TOWARDS GLOBAL EXCELLENCE IN UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION : Taking

Dissatisfaction over undergraduate education seems to be persistent and has been jeopardized by the boost in research performance as fuelled by global rankings. Yet it will continue to be the cornerstone and a key mission of higher education. Hence the tide is shifting and the global debate on “the world-class university” is increasingly inclusive towards excellence in teaching and learning. A renewed focus on liberal arts education is part of this global debate on redefining excellence. This article aims to explain why liberal arts education, as it is (re)emerging in different regions, seems to be an adequate response to the search for excellence in the 21st century. It explores the drivers for liberal arts education from an epistemological, economic and a social-moral point of view. The role of interdisciplinarity, generic skills, and citizenship in different regional context are discussed, and also an admission that a liberal arts education is no panacea -that various limitations should be overcome and a truly global perspective is needed. UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS Amid the massification of higher education, undergraduate education and its discontents is a subject of intensive discussion and analysis. The central elements of dissatisfaction are poor learning outcomes, student disengagement, low retention rates, stagnant or decreasing graduation rates, and lengthening time to degree. Conditions deteriorate, with overcrowded lecture halls, impoverished staff-student ratios, weakening of the research–teaching nexus, and faculty indifference to undergraduate teaching. Moreover, despite relentless efforts, persistent and or growing inequalities exist, while the undergraduate experience is becoming less affordable as a public service. As summarized by Muscatine: “the product of the present curriculum – despite a residue of good learning by good students in good courses – could hardly be called either excellent or economic” (2009, 51). Even in the most elite universities, disappointment with undergraduate achievement has been acknowledged (Bok, 2006; Lewis, 2006). In contrast with the disappointing record of undergraduate education as a core mission of the university, research performance has been greatly boosted. On top of the already dominant publish-or-perish paradigm, underpinning research as the one and only task of the academy that really matters, global rankings have redoubled the strivings for research excellence. In many countries this has been accompanied by investments to further fuel the performance and reputation of national flagship institutions (Palfreyman & Tapper, 2009). Clearly, what is ranked has little to do with education. Prestige can hardly be built on achievements in teaching. Excellence initiatives in teaching, which are costly if they are to be made general to systems, are far less frequent than excellence initiatives in research. In many ways, the growing dominance of research is to the detriment of undergraduate teaching. There has been abundant recognition of the fact that global rankings seem to enhance this effect (for an overview see Van der Wende, 2008). In this sense, in the context of the research university, undergraduate education is more endangered than professional or graduate education. It is rarely adequately prioritized. It seems that in the eyes of some it has even become the main problem of the * Marijk van der Wende is the founding Dean of Amsterdam University College and Professor of Innovation in Higher Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam(VU). This is a version of a paper presented at the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) International Conference “The Path to Engaged Learning: A Global Exploration of Undergraduate Reforms,” held on October 9-10, 2012 on the UC Berkeley Campus: see: http://cshe.berkeley.edu/research/seru/intlconsortium/conference.htm VAN DER WENDE: Global Excellence in Undergraduate Education 2 CSHE Research & Occasional Paper Series research university, perhaps a handicap to individual and institutional progress in research and thus to global prestige. This kind of thinking leads readily to claims that the only real model of the globally competitive research university entails large and growing proportions of graduate students. Yet undergraduate education will continue to represent the cornerstone of any higher education system, and thus a key mission of any institution, including the research university. Arguably, the future and the quality of research and the research university critically hinge upon the quality of undergraduate education (Elkana, forthcoming) and student success at this level represents a key indicator of the potential of a knowledge economy. Consequently both student demand and societal expectation will continue to rise. Lamenting the old days of elite higher education and associated Humboldtian-style ideals is therefore not helpful and actually resists the opportunities and challenges for undergraduate education in the 21st century. THE SHIFTING TIDE: (RE-)DEFINING EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING AND LEARNING . . . . The role that higher education plays in developing human resources for a growing global economy is widely recognized. This has generated a renewed conversation about the purpose of education and awareness that it is necessary to reestablish a sense of academic mission that emphasizes teaching and the curriculum (Altbach et al, 2009; 2011). Moreover, concerns about turning out productive workers and not wasting resources are paramount in an era of globalization and fiscal constraints. This makes it largely inevitable that there will be growing discussion of higher education’s accountability with respect to learning achievement (Arum and Roksa, 2011). The tide is shifting. In parallel, the global debate on excellence or “the world-class university” has led to more awareness of the