The Teagle Liblog

“I just don’t do math.”

“I’m not right-brained enough for that.”

“If I can test out of college algebra, I’ll never have to do math again.”

Those of us who work with incoming students to our colleges and universities hear these kinds of statements all the time. Despite deeply held beliefs and prejudices about mathematical thinking, the appropriate response to all three is that as participants in the world, they have no choice but to “do” math.

Cooking, estimating earned run averages, constructing a fence, or winning a game of poker all require people to “do” math, even when they can’t. Perhaps even more vitally, people can’t make decisions about government, health, and the economy without a sound understanding of statistics and numeric reasoning. Mathematical understanding is a real world skill that can be a barrier to full engagement in the world.

In the thirty-six small private colleges and universities of the Appalachian College Association (ACA), roughly 20 to 30 % of incoming freshman need to take some sort of developmental mathematics in order to be ready for statistics, pre-calculus, or calculus. This is not unusual across the United States; the percentages can rise even higher for public universities. This is despite the fact that most students graduate from high school with at least two years of college algebra.

To deal with the paradox of negative cultural mores about mathematical thinking despite the reality of an ongoing need for mathematically literate individuals, educators talk about the need for Quantitative Literacy, Quantitative Reasoning, and/or Numeracy as an essential skill for all college graduates.

In a forthcoming series of blog entries, ACA campuses that have worked on increasing ease with mathematical competency among their incoming freshmen will talk about some of the challenges and opportunities they pursued with the assistance of funding from the Teagle Foundation. Please feel free to contact me, Irene Burgess at ireneb@acaweb.org if you want further information on details of the projects from Berea College, Bethany College and Emory & Henry College.

A few years back, Bob Connor wrote in this blog about a New Yorker essay that had had a powerful impact upon him -- Atul Gawande’s “Bell Curve.” The essay, which Gawande later included in his collection Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, describes the range of outcomes for centers that treat cystic fibrosis, outcomes measured in life expectancy for their patients. These outcomes fall into a bell-shaped curve, with a few centers at the best and worst ends of the spectrum and the majority falling into the large middle bulge. In 1997, the practical meaning of the curve was that a patient being treated in an average center could expect to live just around thirty years; those at the top center had a life expectancy of forty-six, a gain of over 50%. Gawande’s diagnosis suggests that two essential factors determine whether an institution can move its performance out of the middle range and to the right side of the bell curve: the presence of a transformational leader, and an overarching institutional willingness to commit to doing whatever is necessary to achieve change. Underlying the two factors is a further prerequisite: a readiness to be utterly transparent about one’s outcomes and efforts to improve them.

What intrigued Bob Connor about Gawande’s essay was the questions it posed for higher education: is there a similar bell curve for our institutions? if so, how would it match up with existing rankings, such as those in US News and World Report? and, is it possible for an institution to significantly change its performance? Like Bob, I found this an extraordinary essay when I first encountered it – and indeed I’d heartily recommend Gawande’s book to anyone interested in how organizations can reinvent themselves through a process of improving the basics of practice. Rereading the essay recently, however, I found myself asking some other questions and wondered whether higher education is getting much closer to tackling the issues Gawande describes and whether we are much closer to making the kinds of change for which he calls? Specifically, how fully and how deeply has higher education embraced assessment of its work in the way that cystic fibrosis centers have used it to improve their outcomes?

For me, one of the most educative experiences of the past decade has been the opportunity to serve on teams visiting campuses as part of the accreditation process – it’s a marvelous opportunity to plunge deep into another institution, explore its processes and culture, and learn how, in ways both like and unlike one’s home institution, it goes about trying to accomplish goals of liberal learning. On every visit, assessment has emerged as a significant issue and prompted a range of questions for the team: why has this institution not really begun to assess student learning? Why did that campus respond so well to the report of the last visiting team, do good initial work with developing assessment measures, and then lose impetus a few years later? How can any institution engage in assessment in a way that helps it become something that faculty and staff find meaningful and even essential to their own fundamental work with students? And last but not least, what can be done to help college presidents move from seeing assessment as a hurdle to be got over rather than an opportunity to help them shape their institution? Time and again, one or more of these questions takes shape as the team learns during its visit, through the accumulation of individual conversations, just where the campus culture truly stands on developing its understanding of student outcomes. Moreover, just as Gawande found with hospitals, perceived institutional quality provides no guarantee of success: last year, by luck of the draw, I had the opportunity to be on three teams visiting institutions ranked among in the top 15 national liberal arts colleges by US News. In each case, the campus was facing significant challenges around assessment and, above all, still clearly needed to be persuaded that assessment could be intrinsically valuable rather than merely an externally imposed requirement.

