The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Cathy N. Davidson)

Basic Books, 2017 (Updated with a new preface in 2022)

I have this running joke with my friend Chris (I think he reads this newsletter) that the worst writerly feeling of all would have to be hitting Day 1 of the sabbatical (January 2, let’s say—Monday morning—after all the tinsel has been put away and nearly all the good bowl games have been played), cracking your knuckles, powering up the trusty MacBook, and staring into the Nietzschean abyss of a white MS Word document. The cursor blinks steadily as your heart rate slowly rises.

Whelp! Time to start writing this book. Oh shit I need coffee. Wonder what’s happening on Twitter these days… Hey look at that dog! Wow. Brown.

This newsletter is my feeble attempt to prevent this sort of thing from happening. It’s my notebook, my scribbles on the research I am doing and the books and articles I am reading as I prepare to sit down and stare at a white screen.

I finally got around to reading Cathy Davidson’s The New Education, a really terrific book that scratches a lot of my itches regarding higher ed.

In the Preface to the 2022 updated edition, Davidson references the pandemic and its widespread effects on higher education. She uses the pandemic as an example of how, when pressed into service, higher education as an industry was suddenly able to shift on a dime, pivoting to fully online teaching nearly overnight in some cases. (Though the quality of remote teaching and learning during this pivot varied widely.) Davidson uses the circumstance of COVID-19 putting nearly everyone on the planet into an online space, at least for a time, to make the point at the start of the book that yes, higher education can make significant and lasting changes quickly. Because we just did, and the world didn’t come crashing down. (At least not yet.)

She also wants to show that the structures and strictures higher education has inherited from the late 19th century—such hidebound mainstays as the Carnegie credit hour (which just sounds like something out of the 19th century), the entire standardized testing apparatus, norms surrounding credentialing, and everything else that came out of Taylorist theories of scientific labor management—are completely anachronistic in a postdigital world. She writes,

Certifying expertise and standardizing knowledge acquisition became the higher ed ideal in the age of automation. Once the beacon of progress, those values became anachronistic in 1992, the year that the Mosaic 1.0 browser was released for free to the public, which ushered in the contemporary Internet era. Now, anyone who has an Internet connection can communicate anything to anyone. Anyone can be an “influencer.” Information is everywhere. Yet we remain wedded to an idea that knowledge is a “thing” you receive from one prof, in one class, as documented by your score on a final exam. We prize a mode of learning known as “sequestered problem solving” (focusing on students’ ability to solve problems unaided) even as we live in a world rife with information a roiled by deliberate, dangerous misinformation. (Davidson xviiii)

Preach. When I was still president of faculty senate, which happened to coincide with the worst years of the pandemic (2019-2022), “maintaining the integrity of examinations” was one of the major complaints from faculty: how do we ensure that students are dong this kind of sequestered problem solving on their own, unaided by computers or calculators or the information that is readily available out there on the web? How do we keep them from cheating? I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in meetings trying to solve these kinds of problems during our paltry one semester of fully remote teaching here in Indiana.

But the larger point, of course, is that the way higher learning is structured is no longer working in a hyper-connected world filled with more information than ever before.

Next, in the Introduction, Davidson encapsulates this when she writes that “college is no longer good at equipping graduates to succeed in an ever more complex and bewildering world” (4). As she notes just after this line, “the modern American university is only about 150 years old” (Davidson 4). Moreover, public trust in higher education is pretty low these days—maybe the lowest it has been in generations (or ever). Today’s young people—she calls them “Generation Flux”—have been buffeted around over the last two decades by interminable wars, a Great Recession, and the disappearance of entire industries that were once healthy guarantors of a middle-class existence. These jobs have been replaced by “just in time,” uberfied, on demand, part-time, and piecemeal labor characterized by low pay and few (if any) meaningful benefits or job security. (A theme that readers of my last newsletter will recall in my brief analysis of Gary Hall’s The Uberfication of the University.)

