Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 ...]]> Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, David B. Potts, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 years ago as part of a graduate-level study of the history of American education. Ever since, in his role as a professor of American history and an academic dean, he has carried the torch for what he describes as one of the great, underappreciated documents of American higher education history—a precursor to the influential writings of Harvard’s Charles Eliot and other reformers decades later.

The Yale Reports, reprinted here in scanned form from the original, make up one part of the book. The other major part of the book is Potts’s own analysis and appreciation of the Reports—an attempt to provide context for the document and its relevance to understanding the development of colleges in the U.S. As a third major element, Potts has included documents from Amherst College and Harvard that are similar to and contemporary with the Yale Reports and to which, in some measure, the three authors of the Yale Reports—Jeremiah Day (Yale’s longest-serving president), James Kingsley (professor of Latin, Greek and Hebrew), and Gideon Tomlinson (governor of Connecticut)—wrote in response.

The Yale Reports provide a comprehensive snapshot of the issues stirring higher education and an interested public in the 1820s. The Reports were authored at a time of rapid change in the U.S. and similar change in the academic world. The nation was about to embark on an expansion in the number of colleges it sustained, just as settlement began to rapidly spread westward across the land. According to sources cited by Potts, there were 56 colleges within the country in 1830. This number grew to 203 in 1860 and 370 in 1890. This growth trajectory was accompanied by a tectonic shift in other areas of the academic enterprise as well. A familiar demand was heard for vocational education that would produce men of business, ministers and engineers. Most obviously, “reformers” sought to relegate the ubiquitous study of Latin and Greek from central elements in the curriculum to mere electives.

To illustrate the point, Potts includes a summary of Yale’s rather hidebound freshman curriculum at the time, which included:

I.

• Livy, three books
• Adam’s Roman Antiquities
• Arithmetic reviews
• Day’s Algebra begun [a text authored by one of the Yale Reports authors]
• Graeca Majora begun

II.

• Livy continued through five books
• Graeca Majora, continued through the historical part
• Day’s Algebra finished

III.

• Horace begun
• Homer’s Iliad; Robinson’s
• Playfair’s Euclid, five books

Much of the change that Yale considered at this point was modeled by Amherst College. Amherst had seen remarkable growth in enrollment during its first six years, thanks in part to its new curriculum. It seemed it “might soon have more undergraduates than the venerable Harvard and rank second among the nation’s colleges,” noted Potts; much to the discomfiture of its New England neighbors who often saw proportional declines in their own student numbers. This may have been a direct result of Amherst’s appeal or it might have related to another Potts observation, namely that many well-to-do fathers had begun to question the utility of any kind of college education for their sons.

However, in the face of these competitive challenges, and to answer the critics of higher education in general, the three authors of the Yale Reports (often mistakenly reported as only two, Potts notes), took a careful look at the curriculum and educational approaches used at Yale and found them already evolving, albeit with traditional courses still very much ascendant. In fact, the authors took pains to connect the traditional curriculum to the purposes of college education itself. “The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind,” the authors declare.) But these worthy aims also had to be tempered by attention to practical realities. “A most important feature in the colleges of this country is, that the students are generally of an age which requires, that a substitute be provided for parental superintendence” (Italics in original). Potts, in his explanation of this particular statement, points out that contemporary college administrators had had to contend with a variety of student disorders, including an “uprising over the quality of food” at Yale itself.

Above all, Potts points out that the Yale Reports helped sharpen “the emerging distinction between undergraduate and graduate studies and between liberal as compared to vocational or professional education.”

For readers not steeped in the early history of higher ed, there are implicit lessons for today about the challenges institutions must always master if they are to remain relevant in changing times, in particular the need to balance tradition and innovation. Furthermore, notes Potts, “Yale’s Reports of 1828 is an excellent starting point for exploring the core ends and means of a liberal education in a democratic society.”

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

It’s not the topic that New England’s higher education institutions generally boast about, but for many it is their most obvious attribute—the brick, stone, mullioned, porticoed and columned facades that helped set the standard for what ...]]> Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860; Bryant F. Tolles Jr.; University Press of New England, 2011

It’s not the topic that New England’s higher education institutions generally boast about, but for many it is their most obvious attribute—the brick, stone, mullioned, porticoed and columned facades that helped set the standard for what much of collegiate America now resembles ... New England institutions have this architecture in abundance and, in this volume, it is both analyzed and celebrated.

