I constantly see evidence that people are confused about phrases like “the liberal arts,” the “arts & sciences,” and “the humanities.”  Although some of my definitions may be controversial, I thought a lexicon might be helpful:

The liberal arts encompass the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. These disciplines are meant to be valuable irrespective of their utility as preparation for careers. The root meaning is that they are appropriate for a gentleman or -lady. In the middle ages, it was common to list seven liberal arts, often the following: music (which was really music theory), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The last three were about language, whereas the first four were about nature. Philosophy and theology were sometimes substituted or added to the list, and philosophy has subsequently given rise to a range of liberal arts, from anthropology to zoology.

The phrase arts & sciences seems to be synonymous with liberal arts but avoids the modern implication that the “arts” exclude the sciences.

The humanities involve the interpretation of human culture. Interpretation generally takes the form of insightful description, whether organized over time (as narrative) or across space, but the humanities also encompass theorizing about human culture and applying such theories. By this definition, the humanities encompass the study of literature, music, and the arts. They also include portions of history (cultural history and historical narrative), anthropology (qualitative cultural anthropology/ethnography), political science (normative political theory), and philosophy (history of philosophy and some approaches to ethics and political philosophy). Many would disagree, but I believe that the rigorous moral assessment of human phenomena is intrinsic to the humanities, whereas science claims to separate facts from values.

The social sciences investigate the human world in ways analogous to the natural sciences, meaning that they generally seek to classify, model, and/or explain human phenomena. So a historian who tells the story of Boston’s development is a humanist, but a historian who tries to model the causes of urban growth is a social scientist. The social sciences can be primarily qualitative, quantitative, or theoretical. The line between the humanities and social sciences cuts through departments; the criterion is whether the research is analogous to natural science.

The behavioral sciences do not seem to me sharply distinguishable from the social sciences, but they put human mental states (such as choices and responses) at the center, as opposed to social systems and processes. They tend to employ the elaborate toolkit of empirical psychology rather than other methods.

The arts (in the context of a university) involve the actual production of cultural products, from ceramics and paintings to dance performances and music.

The natural sciences investigate nature, sometimes including human beings as natural species. They thus encompass not only mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and their offshoots but also some forms psychology, anthropology, and philosophy.

Engineering, computer science and related fields do not investigate nature but rather aim to change nature through deliberate interventions.

The professional disciplines aim to understand and teach the techniques, ethics, and underlying principles applicable to particular socially constructed professions, ranging from those that are strictly licensed (e.g., medicine and law) to those that are more loosely and informally defined (business, journalism).

(Philadelphia) Here are the baker’s dozen Tufts faculty who are Tisch College Fellows for 2015-16. Their work involves active citizenship as a topic of study, a research method, or a mode of teaching. I work with a group like this every year; about 100 alumni of the program are still on the Tufts faculty.

Listening to the 2015-16 Fellows introduce their projects last week, I realized that the faculty of a research university resembles a global open-source intelligence service or a nonprofit news-gathering organization to rival a major newspaper. One of our fellows both studies and supports Muslim women leaders in the West African region where Boko Haram makes headlines by suppressing education for women. Another fellow spent this summer conducting detailed ethnographic research in Ferguson, MO. A third is inside the homes of elderly Somerville residents who have mobility problems.

These scholars investigate topics that may also appear on the cable news or the front page of The New York Times. Their methods are more systematic and deeper than those of reporters, although their products also tend to be less timely and (with some exceptions) less accessible. I don’t consider scholarship better than excellent reporting; we need both. But we also need ways to make more public the kinds of knowledge collected or created by scholars. The Conversation is one fascinating and promising effort to marry “academic rigor” with “journalist flair” by employing professional journalistic editors to solicit and edit articles by scholars. That begins to tap the tremendous potential of the academy for public knowledge.

See also Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication

The College Scorecard began as a promise/threat to rate US colleges and universities, but for now, it offers some digestible nuggets of information on more than 3,500 institutions. The results for Stanford are shown to the right, as an example.

I like some things about this. Mainly, it tells a prospective applicant’s family not to be put off by the sticker price. Tuition plus room & board at Stanford costs $64,477, but the average student pays much less than that, graduates quickly, and earns a lot of money. That makes it a good deal (in strictly economic terms) for most people who can get in. In contrast, Cambridge College costs an average of $23,792 and yields an average salary of $36,500 for those who graduate–who represent two percent of those who enroll.

I have three main concerns. First, the average cost overstates the relevant price for a lot of students. Stanford completely waives the parental tuition contribution for families with incomes up to $125,000 a year and waives the whole cost for most families earning below $65,000 (which is about 60% of US households). The average cost is $15k because a lot of Stanford undergrads come from families in the very top tier of the income distribution. If you have a median family income, Stanford will probably be free.

Second, this kind of presentation can mislead about the business model. It can suggest that the real price of a Stanford education is $64k, but thanks to alumni gifts, the university subsidizes attendance for needy students (who, in this case, may be upper-middle-class). I think the following is closer to the truth: there are a lot of highly academically proficient students whose families can easily pay $64k and want to go to Stanford. Their kitchen counters cost more than a year’s tuition. So Stanford charges that much and uses the income to help subsidize all the operations of a research institution. It uses a sliding scale, however, so that all of its students aren’t rich. I don’t necessarily think this is wrong: it depends on how much public good comes from the research. But the numbers give a somewhat misleading impression of the financial model.

