Higher Education in a Global Context: MU Professor Emeritus Mel George (Panelist)

March 29, 2005

Coming last, want to raise some questions, along with some possible answers, that might help illuminate the issues facing higher education today.

• Why are we here? Usual answer is “teaching, research, service.” Better answer is “Helping people learn at all levels and in almost all fields.” More active, focuses on learner, clarifies that students are participants in learning rather than consumers buying a suit off a rack, and it includes research (learning new things) and the kind of service we should be engaged in. Four secondary questions about this task
  
  
• Whom should we help learn? Everyone. After all, we prepare all the teachers and principals for elementary and secondary schools, so we are ultimately responsible, at least in part, for the learning of K-12 students. ACE in 1999 issued an “Action Agenda” for presidents about their responsibility for teacher preparation programs, suggesting that they “must take the lead in moving the education of teachers to the center of the institutional agenda” and “should ensure that graduates of teacher preparation programs are supported, monitored and mentored.” This is not just an issue for Colleges of Education, but for departments of Mathematics and English and History as well, and I believe the people of the state would welcome such an institutional initiative. And we must help citizens learn, not only through the traditional extension services of the land-grant institution; shouldn't we also be helping citizens understand that when a scientist speaks of the “theory” of evolution, she does not mean “a wild conjecture” and she is not making any explicit statement about whether or not there is a creator.
  
  
• Why should people learn? At the recent annual conference of AAHE, speakers reportedly stressed that “lawmakers and the public are demanding that colleges be held accountable for preparing their students for 21st-century work.” Our mandate is broader. Not just for work, but for life, for the preservation of liberty, for the pursuit of happiness, the very words that Thomas Jefferson may be poised over in the statue on Francis Quadrangle. I believe we can best do prepare students for work by preparing them for 21st-century life and citizenship generally.
  
  
• How should we help students learn? By relying on the increased body of knowledge gained from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience etc. about how people learn. We must help the faculty we hire and the new faculty we are preparing in graduate schools know how to help people learn, how to base their teaching on the same kind of evidence about learning that they would expect in their research.
  
  
• Finally, what should we help students learn? Certainly not just facts but habits of mind, ways of knowing, how to act responsibly and morally in the world. Kind of accountability in NCLB may not always aid in that kind of learning. Secy. of Ed thinks NCLB should be model for colleges, too! We must be accountable for something and should help define it consistent with the reason we are here.