Teaching and Learning and the Future of the University of Winnipeg

Some, perhaps many, will take the position that universities are changing and adapting to new social, economic, political, and educational realities. One of the reasons that I came to the University of Winnipeg in the Fall of 2010 was because I felt it had caught an important glimpse of the future that many other institutions had not yet seen and perhaps might never see. However, I expressed the view that the pace of societal change (especially the technological change that is now thoroughly integrated into all of our lives) brings fully into the light the reality that we are fundamentally no different than we have been for centuries in some important respects. Just as the examples I used in my November talk might once have easily been considered to be enduring constants (the newspaper, General Motors, the Mayan civilization in Tikal, the American Bison, even the iPod), the higher education we offer in modern universities is, to me, equally under threat of extinction unless it evolves more rapidly than its usual timeframe of years and decades (or more likely, centuries). If we are changing, we are not moving fast enough to keep pace with our reality. We are the metaphorical frog in the slowly heating water that does not notice the temperature change has risen to lethal levels before taking the necessary steps to save itself.

This is not about budget woes. They are real. They are menacing. But they are nothing more, in my view, than another reason to do what we should have been doing for the past decade anyway. “The future,” as I attributed in my October talk to Paul Valery, “is not what it used to be”. Most, if not all, bets are off with respect to advanced learning in the 21^st century. Yes, let's talk about budgets and cost-effectiveness. We don't have a choice. But let's not mistake talking about the cookbook for discussing dinner.

This is not only a matter of finding new ways to educate students for their benefit. For faculty (and for staff, too) it is a matter of preserving the very reason we exist at all. For me, re-framing teaching and learning is a survival strategy for a social institution that fulfills an essential and foundational public service that stands above all others: we are the trusted brokers of knowledge, the people others turn to for an honest appraisal of what is true. This is really why we exist, though to government, the public at large, and perhaps even ourselves much of the time, we appear to serve the primary function of teaching young people what they need to know for a particular career path. And because that is what others believe we exist to do (and fund us to do), if we do nothing to change how we do it, I believe there will be consequences, grand and negative in their impact, for the existence of that honest brokerage of knowledge that universities have long been. Without fundamental change, I believe that during the careers of the majority of our faculty, the decline of the modern university will have become so great that the once-given societal importance of Professor will be little more than an anachronism. There will still be universities and there will still be professors but the meaning of both will have fallen on hard times. We will have suffered the ultimate indignity: we will have become irrelevant, not because the truth will have ceased to matter but because what society thinks we are most about - teaching and learning of traditional cohorts of students - will have become something they stopped counting on us to do and supporting us to do. We will, in the most stunningly terrible way for us and society more broadly, have become dinosaurs.

Is this avoidable? I believe it is. As gloomy as this all seems, I am writing it because I believe in us. But, it requires a willingness as a collective to move almost everything we do now in teaching and learning to new models. We have lost the luxury of tinkering benignly around the edges of a centuries-old approach to learning and hoping it will be enough to avoid real change. As I stated in November, the only viable way forward I can see requires a zero-based audit of literally everything associated with teaching and learning in which every assumption, no matter how fundamental it might seem, must be challenged. The timetable. The classroom. Examinations. Laboratories, seminars, and lectures. Courses and credits. None of these remains sacred. Why should they? WE created them. WE can un-create them. WE can re-create them.

What must remain of our teaching and learning culture as it presently exists? For me, just one thing. That is our mandate to offer credentials that mean something important within and beyond our own walls. Specifically, we must be able to say that the person claiming the award of a University of Winnipeg credential (most commonly, a degree) may legitimately and confidently be understood to be educated. That, in turn, means that we need to define what our version of education is in the modern world and how we will guarantee that, for each of our graduates, she or he comes with our educational imprimatur that says “you can count on this graduate of ours to be” . . . what, exactly? We assume that we know what that imprimatur means in terms of knowledge, skills, and attitudes gained and learning opportunities experienced by the degree holder. We assume that others know, too.

But I wonder if any of us could write a straightforward 25 or 50 word statement that would define and guarantee clearly and confidently what we have required our University's graduates to have learned and how they have learned what they know. We should have been paying close attention to this all along but have not been. We have been cruising on a 19^th century ship in many respects. So has everyone else. And it's not that this hasn't been noticed. It is why we see such a push on governmental “quality assurance frameworks” and journalistic “student satisfaction surveys” and, increasingly in the United States and Canada, stronger pushes by think tanks for post-graduate competency exams for every graduate of the kind that professional associations currently require of medicine, nursing, and law graduates, for example. And that is why we really need to roll up our sleeves and re-invent ourselves in the realm of teaching and learning before we find ourselves simply swept along in a tide of bureaucracy and mediocrity that turns everything we do and everything we stand for into just a bunch of edu-business.

But if we throw everything out and start over, will we not lose our bearings? Will we not lose our sense of academic history and tradition? I believe that this need not be the case, for the one thing we all hold to be true is the value of pursuing truth. We are about discovering new knowledge and informing others of our discoveries, about turning our ideas over to the peer review crucible and participating in the debate. This is the “what” of the University, the part that has never changed and should not. Having a place where really smart, creative, and passionate people gather to think, to talk, to listen, to write, to explore, to challenge, to argue, and then to inform others of the results of those activities is essential, in my view, to any strong democracy. We cannot count on government or business or the blogosphere, for example, to be dispassionate about what is true. Universities can, and should, be societal leaders in this vital function to the greatest extent they can.

And to maintain that role, we must re-appraise the one thing that those who pay for the very existence of Universities focus on most: teaching and learning. For if we fail to meet our obligations in that realm, it is the truth that will suffer most from the decline of a professoriate that can no longer justify its existence.

How will we find the time to engage in and support high quality scholarship that is competitive with that of scholars in the nation's most accomplished Universities? How will we continue to attract external support, from government and other sources, to do the research and creative activity that we believe makes a difference? How will we balance our responsibilities to teaching and learning with those of our research and creative activity when the financial stability of our University has now become permanently addicted to funding that comes only from maintaining higher and higher student enrolments just to stay in the same place, or fall less far behind?

As I have experienced years of university budget discussions, read as widely as possible about the governments' emerging approach to its systems of higher education, and followed trends with respect to how universities are attempting to cope with current circumstances, two things have become clear. First, we are at last coming to grips with how urgent this all is and I want our University to lead, not follow. Second, there is no clear plan, no clear strategy, no clear consensus, no clear leadership anywhere beyond our University that is going to resolve this for us. There are ideas out there. There are interesting practices in place. There are people we should pay attention to. But WE are responsible for our future. We need everyone's best thinking and, more importantly, everyone's best action. I have the utmost confidence in our ability to re-define what it means to do the right things in the very different world of teaching and learning that we must build.

I have my own ideas of what a nimble, adaptive, exciting, and successful teaching and learning future might look like, but so, I know, do you.

I apologize in advance, but I am not going to leave this alone. It is too important to ignore, to important to treat benignly in the hope that an international financial resurgence or a change of government or a new postsecondary funding policy will at some point mean we can go back to more comfortable and less challenging times. We cannot.