Translator: Luiza Valente Reviewer: Queenie Lee
Universities are on the verge of an apocalyptic and terminal collapse.
At least, that's what you'd have to believe
if you went to a bookstore and looked under the education section at the titles.
By my account in the last couple of years, there have been 39 books
written on the demise of the North American University.
These attacks come from the political left and right;
they come from inside the academy and outside the academy.
I reviewed a couple of these books, a few months back,
for the International science magazine, Nature,
and I began my review as follows:
universities today are fractious places
populated by customers, formerly known as students,
who play increasingly large amounts of, mostly, borrowed money
in exchange for high grades from researchers
with large frequent-flyer miles account, formerly known as professors,
who report to real estate developers, formerly known as university presidents.
Now this, of course, is a caricature,
but as in most caricatures, it conveys elements of truth.
One of the many problems of the modern university
is that they have taken on,
or perhaps, had imposed on them by society, too many goals.
Universities are supposed to be triggers of urban renewal,
and engines of economic growth.
They're supposed to cure sick people;
they're supposed to generate new knowledge,
and train the next generation of scholars,
and if possible, spin off biotech companies in the process.
They're supposed to provide an endless supply of talking heads
for the 24/7 news cycle.
Now, all of these things,
with the possible exception of the talking heads, are social goods.
There is nothing wrong with economic development,
or certainly curing sick people, or generating new knowledge,
but they have created a culture in which the language tells it all.
You talk to any university faculty member,
and they'll tell you about their teaching load
and their research opportunities.
And being mostly rational people,
they attempt to minimize their loads and maximize their opportunities.
Thus, we have a reward system with multiple levels of faculty:
assistant professors, associate professors,
full professors, chaired professors,
and then, in some institutions, university professors;
they are at the top of the pinnacle,
1/10 of the 1% of the distinguished faculty.
You know what the distinguishing feature of a university professor is?
They never have to teach again.
So the problem with these multiple roles and this culture
is that they're inimical to the purpose for which universities were founded,
and that is to educate young people,
and they use educate in the sense of its Latin root:
'educatus', 'educare'.
It does not mean to pour bits of information
from my full vessels into your empty vessel.
What it means is to open up and lead forth,
to open up minds to new perspectives,
and then, lead them forth to a lifetime of learning.
I think to describe where universities are today,
I can do it by a story that really encapsulates the problem
that occurred to me, a few years ago, in my American university.
I had the opportunity to go and teach a class of fourth-grades.
I'm an astrophysicist, and so I talked about the universe.
I showed them beautiful Hubble pictures,
I waxed eloquent about black holes in the cosmic background radiation;
at the end, these there were about 80 fourth-graders in the room,
there were 160 hands in the air, right?
Everybody had a question. In fact, two questions, one for each hand.
And, it went on and on and on, and they just were insatiable.
They were finally dragged out
with their shirt collars by the teacher to go to lunch.
They were still asking questions.
And then, I took the bus back to my 4 o'clock seminar
with first-year students,
a seminar in science that all students have to take at my university,
and I only had 20 of them in the room.
I walked in a few minutes before class, and, you know, it was the usual situation:
two of them were texting, three of them were on Facebook,
a couple of them were asleep,
but, the rest had their pads at exactly the right angle,
they had their pens poised,
and you could read what was behind their eyes.
OK, so in 1 hour and 55 minutes, this seminar will be over,
and five more of these seminars, and my first term will be over,
and I'll be one-eighth on my way to Harvard Law School.
Sir Ken talked about the linear approach to education that we have,
these students have bought into it.
They're on a road,
there are some hurdles they have to jump, and they keep going in a straight line.
We were going to discuss this fascinating article
on the neuroscience of the brain,
and I looked at them, and I said, why aren't you more like 4th graders?
Being first-year students, not recognizing a rhetorical question,
five hands were up.
(Laughter)
So with some trepidation, I called on the first young woman in the front.
She said, Well, Professor Helfand, you have to understand;
when you're in 4th-grade,
and you're curious about something, you ask a question.
But by the time you get to our age - 17, by the time you get to our age,
there's sort of an an infinite amount of stuff to know,
all it's all on Google, anyway,
so what's the point of asking a question?
Which the appropriate response is:
What's the point of not shooting yourself? But I didn't say that.
I called on the next young man; he said, Prof. Helfand, you have to understand -
I'm not making this up by the way, this's the true story -
he said you have to understand this is a seminar.
And I said that's why we're in this small little room with chairs around,
so we can talk to each other.
He said yes, but the point of being here
is to come out on top and beat the competition,
and asking a question is a sign of weakness,
so in seminars you only make statements, you never ask questions.
In a lecture, where youre anonymous, you can raise your hand
and ask a question,
but in a seminar, you only make statements.
Well, I am an obstreperous guy, so I kept going, you know.
I called on the next two people, and it was just as grim;
finally, there was the fifth one who was sitting in the front,
and he was sort of sitting there like this,
and he was watching this go back and forth,
and he finally did this, and I said yes.
