FEATURED ARTICLE

Academic Perestroika:
Teaching, Learning, and the Faculty's Role in Turbulent Times By Uri Treisman

Being invited to give this FIPSE Lecture is an honor for me and has special significance because it was FIPSE that provided the funding which enabled me to experiment with what was at the time an oddball idea. Indeed, FIPSE has been very kind to me over the years. To Brian Lekander, the FIPSE representative here tonight, I say for the record that I deeply appreciate the fact that you and your colleagues enabled me to eat while I was doing the work that I am about to describe.

This work is still evolving. It is an interesting characteristic of innovative programs that, when they work, they change something--and often something fundamental--in the environment in which they operate. It is these changes which necessitate further innovation, or at least response. On the other hand, programs that are infatuated with innovation never take the time to work out the nitty-gritty details that make it possible for a good idea to work. Innovation is an occasional, periodic need. Solid program management and attention to small-scale, nitty-gritty adjustment is an everyday necessity

Let me begin by stating the problem that we were addressing, namely, lowering the failure rate of Black students in calculus. Calculus was then, and remains, a major barrier for Black students seeking to enter careers that depend in an essential way on mathematics.

Let me ask you a question--once a teacher, always a teacher--how many degrees in mathematics, chemistry or physics do you think were awarded to Blacks and Hispanics by the California State University System in academic year 1987-1988? A hint: the system had nineteen campuses serving more than 100,000 ethnic minority students and, of course, several hundred thousand others. Your guess is 500? Yours 100? Well, you're not even close. The answer is eight! Fewer than half the campuses awarded such degrees; only eight Black or Hispanic students received degrees in mathematics or the natural sciences. It is unimaginable, but, alas, true. And it hasn't gotten any better: In 1988-89 there were only three Black students who received such degrees.

At the time we began work on this issue, the problem of Black student failure in mathematics and science was seen by many as principally a political issue, as a question of social justice, as a moral failure of the university. Finding solutions to this problem had little to do with institutional survival. The number of minority students in colleges and universities was relatively small and the number of majority students interested in mathematics and science was relatively large. Minority student failure did not effect enrollment, the life blood of public institutions.

Today we have an added problem: institutional survival in the face of fundamental demographic change. In the next fifteen years, the University of California alone will need 10,400 new faculty members. The California State University System will need even more. Who will they be, where will they come from? The answer, of course, is from today's elementary and middle-school students. If you want to get a feeling for demographic change, take a tour of the kindergartens in the community surrounding this college, or almost any other college or university near an urban area in the United States. On one such tour that I arranged for some of my undergraduates, one young woman's reaction to the extraordinary diversity she saw was: "Where do they keep the white kids?"

What started out for us as a problem of helping certain students pass calculus has become a much larger problem connected to institutional survival and, in fact, the survival of our society. As we look around the world we see country after country being torn apart by ethnic violence. It remains an open question whether we can create a democratic society which respects diversity and enables individuals to participate in all aspects of American life in meaningful numbers. The melting-pot is a great symbol but sometimes it seems like the pot's been on the stove too long. Some of the ingredients have been burned.

Copyright 2001, College of Business & Technology. Western Illinois University