Views on the Future of Universities

Despite a dizzying and disparate array of data about the future of universities, there is a common theme that suggests significant changes are coming.    Many of these changes are beyond the control of universities.   Adjunct Faculty are in a better position than Fulltime Faculty to participate in and influence this ongoing transformation.   Adjunct Faculty have fewer restrictions from forming other research-to-practice partnerships engagements.   One expected change is that universities will be one of many Research-to-Practice and Community Engagement partnership options for Adjunct Faculty.

The following are some notes and references about the future of Universities:

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Phillip Dodd: BBC Free thinking - The Future of Universities. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000bnl7

Dodd’s guests include Economist Larry Summers, former President of Harvard lays out his view of a university, and Philip Dodd debates with the OU's Josie Fraser, classicist Justin Stover, and NESTA's Geoff Mulgan. How are globalisation and new technology changing the university campus, and are traditional courses in humanities subjects like English literature and the classics under threat?

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Colander, David; Kuppers, Roland (2014) Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society's Problem from the Bottom Up. Princeton University Press Complexity and the Art of Public Policy: Solving Society's Problems from the Bottom Up - https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691169132/complexity-and-the-art-of-public-policy.

Complexity science—made possible by modern analytical and computational advances—is changing the way we think about social systems and social theory. Unfortunately, economists’ policy models have not kept up and are stuck in either a market fundamentalist or government control narrative. While these standard narratives are useful in some cases, they are damaging in others, directing thinking away from creative, innovative policy solutions. Complexity and the Art of Public Policy outlines a new, more flexible policy narrative, which envisions society as a complex evolving system that is uncontrollable but can be influenced.

David Colander and Roland Kupers describe how economists and society became locked into the current policy framework, and lay out fresh alternatives for framing policy questions. Offering original solutions to stubborn problems, the complexity narrative builds on broader philosophical traditions, such as those in the work of John Stuart Mill, to suggest initiatives that the authors call “activist laissez-faire” policies. Colander and Kupers develop innovative bottom-up solutions that, through new institutional structures such as for-benefit corporations, channel individuals’ social instincts into solving societal problems, making profits a tool for change rather than a goal. They argue that a central role for government in this complexity framework is to foster an ecostructure within which diverse forms of social entrepreneurship can emerge and blossom.

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Reich, Justin (2020) Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education.  Princeton University Press  https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Disrupt-Technology-Transform-Education/dp/0674089049 

A leader in educational technology separates truth from hype, explaining what tech can―and can’t―do to transform our classrooms.

Proponents of large-scale learning have boldly promised that technology can disrupt traditional approaches to schooling, radically accelerating learning and democratizing education. Much-publicized experiments, often underwritten by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, have been launched at elite universities and in elementary schools in the poorest neighborhoods. Such was the excitement that, in 2012, the New York Times declared the “year of the MOOC.” Less than a decade later, that pronouncement seems premature.

In Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, Justin Reich delivers a sobering report card on the latest supposedly transformative educational technologies. Reich takes readers on a tour of MOOCs, autograders, computerized “intelligent tutors,” and other educational technologies whose problems and paradoxes have bedeviled educators. Learning technologies―even those that are free to access―often provide the greatest benefit to affluent students and do little to combat growing inequality in education. And institutions and investors often favor programs that scale up quickly, but at the expense of true innovation. It turns out that technology cannot by itself disrupt education or provide shortcuts past the hard road of institutional change.

Technology does have a crucial role to play in the future of education, Reich concludes. We still need new teaching tools, and classroom experimentation should be encouraged. But successful reform efforts will focus on incremental improvements, not the next killer app.