THEY FACE FORWARD IN THEIR SCHOOL CHAIRS. PRESUMABLY, THEY are looking at a chalkboard, just out of sight. Dressed like businessmen, in white shirts and subdued ties and dark suits, the students sit stone-faced, blank. Some of the young men hold textbooks, but they’re not reading them. Others sit with their faces resting between their hands, with fingers folded into gentle fists. One young man near the back has his head lowered into the crook of his arm. If ever they were passionate about learning, that time has passed. Almost identical, each face issues a silent plea for sympathy if not succor, showing hues of pain, fear, anxiety, boredom, and confusion. The scene happens to be in Japan, but it could be an all-male university or even a high school anywhere.
A professor in a sweater vest stands amid these pained young men. The painting cuts him off at the collar, below the neck. For all we know, he looks exactly like the young people he lectures.
This is a STEM class: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In many contemporary discussions about reforming higher education for the digital age, pundits or politicians say everything should be about STEM, we’re falling behind in STEM training, in difficult financial times we should be getting rid of anything that isn’t essential and focusing on skills training in STEM fields. Is that what’s going on in this painting?
With a textbook open in his left hand, this professor rests his right on the head of one of the two large, compound optical microscopes in the room. As big as the students, the microscopes each occupy a student desk, too. The round mechanical part of the microscope, technically known as a “head,” has been replaced with an actual, literal human head. Its sadly expressive face is identical to those of the students in the room.
We have entered the tortured, surrealistic world of the late Japanese painter Tetsuya Ishida. His specimen is youth, the modern Japanese student. This painting is named Seedlings. Into what will these students grow? What are we doing to nurture them? The painting of the grotesquely anthropomorphic microscope suggests that the teacher can look down the eyepiece straight into the student’s head, as if thought is a specimen to be examined on a microscope slide.
The painting is a powerful metaphor for a reductionist version of STEM education: rote, unrelated-to-the-rest-of-life, transmission-style learning, the head of the student detached, decapitated, severed, instrumentalized. We are not robots, Ishida protests. You cannot mechanize and dehumanize education by stripping away curiosity. In his view of the world, college makes students “workforce ready” in the most cynical way: school trains students to march, automaton-like, passive and devoid of creativity, from the classroom to the workplace, with nothing vital or inspired anywhere in sight.
It is a dystopian vision, certainly. Ishida made some two hundred paintings, all in the same style and with the same subject matter, in the nine years between his graduation from Musashino Art University and his death on May 23, 2005, at the age of thirty-one. Although he denied that he is the boy-man whose image recurs in his paintings, the physical resemblance is unmistakable. In a painting entitled Recalled (1998), young workers with the same immobile faces as the students in Seedlings box up other mechanical, dismembered workers as if readying defective tools for shipment. In “Exercise Equipment” (1997), a “salary man” manager jogs on a treadmill that’s also an assembly line, powered by legless—literally immobilized—manual laborers who look exactly like him. Other works depict students trapped in some combination of 1950s B-movie spaceships and iron lungs, being trained to become businessmen whose arms have already been replaced by conveyor belts. Outer space and inner space are equally mechanized, tortured, and constrained.
Bosch-like, Ishida paints the nightmare of his generation, dominated by youth unemployment and underemployment, corrupt governments enforcing policies of “austerity,” a school system characterized by endless homework, continual high-stakes standardized testing, and soul-crushing vocational training for jobs that do not exist. His nation’s future? The “graying” of Japan is considered to be the worst in the world, a product of its citizens’ longevity and rapidly declining birthrate as well as xenophobia that prevents the immigration of productive young workers. Youth are delaying having families. The high cost of education is a contributing factor to this national despair. Instead of addressing these crises humanely, Japan seems determined to eliminate anything that might counter them. In Japan, as in the West, the progressive defunding of the arts, humanities, and social sciences has made high school and university as dehumanized as Ishida already understood them to be.
This grim story of education in the twenty-first century is Ishida’s personal tragedy. After graduating from high school at nineteen, this sensitive and vastly talented young man yearned to go to art school to improve his skill at creating manga and other comics. He wanted a career as an artist, but his father, a member of parliament, and his mother, a traditional Japanese housewife, were very concerned that this would be a disastrous choice for their son, condemning him to a life of poverty. They thought he should be a chemist, science teacher, or professor. They promised to pay for his college if he would pursue a STEM major, where he had a chance of finding a job.
Ishida moved out of his family house. He was admitted to one of the finest art schools in Japan, and paid for it himself by working part-time and living in squalor in rented rooms. He kept painting, too, and was beginning to gain recognition in Japan. He was determined to go to New York to be part of the city’s vibrant contemporary art scene. He began to study English, and to save, work, paint, and work some more. He managed to save a million yen, about $8,500, on his minimum-wage earnings and hoped to rent a gallery to show his work. Then, his mentor informed him that there weren’t rental galleries for artists in New York like there were in Tokyo. His savings would only see him through a few months in the city. He became increasingly depressed. His mother began to worry about him. One day, with a one-hundred-dollar US bill in his pocket and nothing else, Ishida left his apartment to go buy breakfast at the convenience store on the other side of the railroad tracks from his rented room. He was hit and killed instantly by a speeding train.
With his untimely death, one of the most powerful voices of Japan’s Lost Decade was silenced. The Lost Decade has now stretched to two, with no signs of abating. Tetsuya Ishida’s protest paintings have become world famous but have done nothing to change the tide of Japanese policies of educational austerity, which are aimed especially at the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences.
