Having spent much of my time recently reading, writing, and thinking about originality and copying (including collage of various sorts) I thought I'd compose a collage (see below.)

David describes the fiscal shrinkage that is driving the next generation of change in universities but it is also connected to a couple of broad changes mentioned by Teena. One is a change in composition of he student body over the last many years, upending some assumptions about the purposes of higher education and the social structures that support it and are supported by it. Another is the increasing reliance on people other than the "real" faculty to do much of the work of teaching. As much as we see universities as the site of knowledge production, most of the people paying the bills think of universities as places where teaching gets done and they don't understand why it's not done better and cheaper thus the inclusion of Cameron's comment on assessment. (The question about what they--and we--mean by "better" is, of course, a large fiber in this thread.)

Part of the social shift in university education has been the "upgrading" of various learning institutions which includes dragging departments, programs, and subjects of study into a new paradigm that may not always be a good fit. Anyone who thinks that this statement or my recent posts have had the purpose of arguing against research or for a traditional view of vocational education is wrong. What I am trying to say is that a forward thinking version of a great university of fifty years past is not a reasonable ideal for most schools. 

A few years back, many people on this list were at RiDE (Reinventing Design Education in the university) in Perth. It was a worthy subject. I do think that design education needs to be reinvented. If, however, the university itself is not reinvented, most will become pathetic shells of their former glory (or, in the case of those with less glorious pasts, stage sets of their former aspirations.)


Gunnar Swanson
[log in to unmask]

On Oct 10, 2011, at 9:26 PM, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> More universities are competing with each other for diminishing funds and a shrinking pool of paying students. For some time now I have observed that more and more of my university colleagues are unhappily working harder for less reward or opportunity. 
[snip]
> There are a few protected enclaves (until the next round of funding cuts), but the overall picture, from where I see it as a visiting and adjunct prof at a few universities, is not conducive to a broad ecumenical view of education and research. Even in contexts where there are brave and innovative people, there is not the funding to sustain the innovation for any length of time.
[snip]
>  But I am coming round to the view that the problems are economic, not intellectual.
> 
> If we added up all the skills, knowledge, and experience that students would need in order to take account of our broader notions of design, we would have to at least double the teaching and learning time on an undergraduate or post graduate degree. 
[snip]
> The danger is that the pie will get sliced ever thinner. The necessary craft skills that form the current core of the design curriculum will have to be reduced to accommodate such things as usability testing, stakeholder management, ethnography etc. In the end, nothing gets done in sufficient depth or with sufficient proficiency, skill, or imagination. This, more than anything, makes the current generation of craft teachers, who dominate design education, suspicious of and resistant to a broader conception of design entering the curriculum. I think they have a point.



On Oct 10, 2011, at 11:56 PM, Teena Clerke wrote:
>  I would like to see a reframing of 'greatness' and 'quality' from that which is defined by 
> what I might call aspirational elitism. By this I mean that which is defined by criteria that exclude 
> many more than they include and which generate elite institutional (social) positionings defined by 
> 'expertise' in arenas determined by an institutional tradition in which only a very few can achieve, 
> not necessarily because of any lack, but attributable to a range of particular concrete 'things', such 
> as age, gender, economic status, membership of certain influential networks, capacity to travel or 
> relocate, and a range of less tangible 'things', such as desire for something else, and/or interest in 
> boundary crossing rather than fence shoring and/or career building. 
> 
> I suggest this might be reframed as defined by the small scale, the minute, the mundane, the 
> academic work that comprises the stuff of the everyday. While in Australia a PhD is a basic 
> requirement for a faculty position, the majority of university teaching is performed by casual or 
> visiting academic staff, and in adult education at least, doctoral students produce most of the 
> research output, yet these academics do not occupy institutional positions defined by aspirational 
> elitism. I am suggesting that building a discipline, which is the metaphor most often used on this list 
> and elsewhere, is a team task whereby all kinds of expertise are necessary, although differently 
> valued. I suggest that we might redirect our attention to all the subjects of academic work to ask, 
> what defines 'greatness' for you, and this is the important bit, in terms of your experience in design 
> in the university. Lots of small scale local experiences, when added together, might say something 
> different about what is valued in our emergent discipline and its location in particular sites of 
> learning, that is, universities, than generating lists of what is generally unachievable for the majority 
> of those who dare to call themselves design academics. 


On Oct 7, 2011, at 2:36 PM, Cameron Tonkinwise wrote:

> An addendum to Gunnar's summary of the pragmatics of the situation in the US as a result of the learning death sentence made by the CAA (notice the lack of D), is that pesky people from Euro-Anglo-Kiwi-Aussie institutions are increasingly gazumping Nth Americans for design academic positions because they, zombie-like, have post-terminal PhDs. In my experience, these same ghostly people get admin and curriculum leadership positions because their experience with quality-assured government-funded university systems mean that they are adept at  learning-outcome driven teaching using criteria-based assessment, processes that are only just now being mandated by accrediting bodies like Middle States.
> Cameron