From a Red House Off Campus, Georgetown Tries to Reinvent Itself

Georgetown University is as old as the United States Constitution, and its history and reputation have long been great strengths. Then came MOOCs, and new questions about the value of traditional higher education, which prompted storied colleges all over the country to ask themselves, “What are we going to do now?”

At Georgetown the answer wasn’t just to try MOOCs (which it did) or start a few online degree programs (which it also did). Leaders decided to attempt to reimagine the core undergraduate experience, by setting up a kind of academic skunkworks in a small red house just steps from the campus quad, where a banner over the fireplace reads, “Yes. A university can reinvent itself.”

Making changes to something as venerated as the residential college experience, though, is as complex as you might expect, which is to say, very, and some on the campus question the project’s very premise. One longtime professor told me that the Red House is based on a “facile and untested assumption” that a university like Georgetown needs to be “disrupted.”

So the challenge for the Red House isn’t just whether it can come up with good ideas, but whether it can find a model for bringing those ideas into the mainstream of a traditional academic culture. Especially since a core principle of the Red House is that every project break at least one rule.

Since the launch two years ago of Designing the Future(s) of the University — the official name of the Red House effort — it has proposed a diverse mix of experiments:

• Project-based minors that depend on students to develop the curricula without the confines of a class, “to help them become self-directed learners,” as one writing professor puts it.
• An experiment with using educational badges to recognize student skills that don’t fit neatly on a résumé.
• An effort called “studios,” where students overseen by faculty mentors work together for credit to continue projects begun in class the previous semester.
• A four-year combined bachelor’s and master’s degree, an idea that takes aim at the college-cost issue but has been a source of particular unease for many faculty members.

Many pundits these days argue that technology is leading to the “unbundling” of higher education, as upstart companies and outside organizations offer slivers of campus services in ways that could make the package deal obsolete. But the director of the Red House, Randall Bass, argues that colleges need to focus instead on what he calls “rebundling” — linking informal and extracurricular activities on the campus more clearly to courses and other official academic activities. He argues that this “experience wrapping” is the kind of thing that will keep traditional colleges relevant as the ground beneath them shifts.

Consider a recent Red House project called Intersections, an online course that Georgetown students took during the summer while they worked at community-service internships off campus. One student worked on road safety in Tanzania, another helped form an NGO in Bangladesh, and a third tutored low-income kids in San Francisco. Each night the far-flung students would log onto the course website to work through class assignments, posting about their experiences to online journals with essays, poems, and other formats, and using Skype and social media to connect with one another. The goal was to create a “community of reflection” and help the students take away deeper lessons from their work.

During the school year, Georgetown students doing internships in and around the city are mentored by the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service, says Andria Wisler, its executive director. The student who served as a tutor in California, Eduardo Valencia, created a YouTube channel of videos as his journal project. He said the course had helped him connect with classmates “doing really cool things around the world” and added a sense of “intentionality” to his work.

Mr. Bass argues that through such rebundling, colleges can offer something that will be hard for upstart online providers to match and will be true to the mission of encouraging deep learning and reflection. “There are a gazillion ways to learn things” today, says Mr. Bass, who is also vice provost of education and a professor of English. “For the first time in a thousand years, universities no longer have a monopoly on certification and learning.”

‘Symbolically Important’

Mr. Bass is no newcomer to educational redesign. Before starting the Red House he spent 13 years as founding executive director of a teaching center at Georgetown, He has also made a name for himself nationally on the speaking circuit, talking about technology, pedagogy, and the themes he cares passionately about, like “moving beyond the binaries” of classroom and extracurricular activities. (Yes, he really talks like that, and some of his longtime faculty colleagues admit that it sometimes drives them a little crazy.)

Mr. Bass is not alone in his reinvention work at Georgetown. In addition to the dozens of faculty and staff members he’s worked with across the campus, his program has three full-time paid colleagues and four faculty fellows. Students play a key role in the reinvention efforts too. Twenty-five of them are on staff as paid or volunteer Red House Board of Regents Future(s) Fellows. A few jokingly call themselves “a little cult,” and they un-self-consciously pepper descriptions of their Red House assignments with terms like “self-authoring,” “agency,” and “dispositions.”

Inside, the Red House looks like a Post-It note test site, with walls obscured by stickies, posters, and whiteboards covered with writing. (A few weeks ago, one featured the headings: “Self-empower,” “Mentorship,” and “Reflection.”)

The Red House has a budget of $5 million for its first five years, money that was raised from foundations and other private donors. University leaders promised faculty members that Red House work would not draw from other university resources.

At other institutions, reinvention efforts like this are sometimes centered in schools of continuing education, where any changes don’t affect the core of the institution. Georgetown’s decision to establish its organization for redesign under the direct auspices of its provost office was deliberate. So was the choice to use the Red House as the locus.

