In part by hosting a new annual lecture series, Steve Nowicki hopes to improve the member interaction and involvement of a group of scholars whose presence as a group has been “relatively invisible” on campus.
The Bass Society of Fellows—which honors faculty members who have achieved excellence in research and undergraduate teaching while also increasing faculty-student interaction—will host a lecture series titled, “Re-imagining the Academy,” starting Feb. 2.
Five national experts will speak on campus to provide a critique of American higher education. Nowicki, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education, said he hopes the lecture series will create opportunity for Bass fellows to interact with each other and “participate broadly in elevating the discussion about advancing teaching and learning at Duke.”
“All of the speakers who are coming have an angle on higher education that essentially challenges the way we think about it,” Nowicki said. “This is explicitly a group of speakers that are invited to provoke discussion.”
The Bass Society inducts new members each Spring and is named after philanthropists Anna and Robert Bass. Anne is a member of the Board of Trustees.
“While I certainly know most of the fellows and find we have many common interests that lead to enormously interesting discussions, we got together only informally,” Emily Klein, a Bass fellow and senior associate dean for the Nicholas School of the Environment, wrote in an e-mail Saturday. “I really applaud Dean Nowicki for reaching out to tap into the enthusiasm of this group.”
The first speaker of the series is Laura Palmer Noone, former president and chief academic officer of the University of Phoenix, a for-profit university that offers online degrees. Nowicki said that although he, like many others, is critical of the “for-profit” model of higher education, he believes it cannot be ignored.
The second speaker of the series, Eduardo Ochoa, is the assistant secretary for postsecondary education under the Obama administration. Nowicki said that Ochoa is a fervent supporter of community college, a system of education that contrasts the elite, private four-year college system Duke students and faculty are familiar with.
The other speakers include Ben Wildavsky, senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, Louis Menand, a professor at Harvard who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Mark Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia University.
Noah Pickus, Nannerl O. Keohane Director of the Kenan Institute for Ethics, noted that these three speakers have recently written widely-publicized books that critique the traditional way American academic institutions are organized.
The speakers are familiar with the challenges facing higher education that include globalization, new technologies and new forms of knowledge, Pickus said. Universities must find a way to prepare to adjust to these changes, he added.
“All of [the speakers] pay attention to the challenges, but also to analyzing what’s possible to change in a university and what the pitfalls are,” Pickus said.
Nowicki said he hopes the speakers will promote discourse but does not expect everyone to agree with their sentiments.
“The best thing that happens is to have a meaningful debate about the discussions that are being raised,” Nowicki said.
Klein said the idea for the theme of this year’s lecture series evolved from discussions among Bass fellows and other faculty about novel and experimental teaching methods that were being tried at various institutions across the country.
“Dean Nowicki asked us for suggestions, and I think the wealth of suggestions led to an impetus to broaden the focus to more than teaching, and include a wider diversity of mini-revolutions that are taking place in higher education,” Klein wrote.
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