A significant part of the challenge, in both medicine and higher education, lies in fundamental issues of organizational culture. When Gawande visited the top-ranked center for treating cystic fibrosis, Fairview-University Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis, he found those factors he saw as essential to improving outcomes: charismatic leadership, overarching institutional commitment, and transparency. However, he also saw “a degree of uniformity that clinicians usually find intolerable” and, what one doctor described as the director’s absence of “collegial respect for different care plans.” To improve outcomes in higher education our most daunting challenge may well be neither the accrediting agencies nor the US Department of Education, but, rather, something that is also the source of our greatest strength: the intellectual diversity and mandate to explore one’s field that we tend to encode into the concept of academic freedom. For it is precisely that commitment to intellectual diversity and the emphasis it has long placed upon individual faculty autonomy that has made it such a challenge to persuade faculty members to look beyond their own courses, see the value of assessing students as a cumulative product of all their educational experiences within the curriculum, and work together to develop such assessments.

How do things get better, then? As a modest proposal, let me suggest the value of separating assessment out of the context of accreditation and linking it instead to that transformational leadership Gawande saw as essential to creating change in the hospitals he visited. College presidents, who are so often called to make declarative statements about the quality of learning on their campuses, are also those best positioned to ask the most fundamental questions about identity and mission and the extent to which the institutions they are stewarding are, in fact, accomplishing their claims. Moreover, and especially on small campuses, it is they who are best placed to exercise the kind of leverage that is ultimately needed to reshape institutional cultures and to conduct the tricky business of persuading the faculty to take on a task that potentially calls for a working in very new ways. In difficult economic times and just two weeks before the peak of this year’s admissions cycle, the challenge of creating a true culture of assessment may well not be the most pressing issue on a president’s mind, but what will best serve their institutions best in the longer term? Just as the treatment of cystic fibrosis shows what could be gained when the resistance to developing and sharing common sets of outcomes data was overcome, so too liberal learning will ultimately be all the stronger for campus leaders who commit to understanding, and disclosing, what truly happens to students on our campuses.





Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.

Having quoted Harriet Martineau’s somewhat gloomy prognosis for Harvard College in the mid-1830s last week, let me begin this week’s post with a more positive vision from Cambridge. We have, after all, come a long way from a time when a woman with Martineau’s extraordinary gifts had no access to institutions of higher education, and a fine example of how much things have changed is to be found in Harvard’s 2007 appointment of its first female president. In her installation address that October, Drew Gilpin Faust offered a moving definition of just how important education has been to America’s ongoing process of national self-definition:

From the time of its founding, the United States has tied its national identity to the power of education. We have long turned to education to prepare our citizens for the political equality fundamental to our national self-definition. In 1779, for example, Thomas Jefferson called for a national aristocracy of talent, chosen “without regard to wealth, birth, or other accidental condition or circumstance” and “rendered by liberal education ... able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow-citizens.” As our economy has become more complex, more tied to specialized knowledge, education has become more crucial to social and economic mobility. W.E.B. DuBois observed in 1903 that “Education and work are the levers to lift up a people.” Education makes the promise of America possible.*

The past half century offers abundant evidence to support these claims. Think, for example, of the enormous broadening of access to higher education that the G.I. Bill gave to millions of Americans after World War II, the expansion of the community college system and the educational access it has given to non-traditional populations, or the opening up of elite colleges first to select women and later to students from a wider range of economic classes and ethnic groups. Our progress as a society, as President Faust suggested, has indeed historically been mirrored in and furthered by the diversification of educational opportunity and its growing availability to ever wider segments of the population.

More recently, however, that access has come under threat, especially among those high-quality residential institutions that serve a traditional population of students aged 18 to 22, that have been the bastions of liberal learning within American higher education, but that also are the most expensive kind of institutions for students to attend. This year, the nominal cost of attendance at Dr. Faust’s university stands at $51,850 and, while that is certainly at the higher end of the scale, total annual costs of between $45,000 and $50,000 are by no means unusual among the institutions in top 100 liberal arts colleges and private master’s universities. Take even the lower end of that range, extrapolate modest 4% annual increases and, by 2020, many of these same institutions will be approaching $70,000 a year.