What is striking about Ishida’s work is how much it both represents the situation in Japan and gives us a grim prediction of one direction in which American higher education is headed. We are hearing the cry, over and over, that higher education is frivolous, impractical, that its real purpose should be to give students “skills” and make them “workforce ready,” by which is typically meant trained in STEM fields where, it is said as if it were true, there are jobs, there are futures. We’ve heard in the last few years that student financial aid should be tied to future “outcomes” and that colleges and universities should be ranked and rated by their job placements. In 2015, the US Department of Education even issued a tool called the “College Scorecard,” a ranking system that allows you to determine how “good” your college is by five criteria: cost, graduation rate, employment rate, average amount borrowed, and loan default rate. That is one way of measuring the worth of an education. Certainly, everyone wants students to be able to find jobs. The scorecard also lists the mean salary of jobs, implying that the higher the salary, the better the job. Is that what we’ve come to? A school that turns out engineers or investment bankers gets a higher score than one that trains teachers and nurses and social workers and graphic designers because certain professions’ salaries are higher than others’?
Ishida was not simply projecting some vision of misery. He felt real despair for Japan’s future. Yet he did not live to see his darkest fears confirmed. In September 2015, the Japanese Ministry of Education issued a formal “request” (which is to say, a directive) to its eighty-six national universities that they take “active steps to abolish” undergraduate and graduate social science, humanities, and arts programs, including those in the areas of law and economics. Citing the radically declining birthrate, the Japanese Ministry insisted that funding for higher education must be cut and that it should go only to “essential” areas, specifically, to STEM. In December 2015, a decade after Ishida’s death, twenty-six national universities announced—despite protests by faculty, students, and the public—that they planned to trim or possibly even close their humanities, arts, and social science departments. Funding for these areas from the Ministry of Education was already dwindling.
This is no longer an artist’s dystopian vision but an unfolding government policy. The late Tetsuya Ishida’s personal nightmare is being realized as national educational policy in Japan. And if some pundits and politicians get their way, something similar could happen here.
STEM IS NOT THE PROBLEM. NOR IS STEM THE SOLUTION.
It is indisputable that we need more people trained in STEM fields and that, relative to many other countries, the United States is poor at training the next generation of STEM experts. At the same time, it is hard to imagine a worse way of teaching STEM than by depriving it of any human applications and reducing it to “skills.” The scientific method is grounded in curiosity, testing, iterating, synthesizing, analyzing, problem solving, inventing. Additionally, the latest research shows that study of STEM subjects by itself does not necessarily lead to better career outcomes in the near or the long term and that expertise in the humanities and social sciences very well might. The US Census Bureau report for 2014 reveals, for example, that a full 74 percent of those who graduate with a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field do not stay in STEM-related occupations. Follow-up surveys indicate that many find that the “glass ceiling” is exceptionally low in STEM, and so they move into finance or business-related careers, such as real estate, which seem to offer more opportunities for advancement and somewhat more security. Most graduates working in STEM fields commonly return for an advanced degree in a complementary non-STEM field such as business, design, public policy, or even the arts. Changes to STEM fields come so fast and unpredictably that there is a supplementary industry dedicated to career counseling for those in STEM that emphasizes that you must keep learning, you must stay networked and connected with those in other fields, and you should be taking every opportunity beyond your training to enhance and develop your portfolio—skills that the relevant, cross-disciplinary new education emphasizes.
A 2007 National Academies’ report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, portended dire consequences if we did not improve the output of graduates trained in STEM, because of the increased technology needs in our country. Yet, at the same time, the report came to the grim conclusion that teaching STEM in a vacuum contributes to a low number of students entering these fields and low retention rates in STEM majors. A decade later, STEM educators (at the secondary and postsecondary levels) have begun to emphasize the importance of increasing the “attractiveness” of STEM education by, for instance, adding real-world experiences that show how one’s STEM training is applicable and meaningful beyond the classroom. This is an important direction for STEM students. Internships, project-based learning, and cross-disciplinary skills building, especially in so-called soft skills (human and management skills rarely addressed in STEM degrees) all deepen learning and make connections between specialized courses and majors and larger issues in the world beyond college.
There are other problems with an overly simplistic and single-minded STEM obsession. Though we need more STEM graduates, we need ones trained differently and better than our current STEM students are trained. They should have a deeper understanding of larger contexts as well as flexibility so that, if their jobs disappear, they can build on their skills and find new jobs. As we are seeing, many STEM positions and whole occupations are susceptible to automation and offshoring. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently predicted an 8 percent decline in existing STEM occupations by 2020.
Automation could well become the defining issue of the next decades. In the past, the risk to human occupations posed by automation has been countered by the “buggy whip” argument. The analogy goes that, with the invention of automobiles, buggy whip makers were, indeed, put out of work, but many new opportunities were created for auto factory workers, highway construction workers, gas attendants, and gas station owners as well as for car insurance salespeople, industrial designers, managers, and CEOs. However, no one knows whether the analogy will continue to hold. With artificial general intelligence powering robots to do everything from drive our cars to fill out our tax forms, it is not clear what new jobs will be created to offset the massive layoffs portended ahead.
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. It’s impossible to imagine that AI-powered robots could displace workers in professions that require human judgment, talent, empathy, persuasive power, leadership, or even basic human touch (hairstylists, surgeons, writers, teachers, nurses, entrepreneurs, politicians, or therapists). Subjective, affective human qualities cannot be replaced by machines precisely because they offer what machines lack: an understanding of human needs, desires, requirements, and aspirations. In the nightmare world painted by Tetsuya Ishida, almost every human occupation can be replaced by robots. Except one: that of the artist. The originality and brilliance of the artist himself remain irreplaceable.
