Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [49]
My experience teaching intelligent and imaginative undergraduates supports the conclusion of a recent five-year Stanford study of student writing conducted by Professor Andrea Lunsford, director of Stanford’s Writing Program. In an article entitled “The New Literacy” posted on the Stanford University website, Cynthia Haven writes that contrary to conventional wisdom, Stanford researcher Andrea Lunsford finds that today’s students “are writing more than any previous generation,2 ever, in history.”
Lunsford admits that her results were unexpected, noting that her research refutes conventional wisdom and provides a response to people who ask “whether Google is making us stupid and whether Facebook is frying our brains.” Lunsford began her study of 189 first-year students (about 12 percent of the entering class) in 2001. Participating students agreed to submit all the writing they did for classes, including multimedia presentations, lab reports and honors theses, along with as much of their personal writing as they were willing to share. To her surprise, Lunsford received about fifteen thousand pieces of writing, including e-mails in eleven languages. Only 62 percent of the writing was for class-work. The aim of the investigation was “to paint a picture of the writing that these young writers do” in all “its richness and complexity.” Lunsford concluded that today’s students are writing more than ever before, but, Haven reports, “it may not look like the writing of yesterday.” Underscoring the important relationship between his work at Stanford and his writing online, one of the participants in the study commented, “The skill of being able to manage multiple, overlapping audiences is a principle of rhetoric, a skill I was able to hone and perfect not only in academic writing, but in the performance writing I did and all the rhetorical activity I was engaged in at Stanford.”
Haven summarizes Lunsford’s conclusions: “Today’s landscape alters fundamental notions of what writing is.” The most important implication of the study is “the need for higher education to adapt; for example, students could post their essays online, accommodating their preference for an audience and online discussion.” But, Haven stresses, this is not enough. “Lunsford said adaptation must go even further: What does an English professor say when a student approaches her and says, ‘I know you’d like me to write an essay, but I’d like to make a documentary’?” Last week a junior major in religion at Columbia came to my office and said, “I’d like to do a documentary film on Muslims in southern Russia rather than write a fifty-page paper for my senior thesis.” I responded, “Then do it; but make sure your ideas are well thought out and rigorously developed and your work is carefully crafted to shed new light on the questions you probe.” I was delightfully surprised when the department approved her proposal.
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Walls to Webs
There can be no meaningful reform of higher education without redesigning departments in ways that will support more extensive collaboration among faculty members and students working in different fields. It is also necessary to make structural changes in the curriculum that will facilitate the introduction of new interdisciplinary programs focused on specific problems and themes. Departments and programs should have the openness and flexibility that allow them to adapt to the constantly evolving structure of knowledge. As I have said earlier, the explosion of information and unprecedented expansion of knowledge have resulted in ever-greater specialization that has