For decades colleges have been administered through a system of shared governance. Although the meaning of the term is ambiguous, causing border skirmishes to break out periodically, shared governance usually means that the trustees concentrate on the overall mission of the institution and on questions of finance, physical planning, fund raising, and, last but not least, hiring and firing presidents. Faculties, in turn, are given the task of taking care of academic matters — deciding on the curriculum, teaching, and hiring and promoting professors.
This scheme has an obvious logic. Faculty members and trustees each have responsibility for the tasks in which they have superior competence. Professors know the most about teaching and curriculum; trustees tend to have the advantage in subjects like finance, budgeting, and physical plant.
Shared governance works well for most purposes. As currently practiced, however, it cannot deal with one important problem — ensuring the highest possible quality of education. In theory, that task should be discharged by the faculty. But even though professors have the most experience in matters of teaching and learning, they feel no urgency to search for the best possible methods to educate undergraduate students.
That is not because professors care only about research; the vast majority are conscientious about their classroom responsibilities and spend much more time teaching than doing research. The difficulty is more subtle. While faculty members may try to do the best they can in class using familiar methods of instruction, they seldom work systematically at improving the methods themselves. Few faculties engage in a continuing effort to assess how much their students are learning, identify deficiencies, develop and test possible remedies, and ultimately adopt those approaches that prove most successful.
Without some process of this kind, it is hard for any human endeavor to improve. College is no exception. Despite many more courses in the catalog and books in the library, it is not clear that undergraduates today are learning more or becoming more proficient in writing, speaking, and critical thinking than their parents and grandparents were when they were students 25 or 50 years ago.
What does seem reasonably clear is that colleges are much less effective than they should be. To cite just a few examples, lecturing remains the most common method of instruction even though much research suggests that more-active forms of teaching help students learn more and remember better what they learn. Although more than 90 percent of professors claim that improving critical thinking is the most important goal of undergraduate education, the great majority of exam questions merely test recall or comprehension of the course materials.
Moreover, surveys show that most seniors do not think they have substantially improved their writing, critical thinking, and quantitative skills during college. Still other findings suggest that many students in basic science courses taught by conventional methods of instruction never understand the underlying concepts but rely on memory to pass the exams. Fewer than 10 percent of seniors believe that their ability to speak a foreign language has improved substantially in college.
As matters now stand, there are no strong incentives to institute the reforms needed to improve upon that record. If applicants could identify which colleges would help them learn most, they might gravitate to those institutions and force the rest to improve their educational programs in order to compete. But students have no way of knowing enough to make such judgments. Instead, they choose the colleges that offer lower tuitions, better financial aid, more attractive facilities, or programs — chiefly vocational — that seem especially useful. As a result, so long as a college keeps abreast of its rival institutions in tuition, financial aid, facilities, and the like, it will suffer no adverse consequences — even though its students may be learning much less than they should.
Many states have tried to achieve high quality by creating performance measures and giving larger appropriations to colleges that score particularly well. Unfortunately, the measures commonly used are much too crude to be effective. Some ask what percentage of entering students graduate; others look to the percentage of seniors who are employed a year after graduation; still others record the scores that seniors receive on standardized tests for entering professional school. Most results are either beyond the influence of the college or chiefly a reflection of how smart the students were when they enrolled, not how much they learned thereafter.
Presidents are the natural source of initiative to see that problems of student learning are identified and reforms are developed. In practice, however, few presidents have made serious, sustained efforts to play that role. Perhaps they fear opposition from their faculties or adverse publicity if they discuss weaknesses in their institutions’ educational programs. Perhaps they are too busy balancing budgets and raising money. Certainly the easier course is to direct their energies toward more visible and less controversial goals, such as increasing average SAT scores or building imposing new facilities.
D o trustees have a role in overcoming this weakness? Surely not by taking it upon themselves to evaluate the quality of education and recommend improvements. Such actions would exceed their competence and antagonize the faculty. A better course would be for trustees to ask the president to report on current procedures for assessing the effectiveness of the faculty’s teaching and for developing better ways to educate students. Specifically, the board could ask the president such questions as:
- Does the college participate in the National Survey of Student Engagement that determines the prevalence of practices of active teaching and learning that have been shown to be effective in helping students learn? If so, what steps are taken to act on the results?
- What efforts does the college make to assess student progress toward generally accepted goals, such as critical thinking, quantitative skills, writing, and proficiency in a foreign language?
- Are the results of such assessments shared with the faculty, and are they used to identify weaknesses and discuss potential remedies?
- Are funds available to enable instructors to experiment with new teaching methods, and are the results evaluated and publicized within the faculty?
- Is training in classroom teaching given to new faculty members? Does it include exposure to research findings on teaching and learning?
- What use does the college make of teaching evaluations, and how well are those surveys constructed? (For example, do they ask students to comment not only on the teacher but on what they think they learned?)
- What evidence of a candidate’s teaching is collected in reviewing professors for appointment or promotion, how reliable is the evidence, and how much weight does it receive?
Conscientious trustees may worry that any expression of serious interest in the quality of education will elicit noisy charges of meddling and provoke resistance from the faculty. Complaints of that kind have indeed been made in recent years in response to trustee attempts to criticize tenure or require students to take particular kinds of courses. But questions like the ones listed above fit easily within the oversight functions of trustees without purporting to invade faculty prerogatives over how to teach or what courses to require. The traditional roles of trustees are both to defend and promote the interests of their institution and to represent the concerns and the needs of the public that does so much to subsidize and sustain higher education. Examining the methods used to enhance the quality of education is a natural way of discharging the second role.
Once the trustees have received answers to their questions, they can urge the president to work with the faculty to make the college a more effective learning organization and to report periodically on the results. By so doing, trustees would not presume to dictate how professors should teach their courses. But trustees would give the quality of education a much higher place among the college’s priorities. Presidents would receive a powerful mandate to press ahead with programs of assessment and experimentation rather than succumb to the forces of inertia and indifference that so often stifle such initiatives. Professors would have to confront demonstrable problems of teaching and learning.
Unless trustees take such action, the prospects for reform are not promising. How else is progress likely to occur? Students cannot tell whether they are learning less than they should. Alumni are too far removed to take an informed interest. Meanwhile, no faculty ever passed a vote of no confidence to protest the president’s failure to act vigorously enough to assess the quality of education and press for innovative methods of instruction. Without more encouragement than they are currently receiving, presidents are likely to continue following the conventional path of pursuing distinction through growing numbers of applicants, higher rankings in U.S. News & World Report, and ever larger endowments.
Such efforts will offend no one, but there is also little evidence that they will do anything significant to enhance student learning. If priorities are to change to put greater emphasis on the quality of education, someone will have to alter the incentives and rewards that currently influence academic leaders. No one but the trustees seems capable of accomplishing that result.
Derek Bok is a former president of Harvard University and a former trustee of the University of Massachusetts. His latest book, Our Underachieving Colleges: a Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More, will be published next month by Princeton University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 52, Issue 17, Page B12