Author Bryant F. Tolles Jr. is the retired director of the Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware, and professor emeritus of History and Art History. He has written several books on architecture, including The Grand Resort Hotels and Summer Cottages of the White Mountains. In Architecture and Academe, Tolles, traces the influences that created the region’s first colleges, particularly Harvard and Yale, namely the English institutions which they sought to emulate—chiefly Oxford and Cambridge—as well as their local circumstances. Thus, builders often favored local materials—stone, wood and brick—and realized their interpretations of college architecture with the frugality necessary in a region still often in a pioneering stage of development.

The very earliest structures, for instance the Old College (Harvard Hall) and Indian College at Harvard were particularly shaped by local conditions, the latter constructed of brick but built along the simplest lines.

Yet it was these constraints, Tolles demonstrates, which yielded many buildings of interest that have in many cases literally stood the test of time (though there are many that were sacrificed to progress or lost to fire or neglect over the years).

None of these first-generation buildings survives and few are well-documented. So, Tolles spends much of the book taking us on a tour of buildings that were mostly built in the century up until 1860 (a few, such as Harvard’s Massachusetts Hall are even older).

Harvard and Yale share an introductory chapter, not only because of their age and stature but because, according to Tolles, they modeled two different campus visions. Harvard, with its famous Yard, copied to an extent, the quadrangle campus form of English institutions. Yale, broke new ground, setting its structures in a row, without a trace of the quadrangle. This form, notes Tolles, became the predominant form for most later New England colleges, at least within the period covered in this volume.

The second chapter pairs Brown and Dartmouth for analysis, since their early campuses date to a similar period, and saw the application of late Georgian, Federal and Greek Revival architectural styles. In this and other chapters, illustrations range from drawings and photographs contemporary with the construction of the buildings to interim restorations and remodeling efforts and, of course, present-day views. There are also some fascinating glimpses of yesteryear, in particular, photographs of student dormitory rooms in the 19th century.

Other chapters cover, respectively: Williams and Bowdoin colleges; the University of Vermont, Middlebury College and Norwich University; some later Massachusetts campuses, namely Amherst, Holy Cross, and Tufts; Trinity and Wesleyan in Connecticut; and Colby and Bates in Maine. These combinations are arranged both geographically and thematically. For instance, the Connecticut chapter also traces the specific influence of the Yale-style row plan on Trinity and Wesleyan, while the chapter on Williams and Bowdoin examines the contrasting responses of planners of the two schools to rural landscapes—the former having buildings scattered across a large area and the latter having a more compact and traditional campus near the village of Brunswick.

This is not, of course, simply a technical history. Tolles discusses the broad development of college building design and campus planning across the region, noting similarities and discussing shared evolutionary forces as well as the exceptions and variations.

Of particular interest is the way the sturdy construction and adaptable designs of earlier times have permitted successive adaptation to new purposes over a period of hundreds of years. In some instances lecture halls have become dormitories or vice versa, for example. Tolles writes: “In the majority of buildings discussed and illustrated in this book, stability, utility and aesthetic virtue have been combined to create bona fide works of architecture, as distinguished from certain more recent, sterile products of the college/university building trade.”

For the non-specialist, Tolles thorough analysis of the dozens of structures built in this period, including many that still exist, is accessible though occasionally taxing. However, thanks to excellent illustrations, many in color, as well as vigorous writing, the subject matter is kept lively. More importantly, anyone involved in New England’s academic enterprise will certainly find interest in learning more about so many familiar landmark structures, which Tolles calls, “surviving expressions of the fertile relationship between architecture and academe.”

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right offers a provocative look at the continued disconnect between the rhetoric of reform and the facts of ...]]> Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools; Theresa Perry, Robert Moses, Lisa Delpit, Ernesto Cortes Jr., Joan T. Wynne, editors; Beacon Press Books; 2010; Paperback $16

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right offers a provocative look at the continued disconnect between the rhetoric of reform and the facts of the real world. Statistics are in short supply here. Instead, we hear the heartfelt voices of reformers and advocates as well as of young people in underserved communities.

