Lee's Proposal to Deregulate Accreditation Gaining Traction with GOP Presidential Hopefuls

Sen. Mike Lee’s accreditation bill has gained the support of two potential Republican presidential candidates, Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Earlier this year, Sen. Lee proposed allowing states to establish their own accrediting agencies as alternatives to the regional accreditation system. According to a piece on the proposal in Slate today, Senators Rubio and Paul have both incorporated similar ideas into their proposals and expressed support for Sen. Lee.

Having the (Aristotelian) Courage to Innovate in Higher Education

(This is an extended version of some remarks I'll be giving to UVU's University Planning Advisory Committee in its January 23 meeting. With a bit of luck I'll have some time to look at a few of the more prominent innovations being considered in higher ed from this perspective before the meeting and post on that as well.)

Too often, especially in such a technology-driven society, we think of the innovative as the opposite of the old-fashioned, the stodgy, the closed-minded. In this binary, innovation is inherently good, and the opponents of innovation are Luddites seeking to hold back progress and seeking stability for its own sake. Often the opponents of the “innovation” are seen as acting out of their own self interest (see the debates on MOOCs in which opponents were characterized as out to protect their own jobs at the expense of students) or out of fear of the new. Implicit in that is a sense of both technological determinism and technological solutionism: technology can do something, therefore it inevitably will do that thing, and that thing will inevitably solve all the problems.

Of course that’s not true often enough to be of any use. Those pursuing innovation have personal interests at stake at least as often as opponents; it is the height of hypocrisy for Coursera, a for-profit company, to accuse those opposed to MOOCs as protecting their own interests. Fear is as prominent on the side of supporters as on that of opponents, as anyone who has heard arguments that we “have to be out in front of change or we’ll be destroyed by it” should recognize. Technologies, as products of social processes that are put to use in other social processes, are no more deterministic than any other social process. And we know of many technologies that make problems worse rather than better. Any of these may be true in any one case, of course. But saying that they are true generally is like saying that flipped coins generally turn up heads.

It seems then, that there are at least three positions: too little innovation to address our problems or take advantage of new opportunities, effective innovation, and too much innovation that pulls us further away from challenges or presents new and more difficult challenges than the ones it solves. We can see effectiveness in innovation, then, as an Aristotelian virtue: a middle point between the extremes of rashness and timidity.

...or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Not Hate the Udacity Pivot

Of course it’s hagiography; it’s in Fast Company, and Sebastian Thrun is in Silicon Valley. Of course he screwed the kids at San Jose State (though more on the virtue of what Cottom does with that conclusion below); that’s what privatized higher education does when “students from difficult neighborhoods” turn out to be unprofitable. And of course he wasn’t making any money; that’s the Silicon Valley business model spoofed so well by South Park. Now if we’re all done doing our best Claude Rains impressions, I want to take a more pragmatic look at the Udacity “pivot” (which admittedly sounds like a chess strategy rather than pedagogy).

A Bit of History from The Other Jeff

I've been blogging on higher education, among other topics, intermittently for a while at The Other Jeff. I'll start this new blog with a few highlights from the old.

One of the big themes in higher education policy has been cost. Soaring costs. Uncontrollable costs. Extravagant costs. Administrative bloat costs. I've had a couple of posts on that, one responding to the 2013 State of the Union Address and one to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Both take the perspective that that "cost" problem confuses cost per student with cost to students, and thus is really a very different problem for different institutions. For UVU, the problem really is state appropriations. Our inflation-adjusted spending per FTE has remained basically constant since the 1990s. During that time funding has been slashed. Students, of course, pay the price. Cost was also one of 12 supposedly inconvenient truths about higher education that economist Richard Vedder posited that I got about halfway through taking down before other duties called.

Another big theme that I've addressed repeatedly is my research on how educational institutions use data. I've argued at several conferences that "big" data processes such as data mining and predictive analytics raise some very serious ethical concerns. That has morphed into a more argument that we need to think about data as an issue of social justice, both within and beyond higher ed. This spring I'll be presenting papers on the constructive nature of educational data processes and how that embeds a host of normative issues in the data itself and the conclusions we draw from it.

"The Other Jeff" wasn't a higher ed planning blog specifically, so there's a lot of other content there: a good bit on teaching, a lot of rather abstract political analysis and philosophy (strange for a former political theorist, I know), and a few rather random musings on life, the universe, and everything.

About this Blog

Are MOOCs going to replace the traditional classroom? Will states ever fund higher education like they did in the 20th Century? How do we adopt a monastery model to a society in which non-traditional students are the norm?

These are the kinds of questions that UVU faces as we plan for our future. This blog is a space for exploring them.

Part of my role as UVU's Assistant Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning is to serve as the institution's resident higher ed futurist. (I promise, the term wasn't my idea.) Thinking in the language of SWOT analysis, it's my job to look ahead and try to understand the opportunities and threats that the university may see in the near future. I see it as especially important that these ideas be subjected to critical investigation given the hype that accompanies so many of them.

This blog is part of that role, but not in the way some might expect. I'm not offering a definitive view of the future here. Partly, that's because such views are wrong a lot more often than they are right, and unlike pundits I expect to be held somewhat accountable for the substance of what I write, not just the number of pageviews. What's here is speculative, a rough draft or first take on issues confronting higher education. Expect to see a lot of the ideas in here abandoned later. Expect to see me happy, not heartbroken, to find that I was wrong.

In fact, I'm really not even intending for this site to be read regularly. My approach to prognostication is mainly curatorial. I follow a lot of really sharp people on Twitter (and try to avoid the idiots that have the media's attention). That's a pool of news and ideas being circulated about higher education. These blog posts draw on that pool to pull together the ideas about a topic, a place to systematize my thinking on them and bring some coherence to the ideas. Ultimately the posts themselves will be brought together in some bigger, more synthetic form to be presented to the campus community.

Needless to say with that kind of description, this is an unofficial blog. It certainly doesn't represent the views of the university or of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning, and may not even represent my own views. I may bat around ideas that I'm not really buying, giving them the most charitable presentation possible in order to figure out what I don't buy about them.

This being a blog, of course, I will say one other thing: Don't read the comments.