Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [68]
9. Our current president’s goal is to double enrollment (from 20,000 to 40,000) despite the fact that there has been no doubling in facilities.
Maybe this will help give a sense of the near insanity of both ends of this current educational spectrum. It’s the center that may not hold. These two ends, decapitated versions of each other, are at the moment here to stay.
After reading Sarah’s e-mail, I called to ask her whether the situation she described is typical of other similar colleges, and she replied that it is. It is important to realize that state teaching universities and community colleges are as crucial to the aspirations of students attending them as research universities and elite colleges are to those privileged enough to have access to them. What is striking about the comments of both my CSULA colleague and Sarah is the pervasive tone of sadness—for themselves and their students alike. It makes absolutely no sense for this country not to commit the resources—financial and otherwise—necessary to improve the educational environment for these faculty members and students. While a significant increase in funding is essential, money alone will not solve the problem. It is also important to develop innovative programs to support overworked junior college, college and university teachers. One major question is how to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor by redistributing intellectual and cultural capital more fairly.
In order to address this growing crisis, I propose the establishment of a National Teaching Academy (NTA), which would be sponsored and funded jointly by the federal government, private donations, corporations, and leading universities and colleges throughout the country. This initiative, which should be given the highest national priority, would have enormous symbolic and practical value. While declarations of the essential importance of quality teaching are all too common, high-minded words are rarely backed by effective deeds. A National Teaching Academy, actively supported by the president of the United States and run by prominent educators, would stand as a lasting monument to the nation’s commitment to the finest quality of teaching in our institutions of higher learning. To those who say we cannot afford such a bold initiative during a time of financial crisis, I say we can’t afford not to make such a major investment in our future.
This is not the place to summarize all of the details of this proposal, but I do want to outline the general contours of the initiative. The NTA would be located in Chicago and have a loose affiliation with the University of Chicago. The central location of Chicago is clearly practical, and symbolically important in its geography, too. But there is more to that symbolism. William Rainey Harper, whom John D. Rockefeller chose to organize the University of Chicago and serve as its first president, had a vision for higher education that remains surprisingly relevant today and bears a striking similarity to some of the suggestions advanced in this book. In addition to establishing a world-class research university with an outstanding undergraduate program, Harper was, as Sarah notes, committed to expanding educational opportunities through a network of community colleges, where students spent the first two years of college. For those who could not attend classes regularly because of work or other obligations, Harper instituted the first extension service in America, fostering education at home when necessary or desirable. Were he still alive, Harper would be the ideal director of the NTA.
The primary mission of the National Teaching Academy would be to support outstanding faculty members drawn from leading colleges and universities, who would be appointed to develop high-quality seminars, classes and other programs for educational institutions that do not have the resources to underwrite proper and continuing faculty development. The activities of the