The University Today: Technology

June 16, 2016June 15, 2016 / rtrube54 / 3 Comments

Last week, I began a series of four posts on The University Today, adapted from an address last summer at the World Assembly of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. I focused on four change forces (internationalization, technology, economics, and secularization) at work in the university world and considering their implications for collegiate ministries working in the university. I’m struck as I write this that these trends do not have implications for Christians in the university alone. They profoundly shape the character of our institutions.

Nowhere is this more true than in the rapidly changing world of technology which is shaping what is being taught, how it is being taught, and how students learn. Most significantly, technology is shaping, wittingly or unwittingly, the very sense of what a university is for. Here is the excerpt of the address on technology, followed by questions for reflection:

Technology

The explosion of technology is shaping what is taught and funded at many of our institutions. Pressures from parents, students, governments, and businesses are compelling changes in how higher education’s ends are being conceived. Academic degrees in fields related to science, technology, engineering, and math (or STEM) are being emphasized while programs in the humanities, languages, the arts, and social sciences are struggling to secure funding, enrollments, and to reconceive their role as an adjunct to STEM. In many settings, education is being treated as a commodity rather than a formative experience and engagement with life’s big questions. Students are the customers, faculty and university staff the vendors, and productivity is measured in terms of job placement rates. As I’ve already observed, the decision of many governments to subsidize international study reflects the fact that STEM enjoys an international consensus.

Technology is also shaping the way we learn, and the way education is delivered. A student may now access on a smartphone information that might have taken hours to find in a university library. Increasingly, the classroom is not the location of lectures but a place to discuss and apply content viewed online and to collaborate in learning with other students, a shift being referred to as the “flipped” classroom. Increasingly educators are required to display expertise not merely in their academic discipline but also in the use of various online technologies and social media. We have also seen a vast increase in online courses as either an alternative to or adjunct to education on a physical campus. Technology also means instant communication of everything from revolutions to complaints about the campus administration. One university leader I know utilizes social media constantly not only to promote the accomplishments of his institution but also to maintain contact with current and prospective students, and other constituents of the university.

Questions

How might Christians contribute to the discussion of education’s purpose in the institutions where they work? What are the opportunities for our mission if the spiritual hunger and aspirations of students are not acknowledged and the “big questions” are not explored in their education?
How should the transformation in the delivery of education influence our ministry approaches on campus? What will it mean for us to incarnate the gospel in an increasingly virtual world?

The Humanities, STEM, and Post-Secondary Education

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 / rtrube54 / 6 Comments

I was in the hospital over the weekend. Not to visit but as a patient. I won’t tire you with the details, but an encounter underscored some discussions with collegiate ministry staff this past week. The conversation was with an orderly, who with courtesy, grace, and care, wheeled me from the ER to a room on the eighth floor–at 5 am in the morning. I learned that while he works at nights to support his family, he is enrolled in a radiology program at our local community college — and loving it as a forty-something.

This man illustrates the promise in American higher education. A man doing good and worthy work devoting spare hours to acquire a base of knowledge and skill to pursue work that has come to interest him and will likely provide a better income for him and his family.

It seems to me that the defenders of the humanities over against science, technology, engineering, and math often do not seem to be speaking to people like my orderly. While defending their discipline’s nuanced and critical readings of literature, art, music, and history, and even with their accounts of race and class, they do not seem to recognize the opportunity STEM fields offer many to improve their economic status while preparing for good, worthy, and needed work that requires more than a high school diploma.

Do the purveyors of the humanities remember that originally their work was in service of the monied elites of the leisured classes–that these courses served as a “gentleman’s finishing school” for young heirs who would become lawyers or inherit the family’s interests, or sometimes for the training of clergy, who needed a broad understanding of the best that humans had thought and written to inform their preaching.

STEM education also offers the opportunity for advance for those whose station in life otherwise does not allow it. And it emphasizes that scientific rigor, mathematical precision, the ability to translate scientific theory into technological innovations that promote human flourishing are equally marks of education along with understanding what the best that has been thought, performed, or written contribute to educating that has as its end learning to live the well-lived life.

There is another issue that actually places the humanities and STEM over and against another form of post-secondary education–training in skilled trades such as carpentry, electricians work, plumbing, and the skills required to maintain and prepare our many machines from computers to cars to the climate control of our buildings. Most of these also involve significant training beyond that of high school but of a different sort than college education. But they have a common end–they prepare people for good work that is both needed and economically beneficial. There is an old saw that says that the society that despises both its philosophers and plumbers is in trouble, because then neither its ideas nor its pipes hold water!

We are tempted to create hierarchies of more or less noble work. Do we consider the work of the electrician who wires a building well as important as that of the electrical engineer designing the latest micro-chip? Do we consider HVAC technicians who configure systems to heat and cool a building efficiently as important as historians who clear away national myths with a more honest rendering based on sources of our national beginnings. Might all these be done Coram Deo, before God, with God-pleasing excellence? For that matter, was not even the orderly’s work in transporting me to a room where I could receive good medical care, offering me a warmed blanket and a friendly voice, noble work. I think so and was struck that all our conversations about educational priorities must keep in mind people like the man who served me so well and wants more for himself and his family. It seems that is a most “human” thing to do.

Should STEM Become STEAM?

February 25, 2015February 25, 2015 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Do we really need more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) majors and graduates? Yes and no according to an op-ed by Loretta Jackson-Hayes, associate professor of chemistry at Rhodes College. She contends that what we really need is STEM grads with liberal arts training. She gives examples of people from Leonardo da Vinci, to Steve Jobs to Carly Fiorina, who combined scientific or technical excellence with training in the liberal arts.

