Change We Must: Deciding the Future of Higher Education

College is too expensive for too many; politicians call for more financial support but approve far less; underpaid and overworked adjuncts teach vastly more than the impressive faculty who drew students to campus; departments and administrations focus more on protecting their territories than on pedagogy or even management. Technology is extolled and resisted, hyped as the force that will utterly transform or deform education. It seems clear that the American system of higher education is broken.

No one “fix” will serve. In a series of essays collected and edited by Matthew Goldstein, credited with reviving the vast but waning City University of New York, and George Otte, Director of Academic Technology at CUNY, well-respected and innovative educators offer solutions to the fiscal, administrative, pedagogical, technical, and political problems. As the editors say of their fellow contributors, “Their solutions mean changing hearts and minds as well as budget processes and governance, managing change and technology as well as teaching and learning.”

Among the solutions:

• Break the centuries-old models of brick and mortar education and replace it with online, peer-led, and adaptive learning.
• Re-envision governance so even reluctant faculty and administrators can once again become invested in education rather than self-interest.
• Implement innovations that demonstrably work and earn faculty buy-in.
• Find innovative ways of promoting the changes American education so desperately needs, including figuring out when and where students are most likely to learn.

With solutions from such stellar educators and thought-leaders as Cathy Davidson, Candace Thille, Ray Schroeder, James Hilton, and Jonathan Cole, Change We Must is a must-read for anyone wanting American higher education to succeed and thrive in these challenging times.

Matthew Goldstein served as Chancellor of The City University of New York for fourteen years until 2013. During that time the University saw a resurgence in growth, quality indicators, economic stability and reputation. He is the author of numerous research papers in mathematics and a co-author in three advanced books in statistics. Goldstein was awarded the Carnegie Academic Leadership Award in 2007 and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, among many other honors.

George Otte was named Director of Instructional Technology for The City University of New York in 2001, and renamed the University Director of Academic Technology in 2008. That same year he became the chief academic officer of the CUNY School of Professional Studies, home of CUNY’s fully online degrees. (He was there for the launch of the first online degree; there are now twelve; eight Bachelor’s and four Master’s.) An English professor for decades–he directed writing programs at Baruch College for fifteen years and was awarded that school’s Teaching Excellence award in 1993–he is on the doctoral faculty of the programs in English, Urban Education, and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has chaired the CUNY IT Conference since 2002 and the CUNY Committee on Academic Technology since 2008. He earned his doctorate at Stanford in what was then the new (still extant) Modern Thought and Literature program in 1982.