The library. We are fortunate indeed to have professor Cathy Davidson with us this evening the author of a critically important book, the new education how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux. Kathys distinguished professor at thprofessorat the graduate Cr University of new york and director of the future initiatives program. Prior to joining the faculty she held a professorship and was a Vice President for Interdisciplinary Studies at duke university. She is the author or editor of more than 20 books, the cofounder and director of the worlds first academic social network and serves on the board of the corporation. The developer as you probably know as the web browser and underwriter open Source Developers and appointed by president obama to the National Council and was a 2016 recipients of the award for significant contributions to Higher Education. All that yo of that you probablw and in any case you can read it in your program should you wish to refresh your memory. Whats more important to understand about the work is the range, its measure, its consequence. I loathe the word transformative, a qualifier that has been emptied of meaning by frequent misuse and its except when im speaking to my grandson about robots that turn into trucks were dinosaurs or when im refusing to take him to a michael bay movie is as close to religion as i get. I note this biased intensity of my admiration for the work when i described it as transformati transformative. Hearing that term in its literal sense writing the change in the way we think i see and believe alters the perception of the subject in a lasting and fundamental fashion. She is i would contend and aircraft a ricanaircraft the rif the american pragmatism, a cast of mine whose roots extend and run through the way of what they have in common is a distrust of settled belief and its what happens to an idea, dialect is the driver of a successful process. Certainly the new education falls within the rubric. Its a book that historicizing current state of american Higher Education. It is the landscape of emerging points of duration and imagines a rich future grounded and what if. But the descriptive transformative applies to most of the work at the rise of the novel in america al old in the field of the literary studies in the way that only a small handful of books have ever done on account of the teaching in japan and the way we encounter pedestrians and opportunities for self invention was in the life and death of an American Factory taught us to see the lives of tragedies and for the future of thinking and now you see it in very Different Things to change this tochange the waye live, work and learn in the digital age and in short Cathy Davidson is an indispensable mind, a scholar whose demand our attention and gratitude and accounted a privilege and a joy to be in conversation with about the new education. She and i will converse for 40 minutes, 45 minutes or so depending upon how selfish i feel and then open up the floor to questions. At the conclusion of the program, kathy will be signing books outside of the room. I recommend it to you with a great enthusiasm. So let me move over to sit next to cathy. [applause] and i didnt fall. Good evening. Thank you so much for being with us. Im so embarrassed its hard to hear about oneself but its nice to hear from somebody that you admire so much. Let me begin with where you begin in this wonderful book by aligning College Football great requests. We have a long runway for the text. You make that alignment on the basis of an obstacle to overco overcome. You write of students first going to college and then graduate leaving to enter the world workforce. Are these new dragons the students encounter with the same that you and i and our friends in the room experience fo expert some of them anyway . I think its a little of both. Some of them are just growing up and they are big enough growing from being dependent on your family and being a minor to feeling like you should support yourself and be a productive and responsible citizen of the world. That is a formidable challenge for all of us. Some manage to go through it gracefully. I dont know about all of you here but it is a formidable challenge and i think people today it is even more formidable than when we went to school. Our schools have become regimes of standardized testing that prepares you for nothing but doing well on standardized tests. The stress we put kids and are at an early age we told them they have to start preparing for the best schools for those that wait is over if they dont get into the top schools and for top performers. Some recruited as child abuse in dc at in University Budgets being used on healthcare and medical care and Mental Health care for young people who are anxious and worried and sure that they are going to be failures in the world. At the same time clearly we have done terrible things. If you are complaining about the tuition that you are havin youo pay for your child now and especially in public education. In a different generation we have gifts given as a gift that our children dont have since they are graduating with tuition debt. If you are graduating with tuition debt you have to be worried and you have to be making different choices about what you study and how. And if you feel like you are graduating debtfree so theres different burdens theyve put on kids today and i think it is quite formidable tool for generations to come out after it. Kids have been given a raw deal and we have to change that. Let me use your own language to amplify what you just said. You write pundits are plain wrong about this generation and google hasnt named them. Their iphone still make him lonely, Child College hasnt made them passive, they want to learn about the world and do a better job addressing major world problems. You ask questions and say how can they publish the goals and how can we train them to succeed in the world changes so fast that no one can predict what will happen next. In some ways is that not the heart of this book trying to imagine an education that does better by its students then to prepare them to deal with the dragons you just described. And so many of the Solutions People have proposed that we must inform education. Some of the solutions have been moth commonsensical their stupid. There was a time when i talk about Thomas Friedman in the book one of the great journalists saying the massive growth in Online Education where you take that he was a famous professors will end poverty. Thats crazy. Who