MM: Have any of your thoughts been influenced by recent trends, such as the rise of artificial intelligence?
JAB: These trends mean that the kind of liberal arts education that I cherish has become more valuable. We have no idea what the jobs of the future are going to be. For example, everybody was learning computer science 10 years ago. And now one of the five industries that AI is most likely to disrupt is coding. Whoops! So, let’s hope you can learn something new. The idea that you can learn something new, that you can become a thinker who is flexible and adaptable, has never been more important.
MM: Professor Zimmerman, your book names certain innovations over the course of time that were supposed to “fix” this thing, like student evaluations. Why didn’t they?
JZ: Well, we were always looking for a better mousetrap, and we have been for about 100 years. You mentioned student evaluations. There are important things we can learn from them. But in and of themselves, they’re not going to solve the essential problem. Speaking of trends and predictions, my interest in college teaching started at a conference about online instruction. About half the people said that online innovation was going to make everything better. About half said it was going to make everything worse. And I’m sitting there saying to myself: Excuse me, what’s “everything”? What are we doing now? The claims that it’s going to make everything better or worse have something in common. They imagine the shared baseline. I decided to write about the history of college teaching because we didn’t have a baseline.
MM: Professor Rendón, I’m assuming that some of the things that Professor Bowen said about the ways that students learn resonate with you because your work is so much about the students who have been left out. What has been most meaningful for students that you’ve worked with over the years?
LIR: As I hear all of these very remarkable ideas, what comes to mind is that that we need to interrogate the basic assumptions that guide teaching and learning. The privileging, for example, of Western wisdom; the privileging of intellectual learning at the expense of intuition and feelings; the privileging of separation at the expense of a relational ontology and working with students in an affirming validating way. It’s not all about content. It’s not all about intellectual development. And let me just say clearly that I’m not against that. I want our students to be super smart, brilliant, but I also want them to be good human beings. I want them to be bridge builders. I want them to be equity and justice warriors. I want them to help this world to be a better place to live. I’m talking about skills such as empathy and compassion and “pluriversality,” a word that I learned from indigenous cultures, where we’re able to entertain not just this or that—contrasting perspectives—but really think about multiple options, multiple solutions to a problem.
MM: Professor Rendón, this is where the rubber hits the road, because these are exactly the kinds of principles that are under attack. How do you respond to the argument that this kind of teaching and learning is “soft,” “anti-intellectual” or “a-intellectual,” “lacking in rigor,” and “indoctrination”?
LIR: When I speak to students and the faculty that are doing just what I’m talking about, we’re not talking about making students weaker. We’re actually talking about making them stronger. Students, for example, that have been in the Puente Project in California start out believing that they don’t have what it takes to be successful. So, we’re talking about transforming these students into believing that they can indeed do this. And so, is that weak teaching and learning? I don’t think so. Those are, again, underlying belief systems that need to be put to rest.
MM: How do you build constituency around that? Professor Campbell?
CC: The kind of teaching that Professor Rendón was just describing benefits all students. This is part of the way that we can build a stronger constituency. We know that the kind of teaching that supports students both cognitively and emotionally is actually a bridge to subject matter acquisition. At the same time, it’s developing students’ ability to be better citizens. The benefits to all students include increases in learning across the board, higher graduation rates across the board, and smaller opportunity gaps.
MM: Do you think people believe you?
CC: Well, there’s real evidence of this. Broad volumes, like How College Affects Students, bring together meta-analyzes of different research. All of the kinds of teaching practices that we’re describing have been associated with student learning, stronger graduation rates, improving ethical and moral reasoning, improving leadership capacities, improving diversity orientations. The evidence base is just that clear.
MM: Okay, well, maybe that’s a different conversation because I’m saying that the facts and the politics are sometimes not in alignment.
JAB: I would agree. There are some “alternate facts” here. And there are people within our own institutions who, despite the overwhelming evidence, think this is going “soft,” who say “I have to make sure my students know this . . . I have to cover all this material.” There are all of those impulses, and now we have this political pressure too. And I’ll just say out loud what I think is another elephant in the room: There are some parts of the population who don’t want us to empower everyone to learn, who are afraid of what that will mean if, in fact, we create students who are more interested in interrogating truths.
CC: As for a constituency, there’s also a really interesting nationally representative poll of the U.S. public asking: What is the most important factor in what makes the “best” university? And the survey listed all kinds of options, like level of graduates’ first salary, whether they had great sports teams, one’s contribution to community, and several other factors. The number one most important factor selected by the public? “It has the best college teachers.” So, there is some broad support across the public that college teaching matters.