Now, to be sure, sticker price and the actual burden upon students and their families are two very different things, and nostalgic yearning for the days when that benchmark figure was a mere $30,000 or even $35,000 is unlikely to be productive. So too, there’s much to be applauded in the Obama administration’s recent leadership for changes in the Pell grants and the student loan system. But the rub remains: though we appear to be emerging from the worst of the recession, that recession has fundamentally changed the American economic equation. According to the Wall Street Journal, American families lost $11 trillion in 2008, or 18% of their net worth and, as many of us know ruefully, much of that loss has come from the decline in home values. While retirement funds have come back a lot, what hasn’t returned are house prices and the pool of home equity they created and upon which so many families depended to pay for college -- in the year immediately before the financial collapse, something on the order of 36% of the cost of higher education was paid for through borrowing. Moreover, anyone who has bought a house in the last year, has likely felt the national tightening up of credit at the very personal level of learning how much harder it has become to get a mortgage.

If family wealth has been so diminished and the ability to borrow for education thus reduced, where does that leave families, and where will it leave those high-cost institutions that have been at the forefront of innovative practice in American higher education? To be sure, there will always be those families for whom cost is not an issue, but what of those on the margins, those whose social identities make any access to higher education difficult and for whom liberal learning may seem especially distant? As we come out of the recession, then, how much of our capacity to, in President Faust’s words, “make the dream of America possible” will we retain, and what will be lost if that capacity is diminished? It is indeed a numbers game, and so much more.




Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.

In the early 1830s, Harriet Martineau, English novelist, journalist, economist and a writer now widely recognized as one of the founders of modern sociology, traveled across the Atlantic to spend two years exploring the American experiment in constructing a democratic society. Traveling more than 10,000 miles around the young nation, she energetically observed the ways in which it was evolving its institutions, manners, and culture, and she recorded what she saw in two books that deserve a wider contemporary readership: Society in America (1837) and Retrospect of Western Travel (1838). For readers of this blog, one part of Martineau’s observations may have a special interest – her account of Harvard University from the latter volume.*

Describing Harvard as “the aristocratic college of the United States,” Martineau suggests that this elite status will itself inhibit Harvard from change: “her pride of antiquity, her vanity of pre-eminence and wealth, are likely to prevent her renovating her principles and management so as to suit the wants of the period.” Nature abhorring a vacuum, Martineau anticipates that these needs are likely to be met elsewhere: “more and more new colleges are rising up, and are filled as fast as they rise, whose principles and practices are better suited to the wants of the time.” Moreover, and by contrast with Harvard, which has priced itself beyond the reach of all but the most affluent, in these new colleges “living is cheaper, and the professors are therefore richer with the same or smaller salaries; the sons of the yeomanry and mechanic classes resort to them; and, where it is the practice of the tutors to work with their pupils, as well as lecture to them, a proficiency is made which shames the attainments of the Harvard students.” For Martineau, the situation is hopeless as she doubts “whether, if a gratis education to poor students were to be dispensed from Harvard tomorrow, it would rival in real respectability and proficiency the orthodox colleges which have already surpassed her.”

One hundred and eighty two years later, however, Harvard still stands, does indeed offer a gratis education to poor students, and gives no sign that it is ready to surrender its status as one of the world’s leading universities. Yet even though Martineau’s bleak forecast for this one institution proved overly pessimistic, she certainly anticipated how a latter-day Harvard, once again in the doldrums, would need “a renovation of her management” to respond to a want of this time and deal appropriately with issues of gender and education. Moreover, her underlying point remains powerful and true for all our institutions: the urgency of finding ways to address the needs of the age and to meet the challenges from new providers of education is as real in 2010 as it was in the America Martineau visited, when James Madison and John Quincy Adams were still alive. Indeed, throughout American history, the defining characteristic of higher education in this country has been its ability to answer this call and to reinvent itself time and time again. Can it do so again now and in the years to come? Where will the most urgent challenges come? What will help and what hinder institutions as they seek to address these challenges? In the coming weeks, I’ll take on these questions, offering some reflections and hoping to prompt your questions and responses.



* Retrospect of Western Travel. 2 vols. London: Saunders and Otley, 1838. All quotations are from the chapter, “Cambridge Commencement,” in Volume 2.




Iain Crawford teaches in the department of English at the University of Delaware. He served as the vice president for academic affairs at The College of Wooster from 2003 to 2009.