How to Produce Students Who Can Change the World

AP Images

Some colleges are dynamic. Others, says Robert J. Sternberg, rust or calcify, becoming places where people feel hopeless or, oddly, wedded to tradition, even if it’s one of mediocrity. Getting them to change, he says, is like trying to move a graveyard.

Those familiar with Mr. Sternberg won’t be surprised by his provocativeness. Over an extensive career, he has challenged orthodoxies on admissions, standardized testing, and academic culture. He spent 30 years on the psychology faculty at Yale University, then served as a dean at Tufts University, provost of Oklahoma State University, and, for four controversial months, president of the University of Wyoming. He’s now a professor of human development at Cornell University.

In his new book, What Universities Can Be: A New Model for Preparing Students for Active Concerned Citizenship and Ethical Leadership (Cornell University Press), Mr. Sternberg synthesizes his research and evolving thinking on intelligence, creativity, common sense, wisdom, and leadership. He extensively cites his own scholarship and popular writing (including for The Chronicle) to make the case for colleges to transform their priorities, admissions processes, and teaching.

“If we want to develop students who are going to change the world,” he writes, “we won’t do it by selecting students merely on the basis of standardized tests or by teaching them in ways that develop only their academic knowledge and skills.”

Instead, he proposes a new model that prepares students for what he calls “active concerned citizenship and ethical leadership,” or “Accel.” That means emphasizing access over exclusivity, he says, and cultivating broad abilities, like creativity, wisdom, and practical thinking, instead of narrow ones like memory.

Mr. Sternberg spoke to The Chronicle about how colleges and professors need to — and can — change. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. What are some good examples of what you call “Accel” institutions?

A. The ones that come closest are the land-grant institutions that take the land-grant mission seriously. Cornell does a good job. It’s both a land-grant and a private institution. It takes its land-grant value seriously and provides access. I thought Oklahoma State did a great job. The thing I really liked about Oklahoma State is they took kids who were largely or mostly first generation and really tried to achieve excellence. I don’t know that there are any who do all the things I say in the book.

Q. Those are both places you’ve worked. Are there others you know of?

A. Those are the two that I know the best, so I’d rather stick with them. I don’t want this to become about specific institutions.

Q. OK, so then speaking generally, what makes institutions embrace these kinds of priorities instead of chasing prestige?

A. One is an emphasis on access rather than exclusion. Honestly, when I was an administrator at Tufts, I was very proud of how many students we were rejecting, like having a really low acceptance rate was really great. That’s not a criticism of Tufts. I’m talking about myself.

The second would be an emphasis on abilities and skills as modifiable rather than fixed. And the third thing would be not just an emphasis on memory and analysis. To succeed in the world and in just about any profession, creative, wisdom-based, and ethical skills are hugely important — more important than analytical skills. What we’re doing, both in our admissions and in our instruction and assessment in colleges, often doesn’t well reflect the challenges that you’ll face as an active citizen and an ethical leader.

Q. How do you try to imbue some of these things in the day-to-day act of teaching?

A. The two courses I’m teaching this semester, one on intelligence, one on life-span development, are smaller. They’re wholly discussions. I’ll give you examples of real questions that I ask: To what extent is the nature/nurture controversy real, and to what extent is it manufactured? To what extent is adolescence a social construction? Can development ever go backward as you get older? I ask why resilience is important in our lives. What makes a study unethical?

Q. Are these essay questions?

A. These are all discussion questions straight from my course. The way I’m teaching the course, the questions I ask, I think you can see they require analytical, creative, practical, and wise thinking. I also do some lecturing and some measurement of students’ knowledge base. The idea is how can they use the knowledge they’ve acquired to think more analytically, practically, and wisely. My emphasis is very much on, How do you use the information? Not just on, Can you say what the textbook says?

Q. When you started teaching, were you more tied to what was in the textbook? Has the approach you now use developed over time?

A. My first year of teaching, I really sucked. The first day of my first course on intelligence, as an assistant professor at Yale, I had 50 students. The second day I had 25. The third day I had 12, and I ended up with five. I think I was doing something wrong there. I came to realize that what we emphasize in our instruction and assessment is what I sometimes call Alice types: people who are good standardized test takers, who are good at getting grades, who raise their hands and say the right things. To a large extent, colleges aren’t developing the skills that matter in life, which are not just knowledge, but the creative and practical and ethical and wisdom ones, too.

Q. Did writing and thinking about leadership and change for this book cause you to reflect any differently on what happened in your presidency at the University of Wyoming?

A. I’m not going to talk about Wyoming in particular. In general, it’s important to have someone who’s a really a good fit. In a leadership job, you have to go to a place that’s a good fit to the things you value. If your goal is to go to a place and say, If we do these things, we can become one of the top land-grant universities or whatever, and people don’t believe it — I’m just talking in general — that’s probably not a good fit. My going to Wyoming was a mistake, obviously. I just wasn’t a good fit to their values, and they weren’t a good fit to mine. I did what I thought was the right thing, which was to get out before someone kicked me with a boot and told me to get out.

Q. At one point in your book, you write about the notion that students are not strictly consumers because they are also producers of their own experience in higher education. That is, students actively create their own experience of college. If that’s true, how much can colleges and universities really influence students?

A. My goal as an instructor is to help you figure out what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are, and then find ways of capitalizing on your strengths and compensating for or correcting weaknesses. Your goal with students shouldn’t be to make them into little versions of you or people you admire, but to make them into new versions of themselves. That’s what we need to do as educators: Develop kids to be who they are, not who we want them to be.

Dan Berrett writes about teaching, learning, the curriculum, and educational quality. Follow him on Twitter @danberrett, or write to him at dan.berrett@chronicle.com.