[space height=”HEIGHT”]
DESIGNING A UNIVERSITY FROM SCRATCH (II)

APRIL 5, 2018 | ALEX USHER

Following on from yesterday’s discussion of the Minerva model (you might want to refresh your memory by re-reading yesterday’s entry, as detailed in the book Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, I wanted to get into a bit more detail about whether the Minerva curriculum is a foretaste of things to come, a weird one-off, or an evolutionary dead-end.

Short answer: I certainly hope Minerva represents a new trend in curricula, but I see one big reason why it might not.

To re-cap: Minerva has five “majors” (which are roughly equivalent to field of study boundaries like Science, Social Science, Business, etc), each of which has a half-dozen or so “concentrations” that don’t correspond directly to scholarly disciplines. Rather, they are interdisciplinary things with names like “Philosophy Ethics and Law”, “Global Governance”, “Earth’s Systems”, and so on. All students across all majors take the same four “foundational” courses which teach “habits of mind and foundational concepts”, and within each major everyone takes the same three “core” courses. Each concentration has nine required courses. For electives, students can take courses from other concentrations, but no courses are offered which are not concentration requirements. At the end, there are senior tutorials and a two-year long capstone project.

Of course, all this is easy(ish) to do if you’re building from scratch. But what if you wanted to incorporate some of this into an existing institution? Well, depends on what kind of institution we’re talking about.

Most of these things I think could, and probably should, be adopted by liberal arts institutions. Theoretically, the argument behind liberal arts is not to become proficient in a particular discipline (e,g, history, philosophy) but to get a wide grounding in different ways of thinking, and this approach certainly does that, while still giving students a good mix of breadth and depth. The notion that no course should be offered solely as an elective is an excellent move simply for cost-effectiveness reasons: elective courses and the professorial time they eat up are the empty carbohydrates of the economics of higher education. Re-deploying some of those resources to senior tutorials and capstone projects (or somethings similar) is a smart idea. If you were a liberal arts school, why wouldn’t you want to do any of that?

The idea of “foundational courses” which teach nothing but habits and concepts (HCs) is a little more dubious. It’s not a terrible idea in principle. There are a few dozen such HCs which are important to any type of scholarship (understanding how to evaluate claims, how to communicate effectively, etc), and if you could get those out of the way early, it might make teaching and learning for upper-year students more effective and efficient. The problem is these kinds of meta-skills are notoriously hard to teach well in a fashion that allows for “far transfer” (i.e., knowing how to use a set of skills in a completely different context from the one in which they were learned). If there’s one thing people should keep their eye on at Minerva, it’s the success of those courses. If it turns out they have the secret sauce for teaching these skills directly, it could change higher education.

Outside liberal arts schools, the likelihood of this kind of curriculum being adopted drops sharply. The Minerva model effectively depends on being able to do away with the tight link between an academic discipline, administrative units and major(s). If you can’t do that, then there’s no obvious way to get sufficient acceptance of what constitutes foundational and core courses. Instructors would also probably object to limiting elective courses. Doing away with those boundaries at small liberal arts schools is conceivable, though by no means easy. But at large research universities? Forget it. The disciplines are far too jealous of their status and privileges to ever give that up (as former University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins once said, “the university is a collection of departments tied together by a common steam plant.”)

What might still penetrate the world of the research university, though, is the Minerva approach to a stricter focus on learning outcomes and a more structured curricula (with the latter very much being an outgrowth of the former). If a Minerva-style focus on HCs can be shown to be a positive one and the world of work is moving in the skills/competencies directions imagined by people like Joseph Aoun and the Royal Bank, then there is still going to be growing pressure on institutions to demonstrate outcomes on skills/competencies even if they retain the current discipline-based structure of education. That will push most departments into a) doing a much better job than they currently do of integrating the teaching and assessment of skills/competencies at the individual course level and b) reduce elective-taking because there are too many electives and it’s hard to actually enforce the learning outcomes.

If/when this happens, there will be one big change associated with it, and that is the rise of the dedicated curriculum-planner. One of the reasons we don’t do such a hot job of integrating skills into the curriculum today is because professors don’t get a lot of experience building integrated curricula. Sure, they design courses all the time. But curriculum design is something different. It’s a different skill set and it’s probably not one many profs care to master since they usually have better things to do. So in order for this to happen, there will need to be a new class of university employee who works with departments continually to a) design curricula in a way that develops skills and competences while at the same time giving students a coherent education in a traditional disciplines, b) help design and embed assessments inside courses which reinforce these skills/competencies and c) find new ways to report outcomes on skills/competencies. Obviously, faculty still need to lead this activity; it’s just that the management of the process isn’t necessarily going to be in their hands.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily going to happen. It’s quite possible that the forces of stasis and conservatism within institutions will fight hard to keep today’s curriculum alive forever. But if governments decide – after carefully reviewing the evidence – that something like Minerva and its habits/concepts approach actually makes sense and institutions are dragging their feet over change, then they may just decide to go around universities and start creating new institutions. This has happened before in the history of higher education, particularly at the end of the eighteenth century. No reason it couldn’t happen again.

Tomorrow: we’ll move from curriculum to teaching and see what impacts Minerva might have.