Florida State University - Renegade / Tally Ho Yearbook (Tallahassee, FL)

Page 31 text:

Ne should have more technical training, yes; but outside the colleges and universities. I think we need a vast increase in the number and quality of programs of technical schools. I think, you know, we still have this archaic notion in this country that just getting and possessing a baccalaureate degree is a good part of the battle toward success. And we really have to knock that notion down. A college degree really doesn ' t mean much anymore. I think there are lots of people who now come to college who ought to be told no; don ' t come here. Go and learn to be a bricklayer, or a television repairman or an automobile mechanic or something, and learn to do it well, but also learn at the same time something of liberal education, and you ' ll earn more money, earn a good living, have a very satisfying life and learn enough of language and literature and communications and those things so that you can engage in an intelligent active civic life as well. I think we ' re much too restrictive on that score. Change will come painfully, slowly. The basic mode of education really hasn ' t changed much since the 15th century, with the so-called learned scholar standing up in front of the group of learners and pouring it out and having them soak it up. There are so many things we can do today that take into account the interests and talents and capabilities of the individual in a way that you never can do with that kind of instruction, and that means the use of the liberated electron to take advantage of all the electronic devices we have. You see, this has a kind of flexibility about it that we just haven ' t had in education in the past. Most of all, it removes time as the constraint in education and lets accomplishment, achievement, become the real variable. Now we say to a student, ' y° u must master this course in 10 weeks because that ' s how long our quarter happens to be and if you haven ' t mastered it by that period of time, we ' re sorry, you ' ve failed. You might take it over, but if you fail too many, we won ' t even let you do that, you ' ll have to drop out of school. ' But for the student who really wants to master something, time ought not to be important at all. You know, people do different things at different rates, so why not give him the extra time if he needs more time or less time, let him master the subject and demonstrate mastery in less time and then go on to something else, and that, you see, changes the whole character of the college degree. It may mean that if we continue to have something called a college degree, you may be able to get it in a year. The average student will perhaps continue to get it in three or four, but some students may require five or six or seven and if that ' s what they want, if mastery is their goal, if they want to achieve knowledge, then why shouldn ' t we let them do it in that way? The technology of the TV cassette is now so well along that we ' re within a very short time, a few months, maybe a year, of having inexpensive cassettes with video tape on them that you can plug into a playback machine on your own TV viewer and play your own program. This is very close to being available for schools and libraries and it will evolve in a very short time and be available for home use at a price that the average person can afford. This me ans that the universities ought to, and I hope will, go into the business of preparing an endless variety of programs in all areas. You not only teach calculus in one of these things, you teach calculus in a dozen or a hundred different methods to take into account the level of the background of the learner, his interests, what he wants to do with calculus at the end of the time, and so on, so that the individual then pulls off the shelf the particular lesson in calculus he wants to study, plugs it into his viewer and gets his instruction that way. That gives him a much greater variety of teaching than he could get by going to a classroom, and it allows him to spend as much or as little time as he needs to and wants to on that lesson. If he ' s a rapid learner who brings a good background with him, he may master that assignment, that lesson, in 30 minutes, but if he ' s slow or if he has a lesser background, he may want to spend two or three hours on it. He may want to do it all today, he may want to spend 10 hours on calculus today, or he may want to spend no time on it today. 29

Page 30 text:

So what I think we ought to do is be discriminating and measure publications by their quality, not by the number of publications a faculty member has. If he hasn ' t published good stuff, not only don ' t count it at all, but it ought to be counted against him, because that ' s academic dishonesty, and we ought to give much more credit to quality teaching. If he doesn ' t publish at all and he ' s a good teacher and shows evidence of doing that aspect of his work in an outstanding fashion, you know, fine teaching, good preparation, working well with students in advisement roles and that sort of thing, I would say that he ought to get the best the university has to offer in terms of tenure appointment and promotion in salary increments. I think there ought to be no need for apology by a faculty member or his department if the man doesn ' t publish at all as long as he is a thoroughly outstanding teacher. | TENURE I think it ' s time that there be some changes in tenure rules and regulations. I think that if faculty are wise, they will take the lead in seeing that some of those changes are made, rather than having them thrust upon them. I think the tenure system really contains some very bad elements. It provides for faculty a kind of job security that almost nobody else in our society enjoys. Really, the kind of security that a faculty member on tenure has is almost unique in our system. At the same time, faculty who have that tenure want all kinds of other protection that go beyond that. They want the best of both worlds. For example, in our decision to recommend to the Board of Regents the phasing out of engineering science, those faculty members who are on tenure want to be preserved in the system. Let me modify that a little bit: they haven ' t told me they want that, but other faculty have come forward to say yes, we must keep those tenured faculty members on the faculty and give them some other assignments just to give them job security here. That seems to me to be exactly contrary to the basic notion of tenure; the academic freedom part of it, which is, if a faculty member is an expert in a field and he is the most knowledgeable person in society in that area— because he ' s highly trained and highly specialized in it— he therefore has a certain freedom to speak out on it in a community. We look upon him as an authority and his expertise qualifies him to say anything he wants to in his classroom. That ' s his domain. Why? Because he is an authority in that field. Now these people are saying, let ' s take those people out of engineering science; these other faculty members are saying, if engineering science is phased out, let ' s take them out of that field and put them some place else in the university just to give them job security. Well, if we put them some place else where they aren ' t really well-qualified, how can we defend tenure, you see? To me, we have the two major parts of tenure in direct conflict. I realize that job security is important and I realize that there are personal considerations— families and careers and so on— involved here. I also recognize that this system that we are a part of, just like Pan American Airways or General Electric or somebody else, has gross technological changes that result in changes in the character of the enterprise, and people inevitably have to make changes in their lives. If one didn ' t approach a job in that way, you ' d end up with a vast, amorphous, meaningless organization that had very little relation to the job i t ' s supposed to be doing, and obviously the people of Florida aren ' t going to support that. BLACK STUDENTS think there will continue to be an increase in black students. I don ' t know that there will be a sharply dramatic rise in student enrollment. We will continue to seek out black students as we have in the past, but a seriously limiting factor here is financial aid. We ' re giving a substantial part of the student financial aid now to black students, and there ' s a limit to how far we can go in that. After all, there are poor white students too, and if we believe in the commitment to the training of the good mind, we can ' t ignore non-blacks. If there is a great infusion of financial support from the federal government or elsewhere, I would guess that would cause a sudden increase in black enrollment. I hope there will be a continuing, that is, a steady, increase, but until we get some new source of financial support, I would not look for a sudden rise. FAMU has a greater proportionate share of the Board of Regents student financial aid than any other university. The Council of Presidents voted on that distribution, and we are quite agreed that they ought to have a larger proportion. If EDUCATIONAL CHANGE 28 you look at the present curriculum, broadly conceived, that we offer in colleges and universities in this country, it came about because some people sat down and said, ' here ' s what we think students ought to know after they leave the high schools to be broadly educated people ' and then, in the last two years, to be professionally educated in nursing and home economics education and so on. But there ' s nothing sacred about those ideas that some people sat down and called curriculum. And I think it ' s high time that we take another look at curricula all across the board and recognize that the world has changed vastly in almost every field since those original ideas were put down. We need to give students much more latitude, to let them choose what they want to study, to break down the formal and narrow barriers on the way to achievement. For example, in the matter of foreign languages, I really don ' t see what ' s so sacred about having to take a certain number of courses in a foreign language for a baccalaureate degree. I ' m all for foreign language education. I think students ought to spend much more time studying a foreign language, but studying it to the point of some mastery, some understanding of the language and the nature of the country or the culture.