He said, Professor Helfand, what I think you're missing here
is I'm paying for a degree, not for an education.
Well, you've grown, so there is hope, that's good.
(Laughter)
And I think that sums it up.
They're paying for a degree, not for an education.
And who can blame them?
For this cynicism,
when the entire structure of universities is set up to reinforce it.
So, as you can imagine,
I was intrigued by the concept of starting with a completely blank slate
and creating a university for the 21st century;
a university that will allow its graduates to face the daunting problems
that this century holds for them,
that equips them with tools to do that;
and is also aimed at them,
at digital natives immersed in a culture that celebrates multitasking.
So what we have to do to design a university from scratch?
First of all, forget almost everything you know about universities;
and think about what you need to do.
One: you need to set goals for your university.
Two: you need an institutional structure for your university.
Three: you need a curriculum for your university.
And four: you need a way to deliver that curriculum to meet your goals.
So, what did we do?
We created something, not very far from here,
called Quest University, Canada
The goal was simple:
rather than that multiplicity of goals at other universities take on; we had one,
and that was to educate undergraduates,
to open up and lead forth their minds.
So that was done: check.
Now institutional structure:
well, there we do have to take lessons from what exists in universities today.
All modern universities are designed on the basis of the 19th century,
German model of the modern university.
I'm not sure what they were thinking in Germany in the 19th century
but it must have gone something like this:
so I've got this group of experts
in some particular field over here, and they work really well together;
and then another group of experts in a different field over here;
a third group of experts over here,
so we'll bring them all together, on one field, a campus,
put them next to each other, and we'll see what happens.
Well we found out
So they build these silos around right,
and that more energetic ones built the really tall silos,
so they can throw rocks down on the little silos around them,
and stage raiding parties at night to steal their resources,
these are called departments in universities.
And they're populated by PhD's.
Now, the process of getting a PhD
is learning more and more about less and less
until you know absolutely everything about nothing.
(Laughter)
The problem is when you put all these people,
who know the same thing about the same nothing together,
there is not a lot of motivation for them to interact with each other
except to steal the other guy's resources.
So the first organizing principle of our institution is no departments.
And we built it into the concrete,
by building a circular academic building,
so there is no edges and boundaries,
and by assigning the offices to the faculty by lottery.
So a mathematician sits next to a music professor
who sits next to an economist; who sits next to a neuroscientist;
who sits next to a philosopher;
and on the other side, there is a poet and a physicist.
And guess what?
When you choose carefully, these people
who went through that funnel of learning more and more about less and less,
remember they like academia in the first place
and that's because they like learning new things,
and they come out the other side,
and you end up with our enumerate music professor,
and our tone-deaf mathematician,
collaborating on a course called: the mathematics of music.
Where in the classroom they're modeling learning for the students
because they're actually learning.
We furthermore think the hierarchies of my five levels and professors
is not particularly helpful,
so we have no faculty ranks.
And everyone, including myself,
has exactly the same size office and teaches exactly the same amount;
teaches the same set of courses
for first-year students through fourth year students.
Also, since we don't do what I'm doing here,
we don't engage in this demonstrably ineffective mode of communication
called lecturing;
we don't profess, so we don't call ourselves professors;
we actually teach, so we call ourselves tutors.
And we build into the classroom,
the kind of environment, for which our brains have evolved,
which is two way communication.
So we have no lecture hall on the campus at all,
every classroom is an oval seminar table with 21 chairs around it,
never more than 21, so one faculty member and 20 students.
In the case of the mathematics of music, two faculty members and 18 students.
This changes a lot.
But then there is the curriculum what would we teach.
Those of us involved in founding this university are very devoted
to the notion of the liberal arts and sciences curriculum.
Liberal comes from libre, which means free.
It's what free people do;
they think about subjects,
and they think about them across the spectrum.
And so the curriculum we designed involves the faculty.
Over the first two years of the student's education,
specifying what they will do, they will all take mathematics;
they will all take biology; they will all take poetry;
they will all take economics;
they will take a set of 16 courses
in broad disciplines and interdisciplinary in nature,
which will open their minds to the intellectual tools,
the different disciplines have developed,
so they can synthesize those tools
into a way of addressing the complex problems,
which are not going to be solved from a disciplinary perspective.
But then, we think it's time having equipped them with these tools
to turn their education over to them.
And so near the end of the second year, 15 students in every group,
get together with a faculty member and spend an entire month,
developing an individualized question,
something about which they want to know, a question about the world;
and in developing this question, they find a mentor, a single faculty member,
with whom they're going to work for the next two and a half years.
They define a set of books, seminal works they're going to read
with that faculty member and discuss to understand the basis of the field.
They select a set of courses that's going to help inform their question;
they define an experiential learning component,
which is required of all students to go out
into the real world, into a research laboratory,
into a K-12 classroom, into a NGO in Kenya,
into a local community organization, into a government office
to see how the real world functions
when dealing with issues related to the question the student has.
