Gee Whiz

In this morning's Inside Higher Ed:

Gordon Gee’s Call for ‘Reinvention’ of Higher Ed

… E. Gordon Gee told his fellow college presidents Sunday evening that the current economic crisis is no reason not to consider bold and far-reaching reforms of the institutions. “I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge,” Gee said here at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education.

The choice for higher education, he said: “reinvention or extinction.”
…
With regard to community colleges, Gee noted that despite his career leading research universities, many of the most important issues are based on the two-year sector. “Truly, the drivers of our future will be this nation’s community colleges,” he said. That means that research universities need to go beyond traditional ways of supporting community colleges — such as articulation agreements — and to think more ambitiously.

As an example, he cited a program Ohio State will be announcing today in conjunction with the College Board and Columbus State Community College in which selected students will be admitted to medical school or other health professions programs at Ohio State while still doing work at Columbus State. While a number of medical schools have programs in which students may be admitted to medical school as undergraduates, these programs generally involve elite undergraduate institutions, not community colleges. Students in the program will receive special academic guidance and a special curriculum to guide them from the two-year college through medical school.

While Gee said he was proud of the program, he said that it was but one effort, when many universities should have much more of a sense of true partnership with community colleges.

Gee was highly critical of higher education for being tradition-bound, but he also said repeatedly that he believes colleges are uniquely suited to help the United States rise out of the country’s economic mess. “This will be the century of the American college and university, if we but have the courage to make it so,” he said at the end of his speech, which received a standing ovation.