Although a degree in certain (but not all) STEM fields yields a first job more quickly than a degree in the fine arts, there is no evidence that STEM training leads to faster or higher career advancement, job security, or job satisfaction. Quite the contrary, evidence suggests that over time the tortoise humanist may actually win the career race against the STEM hare. University of California at Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff notes, “Statistics show that most software developers are out of the field by age forty.” Both Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, and Craig Barrett, a former chief executive officer of Intel Corporation, have observed that programming is a young person’s occupation and the “half-life of an engineer” is only a few years. The research unambiguously reveals that STEM expertise without any grounding in interpretive and critical thinking skills may get you a first job, but it won’t get you promoted. Go to any site offering special training in skills needed for advancement to become a manager and you see the same five or six skills listed: interpersonal or leadership (including cross-cultural) skills, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and finance. If these skills are vital for promotion for those in the workforce, we should not be eliminating from our curriculums the courses that teach them.
If we want to take the phrase “workforce ready” seriously, then we have to understand what is required of today’s workforce. Google endeavored to do just that in 2013 when it launched Project Oxygen, the most thorough, data-intensive study that any company has undertaken to date to understand the qualities that lead to promotion and a successful career. Google has collected data on its workforce since the company started and in 2013 began analyzing the factors that influenced who was hired, fired, rewarded, or promoted from the inception of the company as a small start-up to its present state as an employer of some sixty thousand full-time workers. Because Google’s philosophy is that every manager should have technical training, it was assumed that technical know-how would be a top quality of successful managers.
Yet after a year of data mining and analyzing performance reviews, employee surveys, nominations for top company awards, and more than ten thousand observations of top managers at work, Google’s list of qualities that lead to corporate advancement included, 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, and have a clear vision and strategy. On the list of factors bearing on actual promotion into leadership roles at Google, possessing a level of STEM skills to be able to guide others came in dead last. A piece in Harvard Business Review entitled “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management” describes the way this data-driven company had to revise its vision of itself after sifting through the data.
If we are going to create a new education for the twenty-first century that can train students not for one job but for a sustained and productive life, we need to remember that, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, science and technology are not enough.
WHEN SHA XIN WEI SPEAKS, HIS EXPRESSIVE HANDS ALSO TELL the story, moving through the air and then landing on his computer keyboard, his fingers tapping out URLs with notable delicacy, videos appearing on-screen to illustrate complex concepts as he explains them. He has degrees in mathematics from Harvard and Stanford and is every bit the STEM prodigy. An entire wall of his office is taken up by an old-fashioned chalkboard scrawled with equations and geometric shapes. A mathematician who specializes in topology, a subfield of geometry that charts continuous surfaces, his gestures resemble the Mobius strips drawn on the chalkboards around the room: sinuous, fluid, three-dimensional. In a Mobius strip, that which is outside one moment bends and becomes the inside the next, and vice versa—a good metaphor for his vision of how departments and fields should constantly reposition themselves according to the specific project or challenge they must address. It is one of the symbols for the school he directs, the new School for Arts, Media, and Engineering.
Sha Xin Wei’s research integrates disciplines across the old academic divides between the arts and the sciences, theory and practice, critical thinking and creative production, quantitative knowledge and human applications. He publishes articles on topics incomprehensible to most of us, with titles such as “Topology and Morphogenesis.” In that article, Professor Sha writes: “One can use mathematics not as an instrument or measure, or a replacement for God, but as a poetic articulation.” It’s not clear whether this is math or philosophy, engineering or theology. In his new school, I’m not sure if those categories even make sense anymore.
You’d be mistaken to think this is futurism, science fiction, or something with no place in the real world. On the contrary, Sha Xin Wei’s ambition is to train the next generation of students to make what he calls “palpable impact.” To do that requires studying science, social science, the humanities, and the arts. You need to be able to understand cultural and religious traditions if you want your science to have an impact. You need to be original and creative if you want your solutions embraced by those who might at first be skeptical. Narrow specialization doesn’t guarantee a future, nor does it prepare you to know how to change if your particular job suddenly disappears. He challenges students to address massive, complex, real-world questions such as: “What will life be like in Phoenix when there is no water?”
Dean Sha’s program is not housed at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the famous design school, one of the most innovative and well-funded centers in all of higher education. Nor does it reside at the Media Lab at MIT, another elite and amply funded site for designing the future. Sha’s school is part of Arizona State University, the public university with the largest enrollment in the entire United States, more than eighty thousand students total. This is not an incidental fact. His goal is not to train just a few elite visionaries who can create technologies that change the world for the rest of us but to ensure that students at a huge public university understand the changes occurring in their communities and are capable of leading significant, serious, meaningful technological change that is responsive to their community and far beyond.
“What will life be like in Phoenix when there is no water?” is not a question to be answered by any one discipline. Yet Sha doesn’t like the words interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary. To him, those concepts are also outmoded and do little to change the structural limitations of inherited, traditional disciplines. The term he prefers is synthesis—by which he means a new way of tackling complex problems from seemingly opposite points of view, all of which are necessary if the solution is to hold against changing human or climatic conditions. He wants his students to grasp the math, sociology, and philosophy of any problem and see how each discipline offers a tool that’s useful in solving the same problem in a different way or in arriving at alternative solutions to the same problem. The insights of artists are especially important to him. Unlike theorists (in any field), artists realize their most extravagant visions through the materials they get their hands on—sometimes literally. Like engineers, artists of all kinds must be visionary within constraints. Paint is a constraint—so is canvas, clay or metal, a piano or a tuba, a stage or a town square. Unlike engineers, they may not start with a blueprint, but they still end up with a product, an object, an event, a performance, enacted in real time and real space. Sha doesn’t just want to recruit or foster dreamers. He wants students to learn how those who dream—artists—realize their vision in the real world. That’s what he means by synthesis. By synthesizing the different perspectives and talents offered by different people in different fields, we can responsibly tackle major questions.
