This month marks the 22nd consecutive fall I am preparing for classes as a college professor. I started as an adjunct instructor straight out of graduate school with a nine-month-old baby in the house, sometimes rocking her to sleep at night with my foot on her bassinet as I graded papers or prepared lectures. I was a terrible teacher at first—as an administrator now, I think I’d fire my younger self—but had good mentors and dedicated myself to growing in the craft of teaching and as a member of the higher education community: locally, nationally, globally.
Though my training and professional work is in music, I have wide interests across the humanities and this helped shape my teaching, allowing me to take on classes in myriad disciplines and move up the ranks to more stable positions, eventually being asked to take on leadership roles to design curriculum, mentor faculty, and consider more broadly what it means to educate young people in the (still) early days of the 21st century. If my math is correct, I’ve been the instructor of record for over 160 courses and have worked with close to 3,500 students. I have taught at conservative liberal arts colleges in the Midwest, an experimental institution in California that has only 26 students enrolled per year, historic East Coast music conservatories, and funky art colleges that train future movers and shakers of the art world. Presently I am the Dean of Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, one of the nation’s oldest art colleges and one of a handful of such schools that offers majors exclusively in the visual and performing arts.
Higher education would benefit from a greater emphasis on the art and craft of teaching, a deepening sense of learning’s intersectionality, and an opening to new and different ways of doing the work.
Despite all of this experience, I enter this year more worried than ever. According to Best Colleges, a well-researched and fact-checked resource on the state of higher education in the U.S., at least 62 public or non-profit colleges have closed, merged, or announced plans to close since 2020. While most of these were small, private institutions, many were highly respected and had been in operation for well over 100 years. One closed with a week’s notice, leaving students, faculty, and staff scrambling.
While the reasons for college closures are manifold and complex, the heart of the matter is often declining enrollment, exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to a dismal financial picture, which hinders an institution’s ability to serve its mission. When this happens, for a non-profit institution with a Board of Trustees providing fiduciary oversight, there is no choice but to cease operation. With the demographic reality of dwindling numbers of college-age students in forthcoming years, known in higher education circles as the “Enrollment Cliff,” colleges are faced with the need to “drastically change their business model,” or “diversify their revenue streams,” or “consider reductions in staff and faculty lines.” These are all phrases that will be heard in leadership meetings at colleges this fall, and if a school is not having these conversations, it’s likely because they’ve already committed to closing and discussions have now turned to the divestment of their assets.
Data indicates that 50% of students impacted by a college’s closure never finish their degrees. This is sobering in a society that continues to demand an undergraduate diploma of some variety as the key to unlocking career and financial success. In other words: college closures cost, in more ways than one.
Much of the dismal state of higher education in America has been brought on by ourselves, a society that is in a love affair with capitalism and enmeshes a college degree in that affair. Equally at fault are a host of policy decisions stemming back to the Reagan era and continuing through Obama, Trump, and Biden, which have made the project of college teaching and learning absurdly expensive, highly regulated, overly assessed, and tragically unimaginative. Further, thanks to our divided politics, higher education has never been more suspect in society, and many students, even left-leaning, liberal-minded arts students such as those I work with, have lost a degree of respect for the very project of college. (For a particularly good overview of these issues, I highly recommend “After the Ivory Tower Falls” by Will Bunch.)
All of this leads to a student enrolled in college who may not truly want to be there; who, along with their parents, may be getting into substantial long-term debt; and by necessity, may have to relegate their studies to just one more of life’s challenges. Obtaining a degree is now in direct competition with part-time jobs, housing instability, child care, and navigating the anxiety and mental health challenges that seem to be part and parcel of modern life.
Despite my worry, despite this grim reality, I continue to believe in the work of higher education for the very reason that it is, at its core, providing solutions in a troubled world. Put in loftier terms: the college classroom is a beacon of hope.
When students enter my classroom, we start anew, designing a world together in which they have the agency to navigate their own growth. This is a potentially transcendent transaction. If I’m doing my job well, I provide a pathway for them to find this growth and get out of their way as they do it. The question for me, as a teacher and as a Dean who oversees teaching and learning, is how we get back to seeing higher education as providing solutions and hope, not as drudgery to tolerate on the way to an imaginary real world.
While not exhaustive in the slightest, I see three areas where higher education can find better footing: a greater emphasis on the art and craft of teaching, a deepening sense of learning’s intersectionality, and an opening to new and different ways of doing the work.
Teaching at the Center
In his classic book, “The Courage to Teach,” Parker Palmer describes teaching as if it were a spiritual calling: “As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.” Having shared this quote with many teachers in workshops over the years, I often see heads nodding in agreement, but equally so, furled brows of disappointment from the sense that, though this is how a teaching career may have started, the reality of the college classroom today is far estranged.
My diagnosis of what has changed is the tendency for teaching to now resemble the mere transmission of content rather than the profound projection of the soul Palmer suggests. This collapse into content transmission seems to stem from multiple places all at once including students and families who demand a return on their investment, but equally so, administrators who need to see “deliverables” and “outcomes” to prove their institution is worthy of accreditation, federal and state funding, grants, and subsidies. I believe this has caused a subversive tension in classrooms between students and faculty, resulting in “expectant” students who don’t seem entirely certain they will get more out of a course or a teacher than a Youtube clip or a TED Talk, and apprehensive faculty members who walk into the classroom on Day One worried they will not measure up to student expectations, even though they are experts in their fields and have much to offer. This is a problem whose end result is either apathy on the part of the student, curmudgeonliness on the part of the faculty member, or both.
