Ask and you shall learn

What should administrators do about the nightmare of not having first-year students in 2016 and 2017?

Let me explain the first step towards a solution by using two arguments.

First, let me use an analogy, inexact though it may be.

Suppose you are having serious problems with your marriage. What should you do? Should you ask all your married friends what to do? Should you go to a counselor to ask for advice? Should you surf the Web for ideas? Should you go on retreat?

You could do all of that, but the first thing you should do, as your friends, your counselor, the Web, and your meditations will tell you, is to talk to your spouse.

Second, let us look at the world today.

There is a fresh spirit animating our world today, what Germans call the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time).

It is the spirit that drives social networking, as well as television shows such as “American Idol.”

It spawned “crowdsourcing,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.”

It gave birth to the World Readers Award, sponsored by the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators Association (whose annual meeting I attended in Singapore last week). Online readers vote for the book that will win an automatic contract from Penguin Books.

For school administrators faced with the problem of having no freshmen in 2016 and 2017, the Zeitgeist is the key to solving the nightmare.

Administrators (not all, but many) tend to try to solve administrative problems all by themselves. This is understandable and even apparently logical. Administrators administrate, teachers teach, students study, staff do staff work. There seems to be no reason to disrupt this division of labor which worked well in the past.

Except for the enormity of the nightmare. Except for the Zeitgeist.

Traditional roles are being set aside or at least expanded. Borders are being crossed. Disciplines are being (as we say in the criticism trade) “deconstructed.”

Teachers and students today, in teaching-learning paradigms such as Teacher-Less Classrooms, Massive Open Online Courses, and Flipped Classrooms, are not hewing closely to their expected roles. Even in the K to 12 curriculum, teachers are no longer seen as repositories of knowledge, but as facilitators, in an age when even young children can find information by themselves on their smart cellphones.

Staff (academic and non-academic) nowadays often take advanced degrees, become crucial partners in teaching (especially in libraries, laboratories, and counseling rooms), and themselves become part of administration (for example, in deciding who should get access to a president or a dean).

Editing a scholarly journal, once regarded as merely a minor task and even an inconvenience for professors, has taken on a key role in universities: by deciding whether or not to accept articles for publication, journal editors now hold the academic careers of professors in their hands.

Administrators must realize that they no longer have the sole duty, nor the sole responsibility, to manage their universities. Administrators have to take the term “stakeholders” literally: teachers and staff members have as much stake in their schools as they do.

The British poet Alexander Pope had sound advice to everyone, not only administrators. “Be not the first by whom the new are tried,” he wrote, “Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

There is no danger to being the first by whom the new are tried, because “American Idol” with its philosophy that the public should decide who should win a talent search has been around for a while.

There is, however, a danger that administrators will be the last to lay the old aside.

The old is simply the instinct of administrators (not all, but many) not to consult the persons most affected by any change in educational or school policy.

The first thing to do, then, if you are an administrator facing the nightmare of 2016, is to consult the teachers in your school who will be most affected by the crisis of 2016. I am talking of your teachers who teach General Education (GE) subjects.

The problem is too big for you or for any administrator to solve alone. Your teachers are your greatest resource. Presumably, they are intelligent and articulate (if you chose dumb and incompetent teachers, you really should not be an administrator!). Moreover, they have the advantage of having a vested interest in the project. You may be worried about your current account; they are worried about their future.

Allow the teachers to brainstorm about the problem. Let them come up with solutions that are applicable to your school. There is no “one size fits all” solution. Every school needs to see what can be done using its strengths and recognizing its weaknesses.

The first step in solving the problem of 2016, then, is for administrators to ask help from their faculty.

There are people who are better than administrators at solving the problem of 2016. They are called teachers. (Next week: The next step)