Academic Challenges: Higher Education Reform

From the student level to tenured faculty, academia poses a vast set of challenges. Every two weeks, Al-Diwan brings you a collection of articles and perspectives that touch upon one problem within academia. This week's focus is on Education Reform.

The University Run Amok! 
By Adam Daniel and Chad Wellmon (Chronicle for Higher Education)

According to Daniel and Wellmon, “Higher education’s insatiable appetite for doing more will be its undoing.” Taking the example of the University of Virginia with its China-based subsidiary, an investment company, and a concert-and-events venue in addition to the facilities, faculty, and staff necessary to educate its student population, Daniel and Wellmon begin to explain the issues of higher education institutions attempting to fill all public needs.

Is Higher Ed “Insatiable” or Sucked Dry? A Response to the Chronicle of Higher Education 
By Cathy Davidson (HASTC)

Davidson unpacks Adam Dnaiel and Chad Wellmon’s claim that higher education’s “insatiability” will be the institution’s downfall. In her response, Davidson takes readers through a history of attacks on higher education since 1980.

The Third Education Revolution 
By Jeffrey Selingo (The Atlantic)

Providing a brief overview of the first two major changes in American education, which included the “high-school movement” and the “college-for-all movement,” Selingo moves to explain how this next shift in approach to education emphasizes continued learning throughout one’s life.

The Right Kind of Innovation 
By Kate Ebner and Noah Pickus (Inside Higher Ed)

As institutions race to create and implement the next innovate technique or strategy in higher education, Ebner and Pickus challenge faculty and administrators to step back and reevaluate their hunt for innovation. Participants in their Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership practice this reflection and ask themselves to think of how a certain conception of “innovation” has sidelined solutions to problems.

The Future of Higher Education? Ask the Magic-8 Ball! 
By Dan Butin (Huffington Post)

Similar to Kate Ebner and Noah Pickus’ critique over the need for innovation, Butin has grown frustrated with higher education’s obsession with using technology as the solution to all issues. He says, “The problem is that such ‘futuring’ of higher education confuses our infatuation with the ‘next big thing’ over the real question of what is the purpose and vision of higher education.”
 

Oxymoron of the Week: Congress Seeks to Fix Broken Higher Education System 
By Martin Kich (Academe Blog)

Expanding upon Tom Lindsay’s Forbes article reporting on the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Act, a House resolution put forth by Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Kich criticizes the bill’s dismissal of the student-debt crisis and abuses of for-profit higher education institutions that would stand to benefit from this new bill.