The Evolution of Higher Education

WHAT with shrinking government funds and growing competition from online for-profit institutions, American colleges and universities are facing hard times, and being forced to rethink what they do. Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology, discusses the evolution of universities in his new book, “Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities.” Drawing on his experience as the first chief technology officer at Hewlett-Packard, director of the National Science Foundation’s computer and computation research division, and dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Dr. DeMillo offers an engineer’s view of the challenges facing higher education.

随着政府资助的削减，来自互联网竞争的增强，美国院校正面临一个艰难时刻，迫使其不得不重新思考他们的所为。佐治亚理工学院21世纪的大学研究中心主任Richard A. DeMillo，在他的新书《从阿布拉尔到苹果：美国学院与大学的命运》中讨论了大学的进化。曾经作为惠普第一任首席技术官，国家基金委计算机与计算研究分支主任，佐治亚理工学院计算学院院长的DeMillo博士，从工程师的角度看待了高等教育所面临的挑战。

Q. Are colleges doing the right things to get ready for the future?

问题：大学目前所为是否有助于其应对未来？

A. With a handful of exceptions, college presidents today are recruited to be stewards, not leaders. For the most part, they have gotten their jobs by convincing the search committee and the trustees that they’ll preserve the best of what the university has to offer. That’s a great goal, but as society changes, and universities are subject to the same political, geographic and economic forces as every other institution, preserving the past isn’t the only goal. Sometimes you have to be a chief executive officer, make priorities and set a direction that’s different from where you were going before.

There’s a big disconnect right now between how university presidents see the landscape and how everyone else sees it. A large majority of the American public thinks universities are doing a fair or poor job. But a huge majority of college presidents think they’re doing a good or excellent job. I think many of them are so concerned with stewardship that they lose sight of the data.

如今的大学校长更像是招募来的管家，而非领导。对大部分大学校长而言，获取校长的职位，是通过说服招募团队和委托方，使其相信他将继续保持大学的优势。那是一个很宏大的目标，但随着社会的变迁，大学也遭受了同其他学院面临的政治、地理位置和经济压力，延续过去的优势不再是唯一的目标。有些时候你不得不像一个首席执行官一样，设置优先级，设定一个与你以前设想不同的方向。

如今，大学校长对学校地位的看法与其他人对此的看法存在极大的差别。大部分的美国公民认为大学所为勉强及格或很糟。但绝大部分大学校长认为他们所为很好或非常好。我想大学校长们太关注管理而忽略了实际的数据。

Q. In your book, you talk about some of the recent online educational innovations, like iTunes U and M.I.T.’s OpenCourseWare. What are those going to mean to universities?

问题：在你的书中，你提到近来的网络教育创新，比如iTune大学， MIT的公开课程。这些将对大学意味着什么？

A.What Chuck Vest did at M.I.T. with OpenCourseWare, putting every course online, free, showed that the value of a degree from M.I.T. was not contained in the lectures and the exams and homework. It’s contained in the experience of passing through the network of M.I.T. scholars. So why hang on to what should be shared widely? OpenCourseWare was an important signpost that hammered home the point that the content of a university course was being rapidly commoditized by technology. If you can easily access a lecture in quantum mechanics from the best lecturer on quantum mechanics, how many other quantum mechanics lectures do you need?

 Chuck Vest在MIT所做的，是将每门课程通过公开课程项目免费放上网络，这意味着MIT学位的价值不在于课程的讲义、试题和家庭作业。MIT学位的价值在于与MIT的学者学习的经历。因此，何苦执着于被广泛分享的内容？公开课程项目是一个重要的路标，使得家庭成为一个点，一个大学课程内容通过技术被快速商品化的点。如果你能轻松地获取讲量子力学讲得最好的教师的讲义，你还需要多少其他的量子力学讲义？

Q. Do you hear a lot from professors worried that having so many brilliant lectures available online will eventually do away with their jobs?

