Integration vs Unbundling

The future of liberal arts colleges and universities, if they don’t want to go the way of the dodo, is integration. That’s the thesis of Chris Gallagher’s recent book, College Made Whole. 

The opposite of integration is unbundling. Gallagher’s two foils are Kevin Carey’s The End of College and Ryan Craig’s College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Education, both published in 2015. There is no dispute that many ‘traditional’ colleges and universities in the U.S. do many things within each institution, some seemingly disparate from each other, which led Clark Kerr to famously coin the phrase ‘multiversity’ to describe the modern university. Carey and Craig think the status quo should be disrupted by unbundling. Gallagher thinks colleges should move in the opposite direction, by increasing integration.

Examples throughout the book are drawn mainly from Gallagher’s experience at Northeastern University. (The vision of its president Joseph Aoun to ‘robot-proof’ students is lauded repeatedly.) In particular, the distinctive co-op program is highlighted. It certainly provides good anecdotal examples for how purposeful and thoughtful integration can enhance the holistic education of college students. Showcase stories are always in this vein, and every institution leverages its own success stories as much as possible. Whether such successful experiences are widespread throughout the university is less clear.

I’m not trying to knock Gallagher’s thesis. I’m a strong proponent of holistic education, so in my case he’s preaching to the choir. He makes the very important point that integration is multifaceted and can take many forms. I was glad to see him clearly distinguish integration from interdisciplinarity. Both are important but they are different. Integration, he argues, should be happening everywhere in the student’s education; while it can certainly be exhibited through an interdisciplinary course as a collaboration between departments, it can also span across the co-curriculum and the extra-curriculum, or even take place within a single department or major. The point is to help students tie together the different threads of their college experience in a meaningful and thoughtful way.

It reminded me (while I’m away on sabbatical) of how faculty in my department regularly discuss how different parts of our curriculum and the student experience fit with each other. We are constantly arranging and rearranging things so that students see how different parts within chemistry fit together, how the natural sciences have a unity and diversity, and how student learning meshes with their life goals and aspirations. That’s a huge task! There is no simple answer or silver bullet. The times change. Students change. It’s not surprising that we will continue to have such discussions for years to come (if our version of college doesn’t go the way of the dodo).

Gallagher acknowledges the external pressures and the winds of change buffeting colleges and universities. As intense as it might feel to some of us, this is not new. The generation before Carey and Craig, and the generation before them, railed against the seeming inefficiency and bloat of the university. The prophets have been predicting the university’s demise for a long time. Instead, universities and colleges have evolved, changing with the times, but also acting as an agent to change the times. They will continue to do so. I suspect that in the years ahead, things won’t be easy. I expect more closures among small colleges due to financial exigency. And unfortunately, I think there will be a larger divide between the haves and have-nots, especially with the vision being pushed by the unbundlers.

Gallagher decries the unbundling approach and seeing the signs of the times, issues his clarion call to integration: “This is the opportunity that colleges and universities have in the years ahead.  Only they have the assembled disciplinary and pedagogical expertise to pull it off. Only they have the necessary learning infrastructure. Only they have teaching and learning as their bottom line mission… What ails US higher education is not too much bundling but too little integration: the public good is severed from private goods; courses and disciplines are separated from each other; classes and campuses are set apart from the ‘real world’; liberal learning and professional learning are treated as distinct endeavors; faculty roles are increasingly disaggregated; and degrees for traditional students are segregated from lifelong learning opportunities for nontraditional students…”

I think the challenge will be immense. A veritable strength of the university, to critically argue complex issues, requires stamina and discipline to increase integration. There will be many competing ideas as to how to do this best; there will be no one-size-fits-all solution. There will be turf wars and stepping on toes. It’s easier to be siloed and disintegrate. Do universities truly have the will, not to mention the resources, to innovate themselves into a stronger position as robots take on a larger slice of jobs? I think so. But I also think it will be painful. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from ourselves as living creatures – we’ve been amazingly innovative in transforming our lives and our environment in (geologically) a very short span of time. Systems integration by human beings is a veritable feat. It will be interesting to see how the story of higher education plays out over the next decade.