November-December 2009

It seemed as if all the solid ground under my feet had evaporated, and there I was, like Wile E. Coyote, out over the cliff, pumping my legs in mid-air.

Well, things have settled down. Carnegie has been replaced by a coalition of organizations: The Lumina Foundation and the higher education division of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education will sponsor Change, with support from the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. An executive council made up of representatives from those organizations, along with Change's wonderful board of editors, will advise me. Meanwhile, the Taylor & Francis people have been terrific to work with, and I have high hopes for the good they can do for the circulation and production quality of the magazine.

I will miss Carnegie, especially the wonderful comradeship of Pat Hutchings and Gay Clyburn, not to mention the wise stewardship of Lee Shulman. I will miss the people at Heldref, especially the bright light that is Rachel Adams, Change's former managing editor, and the can-do spirit of Jim Denton, Heldref's president. Those people, with their gifts and quidditas, can never be replaced. But loss is an ineluctable part of change. There's no getting around the basic Buddhist truth that we are, sooner or later, separated from all the things (and people and places) we are attached to.

I thought of my father when reading Margaret Merrion’s article on the future of art education in this issue. She stresses among other things art education’s need to focus on the “hot” fields (design, multi-media, and other fields requiring a mastery of new arts technologies)”—that enable graduates to get lucrative jobs. I certainly have nothing against lucrative jobs; while my father produced art, my mother scrambled to raise and educate three girls. But my father’s career makes me wonder if we distort what we’re about when we use the economic benefits of a college education to the individual as a justification for what we do.

Rites of passage, necessary for growth (“Life is meant to shatter us,” says Florida Scott Maxwell, “and it does it very well”), necessarily change you, as I heard someone say recently. And I expect that this unanticipated one will leave the magazine, and me as its editor, changed. All the same, it's important at times of transition to carry forward whatever it is about what you do that you most value—as Wagner College, whose story is told in this issue, did; or as the successful organizations that Adrianna Kezar describes did when they settled on their priorities for improvement; or as the business programs described by Ed Freeman, Lisa Stewart, and Brian Moriarty, which are changing their curricula in light of the financial system's failures, are doing; or as Mark Cohan and the faculty at the University of Texas, who changed their teaching strategies because the traditional approaches weren't producing high-quality learning, did.

So I've done some stock-taking, and here are three of the core values that I find govern me as Change's editor:

1. Change should explore the issues facing higher education in the US and the world in order to determine how education needs to evolve to serve (in order of importance), first, the public good; second, students; and third, institutional well-being.

2. All positions on the key challenges that higher education confronts should have air time, as long as their proponents make a good (read: well-reasoned, well-written, well-supported, thoughtful) case. I have absolute faith in Change's readers to sort out the arguments and determine which ones carry the day.

A note on this: As a teacher, I tried to be especially fair to students with whom I disagreed (although I admit that it did gall me to give an A to that young man who, decades ago, thought women's admission to the University of Virginia would spell disaster for the honor code). I like to publish articles I disagree with as long as they make me think again about, and complicate, my all-too-settled opinions. Best is when I can publish two articles that take opposite sides on the same issue, as I have done a number of times (Paul Barton, Tony Carnevale, and Alison Wolf on whether the economy needs more college-educated workers; Anne Neal and Barbara Brittingham on accreditation; Maurice O'Sullivan vs. Emily Lardner and Gillies Malnarich on liberal education; and so on).

3. For this strategy to work, editorial freedom is critical. Interestingly, several of the organizational representatives with whom I spoke in generating the support to replace Carnegie's mentioned how important it was to them that Change's voice be independent, a captive to no one's interests or opinions, the way AAHE (the American Association for Higher Education) was. I'm happy to say that the sponsoring organizations and Taylor & Francis have all made it clear that they share this value.

There you have it, my credo.

I also hope that Change will also be highly readable, stimulating, and forward-thinking, and that it will help shape policy and practice in higher education. But that can't happen unless you out there, with your insights and unique perspectives and knowledge and analytic skills, pitch in—not only by reading the magazine but by writing for it. So send me articles, opinion pieces, and letters. (For a description of what works and what doesn't, go to changemag.org and click on “Guidelines for Authors.”) This magazine belongs to us all; if you're so inclined, help it change for the better.