degree because of our work. The gap between the rich and poor has gotten worse over the last few decades, but that's not a long time. Republicans and Democrats agree that that is a problem we have to address. There's enough wealth in the United States to go around. We can address the issue of college affordability, that's within our control. I'm not despairing in that regard, but I have to do work as a citizen.
RM: I love the way that you took that and connected everything.
Brown: Here's the other hope that I have. I have hope for my relationship with you, and her [points] and him [points] and them [points]. This is also in my sphere of control, to treat you with kindness and respect and compassion.
RM: And you don't have to be a Provost to do that.
Brown: No! No! You don't have to have a title for that.