Chief among the former group is Robert P. Moses, a co-author of the book and the person most responsible for its creation. Moses, a 1956 graduate of Hamilton College, became deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s through organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Council of Federated Organizations. He was a primary organizer of the Freedom Summer project, which worked to enfranchise black citizens in Mississippi. Later, he worked as a teacher in Tanzania, returning to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies at Harvard in 1976, after which he taught high school math in Cambridge, Mass.

In 1982, he combined some of his career threads in the Algebra Project, which he funded from the proceeds of a MacArthur Fellowship. The project, an ongoing effort, focuses on improving minority math education.

Fast forward to 2005, when Moses organized a gathering of African-American and Latino activists and intellectuals to envision the establishment of a movement to campaign for “quality education for all children as a constitutional right.”  While arguably a somewhat quixotic notion, given the political realities of our times, Moses and his followers have continued to seed the nation with this provocative concept, notably though not exclusively through this volume.

Perhaps necessarily, though its title might imply otherwise, this book is not a detailed plan of action. Instead, it is our seat at the table, as it were, at the 2005 conference: an opportunity to share the thinking and tap into the feelings of people who are most connected to an ongoing national tragedy. The contents of the book came either directly from the 2005 event or were inspired by it. For instance, Ernesto Cortés, director of the Southwest Regional Industrial Areas Foundation, and a participant in the 2005 event, offers perspectives on the challenges ahead based on his work with Latino communities in Texas. For the reader, this is both the strength and the weakness of the book. We must reach our own conclusions but we have ample opportunity to learn or be reminded of inequity and its awful persistence as well as the long, noble tradition of resistance to injustice.

In an introductory essay, Linda Mizell, an assistant professor of education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, takes issue with the culturally persistent myth that blacks don’t care about education, pointing out that literacy and education were always seen as escape routes from slavery, oppression and poverty. Indeed, efforts by African-Americans to achieve literacy, let alone further education, were frequently viewed as subversive and dangerous within the majority culture, even in the recent historical past. She cites the story of a slave who was blinded by an overseer for trying to learn how to read. In a current-day context, we have the voice of Kimberly Parker, with her essay describing her upbringing and the forces (including her experiences as an undergraduate at Colby College and pursuing a master’s degree at Boston College) that led her to a career in teaching. And, beyond that simple act of career choice, we experience her commitment to change the lives of the students she later encounters at the Codman Academy Charter School in Boston through more forms of creative subversion. Other stories in the book remind us of the power of education and of literacy and of the terrible struggles so many went through to secure even the most basic elements of education.

To move from those frightening lessons to the present era, we are introduced to Baltimore public school students who engaged in protests and direct action a few years ago to try to secure state funding for their bankrupt school systems. We are reminded that this isn’t simply a faddish political activity adopted passingly but rather part of a long-term effort at survival and empowerment—with living links (Moses is one) to a long history of wrongs suffered and rights granted grudgingly. And inferior educational opportunity has been one of the greatest wrongs.

Here, Quality Education as a Constitutional Right does manage to provide some solid examples of successful efforts to bridge the gap and deliver meaningful educational opportunities to underserved groups. In the case of Moses’s Algebra Project, we learn about the way this program has been implemented in a number of communities and the specific elements that have helped it resonate and communicate with students and parents alike.

Likewise, the essay by Joanne T. Wynne and Janice Giles provides insights into some of the ways in which university collaborations can benefit efforts like the Algebra Project.

Putting the right to an education into the Constitution may not really be the goal of this book or its authors, but by “creating a grassroots movement to transform public schools” they may help to achieve just as much as would that ambitious goal. The lessons are fresh and compelling and the examples inspired.

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

In a recent check of Google search term rankings, the term “wiki” garnered more than 100 million inquires over the prior 30 days. Presumably, some portion of that traffic was generated by those seeking for MacroWikinomics or its predecessor volume, Wikinomics. ...]]> MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World; Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams; Portfolio/Penguin 2010; $27.95

In a recent check of Google search term rankings, the term “wiki” garnered more than 100 million inquires over the prior 30 days. Presumably, some portion of that traffic was generated by those seeking for MacroWikinomics or its predecessor volume, Wikinomics. But that kind of traffic is also surely a testimony to the way in which ideas enter popular culture and take on a life of their own. Thus, from Wikipedia, to the eponymous title under review, “wiki” (which literally means fast in the Hawaiian language from which it was borrowed) has become as much a prototypical sign of the times, most often attached to web sites that can be altered by users, as the terms modern, space age and 21^st century, were in earlier eras.

