US higher education needs a revolution

Tyler Cowen, Tribune News Service

When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the US system remains very far from a fundamental transformation. It is no accident that former college president Brian Rosenberg titled his new book, “‘Whatever It Is, I’m Against It’: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.” Some background: Faculty at Tier 1 research universities (which includes my own employer, George Mason University) typically bargain for what is called a “class load.” A class load of 2-2, for instance, means the professor teaches two classes each semester; 1-2 would mean teaching one class one semester and then two the next semester; and so on. Both smaller elite private schools and larger public universities operate on this system. And so long as the faculty member shows up and teaches his or her courses without major incident, the obligation to the university is satisfied.

This system, which has been in place for decades, does not allow for much flexibility. If a professor is a great and prolific mentor, for instance, she receives no explicit credit for that activity. Nor would she if she innovates and discovers a new way to use AI to improve teaching for everyone.

This courseload system, which minimizes conflict and maximizes perceptions of fairness, is fine for static times with little innovation. If the university administration asks you for two classes, and you deliver two classes, everyone is happy. But today’s education system is dynamic, and needs to become even more so. There is already the internet, YouTube and a flurry of potential innovations coming from AI. If professors really are a society’s best minds, shouldn’t they be working to improve the entire educational process, not just punching the equivalent of a time clock at a university? Such a change would require giving them credit for innovations, which in turn would require a broader conception of their responsibilities. Ideally, a department chair or dean or provost ought to be able to tell them to add a certain amount of value to the teaching and student development process — through mentoring, time in the classroom or other ways. The definition of a good job would not be just fulfilling the “2-2” teaching load called for in a contract, it would be more discretionary.

This would be hard to make work, of course, and many faculty would hate it. If the teaching requirement is discretionary, and in the hands of administrators, many professors will fear being bargained into a higher workload. Almost certainly, many (not all) professors would be bargained into a higher workload. A further question is why a semester should be 15 weeks long, as is typically the case. Some basic courses, such as introductory economics or perhaps calculus, involve learning a set bundle of concepts and techniques. But more advanced classes might be better done in four-week units. Or how about hearing a professor lecture every day for a week, and then the sequence ends? Should not most learning be done on a “menu” basis, rather than being forced on everyone in 15-week chunks? Probably so, but then what counts as “one class” is more of a sliding scale than a fixed unit. If higher education is going to be reorganized on such a menu-driven basis, classroom obligations will have to be rethought and renegotiated as well.

To be clear, none of these reforms will come next year, or even in the next five years. But this is what a system that rewards true innovation would look like. Since most people are not innovators, even in Silicon Valley, there might be fewer classes for a minority of professors and higher workloads for the majority. There is nothing inherently wrong with that outcome, but you can see why Brian Rosenberg chose the title he did for his book.