Sha tells me, “Think of everything you must address to answer ‘What will life be like in Phoenix when there is no water?’ Think of everyone you need to know how to work with, to be able to talk to, if you want to fully grasp the magnitude of such a question.” His hands make a dipping curve, like a shorebird taking flight. “We aren’t proposing solutions, we are trying to invent new techniques. We can teach students what we know, of course, but that doesn’t take them very far now, does it? Isn’t it much better to teach them how to ask about things they don’t know, maybe never imagined, never thought of before, maybe problems no one can solve, answers no one knows? We do not need hypothetical questions to push the limits. 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. If you expect palpable impact, you are challenging students to admit what they don’t understand, what they don’t know, what no one knows, and to begin to test ideas that could become solutions.”
The approximately four hundred students in the Synthesis program learn all of the soft human skills prized by managers in the Project Oxygen study. Because no one person can possibly know everything, students have to learn how to learn from and teach one another, translating their specialized knowledge for those who operate with different principles, experience, and expertise. Collaboration across different realms is notoriously difficult—as Charles Eliot portended in “The New Education”: “The practical spirit and the literary or scholastic spirit are both good, but they are incompatible. If commingled, they are both spoiled.” True enough, perhaps, in 1869. We no longer have the luxury to make such distinctions. The world and its problems are too complex and resistant to traditional modes of thought.
“Sometimes the metaphor is the solution,” he says. On his desktop computer screen, he calls up a Basic Science course project that required students to answer the question “How do bodies work?” In this course, students were challenged to find ways of helping stroke patients understand and contribute to their own rehabilitative progress, a particularly difficult task because these patients had lost the cognitive ability to process the feedback from their bodies that they once took for granted.
He reaches forward and picks up a cup from his desk. “Lifting this cup is easy for me. For someone recovering from a stroke, it could seem impossible. You wouldn’t even know how to get there, because your basic information from your gestures, from your nervous system, is what’s damaged. So we teach students to evaluate what abilities a stroke patient still has and to work from those. Work from a strength, not from an impairment. Say this patient’s hearing is still fine. We challenge our students to ask how that patient could hear himself rehabilitating his own hand and arm. He can’t count on other forms of cognition to help him heal his body but maybe he could hear his way to progress. How could we give him that tool to use?”
On the screen in front of us, we watch a solution developed by the students in introductory Basic Science. Stroke patients engage in physical therapy to regain full body movement by swinging their arms in arcs to the soothing sound of electronic music, as pure and clear as the perfect fifths made by a bow drawn across violin strings. The music, it turns out, is interactive; the notes are actually generated by their range of motion. When a patient moves his arm smoothly and correctly (which is to say therapeutically), the music is smooth, too, continuous and clear. When an arm falters or careens in a wrong direction, the music becomes choppy and discordant. In the video, the patient recoils from the unpleasant sound immediately. It’s almost impossible to differentiate the music being made from the progress of the stroke victim making the music. Like the Mobius strips, cause and effect loop around one another: the beauty of the music created by the patient’s rehabilitation is the feedback that inspires him to keep working to rehabilitate his arm, even against pain and the frustration of a slow process. I watch as one patient tries again and again. I see how he is listening, trying to return to the lovely, clean sound, which also means resuming the original arc and rehabilitating arm and shoulder muscles. This is what Sha means by palpable impact. The man is actually improving, using a method that no one had ever tried before because, after all, what medical school specialty teaches you that you can tune your ears to rehab your arm? If we were to break down the disciplinary sources of this solution that students in a Basic Science class arrived at, they would include biology, rehabilitative therapy, composing and conducting, music theory, computing, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, nursing, kinesiology, and psychology. Synthesis, to use Dean Sha’s term, is what pulls all these strands of expertise together into a solution. Undergraduates rarely see how what they are learning in one course fits with what they are learning in another, nor do they typically see their learning turned into an actual solution to a problem, in this case one that literally changes lives by improving recovery time.
“A musician studying orchestral conducting inspired this method,” Sha says, and smiles. “I’ve witnessed experiments in rehabilitation in a well-funded, high-tech biomedical engineering lab at a private university where the disabled are encased in Terminator-style robot suits that cost several million dollars, with electrodes sending feedback that their limbs and brains can no longer supply. The success rate here is promising to be higher, at a tiny fraction of the cost. Who would have thought a musician might help engineers save lives and futures?”
We move on to the next topic. “We’re working on climate change now in one student research group,” Sha says. “Since we’ve had such a hard time getting traction in this politicized time, since there is so much debate about agency—whether humans have caused this rise in carbon dioxide emissions or whether it’s something else—we’re flipping the perspective. We’re taking humans out of the equation. We’re conducting an experiment and making a narrative: we are modeling mathematically and synthesizing climate change from the point of view of the climate itself, from the point of view of the weather. We are asking, if humans aren’t the issue, what can we learn simply by charting what the weather is accomplishing in its assault on the earth? And if weather is what we are concerned with—not who is responsible, not what it will do to humans—what happens if we model what happens to the weather if a hundred thousand random people over the earth stop using cars for twenty years? It’s like a game. How do we scale the impact on the weather? What difference will it make? What math, statistics, data analysis, visualization, and storytelling techniques do we need to go from what we know—the data we have now—to the unknown?”
Sha is convinced that only this new way of doing STEM through synthesis can begin to have palpable impact. If all the research stops because certain people or political groups don’t want to believe humans are “at fault,” you then have to do research that removes human culpability. What humans do is simply a variable to be measured, not a moral position to be regulated. Sometimes you exclude damaged cognitive processes to enact a cure; other times you have to work against social or cultural beliefs.
He calls this approach “modern alchemy.” “When the problems exceed our current scientific solutions, the only way we can have palpable impact is through imagination. Sometimes good science requires magic.” Many of the crucial problems we face today are of the same complexity and require the same amplitude of learning as how to rehabilitate when you’ve lost your normal cognitive ways of processing and how to gauge what life will be like in Phoenix when there’s no more water. It is inspiring to know that these students, from their introductory courses onward, are being prepared to take on these challenges.