In addition to relatively standard arguments about the value of the ability to develop technology that is aesthetically pleasing and to communicate scientific knowledge with verbal and written clarity, she also equates the training of people in STEM fields to that of artists. STEM training is not simply about the transfer of knowledge. It is about apprenticeship, similar to an apprentice working with a master artist or music teacher. Someone who has been an artistic apprentice may make a much better teacher and mentor.

Most telling in this article and one of the main arguments often raised for the liberal arts is that they remind us of the big picture of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Jackson-Hayes argues this in terms of employability, that this kind of training makes people more nimble thinkers and whole people. I think that, while true, this is unfortunate because it concedes that the most important function of the university is job-training, and that the ultimate achievement in life is employment.

More troubling to me is the implication of the emphasis on STEM that not only do schools and universities exist to serve our high tech economy, but also that the human beings who are enrolled in these institutions also exist as cogs in our high technology machine. For this reason, I wonder if one of the most dangerous things one can do for those headed into these fields is expose them to a liberal education. A liberal education leads us to question the reasons for and purpose of and value in the things we do.

I can’t help but wonder if one of the reasons dystopian literature holds such a fascination for young adults is this intuition that giving ourselves heart and soul to what Neil Postman called the technopoly can end very badly for the humans all this technology supposedly serves. For example, we are increasingly networked–our computers, phones, banking and even our cars–and basically all of us should assume we are hacked and we live under the constant cloud of credit card fraud and identity theft. We have done all this because we could, but without asking bigger questions of whether this is really a good thing and without consider whether having our lives so open to the world makes sense given human nature. Those are the inconvenient questions literature and philosophy and history and religious studies help us explore.

My own hope is that those in higher education will stop justifying their existence merely in terms of preparing people for jobs. Jobs are only a part of a whole life, necessary but not all. Many jobs aren’t simply to help other people do their jobs. So much of our commerce, our research, and other endeavors focus around the non-work parts of our lives: our spirituality, our health, our life in communities, our enjoyment of the arts and entertainment, our pursuits of justice and the good society. STEM may aid us in these endeavors but should never dictate what we do and why we do it in these realms. For that we need something more…

Whither, or wither, the liberal arts?

November 19, 2013November 19, 2013 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

A friend this weekend remarked on the “closing down” of the liberal arts at the local university. I did some checking and found that this hasn’t occurred but that there has been a consolidation, following a contentious process with faculty and students from these disciplines. I cannot fully discern the impact of these decisions from what online research I did and so I am keeping the school “anonymous” but the drift seemed clear–de-emphasizing the liberal arts and enhanced focus on STEM disciplines. From all that I am hearing in the world of higher education, this reflects a broader trend.

I am currently reading Anthony Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life. I will be reviewing this in the near future. In this post, I want to reflect on the value of the liberal arts courses I took during my own collegiate experience. I did not attend an elite school, but I feel I was blessed by the opportunity to take courses with a number of faculty who helped me think deeply about the human story–where we’ve come from, what it means to be human and to live well, and why we are here. College didn’t lead, for me, to abandoning my faith but rather deepening my understanding of that faith and its relevance to these perennial questions.

I think of my freshman philosophy course, that introduced me to questions such as how we know what we know, and whether we can root ethics in sources other than the transcendent. We discussed and debated, and I learned how to think more carefully in the process. I think of history courses that weren’t just lists of dates and events but explorations of how we have gotten to where we are. I think of courses in literature including one in the Romantic period (that I took with my English major girlfriend, now my wife) that opened up my mind to the wonders of poetry, and helped me understand the Romantic reaction to Rationalism and its efforts to find meaning and the transcendent in the natural world. I discovered T.S. Eliot and both the despair of The Wasteland and the wonderful recovery of hope in The Four Quartets. The same professor hosted Lenten conversations one year on the works of C.S. Lewis that contributed to my lifelong love of this author. A course in the philosophy of history introduced me to the writing of Reinhold Neibuhr (the result of a professor’s recommendation for a paper I was writing) that not only helped me think about the meaning of history but also began to challenge me to think of how Christians engage in society.

During my sophomore year I participated in an interdisciplinary honors seminar on war and peace. Coming at the end of the Vietnam War era, this course introduced me to literary, political, and sociological writing about war and peace-making that helped me think and act critically as a citizen during the various foreign policy to’s and fro’s of political administrations since that time. My own research was on the idea of “images” in conflict resolution–how our image of adversaries shapes our response to them, and how our own actions can change the “image” our adversary has of us. As you can see, I’ve never forgotten that work, and it has been important in many interpersonal interactions over the years.

In one sense, these courses offered little that relate to the practical realities of my day to day work. Much of that I’ve learned along the way. Yet these courses helped me to think about what a life well-lived looked like, and what was going to matter whatever I ended up doing. And these courses taught me how to learn, to research, to inquire, to think carefully, to adapt to the rapidly changing scene, to have an intellectual flexibility that connect the new and the old, the timeless, and the changing.

Kronman’s book contends that these courses no longer do these things, but have become exercises in politically correct discourse. From friends in higher education, I know this is not always the case, although the trend and pressure is real. And because these courses are not producing either a tangible good (and I find many students balk at the stultifying propagandizing of many political correctness approaches) or a tangible skill, the arguments for reducing or eliminating them is growing stronger. What is most troubling to me is that it seems we may be reducing the college experience to one of training soulless automatons to be cogs in the military-economic-technological machine.

I’m saddened by this–my experience was coming from a working class neighborhood to a working class university that opened my mind in ways that have enriched my life. This wasn’t elitist education! I’m also troubled by the concern of what will happen when the “cogs” wake up to the fact that they have been short-changed in being offered a life that will make them well off without thinking about what makes up a life well-lived.