TITLE: Problem-Based Universities and Other Radical Changes
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 05, 2009  3:37 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Last week, every administrator at my university seemed
to be talking about Mark Taylor's
<A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html">
   End the University as We Know It</A>.
Like many other universities, we have been examining
pretty much everything we do in light of significant
changes in the economy (including, for public
universities, drastic reductions in state funding) and
demographics. Taylor, a department chair in a humanities
department at Columbia University, starts with a critique
of graduate programs, which he contends produce a product
few need because they also provide an essential
commodity for the modern university: cheap teaching labor
that frees faculty to do research.  From here, he asserts
that American higher education should undergo a radical
transformation and proposes six steps in the direction
he thinks best.

The second proposal caught my attention:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate
education, and create problem-focused programs.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

In recent years I have developed a strong belief in the
value of
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-10.html#e2007-10-18T08_40_16.htm">
   project-based education</A>,
especially in CS courses.  I also have a fondness for
the idea of
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-07.html#e2008-07-07T12_48_36.htm">
   problem-based learning</A>
which Owen Astrachan has been touting for some time
now.  I think of these as having at least one valuable
attribute in common: students do something real in
context where they have to make real decisions.

Taylor proposes that we build the university of today
not around permanent discipline-specific departments
but evolving programs centered on "zones of inquiry",
Big Problems that matter across disciplines.  When I
discussed this idea with my provost, I told him that
I was fortunate: my discipline, Computer Science, will
have a role to play in most every problem-focused
program for the foreseeable future.  Talk about job
security!

This idea may sound wonderful, but there are risks.  As
Michael Mitzenmacher
<A HREF="http://mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com/2009/04/taylor-editorial.html">
   points out</A>,
you still need discipline-specific expertise.  Taylor's
offers as an example a program built around pressing issues
related to water, which would ...

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... bring together people in the humanities, arts, social
and natural sciences with representatives from professional
schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social
work, theology and architecture.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

To do that, you need people with expertise in the humanities,
arts, social and natural sciences, medicine, law, business,
engineering, social work, theology and architecture.  Where
will these experts come from?  Taylor doesn't say as much,
but there is a hint in his article, and in others like it,
that collaborative work on big problems is all that we need.
But I wonder how such a university would prepare students
who would become the next generation of experts in the
arts, sciences, and professions, let alone the next
generation of researchers who will discover the ideas and
create the tools we need to solve the big problems.  I
don't suppose there is any reason in principle that a
university in such way could not prepare experts, and my
Inner Devil's Advocate is already working on ways that it
might succeed swimmingly.  But I get a little worried
whenever I hear people talking about making radical changes
to complex systems without having considered explicitly
all of the story.

This particular risk is at the front of my mind because
we face the same risk, at a different scale, when we
create problem- and project-focused curricula.  There is
a natural tension between depth in the discipline and
working in the context of a specific application or
other domain.  If I build an intro programming course
around, say, media computation or biology, will students
learn all of the CS they should learn in that course?
Some time will be spent on images and sounds, or on DNA
and amino acid base pairs, and that is time not spent
on procedures, arrays, pointers, and big-O analysis.
I am well aware that
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2006-03.html#e2006-03-10T17_37_01.htm">
   adding more content</A>
to a course does not mean that everyone will get it all.
But some do, and maybe those are the people who will be
the experts of the future?

We have used media computation as a theme in a few sections
of our intro course over the last four years, and we
observe this tension in the results.  Some students get
just what we want them to get out of the theme: motivation
to dig deep, experiment, and discuss important ideas.
Others don't connect with the theme, and they just end up
knowing less CS-specific content.  The prof who has taught
this course most often is beginning to see ways in which
he can trade back some of the context for opportunities
to program in other contexts, which may hit a broader
variety of students than a pure media comp course.

When I think about how this trade-off would scale to the
level of an entire university in programs that bring
together eight, twelve, or twenty disciplines, I realize
that we would need to think carefully before proceeding
too far.  Perhaps Taylor hopes that his article will
cause faculty and administration to begin the process
of thinking carefully.  Some people have been
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-03.html#e2008-03-19T00_40_23.htm">
   thinking about these issues</A>
for a while and even put some of those thoughts
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/RoadLess.pdf">
   into writing</A>
(PDF).

The law of unintended consequences lurks in the darkness
behind many suggestions of radical changes to complex
systems.  For example, Taylor suggests that universities
abolish tenure.  Many would agree.  After being a
department head for many years, I appreciate many of the
advantages of this idea.  But consider what might happen
in disciplines whose faculty are in great demand in
industry.  Hmm, such as computer science.  Without tenure
and its concomitant security, I suspect that a fair number
of CS faculty would find their way into industry.  Right
now, the allure of bigger paydays in industry are balanced
against all sorts of risk.  Universities offer a level of
security in exchange for much lower salaries.  Without
that security, I might be better off out there in the
real world writing programs, hoping that one turns out
to be the
<A HREF="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+next+twitter%22">
   next Twitter</A>
or the IDE that revolutionizes how we program in dynamic
languages.

I am not suggesting that we not think radical thoughts or
consider how we might do things differently.  In fact, I
spend a large part of my administrative and academic
lives doing just that.  I do suggest that we not rush
headlong into ideas before thinking them through, even
when they seem tantalizingly right at first blush.

As with so many articles of this sort, Taylor may hope
simply to cause people to consider new ideas, not adopt
the specific prescriptions he offers.  Certainly, many
schools are already experimenting with ideas such as
greater collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
As in the case of courses that are focused on problems
or projects, the rub is in balancing the forces at play
so that we achieve our goal of better helping students
to learn.
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