It’s “symbolically important,” says Robert Groves, the provost, invoking a theory of innovation that calls for using volunteers drawn from the main culture of an organization to create and germinate new approaches within it. “We want to start the implantation” at the Red House, says Mr. Groves, who happens to live right next door, and then “have them accepted by the full culture.”

So far, the Red House’s success rate is mixed, although Mr. Bass says even projects that haven’t progressed have yielded useful lessons. The Intersections online course is a clear hit, with plans to run it again this year and open it up to students at other Jesuit institutions. And Mr. Bass says he expects the model will be used again for students in other kinds of summer internships as well. As part of a larger effort to improve retention of first-generation students in STEM fields, Georgetown will also use the format for a summer course it plans to offer to sophomores in the sciences.

The badging project is moving forward as well, with 16 students in the first test group working toward a badge that would recognize each for being a Catalyst. Samuel Holley, a senior and a Red House fellow, calls it a valuable way for the university to validate students’ activities “away from the résumé culture” that permeates student life at Georgetown. As part of the process, the students are being asked to contribute to personal and group blogs. They’re also undertaking a corporate-style “360 degree” review from their professors, mentors, and peers, with the help of a commercial software tool called Checkster that’s used by human-resource departments.

The studios, too, are progressing. This semester four teams from a science-and-society class will be continuing with projects they began in the fall term. They’ll be creating programs to teach schoolchildren about health through lunch-tray place mats, to fight invasive species by encouraging fishermen to catch snakeheads, to mitigate the spread of flu on the campus with “bed rest” kits to encourage students to stay home, and to encourage younger people to become organ donors by offering sign-ups during course registration.

That’s a milestone for the Red House. “Moving away from the one-size-fits-all semester model,” says Mr. Bass, is vital if institutions are to create new faculty-compensation and tuition structures to go along with the new instructional approaches.

Faculty Anxiety

But several other Red House projects have been stalled or scaled back in the face of faculty criticism or general unease about the speed at which they’ve been pushed forward.

That includes four proposed project-based minors. One of them, in communications, is being retooled as a one-year sequence of activities worth a maximum of six credits, although the underlying pedagogical structure remains. If approved, the projects will require students to research a social problem of their own choosing. The students will then present what they’ve learned via a website, an interactive map, or some other form of new media they develop. Professors will award credits based on their assessment of student proficiency.

“It’s taking longer than anyone ever imagined it would,” says Sherry Lee Linkon, a professor of English and faculty director of writing-curriculum initiatives, who’s been working on the idea. She hopes the first set of sequences will be offered by the fall of 2016.

Ms. Linkon says she’s heard questions about the approach from some colleagues. “There was a lot of anxiety about the fact that there was no course — not enough instruction with a capital I,” she says. Student interest is “through the roof,” though, she says, and not because students see it as a gut. They “recognize in ways that some of our colleagues don’t that some of this isn’t easier than writing a paper,” she says.

Ms. Linkon says she understands why faculty members are anxious about this and other Red House projects. Some of it is fear of what they don’t fully understand, and some of it is a sincere concern about whether the new teaching approaches will work best for students. She says she’s also heard colleagues criticize Red House projects even while admitting they don’t know a lot about them.

There’s a lesson in all that for other institutions.

University leaders may see the Red House as a professor-led project — and indeed the entire campus has been invited to work with it — but some faculty members still regard its output as something the administration is trying to foist on them.

That’s made the Red House a bit of a target for some on the campus, especially after Mr. Bass published a report last fall outlining the Red House’s progress to date. Twenty-three pages long, it was packed with not only pilot projects but also efforts that appeared to be in advanced stages, said one professor who asked not to be named, leaving some with the feeling that the Red House was “like a freight train running out of control.”

The Faculty Senate shared that concern. “No one outside of Randy’s shop had reviewed these proposals, so there’s naturally a certain amount of skepticism and concern,” says Wayne Davis, its president. (In fact, some departments had seen some proposals, but not in any structured way.)

It was soon after that the university put the brakes on the minors. “People were concerned about a proliferation of new minors that could drain resources,” says Mr. Bass. Similar questions were raised about the idea for a four-year B.A./M.A. Some faculty members say they were also concerned it could lead to a “dumbing down” of the degree.

Mr. Groves, the provost, says that in retrospect the failure to create a coordinated governance structure for the Red House early on was “stupid of us” and is now being rectified. Last week the senate established a new universitywide committee that will vet all Red House projects before they get too far along. It will also review self-evaluations the Red House plans to conduct.

Mr. Bass says the new faculty committee will ultimately help the Red House because the expertise of the panel can improve early ideas and its imprimatur can give those ideas more credibility in the faculty ranks. Even getting bits and pieces of Red House proposals put into practice is a victory, he says. Mr. Bass insists he’s not discouraged — at least not yet — by the pace of progress.

“It’s plenty easy to do something innovative in some kind of isolated microcosm and run it there and have it have no effect” on the broader institution, Mr. Bass says. But these slower, piecemeal steps, he says, make up “the healthier investment in true transformation.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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