believes it can solve the problems of the world are thinking we focus on skills to make sure every child is just interested in the group. For some its great. Science Technology Engineering and math but for others it is a nightmare. Because of the problem and it isnt the solution. And its not the way they think of science as something that has nothing to do with humanity. It has nothing to do with what matters and i think it is insulting to science but think that you can get away with this as many states are trying to do all this social, political, cultural aspects that allow science to be adopted or as we know it, climate deniers deny it. Those are cultural issues not just scientific. Let me take a step back if i may before we talk about the kind of solutions that deal with this. One of the things that appeals to me the most about this book and i alluded to this in the introduction is the capacity to store size, to recognize education as culture not nature. Its when something of Higher Education is somehow timeless and connected. But what you argue is the modern Research University world in which those of us in education live or have lived is a relatively new organization that arises in the United States and has roots in berlin and europe but it rises in the u. S. And when you put a date to that in which things change you open up the possibility of imagining a different type of Higher Education. Could you tell us a bit of what you argue in the book about the history of american Higher Education and the elements we take for granted about it that are early innovations that came to us in the late 19th century, early 20th century. Th the cliche is it hasnt changed, and therefore it cant change. Plus i love about working in the detail, looking at the archives to find out that the young president of harvard who went on to rule to preside over. What is so great is to see how much detail and how much hes looking at the infrastructure of college and changing all of it. I have a long laundry list of things that did not exist and then did exist between 1865 and 1925 and its anything from graduate school, professional school, electives, school choice, paying salaries for faculty. Before that were thought to have a trust fund so if you are at harborview for both enough you didnt really need your salary. Admissions exams. A long list of things are today. They also invented the accreditation system by which the universities today are still ranked so even though it doesnt have a national system, it still puts up an infrastructure in place and every colleges ranked according to that. That makes sense. Each has a different obligation that they are competing within the shadows of what a Great University that has an endowment so big if it were a gdp that would be the 18th largest in the world. How can a tiny college or University Keep people out and why should it. Theres so many different kinds of ways of being a student and some are being told only a figure to harvard or mit or stanford will they succeed in the world. Theres so many ways to succeed in the puddles and thats terrible to make them onesizefitsall were to make the university. If in fact being at the top is the impulse for the university from some high place from the u. S. News and world report ranking distorts the way which colleges operate for it to be possible to think about ways of education outside. Let me take you back for a moment. You pick the title of your book from an influential article in the atlantic in 1869 called the new education and its a kind of double figure in this book. On the one hand the author of a system that you find destructive for students and faculty on the other theres a strong admiration for his ability to change the. Why did you choose to name the book after this 1869 essay that Charles Elliott wrote in the atlantic . It would be dishonest to say that i had that title in mind. I probably have 20 different titles but that one struck me because i do believe we need a new education for the world we are in right now. So, eliot though was a College Professor teaching at harvard and was a theoretical chemist. He didnt want to be a practical chemist he wanted and his father lost everything in the panic of 57 to the first big Global Financial crisis and eliot thought he would have to go into business and then his grandfather died and he got a little bit of a trust fund and many people in the 18th 57 blamed the crisis on poor american education. They said that america lead the world and morse code was transmitting information faster than anyone could handle what was going on economically as one Financial Market after another collapse is and they said americans are naive and had become technocrats. They have become giddy with at their own power that has a system to train you to be a minister so le is believed that and he wanted to find out how european education changed and he came back to the United States and tried to figure out what would work in america at the time. Now i dont exactly love the people that were his novels but they were the support theorists at the time, so in standardized testing, standard deviation we are talking about the cousin of darwin. He also invented the bell curve and believed british aristocrats should be paid to reproduce and people should be sterilized. The position that many of the founders of the system believed in. They called it moving forward from that the meritocracy but its deeply rooted in class assumptions about who can come is entitled to run the country. When he takes the presidency of harvard and 3 at 35yearsola great surprise you to pretend this kind of an attack it speaks well for the Harvard Corporation to take this chance. The inaugural address features a line in which you said the question isnt what you teach but how. The same question that we are asking. That is one of my questions still. Its not only valid but still more valid now. The typical seminar method where we know who speaks in a seminar room very much replicates the various hierarchies in society that so many progressives do believe in the era and one of the things i advocate is a method of learning where every student is a researcher and is pushed to be curious and follow their ideas and to think about how knowledge comes together in complex ways that were perfect in the 1890s. One of the points you make about this model and education is that he is training students not to the ministers by preparing them to take positions in management. You talk about it as a kind of conspicuous consumption. Whats different