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When I was president of AAHE, the board once asked me to tell them what concerns about higher education kept me awake at night. One that sprang immediately to mind was what would become of the academic profession to which I've devoted most of my life. What will lure graduate students into this work when what they see ahead is, if not unemployment, the possibility of a lifetime of poorly paid part-time or adjunct work in institutions too creaky to change?
But this issue of reminds me of the other side of that coin. When I first became an English professor, I was thrilled to be part of the first wave of women's studies. I taught Images of Women in Literature in 1970, the first year that women were allowed to matriculate in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia, and went on to help start a Women's Studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. Heady days! Then in the mid eighties, I was put in charge of overseeing assessment in Virginia's public colleges and universities just when the assessment movement was getting underway. Being in on the beginning of things, when you have a chance to shape them, is the kind of thing that makes a career sparkle and shine.
And now what I see in the articles in this issue and the particularly rich interaction among them, as well as between them and past and future articles, are a couple of the exciting new possibilities that promise to enliven the careers of those who are just now entering academe. The first is a new appreciation of the need for high-quality information on which to make administrative, curricular, and pedagogical decisions. The second is a newly sophisticated examination of, commitment to, and changes in teaching and the learning of all the students we admit.
Elizabeth Capaldi launches us on the first conversation with her discussion of how the information buried in university budgets can be better displayed so that leaders can move clear eyed toward their goals rather than blindly groping their way forward. This echoes Edwin Welch's piece in the January/February issue comparing the data available to those who run hospitals with those that academic administrators can access. Looking forward, the next issue will feature an article by Paul Lingenfelter on how to make research on higher education's policies and practices more accessible and actionable.
The subsequent conversation in this issue between David Arnold and Ted Marchese on the usefulness to higher education of continuous-quality-improvement concepts is followed by an article by Candace Thille about how those principles are being put into practice in improving the cost-effectiveness of teaching and learning at Carnegie Mellon University.
The articles mentioned above are not the only ones in which the need for better information to drive pedagogical reform is stressed'a point that will be reinforced in the next issue by Carol Twigg's piece on the data-driven redesign of mathematics courses. Steven Handle and Ronald Williams' essay on our need for better research about which remedial strategies are most successful makes much the same point. This suggests to me that we're paying new attention to and raising the standards for research on teaching—which has heretofore been a largely self-taught, intuitive activity.
The Handle and Williams article also focuses on our need to better serve underprepared students. The nation needs for us to educate these students, as an article by Martha Kanter in the next issue will argue. And the fact that we have admitted them means that we believe that they do indeed have the potential to be “college material.”
Looking backward, this leads us to Kati Haycock's recommendation in the July/August issue of that we work with K-12 on the common standards so that more students will be better prepared for college than now is the case. Looking forward, an article on remediation by Gail Mellow, Diana Woolis, and Diana Laurillard in the next issue will explore the challenges of data-gathering in trying to determine how the best teachers of developmental education get their superior results.
And while we work on doing better at the job of remediation, we might also turn our attention to developing students' critical thinking skills. Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum's research suggests that currently those skills develop very little during college, on average, perhaps because we ask too little of students. Have we indeed struck a devil's bargain in which we keep our demands on them small so that they will return the courtesy?
One way to break this impasse is to make the material we teach more engaging. Justin Hall's review of a new book on how to teach comic-book art suggests that we can develop visual literacy, for instance, via materials that are only now beginning to be taken seriously as art but that students actually read and enjoy. And in a thread introduced by John Seely Brown, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, and Richard Adler in the November/December 2010 issue, the Listening to Students here features three graduate students (Shira Klein, Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, and Alexis Kuerbis) who came to a new realization about how their disciplines' research questions and strategies fit into the panoply of possibilities by means of a stimulating cross-disciplinary graduate forum.
In the next issue we'll continue to explore new ways to motivate students to do their best work in an article by Jeffrey Plank, Eric Field, and David Feldon on a simulation of an ecological problem that can only be solved by all the stakeholders (played by the students) working together.
Engagement also seems to be the key to capturing the attention of very busy faculty, who will be the ones to put any promising strategies we come up with to work. That we don't do a very good job of acting even on the knowledge we have was made clear by the article by Trudy Banta and Charles Blaich in the previous issue on the use (or non-use) of assessment results.
Barry Stein and Ada Haynes suggest that one way to motivate faculty is to get them involved in the scoring of critical thinking tests, which make clear what the problems with students' thought processes are and which can lead to rich conversations about how to solve them (hopefully, with the help of colleagues at other institutions who have addressed them as well and rigorously evaluated the outcomes of their strategies). And Mary Wright, Cynthia Finelli, Deborah Meizlish, and Inger Bergom show how even faculty at research universities can be motivated to engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning by institutions that take those activities seriously.
All in all, change does seem to be coming, even if more slowly and sporadically than we might wish. So I suppose it's no wonder that we're still attracting to the academic community successors of the caliber of the students who've been featured in these pages.
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