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These are troubled times for higher education. Skyrocketing costs threaten the very existence of many colleges, while a number of troubling studies are suggesting that students are learning much less than we think in their college experience.
It appears that we are spending too much to learn too little. Meanwhile, dramatic advances in online education make the virtual university an intriguing possibility rather than a futuristic dream.
Given these realities, a cynic might wonder, was it a wise career move for me to enter academic administration at this time?
Was the joy and honor I felt upon being named academic dean misplaced — something like the pride I felt some years ago upon investing in a Blackberry at precisely the time the iPhone emerged to destroy the Blackberry market?
Will MOOCs and online degrees render a residential Christian education obsolete?
Times of crisis, however, can have a clarifying effect. Perhaps higher education is in trouble in part because we have hitched our wagon to the idea that a college degree is the means to a better job and prosperity.
If that is all we are about, we shouldn’t blame people for being critical thinkers: why go into debt to learn the skills for a job that might not require a college degree in the first place?
The mission of Union University, however, has always been to place professional preparation in the larger vocational context of service to the kingdom of God and to the world in which God places us.
This preparation for a vocation of dual citizenship — of being active citizens of our varying communities and of the eternal city of God — is something that we cannot compromise even as we adapt our methods to a dramatically changing world.
Certainly, our educational practices will change, but the questions we must answer are how we will change and what principles will guide these changes.
As we continue to be “Excellence-driven, Christ-centered, People-focused, and Future-directed,” we need to consider how our educational practices measure up to these core values.
At its core, an excellent education takes place in the encounter between motivated students and outstanding teachers. What transpires is more than the mere transference of information.
Sometimes, it seems to me, the most strident calls for the virtual university treat knowledge as a commodity that can be more efficiently delivered electronically.
More than 160 years ago, Charles Dickens satirized this educational philosophy in “Hard Times” through the character of Thomas Gradgrind, who exclaimed, “In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!”
The speaker, and the schoolmaster … swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.
Whether it is the old-fashioned metaphor of children as vessels into which facts are to be poured or the high-tech metaphor of downloading information at the touch of a click, the same educational fallacy underlies this notion of education as the acquisition of knowledge certified by a diploma.
We have to do better than that. We’re after more than knowledge alone.
Our mission involves the pursuit of discernment, the development of good judgment, the cultivation of the virtues and the commitment to serve others in the name of Jesus.
One implication of a Christ-centered education is that we are called to incarnate our educational experience in community together. Community is hard to replicate virtually.
And, as a corollary to that idea, we can think of our incarnated relationships, as teachers and learners, as a kind of intellectual mentorship or intellectual discipleship, as we live out our academic vocations together.
Is this a foolish time to embark on an academic vocation? I don’t think so.
It is a time of tremendous opportunity as we think together about how we can live out our calling together as students, professors, staff and administrators in a changing world that desperately needs informed and discerning followers of Jesus.
John Netland is dean of the college of arts and sciences and professor of English.
