Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "Higher Ed: Innovative or Devoted to Mimicry?"

A number of top higher education policy thinkers met June 3 at the American Enterprise Institute to talk about "Reinventing the American University: The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education." David Glenn reports out on the discussions for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Some sample comments:

The structural incentives within higher education "seem to push against innovation," said Dominic J. Brewer, an associate dean and professor of urban leadership and education at the University of Southern California. "They seem to push toward mimicry."

That theme ran through the conference's first two panels: The structure of higher education makes it difficult to improve the quality of teaching. But the speakers did not always agree about which structural factors are to blame for the purported institutional sclerosis. Some pointed fingers at faculty-governance systems, which they said slowed down the pace of change. Others blamed regional accreditors for being too inflexible about, for example, standard models of credit hours.

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Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of economics at Cornell University and director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, offered a rather gloomy analysis of changes in the faculty profession . . . Outside of elite research universities and liberal-arts colleges, Mr. Ehrenberg said, most institutions of higher education are likely to see a "de-skilling" of faculty jobs in the coming years, as fewer instructors will have Ph.D.'s.

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Two speakers dissented, in part, from the basic premise that there is too little innovation in higher education. Jack H. Schuster, a professor emeritus of education and public policy at Claremont Graduate University, said there is plenty of experimentation at American colleges; he expects higher education to be substantially transformed within the next decade.

And Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, said the problem is not a lack of innovation but a failure to carefully study the experiments that do take place. Thousands of college instructors make good-faith efforts to improve their teaching, she said, but there are usually no resources for evaluating or replicating those innovations.