This wiki-titled book has all the merits and defects implicit in such a moniker. It is a guide to the times and a product of them. By way of background, authors Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams have to their credit a previous effort, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which apparently inspired this second book. As in their first title, they aren’t afraid of tackling huge topics. They do so with gusto. Indeed, the authors almost seem to want to take credit for all the (positive) changes in society that have occurred since their last book hit the stores in 2007.

In essence, MacroWikinomics proposes quite simply that “open” and collaborative approaches to just about everything, as typified by the vast number of web based “wiki” sites, and open, crowdsourced, and collaborative enterprises, can and will reenergize and transform much of society and, in particular, business. This thesis is elaborated through numerous examples that purport to show the truth in this assertion. And there is some truth.

Certainly, the philosophy of “openness” aided and abetted by information technology (itself, often increasingly open in nature) is having a tremendous impact on many aspects of society. And this is doubtless just the beginning. For anyone who hasn’t been paying close attention, MacroWikinomics is, therefore, a lively primer on a changed and changing world.

However, Tapscott and Williams aren’t satisfied with making small points or claiming measured progress. So, the tone of the book is often a bit strident and the claims sometimes almost ludicrous. For instance, a business called Local Motors is hailed as the future of auto manufacturing and maybe even the death knell of the giant automakers. “Revolutionizing the auto industry, thought Rogers, [founder of Local Motors] could reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and bring jobs back to the country’s declining manufacturing sector.” Indeed, according to its web site, Local Motors, aims to “design, manufacture and bring to market innovative, safer, more functional, lightweight, efficient cars through a revolutionary, local assembly and retail experience. These cars will revolutionize not only automobiles, but also the very structure of auto-making, auto-selling, and auto-servicing.” Reality seems somewhat more prosaic.

Translation: Local Motors is actually a high-concept version of the hot-rod shop that dates back to the 1950s, leveraging mass-produced components from large, traditional manufacturers, for the production of specialty vehicles for aficionados with deep pockets. Yes, there is a network of these shops and, yes, design input is solicited from the four corners of the globe. This is interesting but it doesn’t change much of anything, let alone the giant motor industry.

Assertions of this sort are piled on assertions at a dizzying pace throughout the book.

Another favorite is the suggestion that the mass-file-sharing phenomenon (think Napster and BitTorrent), by which many people, especially the young, get their music and videos, actually represents a “new business model” and a generation “renegotiating the definition of copyright and intellectual property.” It also represents theft and piracy. To be sure, there probably are good arguments for rethinking IP definitions and concepts such as fair use—possibly copyright protection lasts too long and is defined too broadly—but to disparage a system that has evolved over centuries for the purpose of balancing the rights of the creator and the consumer seems naive.

Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly bemoan the failure of technocrats but propose to replace them with what is really a technocratic solution–a vision of open-sourced everything—that still seems to depend in large measure on an existing, traditionally organized ecosystem.

MacroWikinomics is certainly entertaining and broadly informative. And it is heavily footnoted, making clear that this is not simply hucksterism at work— there is real information between the covers. Still the book seems to posses an excess of ambition leaves the reader with a sense of having been “sold” rather than merely informed. It is an uncomfortable feeling.

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010

Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder ...]]>

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010

Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder still to ignore. In her last book, Generation Debt, she savaged the higher education world for its ever-rising costs, which in her view are crushing graduates under a mountain of debt.

DIY U aims more broadly—demolishing the pretensions of the most prestigious schools and mainstream institutions with equal ferocity. Higher education, in her view “is the closest thing we have to a world religion.” Its status as a scarce good that everyone wants is part of the reason that tuition costs have continued to outpace inflation year after year. The end result, though, is a good that is too expensive for most people to afford and perhaps not even worth the price.

Still, despite the provocative title and cover, this book is better at reiterating the failures of our current system of higher ed than it is in explaining the revolution it forecasts. Her historical survey—500 years of education in a few dozen pages—hits the key points but distills them into a rather cynical synopsis with few if any heroes. The standout figures that do emerge often have a dubious or elitist purpose; Clark Kerr’s efforts to classify institutions and funnel funds toward some rather than others, being a case in point. “Education is an essentially conservative enterprise,” notes Kamenetz. “If we didn’t believe that one generation had something important to transmit to the next, we wouldn’t need education. So, changing education makes people really, really nervous.”

