Former college president laments higher ed's aversion to change

Which is why, Rosenberg argues, higher education is in real peril. It's an industry that embraces the status quo. That makes it almost impossible to innovate. And it requires so much consensus that almost no consequential changes ever happen.

Perhaps this wouldn't be a problem if higher ed weren't facing big questions about high costs and a demographic cliff — the coming decline in the number of 18-to-22-year-olds across the country. Universities also have terrible completion rates. Only about half of men who started at four-year nonprofit colleges in 2014 had a degree four years later; among all Black students, the completion rate was 34 percent.

In New England, we've witnessed a string of closures (including Mount Ida and Newbury colleges), mergers (including Wheelock being absorbed into Boston University ), and steep cuts (including at Lesley University).

Rosenberg has seen a lot of higher education. He was an undergraduate at Cornell, a graduate student at Columbia, a professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, dean of the faculty at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and president of Macalester from 2003 to 2020. He's now a visiting professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

His new book — "' Whatever It Is, I'm Against It': Resistance to Change in Higher Education " — tells the story of a sector that may talk a lot about disruption but, in fact, seeks to keep even illogical systems firmly intact.

At faculty meetings, Rosenberg says, there are topics that cannot be discussed — "things that, like Lord Voldemort [in 'Harry Potter'], simply Must Not Be Named."

For example, it's generally believed that the ideal faculty member is a scholar-teacher who publishes game-changing books and s in their field, which helps them give knockout lectures. This sort of faculty member represents the Platonic ideal.

Except, notes Rosenberg, there's little evidence that great researchers make great teachers. And there's a good deal of evidence that there's no connection at all. He cites, for example, a Northwestern University study concluding that "top teachers are no more or less likely to be especially productive scholars than their less accomplished teaching peers."

When it comes to pedagogy, Rosenberg points out, "evidence that lectures are an ineffective way of teaching is both voluminous and incontrovertible." He cites Harvard physicist Eric Mazur, who came to realize that lectures are rarely the best way to impart knowledge. For years, Mazur has demonstrated that active learning — including having small groups of students teach one another — is far superior to passive listening. "It's almost unethical to be lecturing if you have [the] data," Mazur has said, arguing that lectures "create the illusion of teaching for teachers and the illusion of learning for learners."

But if it seems verboten to question the superiority of the scholar-teacher or to challenge traditional teaching methods, try starting a conversation about rejiggering — or perhaps eliminating — academic departments.

When Rosenberg joined Macalester in 2003, a department was on the line. Rosenberg declines to name the department, but he says it was chronically under-enrolled, with so few students graduating each year that "you could count [them] on the fingers of one hand." So the provost suggested eliminating the department while retaining all the faculty members and having them join other departments. The faculty voted down this idea.

The next year, a small faculty committee studied the problem for several months and came back with the same idea: Eliminate the department but keep the professors at the university. It was again defeated by a faculty vote.

Eight years later, in 2012, a different provost again floated the idea, and the faculty subcommittee that had studied the problem lent its support to the provost. Nevertheless, the full faculty — joined by an array of retired faculty, who were afforded voting privileges — voted it down 100-47.

A professor who had been on the winning side of the vote told the college newspaper that "a liberal arts education cannot function under a cost-effective model, a capitalist model."

Rosenberg didn't know quite what to make of this comment. After all, universities maintain budgets, invest in programs, and try to build up endowments — all of which seem vaguely capitalist.

Perhaps more important, as he noted to me, for most people, college has an awful lot to do with money. For most families, college tuition represents the single biggest purchase they will ever make other than buying a home.

At the heart of the intransigence Rosenberg witnessed — which he says is widespread across academia and not unique to Macalester — lies a strange paradox that inspired him to write the book: How could the members of a college faculty, who generally think of themselves as forward-thinking, progressive proponents of change in their personal lives, be so incredibly conservative in their professional lives? Not politically conservative, of course. But conservative in their desire to preserve old structures and old processes.

College presidents, Rosenberg acknowledges, also tend to embrace this sort of conservatism. They'll have much longer tenures and far be better liked if they don't rock the boat. Even if the boat could benefit from a little — or a lot of — rocking.

"Regardless of the fact that nearly every presidential job description and nearly every presidential search committee speaks to the desire for a 'change agent,'" he writes, "the truth is that an actual change agent is something that only the most desperate college communities want — and even the desperate ones are not sure about it."

In my own time — albeit brief — as a tenure-track professor, my general impression was that professors were deeply absorbed in everyday tasks. They spent their time grading papers, planning classes, doing their own research, and — if they were early in their career — trying to make sure they were progressing toward tenure. Most seemed extremely well-intentioned and probably did fairly little thinking about overarching changes needed in higher education.

Still, change will be forced on higher ed one way or another. Rosenberg believes tenure will inevitably be "chipped away at" until you can find tenured professors only at elite institutions. For students, he argues, the disappearance of full-time faculty will be a huge loss. Full-time faculty tend to be more engaged in a school, whereas those who teach part-time may have to piece together teaching gigs at multiple institutions.

So if the number of college-age students is shrinking, the American public is losing faith in higher ed, costs are high, and completion rates are low, what comes next?

Rosenberg worries that things will get much worse and that for-profit schools — which he believes are often a "low-cost, low-quality" option — may take advantage of traditional higher ed's inability to change. A few students will get the Lexus, he says, but many more will get the Yugo.

Rosenberg argues that even institutions like Harvard, which has no trouble filling its freshman class or paying its bills, will feel the impact of the public's disenchantment with higher education. Think markedly worse public policy that, for example, taxes behemoth endowments.

So if a higher ed leader wants to reinvent their institution, what would Rosenberg recommend? "Figure out a way to pilot and test new ideas," he says. Find smart, innovative people on your campus. Give them a problem and let them work on it. Microtest things, so you don't have to run every idea through a faculty meeting.

Despite his critiques of higher education, Rosenberg believes deeply in its power to do good, to change students' lives. In his ideal scenario, higher ed would effectively reach many, many more people.

Rosenberg tells me that he's hopeful. Change is possible.

So how high would you say your worry is? I ask him.

He runs his hand over his hair and looks down. "My level of worry is very high."