Why Georgetown’s Randy Bass Wants to ‘Rebundle’ College

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There’s an unusual research center near Georgetown University’s campus. It’s in a little red clapboard house right at the edge of campus. Inside there are whiteboards all over the place, festooned with yellow sticky notes with words like “iteration” and “semester” and “rethinking” and “reimagining.” It’s home to a project that Georgetown calls Designing the Future(s) of the University, with the mission of helping the esteemed institution rethink its core academic operations.

These days there’s so much talk and so many think pieces about whether college is irrelevant, or too expensive. And there are more and more upstarts offering alternatives to the college degree as we know it. This project is Georgetown’s answer to that “end of college” narrative.

It’s headed up by an English professor there named Randy Bass. Mr. Bass was a longtime director of the center on teaching and learning at Georgetown. This new project is not about how individual classes should be taught, but instead asks more fundamental questions about the future of higher education.

Of course, this being higher education, there have been some reservations and concerns on campus about the project’s experiments. But it seems to have made some progress, and some of the ideas there could have a real ripple effect throughout higher education.

The Chronicle talked with Mr. Bass as part of a larger story about the center and its work. Listen to the full audio. Below is an edited and adapted transcript of the podcast.

Q. Can colleges that are hundreds of years old fundamentally change the way they do things?

A. As you may notice, we have above our fireplace a banner that says, “Yes a university can reinvent itself,” and that’s meant to be our way of saying to those who are outside these institutions that we actually believe that there’s a long tradition of innovation inside higher education and that what we need to do is have enough ambition and coordination to be able to work across the constraints of our own structures, to be able to unleash what I think is really a tremendous amount of innovation and interest in innovation that exists inside our institutions.

Q. We hear a lot of talk these days about how higher education is being unbundled, and how students may soon get courses from a mix of college and even from companies. Maybe they’ll get mentoring and job advising from other places. How should colleges respond?

A. I think what all so-called legacy institutions need to grapple with is to think about what I’ve been calling rebundling. I’ve been doing some writing and thinking about this, some co-writing with others, with Bret Eynon from LaGuardia Community College. He and I have been writing about rebundling. Traditional institutions, even with traditional four-year degrees, often have a great deal of disconnection between the curriculum and the co-curriculum, or between student affairs and academic affairs, or between advisement and placement. I think what we need to do is find what is the right remix going forward, and it’ll take us many, many years to work this through. Between the affordances of unbundling that the Internet now gives us, and the ability to connect new kinds of pathways, to connect different services, connect disparate parts of the student’s experience, in ways to create a more integrated experience for students.

Even under a bundled four-year degree, I think students often don’t always have a very integrated experience of their four years, it’s just bundled. I think we can actually do a lot better, not just Georgetown but all of higher education, at helping students create a more integrated experience. That might be by connecting and making strong connections, including building their own narratives around these different unbundled pieces.

Q. How did you get into this? You started out as an English professor, right? What was your specialty?

A. Nineteenth-century American literature.

Q. Are you from a family of academics at all?

A. No, not especially. I think the work that I’ve been doing really for most of my time has been really around the space of reimagining ways that you can teach and ways that people can learn in different kinds of spaces. When I was in graduate school at Brown, I was lucky enough to be involved with some very early work on multimedia, creating these rich interdisciplinary multimedia archives for school-age children. It completely opened my eyes to the potential of digital environments — this was pre-Web, in the late ’80s — the potential of digital environments to be integrative learning spaces.

I think really what has influenced me all my life has been this notion of an integrative education. How can we reimagine, including what’s the potential of technology, to help make learning both more meaningful and more integrative for people of all ages?

Q. Was there some aha moment that led you to create the Red House project?

A. In the last few years that I was running the center for teaching and learning, I could see that there was a limit to how much innovation or transformation could actually take place if you were working only faculty-member-by-faculty-member within the boundaries of just their own courses — that we were not going to exact a broader change just working course-by-course. It doesn’t make sense to innovate something that you hope will change the institution way off on the side in a way that is completely hived off.

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I think the next phase of higher ed’s existence has to be about creative integration. We’re really good at adding things and aggregating and expanding. When you think about it, like 40 years ago, the co-curriculum as we know it didn’t exist. There was social stuff, and there were little small nothings — but the really sophisticated co-curriculum, high-impact practices and internships and supports and the all of the incredible residential things like that, it has only been 30 or 40 years that this has really flourished.

Everything about the university is all about expansion. That’s one of the reasons we can barely afford to be ourselves. I just feel like part of the heart of this work, part of this work for every institution has to be, how do we significantly improve ourselves through integration, through creative integration, whether we think of it as rebundling or reconnecting, or unbundling and reconnecting, it has to be about connecting things that haven’t been connected.

Q. Part of the vision at the Red House calls for a very different role for professors. How do colleges account for all the different things professors do when they’re working with students?

A. I think if we look across the next five, 10, or 15 years, one of the consequences of the explosion of options to learn things online is that our value proposition will increasingly be on the high-quality interaction of faculty. Some of that will be in the classroom, and increasingly some of that will be outside the classroom. That cannot expand if all of that work is happening outside of how we charge for credits and how we credit faculty with workload.

One of the things that we’re trying to help people do is to reimagine how some of the mentoring work they do with students — and sustained project work — could be on both sides of the ledger brought under the credit-bearing experience and counted as teaching load.

Q. The Red House is working on a lot of ideas, including one-credit modules instead of entire courses and a special focus on the last semester. Mr. Bass says there’s really one key to all this innovation.

A. Many people have asked me at various times in this process, What’s the one thing that you absolutely have to change to do the work you’re doing? And I think they all want me to say “tenure,” but I’m never taking that bait. I think the No. 1 thing is moving away from the one-size-fits-all semester model. I think that as we are doing the design work as well as the cost-modeling on the experiments that we’re undertaking, if you can think in units smaller than courses — if you can think in units smaller than three credits and in time spans shorter than semesters, as a way to create new configurations of meaningful learning — you have exponentially expanded your flexibility in creating a sustainable curriculum.

Jeffrey R. Young contributed to this article.

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