about training students for jobs in a technological world then training them for jobs in a world that is still primarily agricultural and industrial . What is different about what the new Education Needs to do for students now than what education needed to do in this day . He is basically creating the infrastructure, the educational infrastructure for the new professional managerial class, professional managerial class running of institutions, new corporations, new professions. Almost all of those have been disrupted in pretty graphic ways in the last 20 years by technology so the professions that people were sure could never be automated are now being turned upside down. And an education that would simply prepare you for a career might get you a first job but it might also be hopelessly obsolete ten years from now. Think about Something Like taxi drivers. Nobody would ever think that coming up now and you cant go near any taxi in new york without somebody talking about not Just Technology but the whole rearrangement of human labor and changed. Another Bonus Service workers. You go to cvs and you dont need nearly the personnel before because the checkout is automated. Many occupations are not only automated the they are terribly resource. When an men by and large statistically are underpaid. Healthcare, bot those are probay under resourced professions. You need a College Degree for this professions and thats not an educational problem, that is a social problem. We have a society thats also so i think students need today not only to learn how to think of how to think critically about the value they are entering. Let me ask a more practical question. If we assume, and i think most people would agree with what youve just said that a first job is just about. It depends on what kind of survey you read that anywhere from seven to 11 jobs and careers how do we train people for the future when we dont know what the future looks like if we dont know what this student is going to do. They wouldve with your argument does is prepare students to succeed in the workplace and by no means are you talking about giving them job specific skills that you talk a little bit about how you think we should be preparing students for this world of constant change and a kind of fluidity in professions and employment. One thing i think that we do a bad job that is giving students the tools not just for imitating or apprenticing an expert but to really understand is a process by which you become an expert yourself and thats a process not just of learning but learning how to learn, figuring out any situation and even to have a return how you know not just content but why something is counted as content. What makes a good argument. What makes up a good way of responding to any situation, whether its in technology or as a taxi driver what kind of things allows you to think about okay i went out to get here but it no longer exists. How do i take my own confidence and ability to learn and use that to apply to something also some people talk about it as Lifelong Learning because it is constantly being able to take a look at ones own habits and assumptions. We are in a system to standardize as waythatstandardig that makes that even harder. What gives you five choices and you come up with a possible answer no one lives their life that they. None of the above. [laughter] are we allowed to say i taught a class here . Certainly. In the research here i said i know youre writing a book but how would you like to teach the craziest class ever talked and i was brought here to start this program and i am the president emeritus of the university of. We came back 45 minutes later and they said what happens now, go away. We came back five minutes later and what we have done is to post a note with a schedule. It is a class everything from Computer Sciences to the speech and ideology. It was a wide range of students. What they figured out is how to Work Together in the group and divide and come up with important topics to do so they came up with experiments in learning and then whether it was an undergraduate i go of feedbak and invented a tool for the 365 students and candidate but talk to each other about what was working and not working as an incredible experience and i dont think you ever forget th that. They gave up their power and let you create a class and created certainly one of the best classes ive seen. In the time in which expertise is being challenged on everything from Climate Change to fake news to the media and so forth, at one point you in the race. If the pedagogy that leads to a kind of relativism that disavows expertise and simply says it certainly can happen in the class you were describing that it gets amateurs and experts and becomes a positive w. And in a moment in which that is a fairly fraught position. I wont say that every professor but does a form of active learning defeated the problem and students were more rigorous and demanding, more determined to get it right you also know a lot about content and how poor we are at retaining content. I wont say the name of the university that the most prestigious schools in the country three years ago did a horrible thing to the students. In september 1 year they gave every student at the schools the final exam that those students had taken so when you took a geology exam you took the same geology test that you took him may. The average grade depending upon the 90 or 92 , the average grade in september can anyone guess what os. Not even borderline. If i were at that school the sd say the biggest lesson theyve learned is that when they have a challenge they are a student saia studentsaid that as a life. It turns from memorizing content to say if i have a challenge what are the things i need to do to be able to make that challenge going back to do eight to 10 . Its replicated over and over again we tend to remember in the class we dont have a test about eight to 10 into the person that has a class versus the one who didnt with all kind of factors woven into that but we tend as learners t take what we want to know, build on that and become more and more expert not oexperts noton everything wevet some strand or thread through learning to make it into a strong rope thats going to be something you can climb up the rest of your life. Describthe scrape of a student d learning is. It is the fault, the argument of this book and im not sure abo about. What do you mean when you talk about student centered learning . It might be either Credential Center of learning were by that