Another chapter, labeled Sociology, dissects the who-gets-what subject even further. It is neither a pretty nor an equitable picture. According to Kamenetz, although higher ed may get kudos for generating knowledge or even making better citizens, it has been much less effective in terms of what she argues has been its wider role—at least since World War II—as society’s uplifter, bringing more people into the middle class and/or enhancing the nation’s economy.  Here, Kamenetz asserts that the earnings premium for college grads is insubstantial when compared to the cost—to the individual student and to society. In many cases (she cites the example of an Ohioan seeking to become a fire fighter), even the requirement for college course work may be contrived and over stated in many fields. Once again, there’s nothing particularly new in the observations, though Kamenetz writes with precision and a degree of passion that makes each paragraph hard to ignore.

But the meat of Kamenetz’s book is in Part II—How We Get There—in which she outlines the ways in which technology and new approaches to education can deliver something that is high-quality, accessible, affordable and relevant. Early on, she outlines the principles that lurk within her analysis:

• The 80-20 rule—the importance of the 80% of institution that are non-selective as well as the growing number of for-profit colleges;

• The Great Unbundling—the notion that colleges will be less inclined to try to “do it all” and may begin to specialize on research, instruction or assessment, for example rather than all three;

• Techno-hybridization—Kamenetz predicts that more and more instruction will be delivered using a mix of online/remote technologies and traditional classroom approaches. It won’t be an either/or world;

• Personal Learning and Pathways—Here, Kamenetz, foresees rapid growth in people choosing to develop (and institutions learning to support), highly individualized education strategies—emphasizing personal goals, assessment of non-traditional learning and delivery through both traditional and nontraditional means. This will implicitly threaten the economic gatekeeper role that higher ed has assumed—determining who will and won’t get access to higher education and, thus, who will succeed or fail economically.

Change is here and most likely accelerating. Certainly, the technological tools already available have the ability or at least the potential to deliver more and better information and to support learning more cost-effectively than ever before. Nor is this only something for learners. Educators, too, can gain insights into learners and into the effectiveness of their didactic approaches, while potentially magnifying their ability to teach effectively and to teach more people. As an example, she cites the work of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, where all kinds of new instruction methods are being pioneered and tested with educators and learners. “When compared to students in traditional lecture-section-paper classes, OLI students learn more, learn faster, and enjoy it a little bit more, too,” she writes. In one case, a grueling statistics course was run through the OLI process and emerged with half as many classes each week and half the number of weeks—yet student results that matched those of the traditional program.

So far steps like these have been mostly tentative. As Kamenetz observes, “Over its long history, and because of the weight of that history, higher education has been uncommonly resistant to innovation in teaching practices.” But change is probably unavoidable, especially when for-profits are lusting after a piece of the $300 billion higher education business. And for the “80%” of learners who aren’t going to go through the doors of the nation’s highly selective colleges, only results matter.

Kamenetz closes out the book with a “Resource Guide,” which takes DIY U from the realm of social criticism into that of self-help. Kamenetz is free with advice for readers seeking to develop a personal learning path and offers pages chock full of web sites, book titles and others connection points—all of which are probably valuable. Still, the departure of the critic’s voice makes one feel as if freshly arrived at some Land of Oz, where one is full of wonderment but also not quite sure whether this was the destination one sought when first opening the book.

Still, Kamenetz has produced a useful piece of work for learners and a valuable reference for those working to keep education relevant and useful in the 21^st century.

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, Peter Smith, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010

In 1970, I was a high school student in a suburban New England town. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had brought spectacular illumination to the end of the academic year and dimmed hopes that the war ...]]>

Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, Peter Smith, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010

In 1970, I was a high school student in a suburban New England town. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had brought spectacular illumination to the end of the academic year and dimmed hopes that the war in Vietnam would soon be over. But optimism and idealism left over from the 1960s still percolated in our midst. That summer, a group of students, aided by a few like-minded parents and educators, came up with the idea of setting up a “free school” in town over the vacation period. Free schools, which at the time were springing up in cities and college towns across the country, were intended to be places where education would finally be democratized; teachers and students would be equals, and the focus would be on real learning rather than meeting pre-established academic standards or simply earning credits. Thanks to several thousand dollars in start-up funding, provided with some reluctance by the school committee, our free school began and flourished, albeit only for an eight-week run, during which we had free use of parts of the high school. It attracted people who had knowledge to share and people, young and old, who wanted to learn. Courses ranged from radio electronics and cooking to rock climbing, foreign languages and simulation games.

