Kevin Carey is convinced that online learning has created a watershed moment in the history of higher education. Not since Johannes Gutenberg assembled an ensemble of movable type, meltable alloy, oil-based ink, and a screw press in 1439 has there been such a moment—or so says Carey in his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere.
It is a strong assertion that rests on the relatively fragile facts of no more than twenty years of shaky experiments with the new technology. If we stick with the Gutenberg analogy, online learning is still in the era of incunabula, that period before 1500 when artisans were still working out what to do with the printing press. As often as not the early printers set aside Gutenberg’s movable type in favor of a carved wooden block for each page. Woodblock printing could retain some of the delicate beauty of medieval ornamented manuscripts, but it couldn’t compete with the speed and economy of production and the ease of correction of movable type.
A Serious Man
Kevin Carey is among the handful of contemporary writers on higher education who merit serious attention. He is far from alone in his enthusiasm for online learning and his belief that it will transform higher education. But he is a far better writer than other enthusiasts and his book deserves the attention of even those who view the new technologies as a mere diversion from more important things.
In the second chapter of The End of College, Carey compresses into 25 pages the history of the university from the founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 to the floodtide of degrees from American colleges and universities in 2012. It is a neat performance, free of ponderous explanation, narrowing swiftly to the matters at hand, and yet touching nearly all the key matters. The modifier “nearly” is needed because Carey (deliberately I suppose) skirts the topic of how universities have been shaped by and helped to share broader political and social movements.
A word on this before turning to Carey’s actual subject. Carey is alert to how higher education has always responded to the changing needs for “intellectual capital.” The medieval university, he writes, arose out of particular circumstances that brought students together in towns where knowledge could be organized and shared. Universities were from the start the seedbeds of what we would now call transnational elites. But they also became seedbeds of nationalism, romantic revolutionary ardor, and later Marxism. In the United States, the history of higher education has been interwoven in complicated ways with religious aspiration and various egalitarian movements, including efforts to advance the rights of women and racial minorities. It would seem difficult to explain the history of American higher education over the last half century without treating race and racial preferences as a central topic. Yet the topic is entirely missing in The End of College—as are the topics of campus radicalism from SDS to BDS; the sustainability movement; free speech controversies; and the politicization of higher education.
These blind spots are no less evident in Carey’s other writings on American higher education. Perhaps it is best to say that he knows his audience, which is liberal, self-satisfied, and not perturbed that colleges and universities have become leftist monocultures.
What Charles Eliot Did
What does perturb Carey is that American higher education is a mishmash of efforts to achieve three competing goals: vocational training, the research enterprise, and the liberal arts. None of these is accomplished especially well, although the liberal arts come off the worst. Carey places the blame for the mishmash at the feet of Charles Eliot, the Harvard University president who in 1869 invented the “elective system,” and who also made the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for admission to Harvard’s graduate and professional schools. The elective system, soon copied at almost every other college and university, meant the demise of the core curriculum and its replacement by an expensive and expansive collection of courses that led to limited learning and incoherent programs. In Carey’s assessment, Eliot also opened the door for the faculty to be made up of research specialists who have no training in or necessarily any aptitude for teaching. The de-emphasis on the core curriculum and the dominance of research over teaching are two sides of the same coin.
But that coin is burnished to a golden gleam with the rhetoric of liberal arts education, endlessly deployed by college presidents who have redefined the “liberal arts” as whatever their institutions happen to be doing at the moment. Learning to “think critically” covers just about any contingencies short of grunt labor, but maybe that too if the labor is spent sorting recyclables or undertaking other sweaty tasks on behalf of social justice.
Rich in Characters and Ideas
In the 2013 spring semester, Carey enrolled in the MIT online course, The Secret of Life, taught by biology professor Eric Lander. The course was one of those that MIT made available as a MOOC through the Harvard-MIT online collaboration, edX. Carey was enthralled by this enormously difficult course, and despite his non-science undergraduate and graduate education, stuck with it, problem sets and all. The End of College carries The Secret of Life through most of its chapters as Carey weighs its lessons and does the writerly equivalent of turning over proteins and amino acids to see how things fit together.
It is a book rich in characters as well as ideas. The portrait of Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in chapter 3—the former president of George Washington University and one of the people who unleashed the terrific price spiral that has turned American higher education into a cul-de-sac of campus luxury, student debt, and intellectual mediocrity—is fair-minded and finely etched. Carey’s conversation with Trachtenberg is one of a dozen or so encounters that he draws on to develop his thesis that the old university—what he calls “the hybrid university”—is on the way out and that the new online thing, “the university of everywhere,” is on the doorstep.
Is it really? The End of College is the best-argued case I have seen yet that digital learning will transform higher education. Carey is fully aware of the inertial resistance to that transformation. Our existing colleges and universities have strong institutional reasons to impede it even as they incorporate some of its technology. And there are deep sources of social and cultural resistance from a public that is invested in the older forms of credentialing and prestige. “The hybrid university will not disappear tomorrow,” he writes, “but they (hybrid universities) have been ripping off parents and students for decades by shortchanging undergraduate learning.” There are sober thinkers on the other side of this, such as Andrew Delbanco, who have argued the crisp opposite: that online education is the barbarian that threatens to despoil undergraduate learning.
The barbarians, if that is what they are, have now found their most eloquent champion in Kevin Carey. Let the contest begin. Unleash the broadband of war. Let MOOCs mix it up with Morrill; Gutenberg grapple with GitHub; and edX close quarters with Eliot. However this works out, Carey acquits himself well on the topic at hand.