Third, the measure of “salary after attending” is very problematic if we see education as a public good. The lowest-paid majors for recent college graduates are “early childhood education ($39,000); human services and community organization ($41,000); studio arts, social work, teacher education, and visual and performing arts ($42,000); theology and religious vocations, and elementary education ($43,000); drama and theater arts and family and community service ($45,000).” A college that produces a lot of preschool teachers, clergypeople, and community organizers is going to score a lot lower on the measure of “salary after attending” than Stanford does. The average salary for recent Hampshire College graduates is $30,800, much less than half as much as Stanford’s figure, but it would be misleading to infer that Stanford offers more value than Hampshire.

Here are five potential answers to that question, each of which depends on a different premise.

1. Teaching would be better if the conditions improved. For instance, class enrollments should be smaller, and teaching loads should be more reasonable. (Premise: faculty/student ratio is too high.)
2. Teaching would improve if professors went through specific recommended experiences, such as short courses on designing curricula or classroom visits from peers. To make those experiences common, provide them–along with incentives or mandates. (Premise: these experiences reliably improve the actual outcomes of students.)
3. Teaching would improve if faculty focused more on teaching. That would happen if they were rewarded for good teaching outcomes or possibly penalized for bad ones. This implies changes in tenure and promotion criteria and the like. (Premises: motivation is a core problem, and the impact of teaching can be reliably assessed so that the right people are rewarded.)
4. Teaching would improve if we employed better teachers. Some people are just better in the classroom than others, and we could marginally improve outcomes if we altered whom we hired and retained. One subtle version of this strategy would involve moving talented teachers into a track where they are responsible for more students, and untalented teachers into a research track where they can teach less. (Premise: talent for teaching is measurable and fairly invariant.)
5. Teaching would improve if faculty collaborated more and held each other accountable for excellence. Students should also be part of the conversation. (Premise: such collaborations can be made widespread.)

I buy #1 for campuses with very scarce resources; I don’t think it applies at the higher end of the scale. I am philosophically most friendly to #5 but don’t know how you make it happen more than it already does at most campuses. Options #2-4 seem to rest on insecure assumptions.

The post what should a college do to improve teaching pervasively? appeared first on Peter Levine.

On October 16, 2014, the White House, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University hosted a Summit on Civic Learning and National Service. This invitational Summit brought together 75 higher education leaders, government officials, representatives of civic organizations, and researchers studying civic learning and engagement. The rich conversation brought up many themes and disagreements.

We have posted the Summit Proceedings here. They are based on a review of the notes from the Summit, compiled and summarized by representatives from Tisch College. These are the key seven themes:

1. Colleges and universities must support democracy. Educating for democracy and generating knowledge to serve democracy were central purposes of the Morrill Land Grant Act, the GI Bill, and the creation of community colleges. The 1947 Truman Commission on Higher Education for Democracy stated that educating for democracy “should come first … among the principal goals for higher education.” But this heritage has largely been forgotten. The public, policymakers, and leaders of higher education now appear to focus primarily on preparing students for a competitive labor market.
2. Democratic education means engagement with politics, institutions, and contentious issues—by students, faculty, and staff in their capacity as teachers, learners, researchers, and civic actors. Serving democracy means more than service, although service-learning programs contribute to that mission. Colleges and universities should be places of courageous conversations and action, where the most pressing social, economic, and political needs the nation and world are identified, studied, and debated, and where students develop the skills and sense of agency to act on those needs.
3. Civic learning must move from “elective and available” to “pervasive and expected.” Since the 1980s, many colleges and universities have created impressive centers and programs for civic engagement, community service, community partnerships, and related topics. These special programs represent a valuable network, distributed across the country and connecting higher education to other sectors. However, they remain fairly marginal in academia itself, enlisting especially interested students and faculty. Some of the institutions represented at the Summit have taken the next step by making civic learning pervasive or even required on their campuses.
4. Colleges and universities should be partners in local problem solving and anchors in democratic communities. Campuses can support reciprocal faculty-community collaborative research, open their doors to the community, and serve as conveners to identify and facilitate change about local challenges.
5. Civic learning must be measured and assessed. Unless colleges and universities collect data and use it to improve programs and hold themselves accountable for results, civic learning will not be pervasively effective. Better measurement systems would also demonstrate the value of civic learning for employment and thus mitigate the tradeoff between education for democracy and education for work.
6. Higher education should tackle growing economic and social inequality based on class and social identity. Many students face economic barriers to civic engagement. At a time of rapidly rising college costs, students may have to work at least one job, may have children of their own, and may hold substantial debt. Some possible solutions to those barriers are course credit for public service experiences, loan forgiveness, and connecting civic and career skills.
7.  Leadership must come from many places, including federal and state policymakers, college administrators, academic departments, students, and also from community-based organizations and business. Many positive steps were proposed at the Summit, from raising the proportion of work-study funds available for community work to changing state or even federal measurement systems to include civic outcomes. Above all, the stakeholders must return the civic and democratic mission of higher education to its traditional high status in American life.

Based on the Summit discussions, we would suggest both an interest in and a need for continued work in two areas:

• Collective work among scholars and practitioners on what the research shows regarding the nature, scope, and effectiveness of civic learning and engagement in democracy; and
• Further, focused discussion among educators and policy makers to prioritize specific actions at the campus, collaborative, state, and federal, levels to advance civic learning and engagement in democracy.

Community partners/representatives should be key participants in both sets of discussions

The post notes from the Summit on Civic Learning and National Service appeared first on Peter Levine.