I don’t mean to single out Wittenberg University, our neighbors to the west of us here in Columbus, but their recent decisions signal a disquieting trend in higher education. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wittenberg plan to deal with a debt crisis and other similar problems affecting small liberal arts colleges by eliminating faculty and staff positions, up to 60% of those positions, “relying more heavily on online course-sharing to teach students.”
Going forward, teaching and learning at Wittenberg will “likely rely on one or more outside partners to provide some student instruction.” The President referred to this plan as “an innovative model,” one that will “maintain the vast majority of existing programs via hybrid learning.” [https://www.chronicle.com/article/cash-strapped-wittenberg-u-envisions-a-future-with-far-fewer-faculty-and-staff]
I have seen this stance reflected at many colleges. They elevate “the program” over the people who teach it, making the assumption that a “program” can exist outside of any human expertise.
I know it’s an old-fashioned way to think about it, but go to any college website. In addition to scenes of leafy, brick-lined campuses and photos of smiling, diverse students, there will be attention drawn to the “programs” on offer. These programs tend to be the same as every other college: business, healthcare, education. As I’ve written elsewhere, competing on the same programs offered by every other institution is not going to be a successful recruiting strategy in an era of the “demographic cliff.”
On most of these websites, there is no picture, no mention of the faculty students will encounter at these institutions. Usually, if one wants to locate a faculty member, they would need to click into the site several times before a profile of a faculty member can be found, and then there might only be a picture or an email address. In better cases, there might be a short biography of the faculty member. These sites make it difficult to locate or learn about faculty: the people–one would hope—who would be forming a mentoring relationship with a student.
Peter Felton and Leo M. Lambert argue in “Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) that “student-faculty relationships are a primary factor in learning, belonging, and persistence…Faculty are central to a relationship-rich education.” (2) The so-called innovative model proposed by Wittenberg would empty the college of these relationships, leaving behind the transactional husk of “the program” intact.
Imagine a college website where faculty were foregrounded ahead of programs. “Here is Dr. Mary Smith, Professor of Biology,” the website might announce. “She is going to change your life.” “Meet Professor Mark Jones. He is going to help you see the world differently.” “Other colleges might have an education program, but only our college has Professor Emily Adams.” Perhaps a more successful enrollment management strategy would be for colleges to invest in faculty-student relationships rather than in programs. Or, rather, colleges come to the realization that “programs” are defined by the relationships between faculty and students.
Faculty at Wittenberg understand this. “The university’s leadership is betting on the premise that students would be happy with a steady diet of online courses, adjunct instructors, athletics, and social opportunities, said [Ruth J. Hoff, an associate professor of languages]. In that case, students would miss out on the close personal interactions with faculty that have been the hallmark of Wittenberg.” The President belies his support for this mission when he says “I don’t see a way for us to continue delivering the product that we have been delivering in a way that makes financial sense.” He might understand the situation better than I do: perhaps today’s dwindling pool of students are demanding “products” rather than “relationships.”
At the same time Wittenberg are desiccating the faculty ranks, they are investing tens of millions of dollars in a sports infrastructure, specifically “a state-of-the-art, 265,000-square-foot indoor practice facility,” which will include “a six-lane, 300-meter track, and an artificial turf playing surface that will accommodate football, soccer, lacrosse, and field hockey,” in addition to “batting cages attached to the ceiling” and a “7,000-square-foot strength center.”
Sports teams require coaches. I have yet to see the athletic program that has been outsourced to “outside partners.” Most coaches–there are exceptions, of course–are not tenured, are at-will employees, and so give an institution the kind of flexibility to hire and fire that tenured faculty do not allow them. And many students are attracted to a college like Wittenberg because of its athletic programs. These students are more interested in playing intercollegiate football or volleyball than they are majoring in sociology or finance.
There is no reason that the relationship forged at a place like Wittenberg could be with a sports coach. This may very well be the future of relationship-rich higher education: that we are moving from a student-faculty relationship to an athlete-coach relationship. Wittenberg could be reimaged not as a place that cultivates academic knowledge but rather “athletic knowledge.”
If Wittenberg is a harbinger, then the small liberal arts college will transform from an institution of higher education into a sports club, perhaps one with a commitment to providing athletes access to educational programs via hybrid learning, but whose core mission is the cultivation of athletic ability.
The college would take on characteristics of a European sports club like FC Barcelona, who are famous, of course, for their soccer team, including youth academy. But Barcelona also sponsors basketball, handball, volleyball and ice hockey teams among others. Wittenberg’s website could be redesigned: the programs on offer are basketball and softball. European sports clubs tend not to include educational opportunities. This could be a distinctive feature of the American-style college-into-sports club.
Small liberal arts colleges needn’t succumb to the Wittenberg model in a desperate hope to survive. Felton and Lambert quote from Randy Bass, Vice President for Strategic Education Initiatives at Georgetown University, who told the authors about:
“how effing hard most faculty and staff work with students every day. There’s so much invisible work going on that is rooted in relationships with students. We need to find ways to tell the full story of faculty and staff work lives. That’s an inspiring story of relationships that are pivotal for college students everywhere.” (57)
Rather than deliberately hiding these stories, an innovative college might highlight them, placing them at the center of their enrollment management strategies, elevating human relationships and the development of social capital over “programs.”
Again, I do not mean to single out Wittenberg for specific opprobrium. I suspect many, many schools like Wittenberg will follow their strategy. I only wonder about the efficacy of such a strategy: of keeping a “program” alive by hollowing out the people and the relationships.
David J. Staley is a higher education philosopher, strategist, futurist, theorist and designer, and is an Honorary Faculty Fellow in Innovation at CHELIP. He is the author of Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education and the co-author of Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets.