if Harvard is offering online courses with world famous professors, what exactly is the justification for offering an inferior product at a much higher cost? It is not at all clear why the “research university” model, with its extremely high costs and inflexible structure, should be the delivery system of choice for postsecondary education across the whole country. Many students might be much better served with a system in which a “rock star” professor delivers lectures online, while specially trained and qualified (but quite likely non-PhD) instructors lead discussions, work one-on-one with students, and grade papers.
A school set up like this would likely offer a much better quality of undergraduate education than lower-tier research universities offer today, with more individual attention and a much, much lower cost.This kind of change would have to come almost literally over the dead bodies of the current faculties in many schools. . . .
These changes will ultimately be beneficial, though the costs will be real. Society simply needs more education than the classical research university can provide at an acceptable cost. Cheaper, better, more convenient and more democratic: it is hard to win a fight against an alternative that offers so much to so many.
In an ideal world, university professors and other intellectuals would have been thinking about these problems for many years. They would be the pioneers in innovation and experiment. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world. The intellectual establishment is fully on the defensive. It is circling the wagons. It instinctively identifies attacks on the existing model with the worst kind of populist ignorance and bigotry. Nobody is angrier, nastier or more self-righteous than an intellectual whose livelihood is under threat.
Walter Russell Mead via http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/06/26/university-of-virginia-only-the-beginning
So is he saying teaching is the only thing being done at research based universities?
How about if we flip this model. What if I were a rockstar lecturer but didn’t have a PhD could I then make big money delivering lectures and then let PhD’s lead discussions?
I’d post these questions and more at his website, but for some reason it is blocked by my school’s filters.
Brendan, those are GREAT questions. You might have to leave them on his web site when you’re at home!
No, teaching is definitely not the only thing being done at research universities. In fact, much of the teaching at those places is quite awful. But the professors who are good teachers have the leverage of the institutional name and reputation, right? That’s what you don’t have (yet). You’ll have to pull a Salman Khan and post your rockstar lectures online and grow your visibility…