At the last meeting of the American Council on Education (ACE), Gordon Gee (Ohio State’s President) called for radical measures to change higher education, Inside Higher Ed reports. ” I am calling for intentional upheaval at our colleges and universities just when fiscal chaos already places us on the edge…” he said. And added the choice for higher education is “reinvention or extinction.”
The situation is sufficiently dire, he said, that colleges need to “reconfigure ourselves,” rather than simply trying to restore lost funds.
Specifically, Gee suggested that colleges abandon their traditional devotion to disciplines, rethink the way faculty members are hired, and embrace a more central role for community colleges in higher education.
On disciplines, he said that the idea was to “move from thinking vertically to thinking horizontally.”