risks of unbalanced approaches that would favour performance in one area (research) strongly over that in others (education), compromising the fact that they represent together the essential and inseparable elements of the university’s mission. Consequently, the need for differentiation, i.e. extending the range of dimensions for which excellence should be defined explicitly, as well as approaches in order to achieve this, is increasingly recognized (Marginson & Van der Wende, 2009; Van Vught 2009; Van der Wende, 2011a). Practical examples include the European initiative in developing a multidimensional global university ranking system, UMultirank1, which includes particular reference to performance in the dimension of teaching and learning. The two trends combined have produced a focus on (re-)defining excellence in teaching and learning, as part of comprehensive institutional performance (excellence in teaching and research). There is also growing support profiling and reputation building focused specifically on the teaching mission. The global context requires that performance in teaching and learning is internationally comparable. Reliable indicators and criteria for this are largely still to be developed. The OECD’s project on Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO)2 should be a significant step in this direction. For institutions (re-)defining excellence in teaching and learning implies the development of a vision on what should be learned, why, and how. It requires a future-oriented perspective on values, knowledge and skills essential for the 21st century. . . . AND A RENEWED FOCUS ON LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION In the US the discussion has been inspired not only by self-critique but also by impressive attempts to formulate the way forward. The LEAP report on “College Learning for the New Global Century” presented a convincing set of “essential learning outcomes” and “principles of excellence” (AAC&U, 2007). The report embodied a review and state-of-the-art consensus on liberal arts education as formulated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities’ (AAC&U’s )membership of over 1200 institutions. Important contributions to reinventing liberal education in terms of new pedagogies was also made by Levine (2006) and as a result of continued work by various dedicated organizations3. Altbach establishes that this renewed conversation on the value and potential need for liberal education is not just an American trend but a global trend, which emphasizes a broad interdisciplinary curriculum focused on creativity, critical thinking, cultural awareness, problem solving, and communication skills (2009, 109). With the re-establishment of liberal education as a key curricular goal, on many campuses there has been, a renewed emphasis on teaching and curriculum, to a certain extent (2011, 249). Nussbaum (2010) notes that universities in many nations outside the US are striving to build a liberal arts component. They acknowledge the importance of liberal arts in crafting a public response to the problems of pluralism, fear, and suspicion their societies face (p. 125). 1 See: www.u-multirank.eu 2 See: www.oecd.org/edu/ahelo 3 The American Academy for Liberal Education (AALE), The TEAGLE Foundation, The Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College VAN DER WENDE: Global Excellence in Undergraduate Education 3 CSHE Research & Occasional Paper Series In Europe, the Bologna Process oriented the discussion predominantly to structure. This led to the recognition of undergraduate education as a phase in its own right, and facilitated the (re-) emergence of liberal arts programs in Europe. In part this can be explained as a response to the need to differentiate the massified European systems, in relation to two main dimensions of differentiation. First, the need to develop broader and more flexible bachelor programs in order to overcome the disadvantages of too-early and over-specialization, re-establishing the balance between breadth and depth of the curriculum, thus enhancing learning effectiveness. Second, the need to establish more selective branches of higher education that are focused explicitly on excellence, that is, to redefine elite education in overly egalitarian systems (Van der Wende, 2011b). A prominent example is the Netherlands, where since 1998 five liberal arts colleges have been established by leading research universities including Utrecht, Amsterdam, Leiden, and Maastricht. Known as “University Colleges”, they represent a new branch of excellence in Dutch university education. This addresses the criticism that Dutch higher education displays an insufficient level of differentiation, as described by the OECD (2008). It argued that excellence is underrepresented, the international dimension should be enhanced, and too-early specialization should be avoided. University Colleges have responded on all these points. Amsterdam University College (AUC) was established in 2009 as an excellence initiative jointly undertaken by the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and VU University Amsterdam (VU). AUC is a selective and residential honors college that offers an international liberal arts and sciences bachelor program, leading to a joint degree from the two founding universities. The fact that these two major research universities in Amsterdam joined forces to create a liberal arts and sciences undergraduate experience is an example of a “local cooperation for global competition” strategy and was based on the vision that the leaders of the future will have to work together across the boundaries of nationalities, cultures and disciplines, in order to be successful in the globally engaged and culturally diverse society of the 21st century. Hence the choice for the liberal arts model. The Dutch university colleges recently obtained special status in higher education legislation, granting them more autonomy than regular university programmes with respect to the selection of students