A volley into the valley of organized nonsense

Part of my compositional energy goes towards articulating or framing problems. This is as it should be, but I am also dead set against whining. My motto as a composer of education is "don't whine, prototype!" I am a big fan of doing the needed research then designing and running a pilot or experiment, or constructing a real-world prototype. I love conversation, but nothing is more enervating that endless talk coupled with no action. Conversation needs composition! It needs a doing component.

So in this post I am relaying a piece of research on the history of American higher education that I think will be useful in the construction of a prototype for my current work context --a context which finds me working on the liberal arts side of a BFA degree program.

The title of the article the excerpt below comes from is only somewhat more forgiving than my subject line. It is: "Brief History of American Academic Credit System: A Recipe for incoherence in Student Learning." I was busy trying to track the craziness of the BFA --marketing slogans which IMO might include "Just add the liberal arts and stir!" or "Just bolt it on to the fine arts!"-- when I happened upon this article. It sheds a different kind of light on the origins of the current plight of higher education in the U.S. as it struggles to find a new form.

For me the value of history as a problem-framing and problem-solving lens is that it conveys the clear message that structures we inherit --and which can thereby strike us as determined or natural-- were created in prior conditions by prior individuals just like us. For me this argues for the need of every generation to re-form the basic structures themselves, rather than conforming new situations and opportunities to old forms.

So this post is one of several that focus on the structural problems that seem to beset the BFA degree and trip-up efforts to reform curricula and so forth. My general pitch is that the problems run deeper than curricula, having to do more with structural, organizational features like 'courses' --and this article fits in this matrix quite well because it talks explicitly about one chapter in the history of courses.

BTW the emphasis in the article on the benefits of using a comprehensive examination (of some sort) rather than credit-hours to determine whether or not a student is awarded a degree dovetails with what is typically done in MFA degree programs in the visual arts: each student has a culminating thesis show. So, why would something like this not make
sense in the BFA degree program as well? i.e., in our case, a presentation and oral defense of a portfolio of best works?

Students would still sign up for and take classes but, as is the case in MFA programs, faculty would give mostly A's because grades and courses don't matter really. And this mirrors how students are graded in the fine arts areas of the BFA. What matters is the progress students are making in their work, as reflected in artifacts, and in presentations and defensea of these at whatever intervals make sense.

In my MFA program we had "reviews" at the end of each term which were basically mini-shows we mounted in our studios, a bit like what D&P does but more frequent and less formal. Our faculty members would basically studio-hop, and each individual's committee members would had more to say and discuss.

Moving to this type of model would mean we would work with STUDENTS, not with courses and credit hours. We could use the existing advising system to divvy up the students each of us would work with. In effect we'd all serve on the committees of x number of students.  I'm tellin' ya the stresses we feel are related to some fundamental structural problems in the way we keep trying to do things. The wackiness includes but is actually bigger than just grading.

Anyway here's the excerpt from the article I found:

At the end of the 1800’s and the beginning of 1900’s, the Carnegie unit became the basis
for granting high school diplomas and credit hours for the baccalaureate. In the late 1800’s,
Harvard’s Eliot pushed for comprehensive examinations similar to those he observed at
Oxford, the Carnegie Unit as a measure of higher school attainment, and elective
courses in the Harvard curriculum. He succeeded in the last two but not the first.

The elective system obviously works against common comprehensive
examinations but for a credit hour system. Kreplin summarized their mutual
reinforcement as follows:

The emergence of the credit-hour system apparently coincided with Charles W. Eliot’s
introduction of electives at Harvard College in 1869. Following Harvard’s lead, the notion
of electives rapidly spread both within disciplines and among institutions, and this
expansion was paralleled by the introduction of quantitative course measurements.

Dietrich Gerhard identified two phases in the spread of the system of course
credits that were stimulated by the introduction the elective system following
1870.

From now on in the growth of the credit system two phases can be distinguished: an
earlier one in the which the colleges start to measure the teaching of subject matter in
hour units, and a later one, in which the credit system is further perfected and becomes
consolidated: the value of each course both in high school and in college is now listed in
units of credits, and it is definitely stated how many units of credit are required for
receiving the respective degrees. The first phase can be dated as of the 1870’s and the
1880’s; the second as of the next two decades, around the turn of the century.

The college credit hour is based on the same rationale as the high school
Carnegie Unit. And the Carnegie Foundation, according to Gerhard, explicitly
stated:

… in the counting of the fundamental criterion was the amount of time spent on a subject,
not the results attained; if, for instance, a year’s work in plane geometry would be
covered by the way of two weekly hours, the subject should be counted as only 2/5 of a
unit.

As the credit hour became the dominant measure of student attainment, four
years became the standard requirement for the baccalaureate. Jones and Ortner
identified six influences that led to the four year standard; one of which was:
There was little trust put in final examinations, and external examinations had no tradition
in the U.S. Hence, the time spent on the college campus became a convenient
measure.

John H. Finley made a parody of the Carnegie Unit as follows:

45 minutes make an hour
5 hours make a week
36 hours make a unit
15 units make a matriculant
5 matriculant hours (for one year) make a point of count
60 points or counts make a degree

In his thorough review of the quantification of education by time units, Gerhard
observed:

It is the rigid system of “points” and “units," organized in a businesslike way, cutting
education into pieces which, from now on, though well fitting into the structure of a
modern depersonalized business civilization, became the headache of every true
educator ….11 (Emphasis added.)

The credit system makes the university a banking system. Gerhard sites
Norman Foerster in his 1937 book, The American State University, as likening
the pursuit of the American baccalaureate to buying it on the installment plan.
Once a credit was earned, it was as safe as anything in the world. It would be deposited
and indelibly recorded in the registrar’s saving bank, while the substance of the course
could be, if one wished, happily forgotten.

The author is John Harris and the full-text of the article is available online at:
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED470030&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED470030