SHA’S METHODS MIGHT SOUND LIKE SOME NEW AGE GOBBLEDY-GOOK, an approach to big questions that appears innovative but that cannot deliver on its promises. Yet the results are, in fact, palpable. Bodies are healing, and students are learning new ways to think about connections between the brain and body, healing and emotions, science and the arts. There are other tangibles as well for these students who learn to think speculatively and boldly about urgent, lived realities. More than most, these students are achieving outcomes—the goal of every pundit and politician arguing for STEM for “workforce readiness.”
In 2016, US News & World Report ranked Arizona State University—not Stanford, not MIT—as the most innovative university in the United States. ASU has taken on a leadership role in transforming higher education. Founded in 1885 as the Territorial Normal School to train teachers in the Arizona Territory, the university went through many iterations in the twentieth century and was renamed Arizona State University in 1958. ASU now is a public metropolitan research university with five campuses across the greater Phoenix area and four additional learning centers. It is leading a coalition of other regional public universities toward massive pedagogical innovation of a scope, thoroughness, and seriousness that would make Charles Eliot proud. These universities—including the University of Central Florida and the University of California at Riverside—rarely come up first in media stories about dazzling new developments in higher education. They don’t have billions in endowments. In fact, Arizona State University has endured a nearly 50 percent reduction in state support since the 2008 recession. Yet faculty and administrators are committed to new ideas that bring the arts and the sciences together for palpable, measurable impact. Across the university, professors are examining the constituent requirements of their fields in light of new challenges, partnering with colleagues in other disciplines, and helping students design projects that address intractable world problems through synthesis and, sometimes, magic.
ASU president Michael Crow has dubbed his university and the others seeking to redefine their curriculums, structures, and mission “the New American University.” For them, inclusion and economic equity are foundational principles, as important as pedagogical innovation, and key to it. Eliot opened the elite Ivies to those who were not simply the sons of Harvard alums (so-called legacy students). He understood that being rich is not the same as being brilliant and, to fulfill Harvard’s ambitions as a “new American university” leading the way into a prosperous, technology-fueled twentieth century, it was necessary to admit the smartest people. He didn’t champion what we now call diversity out of noblesse oblige, some sense of charity toward non-Harvard families. He wanted to admit the most capable young people and train them to be America’s leaders and, indeed, to challenge the elites like himself who were from America’s first families. He was hardly making Harvard egalitarian. No one would argue that. He was simply increasing the pool of those admitted to Harvard, partly to help break through institutional traditionalism and partly because he believed it would improve the university’s excellence and innovation and therefore contribute to society’s future.
Michael Crow wants to do something similar, but on a far broader scale. Crow defines the New American University as an institution “measured not by whom it excludes, but by whom it includes and how they succeed.” This is happening at a time of significant retrenchment by the state. Arizona seems to have a death wish. It is drastically cutting its support of higher education even as it has a gigantic success story on its hands. Becoming more inclusive and more diverse, increasing graduation rates, and raising the research profile and quality of faculty, all at once, is almost unheard of. It is higher education’s equivalent, President Crow insists, of a “moonshot,” the term Google coined to describe the work of its secret Google X research division that explores technology so risky that few venture capitalists are bold enough to invest in it, even though its potential impact is enormous. Such innovation, in other words, is equivalent to a space program that risked putting men on the moon. Thinking quality, equity, inclusion, and innovation, Crow believes, are just as bold and equally important to future generations. “You cannot just abandon our youth—not unless you want to write off the future of the United States, of the globe, really, since we are the most powerful nation on it.”
The first principle undergirding ASU’s success is something Crow calls “Leverage Our Place.” By grounding their studies in connection to community, to the cultural, physical, and socioeconomic conditions of Phoenix, Arizona, and the Southwest more generally, students see how their schoolwork can translate beyond the classroom. The rest of the principles are “Transform Society,” “Value Entrepreneurship,” “Conduct Use-Inspired Research,” “Enable Student Success,” “Fuse Intellectual Disciplines,” “Be Socially Embedded,” and “Engage Globally.”
These principles point to why STEM at ASU looks quite different from Tetsuya Ishida’s demoralized classrooms. Since becoming president, Crow has worked with faculty to create sixteen schools, all of which span, shuffle, recombine, and redefine traditional disciplines in innovative ways. He points, for example, to Cultural Anthropology. Not so long ago, both the number of majors and enrollments in electives were declining. Many universities, especially those faced with severe cutbacks, would have axed Cultural Anthropology. But Crow reasoned that, now more than ever, our world needs people who understand cultures other than their own. So he challenged faculty to work together to remake the department in ways that would draw a new generation of students and that would offer the broadest means of addressing human and cultural factors and from a range of methodological assumptions and histories. The resulting School of Human Evolution and Social Change is rooted in the social and life sciences and teaches one of the university’s more popular majors, conjoining disciplinary areas and methods that formerly were distinct or even antagonistic.
In the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, for example, students and faculty engage in multiple research projects to understand chimpanzee social organization and behavior and to learn more about primate evolution. At the same time, because Kibale National Park, where the project is based, is under constant assault from illegal poachers, the school’s cultural anthropologists and sociologists work with local Ugandan law enforcement officers to come up with better ways of protecting the animals. They are studying the economic pressures and cultural practices of neighboring communities as well as international black markets for animal products, with the dual aim of guarding the chimpanzees and serving the local human populace.
A different research group in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change is looking at medical outcomes in partnership with the nearby Mayo Clinic. They are studying the reasons for the success or failure of patients who undergo bariatric surgery for long-term weight loss. Students and faculty use qualitative and quantitative methods across the social, cultural, and biological sciences for ethnographic and longitudinal studies designed to improve postoperative success rates.