Page 32 text:

Chancelor A T I he university is the creator of knowledge, which can be phrased in many ways— the seeker of truth, the creator of knowledge, however you want to put it. I think it has a second role, which is equipping citizens to take their place in society; that is, the transmission of knowledge and the training of minds. In essence I would say you combine the imparting of the knowledge to enjoy life and to place yourself in the context of man ' s existence so far on this planet, the ability to appreciate the pleasure of creativeness, with the imparting of skills which equip you to be an economic and competitive creature and to function not only from the standpoint of appreciation of life, but from the standpoint of being competitive and contributing as an economic man to that life. If you sit back and take the broad perspective that I ' ve just taken, I think the answer to the question of whether the function of the university is changing has to be no. You change your knowledge art and you may change the kinds of skills you impart, but you ' re still in the business of imparting that knowledge and creating knowledge and making those skills. At one point, the universities had only about ten percent of the college age population. They obviously were training an elite. Now we have about 50 percent of the college age population. There still is a need for college education, but it ' s obvious that now we need systems analysts and computer programmers. We need to upgrade the criminology people; we need to upgrade the law enforcement, the corrections people. Nursing is more complicated. We have whole new knowledge areas in which to train people and so far as anyone wants to say, if this is a new function of the university, then we have changed functions. I don ' t view it that way. I think it is doing the same basic thing, but doing it in different areas. THE PLACE OF RESEARCH Obviously if the university is the place which creates knowledge, then you must have people around making it; creating it. You need the Mike Kashas in life to have an understanding of life, and, I suppose, eventual mastery of it and the ability to direct it. I think that there is more time wasted in so-called research, however, by people who have no particular abilities in this area, who are diverting time from areas where they do have abilities, such as teaching. Because the name of the game these days seems to be research. If you can put the word ' research ' after what you ' re doing, then you ' re in the in group. You have to have it, but the degree of it is open to question. PUBLISH OR PERISH Wi hen you are operating at the highest intellectual level in society, which is the university, I think that a man has an obligation to be scholarly, to do some writing. I think it forces him to organize his thoughts; it forces him to keep abreast of new developments. It forces him to expose his ideas to his peers instead of to students who must accept what he says in order to obtain a grade. I therefore think that some publication is not only desirable, but essential. I think that publication for the sake of publication, or promotion on the basis of the number of words produced, is just the antithesis of the kind of publication which I ' m talking about, and I think it ' s the antithesis, really, of what the research and scholarly activity should be. TENURE I am very impressed by a publication by Yale, the Yale Humanities Group, in which they said no one ' s ever been able to define good teaching to the satisfaction of anyone else, but because you can ' t do it perfectly doesn ' t mean you shouldn ' t attempt to, and they proceeded to set down some criteria for promotion. Among them is an occasional publication so that you ' re exposing yourself to your colleagues. I think student evaluation is another way to determine good teaching. I also think in a pyramid series of courses that the man who receives students from another professor knows pretty well how well those students are prepared and what kind of a job that faculty member did. I think there are ways of getting at this; I just think we ' ve been reluctant to spell them out. Many universities, such as Yale, have done so for the betterment of that university. RECOGNITION OF RADICAL GROUPS I 30 don ' t see any likelihood of change in the policy (not to recognize SDS or YSA). I think it is a sort of head-in-the-sand policy. The problem really is that recognition carries with it the connotation of