Interestingly, and in a way that directly informs my own thinking on the matter, Davidson seems to single out academic disciplines and the siloing of disciplinary knowledge as being a big part of the overall problem. This makes a lot of sense given her background—she spent 25 years at Duke University doing highly interdisciplinary work, and she was the first ever vice provost for interdisciplinary studies (at Duke or anywhere, for that matter). As she writes at the end of the book’s Introduction:

On an institutional level, this movement [proposed in The New Education] seeks to redesign the university beyond the inherited disciplines, departments, and silos by redefining the traditional boundaries of knowledge and providing an array of intellectual forums, experiences, programs, and projects that push students to use a variety of methods to discover comprehensive and original answers. What shapes belief? How do we change minds? (Davidson 13-14)

The first chapter, enigmatically entitled “Quarter-life Crisis,” retells a story that is familiar to students of the history of US higher education, but does so in a way that is fresh and invigorating. The putative focus of the chapter is Charles W. Eliot, scion of an influential Massachusetts family and Harvard’s forward-thinking president from 1869 to 1909, who single handedly transformed American higher education for the industrial era. Eliot was the real deal—a college president who was also a true intellectual (something of a rarity these days, if you ask me)—and in developing his theories of how universities in America needed to be reformed, he toured the great research universities of the European continent, especially France and Germany, to see what he could learn from our effete European counterparts.

Davidson uses this initial chapter as a way to both chronicle the life of Eliot and to make the case for how his version of the modern research university—a model that worked rather well for most if not all of the largely analog 20th century—has now ossified into The Problem facing the post-pandemic, postdigital institutions of the 21st. It’s a rather convincing argument. Here’s a list of all the features of Eliot’s research university that are still essential features of higher ed today:

• majors

• minors

• divisions (humanities, social sciences, natural and biological sciences)

• credit hours

• degree requirements (or at IU, “degree maps”)

• grades

• the bell curve

• deviation from the mean

• class rankings

• certification

• general education

• upper-division electives

• ability to choose professors

• optional attendance policies

• professionalization (credentials, accreditation)

• graduate schools

• collegiate law schools

• nursing schools

• graduate schools of education

• collegiate business schools

• Harvard Annex for Women (later Radcliffe College)

• competitive scholarships

• financial aid

• college entrance exams

• capital fund-raising campaigns (always especially active this time of year)

• living wages for professors (we should probably keep this one)

• tenure (this one, too)

• sabbaticals (definitely keep these)

• faculty pensions (yep)

• school rankings (eww)

• new courses and subjects (including natural history, algebra, laboratory physics, geometry, modern languages, American archaeology, and anthropology)

• secularization

• and optional prayer. (Davidson 35-36)

Davidson provocatively notes, after rattling off this lengthy list, that these were all radically new features of American higher education in the final quarter of the 19th century; further, “not a single item needs explanation for anyone reading today because they remain the basics of the university we have inherited… As the continuing infrastructure for higher education in the twenty-first century, it’s the problem” (36).

The point is that these are all historically specific ways of doing education that we have inherited from a previous era. Davidson argues that in order for the new education to emerge, we have to be able to view these features of colleges and universities as historically specific vestiges of a particular era in US (and world) history. Throughout the book’s 300+ pages (which took me a couple of heavy reading days to get through), she takes aim at the zombie-like ascendency of the lecture and at uncritical assumptions regarding teaching and learning as content delivery (such as those embedded in the MOOC craze of a decade ago—to which she devotes an entire chapter) as holdovers from this turn-of-the-century—the 20th century!—that must be either radically rethought or completely cast aside.

Technophobes & Technophiles

Two chapters in particular—one called “Against Technophobia” and its counterpart “Against Technophilia”—make several cogent arguments about higher ed’s tendency to take things to extremes. “Technophobia” explores the tendency to demonize new tech whether out of fear, ego, misplaced hubris, or something else. She uses the well-trod example of high school math teachers not allowing students to use graphing calculators back in the ‘90s (a circumstance I well remember, though we could never have afforded one anyway) and instead teaching trigonometry using slide rules, which were themselves verboten in Isaac Newton’s era (apparently even Newton had to play with his behind close doors). She also touches on the rabid popularity of the novel at the turn of the 19th century, especially with young people, and familiar refrains about how these tales of romance and adventure and heroism would rot the brains of the youth. (Ditto comic books in the 1950s and their tenuous connection to juvenile delinquency.) The point of this chapter seems to be that one of higher education’s inbred tendencies is this fear of the new, especially the technological new.