“Design what your heart wishes” is the objective Crow has assigned to faculty. Not every faculty has gone along. The business school has been notoriously reluctant to embrace the “New American University” model, whereas other fields have been eager to see how far they can push what counts as a “major” and a “field” and a “department.” The members of the Biology Department argued that they wanted a self-assembling faculty, where professors from other departments could join for specific projects and could either stay or return to their home departments after a project was finished. This meant rethinking faculty recognition and reward systems: what counts as a “contribution,” as peer review, as having merit across the new and home departments. Crow approved the experiment and asked who would be the first collaborators. The first to join the new, fluid department were Philosophy and Public Policy, as it turns out. The biologists believe that they cannot do good biology—with palpable impact—without ethicists and policy advisers contributing.
Arizona State University long ago left behind a narrow-minded “skills” approach to higher education in favor of student-centered learning. Rather than cordon off the liberal arts and general education in the first two years of study, keeping them separate from a specialized major, it has integrated research, teaching, and public service as a mission at every level, from introductory courses to doctoral study. This is achieved through internships, experiential learning, project-based learning, and problem-solving competitions, all of which are woven into the fabric of the New American University.
What do ASU students do when they graduate? They find not just jobs but careers. Their range of talents makes them highly sought after throughout the for-profit and nonprofit employment sectors. In fact, they are often so versatile and multitalented, with such a keen and far-ranging perspective, that the first employer to snap them up is Arizona State University, which hires back its own graduates as educational innovators. ASU competes hard against other area employers because, says President Crow, its graduates are better prepared for the task of solving complex problems than are graduates from other universities. A generation ago, the plum jobs (at the university and in the community) would have gone to graduates from elite universities on the coasts or to ASU’s chief sports and education rival, the University of Arizona.
However, ASU graduates, now, have the reputation for being bold, innovative, mature, independent thinkers. President Crow points out that booming industries are moving into the area, including several large technology firms from Silicon Valley, lured by lower costs and an exciting new talent pool of ASU graduates. Typically, public universities are the largest employer in their area, and that is still the case with ASU. It is common for a university to be the driver of local economies too, both in terms of spending and as a contributor to local culture and intellectual life. ASU now employs eleven thousand of its alums. President Crow’s ambition is to increase that number to forty thousand. He is also aware of the irony that ASU now has to compete harder to employ its own graduates because the university’s stellar reputation for innovation is drawing new employers to the area.
Next on the president’s agenda for ASU is a Humanities Research Lab. Several scholars in the humanities are looking to team with mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists like Xin Wei Sha as well as with the newly formed biological sciences department. “How do you free faculty to redesign their own field?” President Crow asks, and then offers the answer that defines the new world of transdisciplinary STEM education: You free faculty not by insisting they give up the standards of their traditional discipline in order to accept the standards of someone else’s. Rather, you reward them and their students for constantly rethinking options, trying new programs, acting inventively and boldly, collaboratively and synthetically. In design school, this is called “iterative thinking”; as Crow puts it, “You design, you redesign, you adjust, you redesign again, you adjust—the process doesn’t stop. Like learning. There’s no end point, it’s all a process. That’s what a university is.”
ASU AND ITS COHORT ARE NOT ALONE IN IMAGINING AND REALIZING a new vision of higher education. Across the continent from Phoenix, in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia has engaged its entire faculty and student body in the ambitious collaborative project of designing a new course of study in the liberal arts. UVA’s history is as long as ASU’s is brief. Founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819, UVA enrolls more than twenty-one thousand undergraduates and fifteen thousand graduate students and is one of the country’s most distinguished research universities. In its new curriculum, students will engage with aesthetics, empirical and scientific ways of knowing, cultural differences, and ethical questions, all of which the school has deemed foundational skills needed in today’s world. From mastery of a modern language to financial literacy and data analysis skills, UVA’s new curriculum will turn out a new kind of graduate, one who can thrive in STEM fields or any others, really.
The new curriculum was designed during two years of dialogue among faculty, staff, and students, and in the fall of 2016 it was beta-tested by an inaugural cohort of college fellows, students, and faculty who are taking and teaching the new introductory courses in order to contribute to the next iteration of the plan. The goal is a full implementation of the new plan by the entire university in fall 2019. The students and faculty are also developing a comprehensive, capstone “Engagement” experience that will tie students’ classroom learning to some real-world project, in the hopes of making a public contribution and, in the best of circumstances, making a palpable impact.
Numerous colleges and universities across the country are beta-testing new general education models now. Writing and speaking requirements are integral to many of these, including presenting and publishing for a larger public. Fulfilling these fundamental requisites is an excellent way of encouraging students to reflect on and articulate what they are learning as they are learning it (“metacognition,” in educational jargon), one of the best methods for ensuring that learning will be useful in later life. Some educational institutes are partnering with local institutions: libraries, local high schools, science and research centers, civic and community organizations, and museums, as well as publishing companies, technology firms, and other corporations that might yet have roles for students that go beyond the usual unpaid-intern-at-the-copy-machine.
At Duke University, a new program called Bass Connections replaces the scattered general education requirements with a coherent focus on a complex problem that spans five broad thematic areas: brain and society; information, society, and culture; global health; education and human development; and energy. For a project on global health disparities, a student might take a literature course, but instead of reading The Canterbury Tales (standard fare in general ed literature courses), she’ll read Boccaccio’s Decameron, a hundred bawdy tales exchanged in the fourteenth century by young men and women who secluded themselves in a Florentine villa to escape the physical and emotional ravages of the Black Death. Or they’ll read Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1665) or Albert Camus’s existential The Plague, set against the backdrop of the bubonic plague ravaging North Africa, or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, with its depiction of the diseases, including leprosy and smallpox, brought to Nigeria by white colonizers, or the novel by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera. From these diverse historical and international literary depictions of disease, students come to learn about the enduring superstitions, mythologies, and cultural practices embedded within our understanding of contagion and contamination. They begin to understand such recurring impediments to medical care delivery as resistance to vaccinations and antibiotics as well as larger social issues such as xenophobia.
