Sometimes Canadian universities drive me up the wall.  Mostly, it’s when they start lobbying for other people to take action in areas where the clearest problems lie within their own wheelhouse.  I speak in particular of Study Abroad and Work-Integrated Learning. 

To be clear, I am all for more study abroad and more work-integrated learning. They’re both straight-up great ideas.  But it seems to me that if you’re going out to lobby for money to improve something, you might want to make sure your own house resembles good order on that topic.  I think universities have a long way to go on these topics, and for exactly the same reason: curriculum.

On work-integrated learning, institutions have lots of individual program curricula that have been designed around such learning, such as co-ops and practicums. But in programs where work-integrated learning wasn’t there from the beginning, universities are extremely slow to adapt. They not only need to work out where to carve out time for this kind of learning experience, they need to work out how to incorporate it into the overall learning experience, so it isn’t just some kind of extraneous activity tacked on to a traditional curriculum with no real opportunity for reflection or integration.  Is this happening?  Maybe here and there, but my understanding is that overall, it’s not – because it means substantially adjusting the curriculum.

 It’s a similar story around study abroad: one of the biggest barriers to students going abroad is because they often can’t interrupt their studies without delaying graduation because of the way “required courses” are structured.   Need a specific course to graduate and it’s only available in the first semester? That means going abroad in the fall means delaying graduation until the following Christmas at the earliest.  Or: your institution doesn’t guarantee full credit-portability back from your semester abroad?  Then a semester abroad may mean adding an extra semester to one’s studies. In either event, once extra tuition, living expenses and foregone income are factored in, a semester abroad may end up costing three times the sticker price. This is all thanks to the curriculum. 

These are crucial problems, which lie entirely within institutional control.  And yet they generally seem reluctant to tackle them; certainly, the hard work of making these changes seems to elicit a lot less attention than high-profile lobbying efforts to extract public money for the same purpose.  Why?

Simple.  Remember that Alexandra Logue book I reviewed a few weeks ago called Pathways to Reform? The 400-page thriller about curricular reform to improve transfer credit and graduation rates at CUNY?  The answer is all in there.  It’s because fundamentally, no one who runs a university wants to touch curriculum.  Ever.  It’s career kryptonite.

To understand why, cast your mind back to seventeenth-century Poland, where the king needed the permission of the Sejm (i.e. Parliament) to get anything done, but the Sejm was required to operate on the basis of unanimity.  Using a process known as the liberum veto, any nobleman who wished could simply end the Sejm’s proceedings and nullify any action taken by yelling nie pozwalam (roughly: “I will not allow”).  Curriculum change in most universities is a lot like that.  Not that any single professor has an absolute veto, but a lot of profs can get very touchy about protecting specific aspects of the curriculum, so a lot of vested interests are at stake.  And it’s very easy for any single prof to slow the process down to a crawl by claiming that a change “weakens” or “dumbs down” the curriculum (because the status quo is always perfect).

(I grant you it is possible I am overthinking this.  Maybe the real reason people shy away from curricular change is that it’s deathly boring and no one has the time or patience.  It’s possible.  But I think the seventeenth-century Poland analogy is probably closer to the mark).

The liberum veto seemed like a really good idea at the time, but since it weakened the ability of the central state to get its act together in the face of external threats it was largely responsible for the eventual partition of Poland and the country’s disappearance from 1795 to 1918.  I would argue this is probably true of curricular paralysis in institutions as well.  Not that we want to take curricular decisions out of the hands of professors, but institutions have to get a lot better at making curricula easier for students to navigate and easier to change in order to accommodate educational innovation in ways that don’t simply involve tacking new things on to old structures.  Such as work-integrated learning.  Such as study abroad.

Instead, the strategy on both these issues seems to be to make the whole thing about money and get someone else (mostly, the feds) to pay for it.  That’s not just a bad look, it’s fundamentally wrong-headed.  Like early modern Poland, universities need to find ways to accommodate change.