At the end of their four years, they do a project
that doesn't necessarily answer the question,
some of them are very broad.
But arise out of the question and produce a document,
which, having seen many masters thesis in Ivy League Universities,
exceeds them almost every time,
and then presents to the entire university
the product of their undergraduate education.
That's three. Four was how do we deliver this?
And here, we borrowed shamelessly from Colorado College.
And we decided to confront
this neurophysical nonsense of multitasking head on.
Your prefrontal cortex does not multitask.
It does one thing at a time,
unlike your laptop which has 4-cores and could do 4 things at a time,
your prefrontal cortex can only do one, which is why driving, talking, and texting
on the phone together is good for the gene pool
because you will die and be removed,
(Laughter)
we won't have to worry about this multitasking 50 years in the future.
So what we do rather than have students
take 4, or 5, or 6 classes at a time, which means they devote a few minutes,
or maybe if you're lucky, a few hours a week to each class,
and you as the tutor, gets to see them 75 minutes twice a week,
the students take 4 courses in the semester,
but they take them in series rather than in parallel,
what we call blocks.
You walk in the classroom, and you have nothing else to do for the month,
and the students have nothing else to do for the month.
So if you want to go on a field trip,
don't worry about getting back timely for their chemistry lab this afternoon;
or the fact they have an English paper due the next day,
because they don't; they're yours.
I'm an astronomer - if I want to keep them up all night
for 18 hours, not a problem.
Because that's all they're doing is astronomy.
If you want to teach them international economic development,
you could do that in a classroom in BC, out of a textbook;
or send them to Belize for three and a half weeks
and teach the course there.
That's the mode we operate in. It's called block system.
And every academic I've spoken to about it, says:
I see how that would work in your field, but it won't work in my field.
Everyone except the 40 tutors at Quest,
none of whom will ever go back to teaching any other way,
because this is so extraordinarily effective.
And I'll give you one example, because I only have two minutes left,
rather than the hundred that I could.
Every student at Quest in their first year has to take a math course.
But the point of it and all of the foundation courses
is not to pour knowledge from the full vessel to the empty one;
not to gain a set of facts,
which you can find easily on Google as my students so eloquently said,
but it is to show by example
how a mathematician asks questions about the world
and goes about trying to answer them.
And how a philosopher does that; and how a poet does that;
and how a physicist does that.
So they can accumulate those tools and apply them to their unique interests.
So everyone takes a math class
and one of the math classes is spherical trigonometry.
How many people have had spherical trigonometry?
That's what I thought
because it's not taught at any university in North America except ours.
And the reason it's taught there
is because our math tutor, a remarkable pedagogue,
loves spherical trigonometry.
His book came out with Princeton University Press
two months ago on spherical trigonometry.
This was a huge development in the 19th century,
because, after all, we do live on a sphere.
It turns out trigonometry is different on a sphere,
so your GPS would not work at all unless it know spherical trigonometry;
therefore, you don't have to;
but in the 19th century, it was important for navigation and for surveying.
So Glenn teaches spherical trigonometry and this class becomes a cult.
They get these Lucite spheres, so they can draw,
carry them around like pet rock, take to the cafeteria,
show their friends how to do this trigonometry.
Two Decembers ago, a remarkable thing happened.
Glenn has taught this class in three universities,
six or seven other times.
He had a group of 18 first year students, in their 4th month of university.
None of them were going to be math majors, we don't have math majors or departments;
nonetheless, none of them were particularly interested in math,
just this course has a reputation, so the kids all signed up for it.
And on the 9th day of class, Glenn presented a theorem,
first published in 1807, reproduced in every textbook ever since,
and in his forthcoming book at that time with Princeton University Press.
And by the end of the three-hour class,
the students had found a logical flaw in the proof
that had escaped mathematicians for 200 years,
which meant Glenn had to withdraw his galley-proof, fix it,
and acknowledge his class in the acknowledgements
for having advanced the field of spherical trigonometry
as a bunch of first year, non math major students.
That's the level of analytic ability one can cultivate,
that's the level of engagement one gets in this regard.
It's actually I must confess, not a completely original idea.
2,500 years ago,
Confucius summed it up, succinctly as usual.
Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I'll remember,
involve me and I'll understand.
Tell me and I'll forget: the model of the modern university lecture.
And the ultra-modern MOOC even better.
Show me and I'll remember:
I don't think he had glitzy PowerPoint presentations in mind there,
but maybe he did.
Involve me, involve me
in an environment enriched by a contrasting cultural perspectives;
enabled by the ability to draw tools from multiple intellectual disciplines;
and facilitated by effective and persuasive communication,
and I will understand.
Involve me in a setting where lateral thinking is rewarded
where collaboration rather than competition is celebrated
and where failure is understood to be essential on the road to success.
Involve me and I will understand.
So to educate, that's the only goal we have at our university.
To open up young minds, and lead them forth
so they have the tools, the capacity, the will, the grit
to confront and to conquer the daunting challenges
this new millennium presents.
Thank you.
(Applause)