While this issue is complex and not easily remedied, what I desire is to see a return to the art and craft of teaching as a central component of the experience of higher education. This may sound odd to say, given the subject of my writing, but I truly believe that great teaching is no longer on the minds of many involved in higher education. It must be, and a return to the centrality of teaching would need all involved in the process to consider their positions.
Faculty would need to dedicate themselves to becoming exceptional, not only in the area of their professional or academic interests, but in how to translate that knowledge effectively to the students in their care. Faculty cannot be expected to do this alone, however, and college administrators need to provide the tools to achieve great teaching, ranging from faculty development opportunities to proper sabbaticals to excellent working conditions and rewarding, equitable pay. Lastly, but importantly, students must regain something that has been lost in recent decades: the vantage point that they are engaged not on a return of their investment or the preparation for a career, but in the expansion of their minds. This does not start at the college level, of course; it begins with the earliest engagement of learning a person has, continuing through all levels of schooling, flowing into the college classroom.
The Intersectionality of Learning
I’m grateful for the concept of intersectionality, first developed by American scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw. While often used to refer to intersecting social categories such as race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc., the concept also helps us understand how much of what we do in life exists within an ecosystem, the health of which determines the good of all that is dependent on it. I believe higher education is on better footing when it sees the interconnectedness of all it does.
The effective teaching mentioned above falls short when it does not intersect with an ecosystem of healthy, people-focused budgeting, a robust co-curricular system that cares for the whole person of the student including their social and mental health, and a campus that offers a physical environment conducive to learning. At the heart of the ecosystem must be a belief in shared governance, not only in name but in practice, where administrators, faculty, staff, and students share the burdens and joys of the project of higher education.
An example of a college living out the intersectionality of its mission is Deep Springs College in the desert of California, where I had the privilege of being a Visiting Professor on two occasions. Started in 1917 by L.L. Nunn as an experiment in higher education, Deep Springs limits its student body to only a handful of applicants and educates them on a working farm and cattle ranch, asking the students to commit to shared labor in addition to their studies, with the belief that each complements the other. While the work/study paradigm of Deep Springs is a major part of their healthy ecosystem, it is their full commitment to shared governance that truly affected me and which I believe more institutions can learn from. At Deep Springs, students, faculty, and administrators sit on every committee, together making decisions that shape the present and future of the college. This is true shared governance because each of these constituents is the college and they commit to understanding one another and the implications of their decisions. While never easy nor blemish free—democracy never is—the shared governance system at Deep Springs is a model to examine as to how colleges and universities can create an intersectional learning ecosystem in which each component can flourish.
Something (Anything) New and Different
If higher education is to regain its position as a beacon of hope, it must open itself to new and different ways of doing the work. As mentioned above, the highly regulated nature of higher education has made it tragically unimaginative as it strives to prove itself to accrediting bodies, and, more and more, law makers. One only needs to consider the questioning of college presidents in the U.S. Congress that took place over the last year in relation to student protests to understand the pressure colleges face to perform and conform. There is a need for college administrators and those that govern them to break from the methods they have employed for decades and think more creatively about the work at hand.
Let’s look at a few new and different ideas, which, frankly, are really not so revolutionary, and how they are being implemented in various contexts:
- Eschew traditional letter grade systems to focus on a competency-based model that values inquiry and process in equal measure to outcome. Many colleges and universities have adopted models of this nature either in part or whole, but what if it were the norm across higher education? (Deep Springs College, mentioned above, works with such a model in which I wrote a narrative assessment of my students as opposed to assigning them a letter grade. While time consuming, I have never felt more connected to my students’ growth than when teaching at Deep Springs.)
- Implement a block plan of course study where students immerse themselves in one subject for several weeks at a time instead of juggling multiple courses per semester, which thins the depth of their learning. (See Colorado College as a successful example of this model.)
- Experiment with a move away from the traditional four-year bachelor’s degree, which has seen very little openness to change since the early 20th century when it was essentially adopted. Three-year degrees are commonplace in many countries yet few colleges within the United States consider it as an option. Imagine the financial implications for students and families, not to mention the impact on the workforce as more young people apply and receive jobs at a younger age, college degree in hand. Note: this does not impose a “watering down” of the educational project but an examination of the content of degrees and the speed at which a student can manifest knowledge of that content, especially if in tandem with a move toward competency-based assessment.
- Limit the number of majors offered at any given institution, focusing on being known for something rather than everything. While this may sound counterintuitive to a business model that can attract a large number of students, it helps an institution manifest its vision more deeply, adjusting budgets and overhead to meet its goals. (See College of the Atlantic in Maine for an example of offering only one interdisciplinary major to a limited enrollment of 300 students.)
Work of Hope
As I write, I am one week away from standing in front of 18 first-year students in a new class I have designed called The Emerging Artist. The curriculum will engage young visual and performing artists in questions about the roles of artists in society, the ways communities support the arts and artists, and how our personal histories as creative beings can shape our vocation. The students will be, on average, 18 years old. I am 53. The difference is startling when expressed in numbers.
And yet, if we all do the work, we will come to the classroom collectively projecting the condition of our souls, to circle back to Parker Palmer. Despite the many discouraging signs that American higher education is in crisis, the college classroom remains a beacon of hope, where the world is made new, and young people begin to engage the questions they will ask the rest of their lives. I am honored to be on that journey with them and will continue to fight for the belief that higher education is a place to find solutions to the difficulties we face around the globe. This is work worth doing. This is work of hope.
Illustration by Tasha Walters.
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James Falzone