Alongside these literary works, the students read in classical economics and in the much more recent field of behavioral economics, while also taking science, business, and management classes, in classrooms and in labs. They might devise a cost-benefit analysis and an actual, strategic business and workflow plan that embodies philosopher and economist Amartya Sen’s idea that we must also account for the intangibles that enhance or cripple our lives, such as inequality, life expectancy, infant mortality, and disease. In addition to their historical, theoretical, philosophical, entrepreneurial, service-oriented, and practical work, the students will ideally spend time in another country. The result is that a general education requirement in global health disparities becomes a foundational experience for whatever a student might do after college, whether that means heading to medical school or to Ghana to work with a nongovernmental organization.
From UVA to Duke to a grand new experiment: at the 2016 South by Southwest, an annual carnival of creative technology and ideas, MIT graduate school dean Christine Ortiz, a professor of Materials Science in the Department of Engineering, unveiled her ambition to start an entirely new university on the principles of transdisciplinary inquiry.
Every academic I know has a fantasy of going off and starting their own college or university. Professor Ortiz is taking a leave of absence to create a nonprofit residential research university steeped in project-based learning. As yet unnamed, and still quite shadowy in its detail, her vision of the new education promises to be this generation’s MIT Media Lab, mixing and matching all things STEM with all things otherwise.
No more lectures. No more classrooms. No more majors. Professor Ortiz is starting from scratch, getting rid of the basic pedagogical and curricular infrastructure we’ve inherited from Eliot’s research university. Elitism, too, is an antiquated idea with which she, like Michael Crow of ASU, wishes to dispense. Why do the smartest students have to be the richest? Why do we have to compete for a handful of “diverse” students instead of recognizing the brilliance it takes to survive harsh and difficult upbringings? How can scrappy genius be channeled in higher education without it being overlooked or snuffed out? In Crow’s and Ortiz’s view, rethinking what we mean by selectivity follows from any attempt to rethink how we teach and learn.
Ortiz’s methods have garnered a good deal of attention, and it remains to be seen what her new university will actually look like. She insists all learning will be learner-centered, collaborative, and project-based. Science and technology will be emphasized, with equal focus on both basic and applied research. And, again, like ASU’s Michael Crow, Ortiz is endeavoring to make everything at her university work for the good of humanity and the improvement of society. As ASU and Ortiz show, we need STEM. But STEM, of course, needs the human and social sciences and the arts. Otherwise, it is good for the development of a specific skill but ultimately not terribly significant over the longue durée of a student’s life and career.
Professor Ortiz considers her ideal student for the university of the future as someone with a vision and a mission. She explains, “We want to have an emphasis on science and technology, and, in particular, the interface of science and technology with humanities and the arts.” They seek students with interdisciplinary interests “who would like to have an education that has technical depth, but also the breadth of working with that interface. Students who want to explore interdisciplinary pathways, emerging pathways, and also who sort of enjoy self-directed learning and are passionate about working on their own projects.” She is in the vanguard of those rethinking standard disciplinary and graduate requirements, the merging of STEM and non-STEM fields, the different contributions of selectivity and inclusion, and other binaries established over a century ago. Crossing those divisions, she insists, is mandatory if students are to thrive in the world after they receive their degree. Her hope is that these students will go on to become the leaders we need to solve the equally vexed problems that trouble all our futures.
IF PROFESSOR ORTIZ IS SUCCESSFUL IN STARTING HER NEW UNIVERSITY, it will be the first institution of higher education founded in Massachusetts since Olin College in 1997. Olin is where Sara Hendren teaches. She is an artist. She is an engineer. Her projects are frequently for people who are labeled, by the able-bodied world, as “disabled.” Like many of the professors at Olin, she refuses to see boundaries. She considers that strategic disciplinary transgression as her charge, her mission, her art, her design, her science.
As a designer, she works with clients—not for them, with them. She extends that same participatory goal to pedagogy. She does not teach students; she learns with them. She often poses specific problems for them to solve, and, in turn, they reach out to their clients to include them in the process of problem solving too. “Cocreation” of solutions, she insists, needs to be part of the design process.
Hendren builds these design principles into her teaching, research, and design projects in “assistive technology.” For example, in collaborating with Chris Hinojosa, an engineer born with one arm, Hendren’s students spent a week with him to understand his abilities and his limitations. They learned that he already could use his body, one arm, and two feet dexterously. And they learned that the last thing he wanted was the unwieldy, sci-fi-like million-dollar bionic arm contraption NASA was designing for him. Why would he want to lug around that heavy mechanical thing? However, this athletic young man longed to do what he could not do with his body or with the cumbersome bionic arm: he wanted to scale a climbing wall and, maybe someday, a cliff. He couldn’t do that on his own.
So, instead of a multifunctional mechanical arm, he worked with Hendren’s Olin students and, together, they fabricated a simple, lightweight device, a modular socket that allows him to switch out different, lightweight, single-use extensions, such as one that allows him to climb a wall and another that enables him to ride a bicycle. He worked with the student artists because he found their actual and visual vocabulary more imaginative and flexible than the technical jargon, blueprints, and fabrication software that seemed to limit the ingenuity of the engineers. The artists could see possible solutions that the engineers could not. At the same time, the skills of the engineers were crucial for turning artistic prototypes into strong, functional, serviceable devices. Together, everyone, including Chris Hinojosa, studied plants with tendrils to consider ways of grasping that do not require hands. They studied animals. They read and looked at art together. And they designed and built exactly the right device to do the job, one that was simple, portable, with attachments designed specifically for a particular function. The device met Hinojosa’s needs perfectly.
If the students had not been trained to listen first before cocreating with a client, they never would have come up with something that was suitable. If they hadn’t read widely and gone with their client to art museums, to the gym, to movies, and experienced what he could do and what he wanted to do, none of it would have been possible.
