Meaningful improvement does not come easily to postsecondary education, especially in the realm of teaching and learning. Change can be made most readily at the margins of the academic enterprise, but deep and abiding transformation sometimes seems almost as difficult to achieve as agreement to move a graveyard.

Change for the sake of change is not the issue. There has been more than enough of that. Rather, I am thinking of the many possibilities for improving the instructional mission that are never explored because of resistance to change, which, in effect, becomes a barrier to improvement. At a time when practices and institutions outside American higher education are undergoing profound change, the Academy remains largely impervious to alteration.

The Berlin Wall topples, but a faculty reward system at major research universities that is inimical to good undergraduate teaching remains firmly in place. Disciplines split into subdisciplines smaller than the atom. Departmental turf wars produce fiefdoms that dot the campus like the moated manors of medieval lords. Crossing the disciplines and trying to mount interdisciplinary courses and programs becomes as difficult as getting the Moslem and Christian factions to unite in Lebanon. Some colleagues and universities find that the only way to gain support for interdisciplinary studies is to create special institutes outside the restrictive departmental structure.

A curriculum replete with incoherency is the fragmented road map that guides most undergraduates through college. Like Alice in Wonderland, they undergo a series of experiences that seem remote and unrelated. They end up sampling a smorgasbord of isolated courses called an education that, beyond the major, leaves them with neither intellectual nourishment nor a sense of the connectiveness of knowledge.

While elementary and secondary schools become subject to intense review, higher education curiously is able to keep itself beyond the penumbra of scrutiny. Critics as diverse as Allan Bloom and Charles Sykes are dismissed as swiftly as a homeless vagrant who has wandered into a private club on Fifth Avenue. The purpose here, however, is not to indict higher education. Despite its faults, it looms pure and noble on an American landscape littered with endeavors that have been consumed by greed, bad taste, and poor management. Yet, to appreciate the context in which the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education operates it is necessary to recognize the formidable challenge that confronts the agency's Comprehensive Program. Judging by the nature of the projects that FIPSE has selected for inclusion in this publication, the agency wields no magic wand.

What becomes clear in reading about the projects described on these pages, though, is that FIPSE makes a difference and, by its recognition and funding, the agency helps prod a measure of improvement. There is evidence from the reports that some projects are leading to replication and helping to introduce needed changes on a wider basis.

As this selection of projects also shows, the activities that earn support from FIPSE are diverse; so much so that at first glance they seem to defy categorization. However, I suggest that even this small sample can be sorted. Five main kinds of projects--with some overlap--emerge from the sample:

1. Minority and disadvantaged students.
2. Relationships between higher education and the schools.
3. Teaching problem solving and critical thinking.
4. Assessment.
5. Bolstering the disciplines.

Before discussing these five topics, I would like to take note of a few overarching themes. The frequency with which computers and technology in general figured in these FIPSE projects is encouraging. Higher education has not been as slow as the schools in moving into the computer age, but all of education is certainly a backwater when it comes to technology. It is as if Gutenberg invented moveable type and hundreds of years later scribes continued to letter books by hand.

Teachers and professors are not sufficiently integrating technology into instructional methods and students do not have enough access to technology to assist them in their learning and their research. Furthermore, too many students are not studying about science and technology, areas of the curriculum to which they should be exposed regardless of major.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation recognized this problem almost a decade ago, when it set up its new liberal arts program to provide grants, first, to private liberal arts colleges and, later, to other kinds of institutions of higher education. The aim was to make it more likely that undergraduates in all fields would develop an understanding of the problem-solving techniques and fundamental concepts which underlie modern technology, as well as to help the students grow comfortable with mathematics and computing.

This idea has not taken hold in all of higher education, as it should. Too many colleges and universities have not progressed from the point of acknowledging the value of technology to the point of preparing students to use it and understand how their lives will be affected by it. Institutional commitment is so weak that several colleges and universities in this sample, though they made technology central to the projects, provided insufficient hardware or software.

Technology itself might have been one of the categories by which I defined a group of projects, but I decided this would signal the wrong intent. It is more fruitful not to think of technology in so limited a way. Technology should be considered basic to education, just as books are. In other words, it is a mistake to try to view projects that use technology as being of a certain type. Technology should cut across the projects, whatever the goals of the projects may be. FIPSE, too, apparently is coming to adopt this view. An essay in its 1989 program book holds out the possibility that the technology section of the guidelines "will eventually dissolve into the other categories as technology becomes further entrenched in all areas."

Progress in this direction can be seen on the following pages, where, among just 15 projects, technology was used to help students of international public policy better understand the issues with which they grapple, to teach physiology, to allow composition by word processing, to give underfunded libraries greater access to bibliographic services, to create simulations, and to allow students to learn how to present reasoned arguments.

A look at the projects in terms of the five broad categories gives some hints as to possible directions in which institutions of higher education might proceed in seeking improvement. Most colleges and universities share the concerns that gave rise to these projects. For instance, "diversity" is a word often used to describe the changing face of higher education. College-going patterns have shifted sharply during the last 25 years and one of the most striking changes has been the inclination of minority students from disadvantaged backgrounds to enter higher education. Bureau of the Census statistics show that the portion of blacks in the enrollment grew from 4.8% in 1965-66 to 11% in 1987-88. For Hispanics, the portion rose from 4.2% of the enrollment in 1976-77 to 6.1% in 1987-88.

Unfortunately, there may have been some slowing and even decline in the actual numbers of minority students enrolled in recent years. A report in early 1990 from the American Council on Education found that the rate at which blacks and Hispanics continued on from high school to college declined during the 1980's. Statistics from the U.S. Department of Education indicated in 1990, however, that minority enrollment began climbing again in the 1980's.

It is clear by now that access alone is no assurance that students will be able to take advantage of opportunities. When the door is first thrown open, some people have to be helped across the unfamiliar threshold. FIPSE recognizes this and a fundamental theme of its work from the outset has been the promotion of access. Many students, while in high school and even earlier, do not get proper preparation for higher education. Those who persevere and make it to college sometimes are overwhelmed by difficulties, both academic and social, that truncate their education.

[Table of Contents] [Introduction - Part 2]