June 9, 2008

Conference Examines National Purposes of American Higher Education

Policy analysts, college leaders, and government officials gathered in Charlottesville, Va., today to discuss the national purposes of American higher education and to identify ways to overhaul public policy to meet the needs of the nation’s changing population.

The conference was sponsored by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. The groups plan to publish a report and recommendations that emerged from the day of conversations. Detailed information about the event, including video, is available here.

Gordon Davies, the former director of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the state’s coordinating board, concluded the gathering by saying that the group had reached a broad-based consensus on the key higher-education issues facing the United States this century.

Those issues include the need to improve job training, to enact policies that support and foster lifelong learning as most states’ populations age and grow more diverse, to alter reward systems for institutions and states, to support institutional research that is focused on states’ needs, and to foster institutions’ engagement in their local communities in ways that seek to improve social and economic well being.

Mr. Davies also emphasized that while the group had articulated a set of national purposes for higher education, most solutions for improving policies must be developed locally. —Sara Hebel

Comments

1. Who came up with these brilliant sets of ideas, hats off to you. Maybe it will do some good as a whole. Although this diversity issue has been in the forefront for so long and still people complain about racial discrimination. Maybe there’s light at the end of the tunnel? I received this from NASA below.

   http://www.bccmeteorites.com/NASAcert.html
   SRD

   — SRD-BCCM    Jun 10, 12:19 AM    #

2. How about a conference to examine the value of conferences?

   — GT    Jun 10, 08:38 AM    #

3. These issues are not at all as “abundantly obvious” as Gavin (#2) suggests, especially with the current anti-intellectual mood that requires us in higher education to be able to explain ourselves to those around us. I for one appreciate the guidance provided by this article.

   — Jody Profuturus    Jun 10, 10:58 AM    #

4. These recommendations are obvious byproducts of college and university functions, but they have nothing to do with the core, and they do not speak to the intrinsic worth of human development and liberation. If we keep following these bureaucratic prescriptions, we might as well close down the arts and humanities, let unions take over every faculty, and hire good plant managers (certainly not academic leaders!) as presidents. We can then graduate each year millions of interchangeable human widgets, calibrated to the short term needs of American industry. Only those who can attend the elite institutions will be educated for their own cultural development; the rest will be “products” with a defined mid-level only place to serve capitalism. The unfairness of this economci model approach to the disadvantaged and to most minorities is palpable. These socially useful recommendations are OK as “add-ons,” but when they supplant the core of intellectual life, the philistines and right wing culture warriors will have triumphed.

   — LKP    Jun 10, 12:24 PM    #

5. I remember when job training was taught in trade school.

   — A    Jun 10, 05:30 PM    #

6. So our rhetoric about inter-national and global education is fluff. National purposes? Maybe a model from Germany of 1939.

   — Don    Jun 10, 09:16 PM    #

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