Selling Out Socrates

.

I find myself in a rather unique situation this semester. I am teaching two undergraduate classes that represent the best and the worst of contemporary higher education.

On the best side of the ledger is a special topics course, Media and the Creative Mind,  that explores the creative relationship between artists and the tools that enable the art they create. Unlike many courses with similar titles the course is not focused primarily on the “meaning” or “message” of the works. Rather we explore how the artist, message in mind, uses the technology available at the moment - brushes, chisels, keyboards, whatever - to manifest the intended message.

The course currently has 9 students enrolled, a luxury traditionally reserved for graduate seminars. I realize that were my department head less flexible, and were I not in my last couple of semesters of phased retirement, the course would have never been allowed to get on the books. But it is up and running and is in form, and I hope in content, what college is supposed to be about: the Socratic method. The Socratic method is driven by a cooperative environment of debate. Question, answer, discussion, advocacy and compromise. It is the world I remember from my own undergraduate days at Kalamazoo College back in the 1960s. And it is a method that, no matter how much we might which it were otherwise, cannot be “teched" or “AI-ed” together and fed to an intimate class of several hundred or several thousand students.

On the worst side of the ledger is Technology and Communication, a large online general education course. Let me hasten to point out - in my own defense and in defense of the couple of dozen teaching assistants who have more than ably aided me over the couple of decades of the life of the course - the course is a fine example of the genre. What lands the course on the “worst” side of the ledger is the simple fact that it is of the genre “courses on digital steroids” with hundreds of students. These courses have become increasingly common - and in some large state schools are the norm in undergraduate education.

I have heard it asserted, in one case from a colleague in my own department who had the unenviable task of reporting to me that some of my students felt I was “distant,” that large classes could be designed to be as intimate and personal as their much smaller ancestors. She is a bright and gifted young academician and will, no doubt, go on to design excellent courses. But she, and many like her around the country, have been sold a bill of goods. And as a result they put much honest and productive work into creating meaningful educational experiences in a basically flawed system.

One can legitimately argue that for certain isolated populations for whom - for geographical or physiological reasons - attendance in a small class is impossible, large online classes have a place.  However, if we are honest about it, the huge class model, particularly at state institutions, is simply a way for universities to generate revenue, to become in present parlance, “profit centers providing a revenue stream.” You attempt to put as many tuition paying students in the seats - or before digital screens - as possible and teach them using the cheapest labor available, graduate students. This frees your “real faculty” to teach Socratic courses to tiny clusters of graduate students while selling their brains by seeking grants from private and government funding agencies to gerrymander compensation at a far higher rate than legislatures are willing to provide for faculty.

It’s just good business, right? Supply and demand decrees that universities work that way, and the kids still turn out OK, right? Not really. Well, maybe so. Maybe the kids do turn out OK.  But as a recent spate of AT&T TV ads assert, there are situations when just OK isn’t good enough. The quality of education in America’s colleges and universities is one of those situations.  I would opine that there is a correlation between the fact that President Trump seems to be able to lie repeatedly and with impunity and the sorry state of higher education. While it is true that the president doesn’t do well among voters with college degrees, a sizable chunk of sheepskin toters did pull the lever for a guy whose response to overwhelming national and international scientific data regarding the human role in global warming is a simplistic “I don’t believe it.”

It is true that Socratic educations are still for sale in American higher education - “sale" being the operant word. According to The College Board, the average cost of a degree at a private four-year school college is five time the cost of a degree at a state school. And that is just an average. If you want to rub shoulders in small privileged classrooms with the children with the 1% at places like Northwestern, Duke, Harvard and Yale be prepared to pony up another 10 or 15 thousand dollars a year.

We are a democracy, and a democracy depends upon an educated citizenry. Not an “OK” educated citizenry, not a citizenry where the wealthy are educated, but a nation where all the citizens are educated. That may not be a case of “college for all.” In my 45 years in college classroom I have encountered many students who would be better served in trade schools and apprenticeship programs. We need to explore those options more fully. But the citizenry is not well served by the current “profit-center huge digital classrooms” model gaining ascendancy in our large state universities. We need to bring back Socrates into smaller classrooms and pay the cost to bring senior faculty into those classrooms with him. State legislatures - mine more than most - are going to have to realize that slowly strangling their universities is a sure way of debasing the democracy and hastening America down the slippery slope to irrelevance. 
.