Mr. Duncan, tear down this wall

Promoted by Sarah

I've been doing some thinking on the role of a University. Our conception of what it should be is very different from what it is in reality. Professor Michael Wesch, a Cultural Anthropologist at Kansas State University put it very nicely a while ago:

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously – not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our “subjects,” “disciplines,” and “courses.” McLuhan’s statement about the bewildered child confronting “the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules” still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called “the real world” which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is “merely academic.”

Not surprisingly, our students struggle to find meaning and significance inside these walls. They tune out of class, and log on to Facebook.

A true University should embrace learning, not teaching. A true University should view knowledge as a journey, not a scarce parcel. A true University should build a culture of the possibly of discovery through discussion at all times of day and night.

Instead we fidget in our chairs for three hours a day, spend hours dumbly thumbing through books in the library, and spend the rest of our time in a whirlwind of activity, trying to keep up with mounting piles of work, but also plunging headfirst into the elaborate civil society we've created to bring meaning, purpose, wholesomeness to fill the emptiness in our lives that our classes carve out.

Mr. Arne Duncan, tear down this wall.

What is a University? What should it be? I'm not asking you to describe your own college or similar institutions. Instead, what are the aspirations, hopes, contradictions, negations, paradoxes, stereotypes and associations with this concept? A University is not a college, the beer-soaked playground of the idle bourgeois, one long sex romp for the future staid suits of tomorrow. (In reality, perhaps it is, but we have entered the land of myths and symbolism).

I close my eyes and let my mind wander. The word University evokes vague echoes of Plato's academy, no? A grass and marble oasis of idyll, with students, their features wavering between long-bearded be-toga'd elders and excitable, sandy-haired fast-talking youngsters. These students might be tweed-jacketed, their brows furrowed too deeply for those so young, opening tomes in a rich velvet tomb of a room. Perhaps two women are striding to some unknown destination, the Pakistani explaining her understanding of the intricacies of physics to her Kansas friend. A rich tableau of images bubble and dissolve in a warm bath of emotions in the mind. Timelessness, Pursuit of Knowledge, Camaraderie, Dedication, Wholesomeness. All these concepts rush past my mind and double back to make sure they left their mark.

And yet, something is missing, is it not? Where are the professors? Where are these Socratic guides in this journey of intellectual discovery? A holistic concept of the University is intricately tied with those modern-day sages. They could be sitting down in a circle on a lawn with their students, leading them on a nature hike, arranging tours to local institutions of interests. They could be narrating the story of how a train stays on its tracks, or the first time they took a girl to a dance, while sharing a barbecue'd kebab with their pupils.

A true University should embrace learning, not teaching. A true University should view knowledge as a journey, not a scarce parcel. A true University should build a culture of the possibly of discovery through discussion at all times of day and night.

The "modern" University observes an archaic ritual, barely changed since those times when books were scarce and princes and monks paid to have a scholar read one aloud for hours a day. Michael Wesch, cultural anthropologist, explains the classroom:

I arrived early, finding 493 empty numbered chairs sitting mindlessly fixated on the front of the room. A 600 square foot screen stared back at them. Hundreds of students would soon fill the chairs, but the carefully designed sound-absorbing walls and ceiling, along with state of the art embedded speakers, ensured that there would only be one person in this room to be heard. That person would be me, pacing around somewhere near stage-left, ducking intermittently behind a small podium housing a computer with a wireless gyromouse that will grant me control of some 786,432 points of light on that massive screen.

The room is nothing less than a state of the art information dump, a physical manifestation of the all too pervasive yet narrow and naïve assumption that to learn is simply to acquire information, built for teachers to effectively carry out the relatively simple task of conveying information. Its sheer size, layout, and technology are testaments to the efficiency and expediency with which we can now provide students with their required credit hours.

Professor Wesch had his students produce a video on their experiences in the classroom:

It is strange, it is not? This take on a University is very different than the collective assumptions, stereotypes, and aspirations we have for what it could be. Perhaps this dream of what a University could be, should be, is a lie. Perhaps we are nostalgically clinging to a past that never was. Perhaps. However, the present is untenable. A generation of students and a generation of teachers are bound by a love of learning, but everyone can sense that the current model of schooling deadens the spirit and slows the mind of teacher and student alike.

Crossposted (with edits) to InnermostParts.org