FAZLUR RAHMAN: HOW TO IMPROVE COLLEGE GRADUATES’ REASONING AND WRITING TALENTS

                      THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

FAZLUR RAHMAN: HOW TO IMPROVE COLLEGE GRADUATES’ REASONING AND WRITING TALENTS

Published 11 March 2011 

A recent study on the state of college learning offered damning evidence. During their first two years of college, 45 percent of students made no gains in critical reasoning and writing skills; 36 percent made no gain after four years. These statistics, compiled by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia, led one education think tank to bluntly blame each and every participant in higher education.

They criticized the policymakers because the latter don’t want to admit that some of their programs have failed; college presidents because they want to avoid friction with the faculty; professors because of their unwillingness to examine weakness in their teaching and whether teaching is less important to them than research, and students because they want less work and more leisure.

My experience and reading leads me to agree with the concerns put forth in the study, albeit with reservations.

Some of the problems cited in the recent reports are common knowledge. Poorly prepared entering college students are often poorly taught in the schools to begin with; they are neither forewarned about the rigor of college nor are mentally attuned to it. And the students who come prepared sometimes find that hard work is not necessary to get good grades.

Academic freedom, the cornerstone of higher education, has served us well. But it has been carried to the extreme in some places, so much so that faculties become insular and are reflexively suspicious of any constructive idea from the non-academic circles.

Trustees and leaders of many colleges and universities are no better. They select presidents whose forte is not scholarship but business and public relations acumen. The result is presidents who care more about how to attract money and what looks good than they do about academic rigor. So they leave the professors to their own devices.

Some trustees assiduously proclaim that the colleges must be run like a business. True enough. No institution can survive without financial discipline. But a college is not a conglomerate that can shed off an unprofitable division; you can’t abandon or avoid an unprofitable subject that is essential to grow young minds.

So what’s my reservation about the wholesale damning of higher education? In the din, we have ignored one vital fact: the contributions of the liberal arts colleges, such as Austin College, in producing thinking future generations. The perennial complaint of the business world is that it finds a dearth of college graduates who can reason and write effectively. But if the business world wants to see this type of  graduates, it must support these colleges.

Good liberal arts colleges must be doing something right. Countries such China have been spending huge sums for engineering and mathematics education. But now they realize that linear and technical knowledge is not enough to progress. They need open and diverse minds that can come from a liberal arts education. So they are attempting to emulate our model in establishing liberal arts colleges.

All this became clear in a recent John E. Owens Foundation Conference, a joint project between Austin College and SMU, in which scholars from around the country and abroad presented their observations. The subject, appropriately enough, was “Human Capital and Global Business: Implications for the Liberal Arts College.”

Fazlur Rahman, an oncologist and education advocate from San Angelo, is a trustee of Austin College. His e-mail address is frahman@wtmedical.com.

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Clearly it's a "hornet's nest" in need of disturbing (or a "can of worms" worth opening).

There is an additional issue that needs to be a far more prominent aspect of this debate: the fact that so many of these incoming freshman are so ill prepared because our nation's public education system is such a farce. Focusing so much on only the higher education end of things is very much closing the barn door long after the horses, cows, pigs, and chickens have taken a hike.

It would be remarkable to see the number of "higher ed ills" that get resolved by the presence of properly prepared, well & holistically educated, students entering colleges and universities, and thereby "organically" causing a change in the system from within.

As was pointed out in this article, even China is finally cluing in to the fact that the world doesn't just need more specialists and experts. The world needs specialists and experts who also function as higher thinking, effectively communicating, human beings, adept at taking in, processing, synthesizing data and information from sources outside their own immediate arenas. Specialization to the point of excluding the understanding of the interconnectedness of things is a core root-cause of all the tragedies - great and small - experienced throughout the history of humanity (current events in Japan being one obvious example).

Alas, it is unrealistic to solely depend on this manner of educating to only being at the college and university level. It must start as early as primary school.

Let's throw another monkey wrench into this higher education stew pot: how about addressing the culture of binge alcohol consumption, so readily prominent on campuses around the country, and how it contributes to sexual assault and other forms of violent behavior? Might these be having an impact on the higher education issues of concern?

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by Prince Rahman