Hendren’s students also worked with the eminent curator and scholar Amanda Cachia to address a problem she had in giving large public lectures. Cachia is four-foot-three. She is constantly confronted with podiums, microphones, and other stage setups designed for people far taller than she. She had plenty of experience with “disabled” podiums supposedly designed to accommodate “little people.” Inevitably, the podium wires would be too short or one piece of equipment didn’t interface with another in the way it should have. She wanted a device that could bring her up to the level of the existing podium, allow her the dignity to be in control of the stage on which, after all, she is the distinguished speaker, and give her the autonomy to do this efficiently without detracting from the content of what she is saying. This may sound simple enough to an able-bodied person, but it’s precisely because the able-bodied take such matters for granted that there is a problem.
Hendren’s students, in consultation with Cachia, experimented with various materials and settled on the high-tech carbon fiber used in racing motorcycles and spacecraft. They designed a sturdy, lightweight podium that folds, like origami, into a laptop case. They called it the AlterPodium. Cachia simply unfolds and slides the AlterPodium behind the dysfunctional (for her) existing podium and ascends to her rightful place, center stage.
These students read memoirs, literature, and disability studies in the humanities, social science, and science literature, so they understood that dignity is at least as important in Cachia’s situation as are other considerations, such as weight and efficiency. They engaged with the idea of “normativity” in the abstruse, important theoretical work of philosopher Judith Butler—not typical reading for engineers, but absolutely crucial to their vocational training.
For example, in “Examined Life,” a video about our different abilities, Butler and disability activist Sunaura Taylor ask: Don’t we all need assistance of some kind or other? Isn’t there a time in our lives when we all need others whose abilities supplement our own? Aren’t we all co-learners and co-teachers? Given human frailty, aging, and mortality, isn’t it inevitable that we will all need assistance at some point in our lives? Butler and Taylor emphasize that this is a fundamental question not only for the “disabled” but for everyone and for society as a whole.
Hendren notes that the theoretical questions of ability and disability, empowerment and impairment are central to the engaged form of pedagogy that she practices at Olin College. Basically, if we decide we do want to live in a world where we assist each other, we must unlearn the idea that “expertise” is a condition or an outcome, that the prof has it and the student’s job is to gain it through a series of trials resulting in a diploma. We need to realize, instead, that learning is lifelong and that the conditions in which we learn can change in an instant. The human condition means we are all potentially impaired and can, in an instant, become the client, not the technology designer. This appreciation is key to how Hendren teaches. She notes that, in every space—including in the classroom—different people are experts in different things, different people need help and give it. If curator Amanda Cachia’s expertise at spatial and installation art inspires the students who make the portable podium from which she can better deliver her message, who is assisting whom? Hendren would say the dependency is mutual. She believes the idea of “assistive technology” is key to good pedagogy because, in the end, as we learn we all assist one another.
Hendren argues that, in her role as the teacher, she also has to relinquish the idea that she is the expert in the room. Even as she prods her engineering students to ask harder and harder questions and produce more and more useful and sophisticated and innovative devices, she realizes that their capabilities far exceed her own knowledge and expertise. In situations where some students possess greater technical expertise than others, her students have to trust her questions and she has to trust their answers. Their ability as responsible co-learners becomes the highest standard of excellence, one that they also apply to their collective projects and problem solving.
This is not the specialized, vocational STEM learning we’re accustomed to. Yet we know these students will earn entry-level jobs and, beyond that, they are destined for fulfilling careers. They are trained to address crucial challenges that graduates of most programs are not prepared to tackle. Olin’s undergraduate engineering program is consistently ranked among the top five. Olin students typically start in high-paying engineering jobs. But Olin aspires to encourage its students to build their knowledge and their future on the firmest footing of all: interests and passions—exactly what is missing in the vacant eyes of Tetsuya Ishida’s dazed and cowed and workforce-ready specimens.
Sara Hendren hopes each of her students aspires to become what she calls a “Public Amateur.” She believes every professor should strive for that amateurism too, in the sense that, as an amateur, one is open to ideas, imagination, and change. Public amateurism is difficult for most professors—and for most professionals in the workplace. It means relinquishing expertise and status. Yet it is necessary to attain as the problems we face become increasingly contradictory and vexing. Public amateurism—receptiveness to other perspectives and other expertise—is a crucial skill to teach our students if they are to have palpable impact in the world.
I think of Sara Hendren and her students whenever I pass one of those familiar blue-and-white “handicapped” icons of the stick figure in the wheelchair. More and more often, one sees this traditional symbol replaced by one in which the stick figure leans forward, as if zooming full speed to the finish line. The zippy, racing version is part of her Accessible Icon Project, an open-source activist art endeavor that encourages anyone to download images from her website and turn them into stickers, stencils, posters, and signs that they can plaster over the usual handicapped sign, which she believes stereotypes those with impairments. The Accessible Icon signs have been showing up everywhere, from hospitals in Delhi, India, to the signs in the parking lot at the US Department of Transportation in Washington, DC. “An icon is a verb,” Hendren insists; it “does things” in the world. Like all art, an icon shapes our perceptions, it expands our vision or limits it. Her goal with the Accessible Icon Project, as in everything she does, is expansiveness. This is why she teaches at Olin College, a liberal arts school of engineering. The vision of education there is far more radical, on an epistemological level, than what many think tanks and pundits insist is “revolutionary.” It is also more practical and more likely to prepare students for good careers than the limited and antiquated skills training or vocational higher education movement.
All of these educators dedicated to higher education reform understand how deeply we must go in our reconsideration not just of STEM education but also of the purpose and mission of college as a whole if we are going to train students to address the scale and scope of change in the world they face. 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 in the world. In the end, the new education is also a verb, one that empowers our students with better ways to live and thrive in a complicated world.