Academe (where a weathered historian shares)
Alright, let’s admit we didn’t get terribly far with the discussion about what your “fantasy university” would look like. So, I’ll share some principles and principals about the goals that I think higher ed ought to pursue. These have come to the surface for me as I’ve bumped along on my academic career and are certainly not an exhaustive list of goals. If you think of more or how to refine these, please let me know.
Content and Skills
Both content and skills need to be taught but skills are more important. I teach history and there’s a lot of potential content to teach. Names and dates. Names and dates. That’s what most people think history is. But how were those names and dates chosen for the textbook or monograph? What argument is the historian making?
Useful Questions
Asking questions is one of the principal skills that higher ed is built upon and should build. It’s the first step of critical thinking, which is figuring out how to think with useful purpose. Asking questions is a skill because haphazard questioning can lead to haphazard results. Questions need to be questioned in order to get to the better questions to ask.1
Useful Information
To ask about what? Finding useful information is another principal skill. Anyone can do a DuckDuckGo search or look for guidance on YouTube, and those searches can lead to helpful results, but the algorithms are going to put certain items at the top of the results that are meant to nudge the searcher. Nudging can be good, but it depends on who is doing the nudging; I don’t want to find only stuff that colludes with the stuff I’ve found before.
How to search for information is based on principles that need to be taught and that have to do with meta-knowledge. For example, how is the information organized? How was it meant to be accessed? Why do we have confidence in the trustworthiness of the information?
When teaching history, I demand that students identify the author and the publisher and the publishing process of the sources they want to use, and to learn to weed out the less appropriate sources. Libraries are still our principal repository of knowledge and information for academe because the sources have gone through peer review.2
Useful Analysis
Acquisition of information and knowledge is not enough. And here questions and questioning come back into play. If students have picked up any theory, they might apply it to their gathered information. They might just hold up a piece of information to the light and see how they might chisel out a diamond from it. Above all, students are expected to think for themselves.
Useful Communication
Conveying what one has figured out is usually the last important step in the process. I’ve said it a million times if I’ve said it once: writing is thinking. Other means of conveying information and knowledge are valid,3 but writing is still the primary medium of history, so it’s what I’m focused on. Writing is by nature never finished, writing is inherently creative, and writing is intrinsically provocative. The act of writing constantly stimulates more thinking. Writing is thinking.
Another step, a post-step if you will, is the grading and feedback process. Encouraging students to figure out how to take the reins of their meta-cognition is a skill that could be taught more and more effectively.
If I were forced to distill these principles and principals down to one phrase, it would be, “to teach how to think, not what to think.”
I’ve repeatedly used the word “useful” as a qualifier for the principals. That raises the obvious question: useful for what purpose? The purpose of a university, in my mind, is to produce knowledge, that is, to further knowledge. So at every step it is necessary to become familiar with existing knowledge, to demonstrate familiarity with existing knowledge, and to understand how one’s own questions, information, and analysis relate to existing knowledge.
Respect
A university is a place where thinkers and ideas from a variety of sources come together and may or may not cross-pollinate but will be available to students in all their variety. It is also where each discipline is respected for its practices. (Yes, I’m advocating for “silos” here.) Ideas require structure to take shape.
As always, these are imperfect thoughts and I would love to hear what you think.
With Critters, It’s Personal
Ande proved herself an excellent hiker-dog this winter break and also very curious and not at all nervous about the edges of many rock cliffs.
We were very high up indeed.
Lichen is neither animal nor plant. It is an organism that is algae and fungi in symbiosis. It is beautiful and not at all nervous about the edges of rock cliffs.
One thing I like to discuss with students are fallacies, to learn common ways one can go wrong in one’s thinking.
Information: A Historical Companion is a weighty volume but a surprising page-turner.
Other means are valid, especially in this digital age, but I am yet to be convinced that dancing can be substituted for writing.
You mentioned peer review as a main reason that libraries are repositories of knowledge and information for historians. I can see that for primary source material, but it seems that libraries would not contain the most up to date information or theories on many given subjects.
Question for you- are there times when peer review can suppress new thoughts and ideas?
Question two- is knowledge created or discovered? :^)