The point is that these are all historically specific ways of doing education that we have inherited from a previous era. Davidson argues that in order for the new education to emerge, we have to view these features of colleges and universities as historically specific vestiges of a particular era in US (and world) history.

And yet, as she explores in the following chapter, “Against Technophilia,” there is also a tendency in higher ed to jump on every shiny new toy or tool that comes down the line. Davidson explores this tendency via the well-documented MOOC craze (Massively Open Online Courses), about which much has already been written, and how there is quite often an uncritical tendency to believe that more and better tech tools will get us out of whatever situation ails us at the moment. If the previous chapter was a lot of reheated mashed potatoes, this chapter is where the book’s argument really shines, especially in her take-down of some of the core assumptions behind MOOC-ish technologies: assumptions about content-delivery-as-teaching-and-learning that we saw reheated yet again during the pandemic years of 2020-2021 and the rapid shift to fully online and remote teaching and learning that occurred. Davidson notes near the end of the chapter, after a stunning profile of the work Tressie McMillan Cottom has done (was doing at the time) at Virginia Commonwealth University, “The power and influence of online interaction are rapidly becoming the most important factors in every aspect of our political, personal, and economic lives” (131).

But we are still obsessing over credit hours, butts in seats, and degree maps, still reheating the same leftovers from over a century and a half ago and wondering why students are disillusioned with college, dropping out in higher and higher numbers, or “just don’t get it.”

“What will life be like in Phoenix when there is no water?”

In the next chapter, entitled “Palpable Impact,” Davidson profiles Sha Xin Wei, formerly the Director of Arizona State University’s School for Arts, Media, and Engineering. Before she gets to that, however, she spends several pages taking down the whole STEM obsession we seem to be suffering from in the US today, partly because of Obama’s PR work to make everyone believe that STEM is somehow the wave of the future and the only way to get a good paying job, partly because of simpleminded assumptions about how technical knowledge works, and partly due to the general public’s tendency to armchair proselytize on topics about which they know nothing. This chapter really spoke to me because I hear so so much about how we need more STEM.

(For those who might not know, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, but it’s also just generally used as a counterpoint to any area of study that smacks of the humanities or art or soft skills or any major that will send you straight from your graduation regalia to a Starbucks apron.)

She cites a lot of data to show that STEM is not the answer to all our problems, despite what your next door neighbor says or that op ed you read in the Wall Street Journal. For one thing, as we all know, technology changes on an almost daily basis, so today’s hot new thing is tomorrow’s old hat. For another, a lot of what used to be good middle-class tech jobs have been casualized and stripped down to just-in-time, piecemeal positions, such that “working in tech” doesn’t necessarily mean that you are earning a living wage anymore. Then there’s automation, which threatens to take away any job that can be performed more cheaply and efficiently by a robot. A robot who you also don’t have to invite to the office Christmas party or buy a fruit basket for. ‘Tis the season. Most interestingly, she cites an internal study conducted by Google that found that the qualities that lead to corporate advancement are (in descending order of importance):

• be a good coach

• empower others (and don’t micromanage)

• be interested in the well-being of your team

• be bold and results-oriented

• be a good communicator

• be a good listener

• help your employees with their own career development

• have a clear vision and strategy. (Davidson 141)

Having a specific set of tech-related know-how (what the Greeks called techne, which is also where our term “technology” comes from) “came in dead last” (Davidson 141).

Davidson writes, “In the foreseeable future, it is safe to say that the only jobs not susceptible to automation are those that require crosscutting skills of human discernment and creativity that no robot can approximate” (139). And this is where her profile of Wei comes in—as a Harvard and Stanford trained mathematician, Wei challenges students to ask big, real world questions that resist single-discipline answers, like “What will life be like in Phoenix when there is no water?” These are questions, not unlike the questions posed by the effects and spread of mis- and disinformation online, that far exceed the ability of a single discipline to understand, much less solve.

