Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fads?  Great big, often stupid, enthusiasms about things that were going to change higher education completely.  Seems like we don’t hear about them anymore.

Remember MOOCs?  They were going create tsunamis of change.  Many people said a lot of incredulous things about MOOCS and higher education, maybe none more so than Trent University’s Chancellor, Don Tapscott.  (Remember this gem of futurology, about the week “higher education as we know it “ended”?  Maybe not as bad as his synapse-destroying piece about blockchain and higher education but still.)  We were all headed very quickly towards a world where all education was virtual, there would be mass redundancies among the professoriate because only “super-teachers” would be left….

Competency-based education?  That one probably got less attention than it deserved.  But, briefly competency-based education was going to change higher education.  And we were definitely going to be more focused on learning outcomes once AHELO was up and running and we could compare institutional outcomes across international boundaries.  

Bologna!  Bologna was totally going to be a game-changer.  Not just because it heralded the arrival of Europe as an equal to America in terms of higher education and innovation (still a work in progress….) but also because we were going to have a whole new world of student mobility.  And, oh yeah, three-year degrees!  That was a great European invention that was definitely, definitely, going to change everything here.  

And before that we were talking about university alliances as potentially game-changing things, akin to airline alliances.  Or Total Quality Management.  Heck, I’m even old enough to remember how higher fees and income contingent loans were going to make institutions both richer and more responsive to student needs.

Now, at one level you can dismiss all these things as fads, and some of them harmful at that.  Certainly, there are a lot of people with paper-thin ideas of what higher education is about that show up, uninvited, to make claims about how higher education needs to be/is about to be re-invented/disrupted/whatever and on the whole the system could do with less of this kind of thing.

On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that most of these fads – well, let’s be nice, let’s call them enthusiasms – were born of some sincere desire to improve higher education, to make it better/cheaper/faster/whatever.  Sure, sometimes these desires were badly misguided, but the sense that change was both necessary and possible was fun, and intoxicating.

We haven’t had a good fad in a few years now; not here, not anywhere.  No doubt many of you are thinking to yourself “thank God, no more stupid wrong-headed attempts to reform higher education”.  And there’s a part of me that agrees with that.  But then it occurs to me: what if higher education’s ability to shrug off all these ideas over the years – the good as well as the bad – has been understood by everyone, both inside the academy and out, as a sign that the sector is simply immune toreform?

I have a feeling that the long-term consequences of such a belief might be huge, and very unpleasant.  Which is why, as stupid as crazes and fads like MOOCs and three-year degrees and what not might be: I kind of hope a new one comes along soon.  I think we’ll all be better off when it does.