OR: Growing Pains: How to Evolve from a College into a University

And, in particular, how to become a university of which everyone can be proud.

I’ve been pondering this question as I am now at an institution (which I believe has great promise) that is poised to change from being a college with a very good reputation for student satisfaction, to being a undergraduate university with a reputation it must build.

Then there are many faculty who have been at the college a long time. Many of those have chosen to stay at the college because it is what it is. What will it mean to become a university?

There are (primarily) new faculty who have come to the college expressly because it is going to become a university. They have personal research agendas. If they are not given the time, space, and access to the necessary infrastructure to actually do their research, they will not stay. This means that the only people who will stay, are those not interested in doing real research. No amount of branding will be able to change the fact that the institution will retain the culture of a college.

I am one of the new guys on the block, but one who has literally grown up in a university environment (a university that has gone from first-rate, one-to-be-proud-of to third-rate, and one that brings shame to anyone left who still has integrity). This gives me a perspective that may be unique.

One refrain I keep hearing around my institution that is beginning to cause me concern is, \”We have always done it this way…\”, or \”We like to ….\”, \”That’s not how we do things here….\” etc. While it is laudable and useful to be proud of one’s good qualities, there is a potential danger in painting all ‘traditions’ with the same brush. They should be examined from time to time to see if they are still working and still worth keeping. With the shift to university status, it becomes even more important to try and look at these things critically – do they / will they still fit with being a university? Are these things that we (as a college, as opposed to as individual units) cherish or find useful and wish to keep? Will these things also fit with 21st century learners (or will we end up attracting a specific sub-set of the population: namely those that cling to parochial approaches to learning)?

Now, before we go any further I need to say that I IN NO WAY mean to imply that all things must change when a college becomes a university. Some things really really should NOT change. And just because something is ‘traditional’ does not mean it is out-of-date. What I Do mean is that things need to be examined through the lens of becoming-a-university, which must first be shaped by deciding what kind of university one wants to be. In other words, what should its character and culture be?

The focus on teaching at the institution is an important one. It is the other reason I personally chose to work there. Preserving that sentiment will serve, among other things, to distinguish it from the ‘other’ university in town (who makes many claims about how it values students and teaching, but if you ask any student there, or any faculty come annual assessment time, they will tell you how little that institution really cares). However, if the focus is on quality teaching (and I hope on innovation too), then we must move away from the traditional view of teaching that implies that teachers are only really working when they are in front of students. A heavy course load conflicts directly with innovation in course design and development. It is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to bring innovative approaches to teaching into elementary and secondary systems: the teachers simply have no time because most of their time is spent in the classroom. It must be recognized that time for course development counts as teaching, AND, connected to that is the notion that traditional course development (i.e. the usual lecture with slides, assignments from the text, and a midterm & final) does not count in the same way as innovative course development. Providing resources beyond the text, preparing experiences (as opposed to worksheets) is far more time consuming than assigning problems from the text and renovating the same old questions and assignments. Providing innovative course resources for other instructors of the same course also needs to count. This should also be seen as teaching, but it does not count as research.

What are some of the cultural differences between a college and a university? Here is a *very* preliminary comparison of high school, college, and university. I had always thought there was little difference between colleges and universities, but I am discovering that this is not necessarily the case, and that there are many similarities between high school and college. These are, in no small measure, going to represent a huge challenge in the move to a university.

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