Designing the New American University

Abstract

Designing the New American University CROW, M. M., AND W. B. DABARS. 2015. BALTIMORE, MD: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS. 344 PP.In Designing the New American University, authors Crow and Dabars examine the scope and complexity of research institutions in the United States and explore the dilemmas and challenges these institutions face in serving the needs of 21st century learners. The authors envision the New American University as "a complex and adaptive comprehensive knowledge enterprise committed to discovery, creativity, and innovation, accessible to the broadest possible demographic, both socioeconomically and intellectually" (viii).Consistent with institutional design efforts articulated by Lombardi (2013), Crow and Dabars question whether education reform can better be achieved by strengthening elements of the existing system or by declaring the system to be fundamentally unsound and replacing it with a different type of learning organization. Ultimately, the authors suggest that a compromise may be possible and propose reconfiguring the existing organization while rethinking its current practices.With this compromise as the framework, the authors use the term "New American University" to describe a broad set of concepts that may apply to the approximately 200 private and public U.s. institutions that are classified as either RU/vh (research university/very high research activity) or RU/H (research university/high research activity) (Carnegie n.d.). According to Crow and Dabars, the New American University is intended to complement rather than replace the current model of U.s. research institutions.Historical BackgroundUnlike the first three-quarters of the 20th century, which saw massive investments and growth in higher education in the United States as well as widely shared prosperity and increases in the standard of living for most Americans, the 21st century has been marked by a widening gap in postsecondary education attainment by socioeconomic status. Comparable to findings by Mettler (2014), Crow and Dabars state:Despite the conventional wisdom that America is a classless society and represents the promise of boundless opportunity for those willing to work hard and sacrifice, stark inequalities in opportunities grounded in socioeconomic disadvantage based on family income and the educational attainment of parents increasingly remain a barrier to intergenerational economic mobility as well as access to higher education (42).The authors note further that socioeconomic forces affect not only access but also persistence and graduation rates; this has resulted in "two opposing streams of upwardly mobile college-haves and downwardly mobile college-have-nots" (54).According to Crow and Dabars, one of the primary contributors to the problem of accessibility is that the U.s. research university model is entrenched in obsolete institutional design, lacks scalability, and promotes residual elitism (19). Selective research universities have failed to meet the growing demands of an increasingly diverse knowledge-based society because they refuse to build their capacity to educate academically qualified students. Simply stated, research institutions have come to define themselves by whom they exclude in order to retain prestige.The current U.s. education model, they suggest, is rooted in traditions that have become so internalized as to have become invisible. Excessive veneration of tradition has led to isomorphism-"the paradoxical tendency for organizations and institutions within given sectors to emulate one another and become increasingly homogenous" (10). Isomorphism, in turn, has led to institutional obsession with prestige achieved through selectivity and exclusion.Rationale for a New ModelCrow and Dabars state, "Recognition of the limitations imposed by excessive veneration of tradition is the first step toward maximizing the potential of our knowledge enterprises" (118). …