But Wei doesn’t much care for trendy buzzwords like “interdisciplinary” and “multidisciplinary” because these terms are “outmoded” and maintain the static boundaries of traditional academic disciplines. He prefers the term synthesis, which for him signals a way of bringing together diverse and at times even opposing points of view (Davidson 143). So the challenge is to think of every single aspect that one would have to address—everyone you would need to talk to, everyone whose opinion and expertise you should seek out, everyone who would be affected by it—in order to answer the question, “What happens when there is no water in the middle of the desert?” What will you do then? It’s a bit like Spinoza’s radical reorienting of philosophy from a Cartesian obsession with form and duality (mind and body) to a focus on what a body can do. (I write about Spinozan ethics in one of my articles from ages ago—you can read it here—I may return to this in the book somehow, though I haven’t yet figure out how just yet.)

Wei again: “We live in a time when the world’s problems are of such magnitude that no one knows the answers. Yet in universities, we are still teaching as if we know. That’s a deception. It’s dangerous, really” (qtd. in Davidson 144). Dynamite stuff.

The rest of the chapter is equally important. She profiles Michael Crow, the disruptive president of Arizona State University, innovative work at the University of Virginia, the Bass Connections program at Duke University, and MIT’s graduate school dean Christine Ortiz and her work on "transdisciplinary inquiry.” The upshot of this chapter is to show that “the new education” is not and cannot be a tinkering around the edges of what we do in higher education. It’s not something we can crib from another university that has succeeded in adding a few hundred or a few thousand more students to its full-time enrollments. That’s thinking that is stuck in the late 20th century. It’s survivalist thinking.

Nor is it a change to the curriculum or a new pedagogical focus here or there or a shiny new tech toy in a $23 million dollar facility. Davidson writes in closing out this chapter:

The new education isn’t simply a change in curriculum or implementation of a new kind of pedagogy. It’s not just a course or a program. It is all of the above, undergirded by a new epistemology, a theory of knowledge that is deep, synthetic, active, and meaningful, with real impact on the world. (161)

“We live in a time when the world’s problems are of such magnitude that no one knows the answers. Yet in universities, we are still teaching as if we know. That’s a deception. It’s dangerous, really.”

-Sha Xin Wei, Arizona State University’s Director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

I should probably start wrapping this up because it’s already at 3,000 words and, frankly, I have my doubts that anyone is still reading. But…if you are, then here’s a brief run-down of the rest of the book, which is well worth reading.

Chapter 6, “Why College Costs So Much,” is a rehash of older arguments that even a casual student of higher education will find familiar. However, it’s a nice, tidy chapter that lays it all out. Here’s the thumbnail sketch:

• State legislatures, increasingly controlled by Republicans (Davidson never actually says “Republican,” preferring the term “conservative” for some reason), have defunded higher education in many states, especially in the South, since the mid-1970s. This really ramped up in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan took over as president and took his hippie hating disdain for intellectuals and leftists and “welfare queens” from Sacramento to the White House. So now states pay in some cases less than 10% of revenues for the public universities in their states, which has effectively shifted the burden from taxpayers to students and their families. Like everything else in American life these days, those who are at the bottom of the earning scale shoulder the heaviest burden and thus get stuck in a vicious cycle.

• So you have massive amounts of debt leveraged financing of higher education, which, again, impacts poorer students much moreso than wealthier students.

• The money that states do give to public universities often goes to STEM programs, with humanities and social sciences programs getting the axe because Republicans don’t like these programs because they make you think too hard about stuff that doesn’t tie directly into getting a job. (I am paraphrasing Davidson here, but this is likely what she would have said were she not trying to get this published on a respectable imprint like Basic Books. I am on Substack, so I don’t have that problem.) This is also because of the aforementioned, uncritical, and mostly unexamined notion that STEM generates more revenue for both students and for schools.

• Ultimately, the solution is that we have to somehow figure out how to get back to previous funding levels of 1945-1975, the “Golden Age of Higher Education” (except not if you were Black, Brown, or female, but curiously Davidson doesn’t spend a lot of time on this—she spends a bit of time on it, but not nearly as much as you might expect). Davidson writes, “In the end, though, remedying the problem of high costs at our public university requires championing public higher education at the level that was commonplace in American between 1945 and 1975” (187).