Sadly, our free school never managed a second act. By the following summer, idealism had turned to cynicism and the first signs of the decade's economic malaise had begun to make officials more parsimonious and everyone perhaps less experimental. However, having witnessed this wondrous phenomenon, I never entirely let go of the idea that education could be done differently.

Peter Smith, the author of Harnessing America's Wasted Talent, also has had occasion to see education from different vantage points, thanks to a long and varied career in education and politics. Founding president of Community College of Vermont and California State University at Monterey Bay, Smith has also served as Vermont's lieutenant governor and as a Vermont congressman. In recent years, he has authored a slew of books serving up thoughtful critiques of American higher education along with nostrums rooted in his experience.

On a perhaps more controversial note, Smith currently serves as vice president of academic strategies and development at Kaplan University, one of more than a dozen for-profit institutions skewered by investigators of the Government Accountability Office for allegedly deceptive statements made to investigators pretending to be applicants. And for the most part, for-profits are anathema to mainstream educators.

Leaving aside any temptation to shoot the messenger, though, Smith's arguments come across as both persuasive and simple without being simplistic. His central thesis, what he calls his “Law of Thirds” is that higher education has done a generally good job of serving the needs of the “top” one-third of learners who have the means and/or the skills to access and navigate the formal structures of K-12 learning and the college world that follows. However, the remaining two-thirds of learners either never make it out of high school or graduate but do not go on to college. This, he says, is not good enough given that so much job growth is in fields requiring advanced skills.

The cure he proposes is not dismantling higher education, nor does he really fault the higher education “establishment.” Instead, he suggests that higher education is simply “maxed out” and cannot and should not be expected to solve the two-thirds problem by itself. It is what he characterizes as a cottage industry rather than a system—with each school issuing its own currency in the form of academic credits. Still, despite its faults, he is largely content to let much of the higher ed establishment do what it has been doing, often with great success.

What does need to change, he argues, is the notion that only traditional schools, traditional curriculum, traditional classrooms and traditional methods for assessing and awarding credit should remain as the only way to serve up education. Like the American automobile industry, which fattened on cheap petroleum and government subsidized highway and ignored foreign challenges for too long, the education establishment must recognize that change has arrived and a revolution is brewing, Smith writes.

With so many people effectively excluded from the benefits of higher education, with a deep and persistent need for more skilled and capable people in the workforce, and with unlimited quantities of information on the web and communication technologies that have grown ubiquitous and cheap, Smith says America can no longer wait for miracles that will never happen. He points out that the U.S. is the only developed nation where younger workers are less educated than older workers. Therefore, he suggests, educators must devise ways to recognize learning in all its form and engage learners from cradle to grave using more innovative methods and recognizing each individual’s personal learning capabilities.

One of the solutions he proposes is the creation of Colleges of the 21^st Century (C21C). Instead of focusing on exclusion—with admission standards as the gate—he says, “For the first time in history, we have the knowledge and the tools available to educate through new designs,” including “emerging information technology.”

C21Cs will, in his vision, thoroughly personalize learning, connecting it to all aspects of life and ensuring the mobility of credit and credentials so no one will be left out of the system. For example, C21Cs would find ways to identify and recognize learning done on the job, in the home and through leisure. The competent and intelligent people that often have crucial positions in our world—albeit without benefit of formal credentials—would be embraced and given opportunities to grow. In the end, he writes, “the new ecology of learning will change forever the balance of power between the learner and his or her learning.”

Smith’s vision of a democratized, wide-ranging and humanized education system is everything an idealist might hope for supplemented by plausible means of implementation that should satisfy the pragmatist. It will be interesting to see how far he gets.

_______________________________________________________________________

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer.

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer who earned a graduate certificate through Harvard Extension.