and the level of tuition fees. The model has attracted attention in the broader European context. For instance Germany has also established a number of such colleges and programs. There the Science Council is considering the model as an element in the further differentiation of the German higher education system (Wissenschaftsrat, 2011). The trends in the United States and Europe are clearly not isolated from each other. This is recognized by Rothblatt (2003) who states that the transnational dialogue on liberal education has become more meaningful since massification of higher education in Europe forced policy makers to consider more differentiated and specialized systems of higher education, including approaches to undergraduate education such as liberal arts. Nevertheless, US and European models for liberal arts demonstrate both similarities and differences (for an overview see Van der Wende 2011b). The renewed focus on liberal arts is not limited to these two regions either. Kirby (2008) notes that leading Chinese universities share a commitment to general or liberal education with their US counterparts. That is a commitment to educating the whole person and not just training the specialist, which may seem counterintuitive in an age increasingly dominated by science and technology and by pressures for ever-earlier and ever-greater specialization. But this understanding about the whole person, which has long-standing roots in Confucian approaches to education, is now the cornerstone of curricular reform in leading universities in China. These reforms have resulted in the introduction of small residential liberal-arts-style colleges for undergraduates in elite universities such as Peking, Fudan, Zhejiang, Wuhan, and Sun Yat-sen Universities. Others have unveiled general education programs or postponed specialization to the sophomore year and introduced broader course requirements (for example all Peking University students, even those in professional study programs, take courses in literature, philosophy and history), or introduced focused liberal arts curricula. United International College is China’s first independent liberal arts college. In the same region, Hong Kong has benefited from the extension of the undergraduate phase from three to four years by installing the liberal arts a major role in the first two years of the new bachelor curriculum. Some leading Japanese universities are considering this approach as well. Liberal arts programs have also been set up in Taiwan and recently the National University of Singapore announced a partnership with Yale University to introduce a new liberal arts college. Such initiatives are also being undertaken in other regions, such as the Middle East. New York University recently established a residential liberal arts college in Abu Dhabi. Previous examples in that region date back to the American University in Beirut (founded in 1866) and the American University in Cairo (1919). More recently liberal arts colleges have been developed in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Palestine and Bangladesh. Institutions that attempt to align the broader underpinnings of liberal education with professional education can be found in Turkey, India, and South Africa (McGill Peterson, 2011). VAN DER WENDE: Global Excellence in Undergraduate Education 4 CSHE Research & Occasional Paper Series This global trend to renewed conversation on the value of and potential need for liberal arts education is both an example of the manner in which curriculum considerations have become broadened in an era of heightened globalization and internationalization, and an example of the fast passage of trends on the global scale. But what exactly are the main aims and rationales driving this trend? To what extent are they similar or different across the various regions? To what extent is liberal arts education ‘truly global’? How does this trend relate to the way in which excellence is being defined for undergraduate education in the 21st century? DEFINING GLOBAL EXCELLENCE: THE DRIVERS FOR LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY Liberal arts education should provide students with both breadth and depth. It should ensure broad knowledge of culture, science and society, and in-depth study in a specific area of interest. More specifically it should help students to develop a sense of social responsibility; and also develop strong and transferable intellectual and practical skills such as communication, analytical, and problem-solving ability, and a demonstrated competency to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings (AAC&U, 2007). The arguments in favor of this type of approach to undergraduate education in the 21st century can be described in three broad categories: • The first type of argument is of an epistemological character. It relates to the development of knowledge and the fact that the most exciting science is happening at the interface of the traditional disciplines. Some of the “big challenges” both in science and society are just not solvable by single-discipline approaches. This has led to a substantial focus on crossdisciplinary or interdisciplinary research into themes such as climate change, energy, health and well-being. This trend needs to be reflected in the curriculum. • The second type of argument is of an economic and utilitarian nature. It relates to the employability of graduates. A society characterized by a knowledge economy, innovation, and global competition requires the so-called “21st century skills” which enable graduates to be creative, critical thinkers, and problem solvers who can cooperate in teams and communicate across the boundaries of languages, cultures and disciplines. • The third category of argument relates to the moral and social dimension and to the humanistic tradition of liberal arts. This underlines the importance of educating the whole person, including personal and intellectual development with a view to social responsibility and democratic citizenship.