Since this is a crazy week for everyone, I’m going to try to post something that you can contemplate when you get the chance to relax your heart rate and breathe. I hope that you will give me the benefit of the doubt when you read this post, because I can imagine this question might be a delicate one and I raise it because I suspect it might help us more authentically and more honestly navigate through some obviously choppy waters as we make some key decisions about our new semester design.
Sometimes, when we advocate for the value of double majors and similar, or even improved, access to double majors in the new semester system, it seems like the rationale for this argument is grounded in the belief that double-majoring is advantageous for Augustana graduates and, as a corollary, relatively easy access to a double-major is helpful in recruiting strong prospective students. In other instances, it sounds as if we advocate for ease of access to double-majoring because we are afraid that programs with smaller numbers of majors will not survive if we build a system that produces fewer double majors.
Without question, both rationales come from the best of places. Doing all that we can for the sake of our student’s potential future success or the possibility of attracting a stronger and larger pool of future students seems utterly reasonable. Likewise, ensuring the health of all current academic departments, especially those that currently enjoy a smaller number of majors, and therefore ensuring the employment stability of all current faculty, is also utterly reasonable.
Yet I wonder if our endeavor to design the best possible semester system would benefit from parsing these concerns more clearly, examining them as distinct issues, and addressing them separately as we proceed. Because it seems to me that prioritizing double-majoring because it benefits post-graduate success, prioritizing double-majoring because it improves recruiting, and prioritizing double-majoring because it ensures employment stability for faculty is not the same as more directly identifying the factors that maximize our students’ post-graduate success, optimizing our offerings (and the way we communicate them) to maximize our recruiting efforts, and designing a system that maintains employment stability and quality for all of our current faculty members. The first approach asserts a causal relationship and seems to narrow our attention toward a single means to an end. The second approach focuses our attention on a goal while broadening the potential ways by which we might achieve it.
Certainly we can empirically test the degree to which double-majoring increases our student’s post-graduate success or whether a double-major friendly system strengthens our efforts to recruit strong students. We could triangulate our findings with other research on the impact of double-majoring on either post-graduate success or prospective student recruiting and design a system that situates double-majoring to hit that sweet spot for graduates and prospective students.
Likewise, we could (and I would argue, should) design a new semester system that ensures gratifying future employment for all current faculty (as opposed to asking someone with one set of expertise and interests to spend all of their time doing something that has little to do with that expertise and interest). However, it seems to me that we might be missing something important if we assume, or assert, that we are not likely to achieve that goal of employment stability if we do not maintain historically similar proportions of double-majors distributed in historically similar ways.
Those of you who have explored the concept of design thinking know that one of its key elements is an openness to genuinely consider the widest possible range of options before beginning the process of narrowing toward a final product or concept. At Augustana we are trying to build something new, and we are trying to do it in ways that very few institutions have done before. Moreover, we aren’t building it from an infinite array of puzzle pieces; we are building it with the puzzle pieces that we already have. So it seems that we ought not box ourselves prematurely. Instead, we might genuinely help ourselves by opening our collective scope to every possibility that 1) gives our students the best chance for success, 2) gives us the best chance to recruit future students, AND 3) uses every current faculty member’s strengths to accomplish our mission in a new semester system.
Please don’t misunderstand me – I am NOT arguing against double-majors (on the contrary, I am intrigued by the idea). I’m only suggesting that, especially as we start to tackle complicated issues that tie into very real and human worries about the future, we are probably best positioned to succeed, both in process and in final product, to the degree that we directly address the genuine and legitimate concerns that keep us up at night. We are only as good as our people and our relationships with each other. I know we are capable of taking all of this into account as we proceed into the spring. I hope every one of you take some time to relax and enjoy the break between terms so that you can start the spring refreshed and fully able to tackle the complex decisions that we have before us.
Make it a good day,
Mark