Reading, Writing, Radical Change

When Mark Taylor’s children were growing up, he made them write a three-page paper once a week each summer between sixth grade and college. “It could be on any subject they chose, and the only requirement was that the essay had to be discursive, that is to say, they had to formulate a thesis, develop an argument, defend it, and draw a conclusion,” he writes in “Crisis on Campus,” a manifesto for overhauling higher education. He says proudly of the summer regimen: “I am so committed to teaching young people to write clearly and effectively that I decided this would be the inheritance I would leave my children.”

Mr. Taylor is the chairman of Columbia University’s religion department, but his willingness to value essay-writing may be the more impressive credential. At heart, Mr. Taylor has an old-fashioned sense of what it takes for students to become good writers and good thinkers: for starters, a lot of practice at writing and thinking.

Mr. Taylor’s “bold plan for reforming our colleges and universities,” as his book’s subtitle has it, started life as an opinion piece in the New York Times last year. He proposed ending tenure for professors, limiting the amount of research they do, placing more importance on teaching and ending over-rigid academic departments. To judge by the angry letters that the Times published, and the Internet commentary the piece inspired, many professors and academic administrators found the plan all too bold.

But Mr. Taylor believes that reform is inevitable, because there is indeed a crisis on campus, akin to the one that financial institutions faced when the housing bubble burst. “The value of college and university assets (i.e., endowments) has plummeted,” he writes. “The schools are overleveraged, liabilities (debts) are increasing, liquidity is drying up, fixed costs continue to climb, their product is increasingly unaffordable and of questionable value in the marketplace and income is declining.”

Mr. Taylor’s rhetoric may be overheated, but the gist of his claim is certainly correct. As he notes, Harvard has a formidable endowment, but it is also $5 billion in debt; Dartmouth recently lost its triple-A bond rating; and 114 private colleges failed to meet the Department of Education’s financial-responsibility standards in 2009. States are cutting back their education budgets. The University of California hiked its tuition by a third in the spring. College tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation every year for the past two decades.

Intellectually, too, Mr. Taylor says that universities are “illiquid,” perhaps even broke. Academic departments stake out scholarly territory and guard it jealously. Meanwhile, professors develop narrow areas of expertise and, in the limited time they devote to teaching, prefer to tailor their classes to their expertise rather than to the rudimentary knowledge that students need.

But the “single most important factor in preventing change in higher education,” Mr. Taylor argues, “is tenure.” It shuts out new talent, allows ineffective teachers to remain in place, and creates a sub-class of part-timers and graduate students who do a great deal of the tough classroom work and grading. A college president in New York tells Mr. Taylor: “I have never been more frustrated. All but a few of my faculty members are tenured, and two-thirds are well over sixty-five but give no hint of when they will retire. Everything is blocked and students are losing interest.”

Another reason for abolishing tenure, Mr. Taylor says, is to free up the basic structure of college teaching and to make way for the help that technology may provide. A few years ago Mr. Taylor and a Finnish colleague used teleconferencing to teach a course with 10 students at Williams College (where Mr. Taylor used to teach) and 10 at the University of Helsinki. Students had the benefit of both professors’ teaching; and discussions took place in real time. Mr. Taylor, reflecting on the arrangement, was “surprised by how effectively it simulated what goes on in real classrooms.”

Online education in one form or another—e.g., streamed lecture videos, texted discussions and testing—is the wave of the future, Mr. Taylor claims. It will reduce costs by allowing colleges to avoid the duplication of services—not every school needs philosophy professors, after all, when many of them are just a teleconference away. It will give broad access to great professors, too, assuming that contractual arrangements can be worked out. Why shouldn’t students in Helena, Mont., be able to turn on a computer and hear Steven Pinker lecture on “the language instinct” instead of only a handful of Harvard students living in Cambridge, Mass.? Mr. Taylor believes that traditional colleges will partner with for-profit companies to sell the lectures of their professors in various ways, giving the schools an income stream and making it possible for even lower- income students to learn from first-rate teachers.

Mr. Taylor imagines a wonderful new world of learning coming out of all this—including a flourishing of interdisciplinary study. Perhaps he is right. His vision is less appealing, though, when he claims that, in the new university, students will be “less reliant on teachers and mentors” and more likely to take responsibility for their own education. One can’t help feeling that students are already assigned too much responsibility for their own schooling; they often don’t know what a good education looks like. What is more, technology can’t entirely substitute for the intellectual excitement that comes from face-to-face learning—the experience, say, of a small seminar with a wise mentor. And technology can’t make a better curriculum: that will have to come from reformers who, like Mr. Taylor, have not forgotten the value of good thinking, good writing and a well-argued essay.

Ms. Riley is the author of “God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America.”