Higher Education

In the first article we looked at the first five of ten lessons learned from fifteen students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who wrote a response to published essays in the New York Times and Slate, which focused on approaches to lecturing. Now we look at the last five.

6. Teachers and Administration Must Be Accountable

Students: “We expect to be held accountable, but we would hold our professors accountable as well.”

2015 was a tough year for the University of Missouri. With escalating racial tension, student protests began, culminating in a strike by the entire football team. By that time, the call was for the president’s resignation, as it was perceived by many that he hadn’t done enough to address the racial divide. By that time, even the president seemed to see no other feasible resolution. On November 9th, he resigned, highlighting a major failure at multiple levels in the university’s administration and student body.

Recently at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, fifteen students in a writing course taught by Professor Catherine Prendergast wrote a response to published essays in the New York Times and Slate, which focused on approaches to lecturing.

The response of these students is enlightening especially for those who would be effective teachers and communicators. I observe (at least) 10 lessons from their brief letter that are helpful not just for those who are delivering education in the classroom, but also for those in leadership and administration.

“[I]t is not good for a person to be without knowledge, and he who hurries his footsteps errs ” (Proverbs 19:2).

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William (Bill) Bennett was Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan and apparently is now a talk-show host (though I’ve never heard his program, nor even heard mention of it outside this book).

From Voice, Nov/Dec 2014. Used by permission. Read part 1.

Most of the innovations sweeping higher education are products of the Internet that is quickly transforming virtually everything and making our entire world more global, mobile, social, visual and digital.

Global

The world of work is increasingly international. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and be culturally diverse. Working from his home country of St. Vincent, a West Indian pastor/graphic artist designed the current Piedmont logo. That seemed most appropriate to me as we added “International” to our school name and featured the curvature of the earth in the logo.

From Voice, Nov/Dec 2014. Used by permission.