The Arts & Science Council, on which I serve, is the chief governing body of the University of Toronto's faculty of Arts & Science. Recently the Dean's office released a report about a new online tool the faculty is developing to standardize the production of syllabi. In essence it would be a digital form containing fields for required course information. Each professor would be required to fill out the form in lieu of a paper syllabus. The new standardized syllabi would be offered online.
The university administration evidently didn't expect this to cause significant controversy. They calculated that this would simply be one more element of university modernization akin to applying a new coat of paint. Those supporting the idea were gravely mistaken.
The trouble with this matter and why it garnered so much opposition is in what it represents: a transfer of power from individual professors to the Dean's office. A traditional view of education is as a transaction between professor and student. The one wants to learn what the other has to tell him and is willing to provide compensation for the trouble of doing so. Of course there is a need to facilitate this relationship and at a large institution like the University of Toronto there is a need to provide administration to serve as an intermediary between students and faculty.
Of course in the modern university administrators have moved far beyond clerical work. Today they manage massive grants, solicit contributions from donors, provide resources for students such as healthcare, promote the University's brand, manage student life, and even lobby politicians. Modern universities have a dual concept--as places where students and professors are linked a la airbnb and also as massive research and youth centered management centres.
The trouble with the proposal from the Dean's office is that it represents an ongoing shift away from faculty-administration dualism and towards the establishment of the primacy of the latter over the former. Administrators no longer manage all the mechanisms around professors to make it easier for them to teach; administrators now tell faculty how the administration thinks they should instruct students.
The problem this dynamic threatens is the very nature of education itself. Administrators under pressure from business interests are trying to turn education into a standardized commercial product. Education is ultimately a form of providing what one, a teacher, specifically has. An administration cannot very well know what one professor might decide to tell his students versus another. Only a teacher can know what he has to say and it is very hard for a third party to distinguish between the different voices of distinct individuals with the same qualifications and duties.
Education fundamentally cannot be standardized because its value is inherent. Any attempt to quantify it will leave us with well qualified yet uneducated students. There is no need to spend a lot of money on professor's as standardized information providers who are meant to provide a standardized "learning outcome" for a given course regardless of who is teaching. It's a relatively logical jump to start requiring the same syllabus for the same course through the new online tool. One professor said at the council meeting "I want to be able to put a picture of a cow on my syllabus"; he wants for it to be under his control.
There's nothing wrong with administration as a facilitator and offering to put faculty information online is a good form of facilitation. The problem is in coercing scholars to jump through a bureaucratic hoop. That changes who holds power. Dean Cameron please make the new tool non-mandatory; that will effectively disseminate most information while preserving the independence of education which is the bedrock of UofT.
Nota Bene: I will address restoring the process of learning in classes at a later date.