问题：你是否从教授们那里听到类似的担忧，就是有如此多很棒的讲义在互联网上传播，是否会最终夺走他们的工作？

A. Absolutely. If you think your value is in 13 weeks of lectures, then exams, it’s true that that’s probably not going to be as valuable in the future. To some extent, that’s already happening with iTunes U, where you can hear a lecture on English literature or the global financial meltdown from someone who can explain it very well. What you get there is pretty much all you need to get students involved in the discussion. But that’s not the discussion. The discussion is what takes place afterward, maybe not in the classroom, but in the learning community. That’s where professors can add value.

听到过。如果你认为你的价值在持续13周的讲义、最终的考试中，在将来它们将不再那么有价值。在某种程度上，这一切已经通过iTune大学发生了，在那里你能听到很棒的专家讲英国文学或全球金融风暴。你在其中扮演的角色就是让学生们参与到讨论之中。但那又不是真正意义上的课堂讨论，它可以是在教室里，也可以是在学习社区里。那才为教授们增值。

Q. Can you give me an example of how your university, Georgia Tech, has evolved to meet the future?

问题：你能给我们举例说明佐治亚理工学院为应对未来已经做了哪些工作？

A. When I stepped down as dean of computing in 2009, we had just come through a big transformation of computer science at Georgia Tech. After the dot-com bust, enrollment had fallen off dramatically, with people staying away from computer science for all the wrong reasons. They were afraid the jobs would be outsourced to India. Women were scared away from the field. So we went to employers — video game companies — to ask what they were looking for from computer science graduates. We talked to maybe two dozen companies, big and small. They said they needed people who not only know the technology but were skilled in the art of storytelling, the narrative arc. So we started an Introduction to Computer Science course for people who had grounding in humanities and liberal arts.

People who’d been turned off from computer science flooded in. Women flooded in. It was a group of Georgia Tech students who were impassioned about using computers for things that are impactful in art and in society. So we redesigned the undergraduate curriculum to let students choose two interdisciplinary threads, like computing and media, or computing and people, or computing and modeling.

What engineers are good at is out-of-the-box solutions, prototyping, and not waiting for a big system change to make an improvement.

当我在2009年从计算学院院长一职上卸任，佐治亚理工学院的计算机科学已经经历了一场重大的变革。自网络泡沫后，人们因为错误的理由纷纷拒绝计算机科学，其入学率急剧下降。他们担心将来的大量工作会被外包至印度。女性也对该领域避而远之。因此，我们到视频游戏公司调研，明确他们酒精需要怎样的计算机科学毕业生。我们可能于近24家大大小小的公司沟通过。他们称他们需要的雇员不仅懂技术，还要具有叙述故事的能力。因此我们在具有人文背景的学生中开设了计算机导论课程。

系外的学生、女性学生开始涌入计算机科学。这群佐治亚理工学院的学生充满热情，在他们熟知的艺术、社会领域应用计算机。因此，我们重新设计了本科课程设置，使得学生可以交叉选择，比如计算与媒体，或计算与人文，或计算与建模。

工程师们在行的是利用现成的解决方案，搭建原型，而不是等待一个庞大的系统变更去实现改进。

Q. So from your vantage point at a leading engineering school, can you tell me what the university of the future will look like?

问题：你能否从作为工程性学校领导的角度，告诉我们未来大学究竟会是什么样子？

A. That’s the question everyone asks, but I really believe it’s not the right question. The 1910 landscape for higher education is almost unrecognizable today. A hundred years ago, when Edwin Slosson ranked universities by their reputations, there was no public funding of academic research, and his list of the top 14 elites included five public universities. Now, public research funding is huge and there isn’t a single public university in the U.S. News top 20. The only thing we can be sure of, here in 2011, is that there’s going to be a wave of innovation over the next century, and 100 years from now, higher education won’t look the same.

那是每个人都在问的问题，但我认为那个问题没有问对。1910年来高等教育的地位在今天已经几乎不显现了。100多年前，当Edwin Slosson通过声誉对大学进行排名时，没有公共基金资助学术研究，但在他的排名中，前14所大学包括了5所公立大学。如今，公共研究经费巨大，