The Future of Learning

The book’s final chapter, “The Future of Learning,” profiles the work of Georgetown University’s Red House, a kind of on-campus think tank for undergraduates, and Patrick Awuah, president of Ghana’s Ashesi University, an institution of higher education that he created nearly 20 years ago after studying in the US at Swarthmore and Berkeley. Both are fascinating and relevant to what Davidson is trying to do in this final wrap-up chapter, but I will focus on the latter because I think what Awuah is up to is even more impressive, and it sparked some thinking on my part.

Awuah believes that since one of the key features of Ghanian life is the corruption that has plagued the country for centuries, thanks to European colonialism, students have to learn about this context of exploitation and the understanding that “the ingrained culture of what we in the West consider corruption was, for many centuries, the only way for an ambitious Ghanaian to ascend the ranks in colonial society” (Davidson 244). In other words, in order to learn anything of value, students have to first understand the context and shaping forces of their own cultural, social, and political milieu. This makes me think about the work of Brazilian educator and founder of critical pedagogy Paolo Freire, of course, but it also makes me think about the kinds of work that a meta-disciplinary approach like misinformation studies might be able to offer students—a grounding understanding of the epistemological milieus of the postdigital era.

Davidson also writes about how in the decade and a half (or so) since Ashesi opened, its graduates are “highly sought after and are often offered multiple positions upon graduation” (245). This is an interesting theme that runs throughout the book. I offer this not so much as a critique, though I suppose it is that, but more as a symptom of Davidson’s thinking: for all the nuance and disruptive innovation that she chronicles throughout The New Education, she returns again and again to material success—specifically, graduates’ ability to get good jobs and launch meaningful, lucrative careers—as the imprimatur of a program’s success. It’s as though she keeps getting pulled back to earth by the orbital pull of capitalism, not matter how many different innovative or radically off-kilter programs, initiatives, colleges, or universities she profiles. There is a lesson here—probably more than one—but I think it’s safe to say that it shows just how tied our metrics for a “successful university” are to fairly traditional understandings of what success looks like in the “real world.” What if higher education had nothing whatsoever to do with job training or career building or even (blech) networking?

Would there even be business schools anymore?

Of course, a significant part of the problem is that a college degree just costs too much. In the closing pages of the book, Davidson provides a helpful summation of all of higher ed’s current challenges (pp. 248-249):

• Educators and administrators must be committed to redesigning universities to be ethical, democratic, practical, and forward thinking, which includes thinking critically about the use of technology and its role in the world.

• The lecture is a broken medium. Active learning must reign.

• High-stakes, summative, end-of-term testing is broken and does little to either teach students or to evaluate what they know or have learned.

• It’s just too damn expensive. The public is going to have to kick in whether they like it or not (I’m paraphrasing here).

• Traditional models of apprenticeship don’t teach students how to be experts.

• Majors mapped onto traditional disciplines don’t really work in a postdigital age where information is seemingly infinite and skills as well as tools are changing every day.

• The exclusivity of many of our finest schools, which then in turn breeds more selectivity and a race to see who can be the most selective, isn’t doing us any favors as a society. We need meaningful partnerships among and between colleges and universities at all levels and at all price points.

• Community colleges need and deserve our unconditional love.

• Academic labor is in deep deep shit and has been for quite some time. Fix it. Now. Before it’s too late. This point has been so thoroughly argued, studied, and researched that it doesn’t even really need to be cited anymore. The average third grader could probably cite you that statistic that over 75% of college courses are taught by adjuncts.

So there you have it. It’s a great book—I heartily recommend it. I am going to lean heavily on both Davidson’s history and the interviews and profiles she includes throughout in my own research. Her ideas have given me a good sense of where the conversation lies on transforming higher education and she does a terrific job of providing cogent arguments, data and evidence for her claims, and clear illustrations of where and how we need to improve. I didn’t write too much about it here, but her chapter on community colleges (Chapter 2, “College for Everyone”) is downright inspiring, and the book is stronger for her having included it.

There is much more I could say about The New Education, but I have got to take this lady for a walk before she gets up and leaves me. See you all next time. I am going to be writing about Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (Verso, 2020).

Have a book recommendation you think would be useful for my research or that you would like for me to review? Drop me a line in the comments below.