Mimesis

As dean of a new college (founded in 2009) within The University of Northern Colorado, I naturally let my mind drift to questions of what it might mean to do something truly new in higher education. Surprisingly perhaps, given that colleges and universities are chock-full of highly intelligent and creative people, the structures and alignments of American higher ed have changed very little in the last century. One would think that with rapidly changing demographics among students, stunningly rapid advances in technology, decreasing public support, and the shrinking and flattening of our world, institutions of higher learning would be engines of innovation, spawning new structures and processes.

Not so. The way professors go about their business of teaching, scholarship, hiring, promoting and tenuring colleagues, and so on remains substantially unchanged since before the turn of the last century. This is so, I believe, because the spirit of imitation rather than innovation has been, and continues to be, a prominent if tacit principle driving our work. The organization of university faculty into disciplines, with corresponding national and international professional societies, was driven in the late nineteenth century by a conscious effort to ape the success of the professions (law and medicine, for example) in restricting entry to them. As Louis Menand has pointed out in his marvelous new book The Marketplace of Ideas, the professionalization of academic disciplines around the turn of the century, and to this day, is less about controlling the production of knowledge than about controlling the production of knowledge producers. The current disciplinary configuration of colleges and universities is a rather late, self-consciously constructed, and profoundly self-interested piece of mimesis, though I suspect most academics think of it as just the way things have always been in higher education.

There have long been those who have harbored suspicions about this project, and have decried the pernicious effects of an undergraduate education dictated by the hegemony of professionalized disciplines. The great--and varied--efforts in the early and mid-twentieth century of Harvard, Princeton, and Chicago to create core curricula that scumbled the lines between disciplines mark noteworthy examples of such resistance. But their very notoriety bears witness to the fact that their efforts failed to change the direction of American higher education.

Calls for a more interdisciplinary approach to undergraduate education began to increase dramatically in the 1970s, and the term "interdisciplinary studies" has become something of a commonplace; indeed, to this day it seems to have a vaguely "sexy" ring.  But despite decades of such discourse, the exaggerated valorizing of disciplinarity has not gone away, even as evidence of its inadequacy mounts. Indeed, the disciplines themselves have begun to become "interdisciplinary;" a trip to just about any professional conference will reveal that scholars are continually borrowing new methods and insights from other disciplines just to keep their work fresh. There are, then, signs of a kind of self-subversion afoot.

Much else in higher education rests on a foundation of imitation rather than critical thinking. Think, for example, of that bane of all deans: student credit hour production. What is that exactly? Does it mean anything at all? The student credit hour is a fictive construct from the turn of the century, aimed at demonstrating that education can mimic the model of industrial production by cranking out a definable widget efficiently, so that public stakeholders could grasp onto some hopeful simulacrum of a "product" for their money. In fact, it measures almost nothing. Yet academic administrators haggle over the vaporous SCH; programs and careers can turn on it. Whatever it is.

One of my highest hopes for University College is that we can escape the gravitational pull of mimesis--however it expresses itself and regardless of how much others are captive to it--and allow our creativity, our collective wisdom, and our knowledge of how students learn best to dictate our practices.