How can universities shape creative, adaptive, integrated learners
ready to confront the world? This book's clear-eyed optimism is a
challenge to everyone in higher education.
American higher education is being torn apart. Institutions, curricula,
courses, and faculty roles are being "unbundled"--broken into
constituent parts in the name of efficiency and cost savings. As a
result, the college learning experience is fragmented and incoherent,
leaving graduates less and less equipped to confront the dire social
problems that cause those divisions in the first place.
In College Made Whole, Chris W. Gallagher lays bare the dangers of the
dis-integration of the college experience and shows how we can put
higher education back together again. The successful colleges and
universities of the future, Gallagher argues, will be integrated:
coherently and cohesively designed to help students achieve a lifelong
learning experience that is more than the sum of its parts.
Pushing back against pernicious dichotomies that frame much discussion
of US higher education, Gallagher critiques many of the hottest
educational trends, including the overhyping of technological
"solutions," rampant adjunctification, the promotion of nondegree
credentials as a suitable replacement for college degrees, and the
increasingly narrow focus on the vocational aims of a college education.
Ivestigating the purposes of higher education historically and today, he
suggests audacious proposals to enhance learning, including reorganizing
institutions, reordering institutional priorities, redesigning curricula
and courses, and rethinking edtech and learning technologies.
Lucidly written and packed with practical recommendations and real
student stories, College Made Whole will challenge higher education
professionals and policy makers, as well as anyone with a stake in the
future of US higher education--which is to say, all of us who inhabit
this fragile planet.