i mean its a final exam that is Traditional Center of learning but we were preparing students not just for the final exam but take all the able learn and have that at their disposal to other it is in there life beyond you are thinking about the focal point of what can this do for the student so the selectivity can be the top 4 and also she says i have a much higher job than stanford or harvard and when you think about that, her job is to take any student from where they are and constantly say i got in everybody who now has three kids coming back to school for the first tim time ad held why take them wherever they are so that is the student centered ms. So they could be a productive member of society. They are one of the big heroes and the book. Every university and professor can learn from the Community Colleges. Going back to elliott, a professor at a recent University Never learned anything about learning. Their job was to learn their specialization and emulate them. I never do the research and i would say there is only a handful of us. Two steps today, d . I mean, what a way to kill motivation and learning. If you are learning tennis or yoga you are learning by constant formative feedback to score in private and you are either ashamed or proud and then its over. Come back in september where we now know from this very fancy school but you never do that because you are not destined to. So, for example, a mathematician but teaches at Arizona State is a director of the program it the new media. He takes firstyear students every year and give its been ah problem to solve. One year it was life wa with quality like when there is no more water. Think about that. That is a question of ecology, hydraulic science, class and race, culture. Its everything. So his students Work Together to come up with a paradigm for how to solve really complex problems but also problems that are about their life. You probably think about what life will be like when there is no water because you are close to that. The example you just offered, one of the terrific things about this book is rather than offering pronouncements of platitudes and how to change education is that it offers examples of for various teachers, schools from exercises and Community Colleges to that unique institutions and everything in between. Each chapter offers some of the examples youve just given. One class you talked about as another. My question is scalability that gets asked. And a lot of the examples you provide our Interdisciplinary Studies and programs that dont generally hire their own faculty that exist in some marginalized way at universities, colleges, program that takes place in the Senior Citizens home. What is your thinking about how these extraordinary examples of student centered learning have far Better Outcomes how does that become scalable at the time in which american Higher Education, particularly in the Public Sector mor of more than of the students go to college, attend college at public universities and they are all under massive stress and more than half the teachers that are now teaching at the colleges and universities are parttime instructors and out jumped. How did you move from these particular examples to scale these examples up. First i made sure of my examples. Many are from universities that are incredibly stretched. Stretched. That is just appalling. There is one part californias promispromised that says if evey middleclass person in california paid 39 more each year in taxes and is dedicated to the University College system, the whole california system we could be returning to 1980s levels of support which would almost be free tuition, non adjunct faculty so its a small individual investment for a massive social good so thats one thing. Number two, this is like one of the few situations ive been in where i havent done a thing to pair share where it is an experiment i teach in a class i did once with 6,000 International Baccalaureate teachers to show how a very simple exercise that allows every person to have a voice already changes so that youre actually processing the hearing. At the end of every class he has the students write out on an index card and sign their name what is the one thing we talked about in this class lecture. Its like a pop quiz that tells the students you are not just a body in the room you are a human in this room but happens to be a student then he rolls out these cards in the figures of his lecture for the next time and the first with the students contributed. That is a lowcost way of changing the paradigm and we could have done that if the situation had been a little different today. Have people peertopeer to talk about what youre going to do in an educational setting to change the classroom the next six months and i have people write down their email address and promise they will email each other to make sure theyve done that. It seems trivial but it changes the way the students represent them in the class. Its those that feel entitled to speak in a classroom. People of color, immigrant students, whose english isnt as good, continence disabilities, shy people, these are inventory methods that says every person in this room deserves to be there, no poker. 100 of you deserve to be here and you are all going to get an education, thats another one of those things that is a life lesson and contributes to an idea of citizenship in the world. Not im getting mine but you are not getting yours. Let me follow on that. The underfunding of education, bifurcation, economic inequality, all those things we think about all the time. If in fact the goal isnt simply to change individual teaching techniques to provide that level of respect but to think about the ways in which we return to education as a public good rather than a private investment you talk about the g. I. Bill as an investment in the future but the larger civic good of the United States. We lost our way with that and then education becomes a matter of private investment you will benefit with a higher salary but this isnt an obligation. Its consistent with an aging obligation and security and health care in a systematic the funding of public education. We know this but whats the line of argument we make . Theres this famous thing where they say michigan was a State University that became a statesupported university than a state assisted universit univn the state located university and state molested university. [laughter] and that argues he always got a good laugh out of that but it made a good point. Its a manifesto for change