The old saying, attributed variously to John F. Kennedy and Count Ciano, that success has many ...]]> The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910-2009; Michael Shinagel; Harvard University Extension Monograph, Puritan Press, Hollis, N.H., 2009; $14.95

Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer who earned a graduate certificate through Harvard Extension.

The old saying, attributed variously to John F. Kennedy and Count Ciano, that success has many fathers might well be applied to the origins of non-traditional college programs. Over the years, there have been innumerable pioneering programs in New England and elsewhere that collectively have helped to broaden access to college, providing educational choices today that would have been unimaginable in an earlier time. Which program was first, or best, or most influential may be moot. But when the program is Harvard—long the quintessential bastion of privilege and tradition—the story of “unbarring the gates,” as author Michael Shinagel phrases it, becomes of more than passing interest.

As someone whose professional life has been associated with Harvard and who led the Extension School itself, Shinagel is hardly dispassionate. But perhaps that is no vice in a book which claims as its mission merely to provide appropriate recognition for continuing education at Harvard: a subject almost completely absent from earlier histories of the university, according to Shinagel.

Harvard Extension, still the central program in Harvard’s continuing education realm, was launched by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell as an elaboration of the public lecture program endowed by an earlier kinsman, John Lowell Jr. at his death in 1835.

In the spirit of the “five foot shelf of books” (or Harvard Classics), edited for the common man by his predecessor, Charles William Eliot, Lowell, who became president of Harvard in 1909, saw an unmet need to provide college classes for working people. Under his direction, the first of these classes—which immediately proved popular with the public and with many members of the faculty—got underway. At his behest, these programs were expanded through a consortium he established with other Boston area institutions. And almost immediately, the University Extension program, as the joint effort was called, initiated a degree program, an associate of arts intended to be substantially similar in content to the bachelor’s degree offered at Harvard College.

The individual courses and the degree program in particular proved especially popular with local teachers who sought to further their own education in evening hours. This happy state of affairs—with annual enrollment sometimes reaching 1,500—persisted until nearly mid-century, by which time most of the other participating institutions had either moved in different directions or had developed similar programs of their own.

Shinagel credits his predecessor, Dean Reginald H. Phelps, who was involved with the Extension School from 1949 to 1975, with expanding the course offerings and increasing enrollment dramatically. In particular, anticipating in some ways the rich distance-learning options of today, Phelps initiated the delivery of Extension School courses via radio broadcasts carried on WGBH FM in 1949 and over WGBH television a decade later. The success of these efforts so impressed the U.S. Navy that it hired Harvard to produce dozens of courses, which were offered remotely to servicemen and servicewomen through the 1960s and into the 1970s.

Nor did the Extension School miss a beat when new technologies evolved. Under Shinagel’s leadership, in the mid-1980s, the school linked students in a distance-learning calculus class through personal computers and dial-up modems, allowing faculty and students to communicate and share in real-time. Today, of course, the school has many distance-learning courses.

In the 1970s, the Extension School also established the first of several graduate degree or certificate programs.

Not every endeavor at the Extension School was marked with success. A case in point was the creation of the Indian Computer Academy (ICA) in Bangalore, India. By the late 1980s, the Extension School had established a successful and well-regarded graduate-level certificate program in computer science geared to the booming regional high-tech economy. A Boston-area business person with ties to India suggested, in essence, establishing a clone of the program in India. He offered to provide the funding if Harvard would become a partner. Eventually, with the participation of additional business people in India and grants from U.S. philanthropies, the ICA was launched with much fanfare. Unfortunately, its association with Harvard and the Extension School turned out to be short lived. For one thing, according to Shinagel, the ICA was being operated more or less as a for-profit enterprise, and the lack of acceptable accounting practices made it hard to determine where the money was going or to whom. Perhaps even more worrisome, the quality of the facility and of the programs was quickly allowed to deteriorate to an unacceptable level. These factors caused the university to withdraw from the project in 1993.

Meanwhile, however, Extension School continued to grow and prosper in Cambridge. Up through 1975, only about 1,000 degrees had been conferred by the school. Yet, 34 years later, that total exceeds 12,000. At present, the Extension School has a course enrollment of nearly 8,000 students with about half of those served entirely through distance education. Shinagel reckons that over its century of service to the community (including many international students), the Extension School has enrolled more than half-a-million students—an impressive feat by any measure, even using a Harvard-size yardstick.