Harvard inaugurates its Initiative for Learning and Teaching

ON ONE HAND:

The good news is that Harvard is beginning to play a public leadership role in increasing student learning! The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) had its inaugural event, a symposium, on February 3. HILT was founded as the result of a generous $40M gift from Harvard alumni Gustave and Rita Hauser. The invitation only event brought in several outside luminaries with considerable expertise in learning, such as Physics Nobel Laureate Carl Weiman, and around 300 people from the Harvard community including Harvard's own luminary in the field, Eric Mazur.

The poor state of undergraduate student learning over all has been chronicled in many books and studies (see an earlier discussion here).  One of the most readable of these books was written by Harvard's own Derek Bok - Our Underachieving Colleges, so the issues are not unfamiliar at Harvard itself. As Bok (and many others) pointed out, the problem is not that there aren't many well documented ways to greatly increase student learning, it is that these methods have not been adopted widely by colleges. The powerful forces of the status quo have dominated teaching and learning.  

Harvard's Clayton Christensen (also at the symposium) and BYU-Idaho's Henry Eyring (CE) recently published The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. In it, they focused on the development of Harvard over the centuries to show how the evolution of colleges from small local entities to huge research universities produced changes both positive and negative for society and the students themselves. Among the changes was that student learning played a ever decreasing role in the reward systems of the institutions. Thus, the learning (or lack-of-learning) results described by Bok and others becomes an understandable outcome of the growth of the research university.

CE argue that most institutions are, at their own level, seeking to emulate Harvard in ways that they can. While CE's focus on the uniqueness of Harvard as a role model might be considered to be a bit overdone, it is nevertheless true that the research universities are at the very pinnacle of the higher education prestige ladder, and of course, Harvard is certainly to be found in the very top echelon of the research universities. It is not unexpected that many, if not most, institutions have an understandable desire to move up the prestige ladder, thus, indeed, becoming more "Harvard-like".

So Harvard is certainly a very visible, very important role model in higher education. While it cannot dictate change in higher education, it certainly provides a fantastic bully pulpit from which to promote an important point of view.  And significantly increasing student learning is of critical importance in this time of globalization and change. Thus the "better learning" movement has to cheer the appearance of Harvard on the stage with HILT. 

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND:

There is a downside, however. As CE argue, teaching and research actually are carried out following very different business models.  Research shows that organizations that run multiple business models simultaneously incur very significant overhead due to the complexity of balancing those models. CE argue that much of the high cost of higher education can be traced to the multiple-business-model nature of the business, and the resulting high overhead. 

More negative than the high cost, in many ways, is the reality that if multiple business models are carried out together, the resulting constraints imply that no one of the business models can be optimized.  In the research university (e.g. Harvard), the research business model is optimized as much as possible within the constraints, meaning that the teaching business model is greatly suboptimized. Or to put it into a more concrete articulation, for a faculty member, doing research conflicts with teaching, and the system rewards doing research most highly. Thus teaching (and learning) will naturally suffer, and this will be particularly so if doing teaching more effectively requires that the faculty member consecrate additional time and energy to learning a new field (pedagogy).  

So this new Initiative suggests increasing the optimization of the teaching component somewhat - which almost certainly will decrease the optimization of the research component.  At the simplest level, if the faculty member spends more time and effort on teaching, less will be spent on research. Some faculty will undoubtedly suggest that they can maintain research levels if they have lowered teaching loads reflecting the additional time requirements for learning new approaches (which are often more challenging for the professor than the old, if truth be told). This will mean that cost/student for the students they teach will go up, thus increasing upward pressure on tuition - another no-no. Former Tufts President and now member of the Harvard Corporation Lawrence Bacow summarized this box well at the symposium:

All ways of improving the teaching/learning environment will only add costs to our system. That can’t go on forever. These things come to an end and usually it’s not pretty.

It may well be that Harvard is rich enough to find a way to thread this needle - maintain  its high research profile, increase learning outcomes, and control costs - without making any major changes in approach. But for most institutions, this needle will only be threaded through major changes that address the very high costs of the multiple simultaneous business models and the current lack of significant economies of scale. 

So the danger is that Harvard is taking up a leadership role in increasing learning - and offering a model that only it can afford.