What I write here was triggered by seeing an ad in Facebook about a Master Class taught by the well known writer, Michael Lewis. I've read several of his books. Back in 1999, I read The New New Thing, Lewis' take on the technology entrepreneur, Jim Clark. As Clark was instrumental in the founding of Netscape and Netscape was the sequel to the Mosaic browser, the book held some extra interest for tech folks at Illinois, where Mosaic was developed. The university botched that technology transfer process, which indirectly impacted me in ed tech, as neither CyberProf nor Mallard, sophisticated online quizzing tools that were popular on campus at the time, were brought to market, ultimately ensuring that these applications would have limited shelf life.
But it wasn't just technology transfer where there were issues. I thought then that undergraduate education had severe problems. It worked well for the top 10% of the students and perhaps the next 10% as well. But it didn't work well at all for students more in the middle. And while individual instructors would talk about this with me, at the time I was the Director of the Center for Educational Technologies and had such conversations with some regularity, there was nothing like the social networks of today for having a more public conversation on this subject. The Campus, as a rule, likes to self-promote on its Website and in other vehicles (like those infomercials shown during the halftime of football games). It didn't have a way to publicly discuss areas of weakness. I thought the public should be made aware of the concerns with undergraduate education. But how might one go about doing this?
I want to note that this was about 5 years before I started writing this blog and while the CET had a newsletter where I had a column, that wasn't the right vehicle for disseminating my concerns. Further, while I was an insider on these matters, I was not a journalist, so I didn't consider writing an exposé, as I thought doing so wouldn't get much attention at all. (Most academic writing is for insiders, so gets little to no attention from the general public.) Instead, I made a leap of faith and convinced myself that if I could tell a story that was compelling in its own right, then people would read it for that and learn en passant about the issues I wanted them to consider. With that I came up with the idea for writing a novel.
It is called The Rise of JCU. JCU stands for Justin Carruthers University. Note that JC are the initials for Jim Clark. The character in my story is loosely modeled after the real world Jim Clark. There is another character loosely modeled after the real world Michael Lewis. The underlying idea was that a character very much like me came up with a plan that Justin Carruthers would sponsor - a for-profit university that would do undergraduate education in the right way. But that is expensive to do, so a good part of the story is in coming up with ways for this to make sense as a business venture.
Ultimately, I produced 10 chapters and some front matter, which if you are interested you can find here:
https://uofi.box.com/s/0d4qvf0i47763dia4enk
I do want to note here that at the time of writing the labor market was overheated - jobs at McDonald's were going unfilled even though they were offering well above the minimum wage. The economics part of the story is more plausible in such an environment. Alas, the dot.com bubble did burst, as did the housing bubble some years later. A real solution to the issues I raise needs to be functional regardless of the macroeconomic climate.
I stopped about halfway through the novel for a few different reasons. Having just reread it all the last couple of days, I can see that the main reason was that I had explicated all the learning issues and economic issues that I wanted to talk about ahead of time. Perhaps those could have been refined further in later chapters, but more likely, it was simply that the rest of the story needed to play out. There was less motivation for me at that point. Another reason, I had a friend in the Writer's Workshop on Campus who was reading the chapters and offering his critique of them. In the last couple of chapters I started to write about a romantic interest between a couple of students at JCU. He said that part didn't work for him, on a story level. I didn't know how to fix this and/or whether I should simply take it out altogether. But having more on the student perspective and the life issues that accompany the school issues is critical. I do have a different scene where the faculty talk about this. So I don't want to minimize the concern. But I'm less able to talk about the student experience - mine was so long ago and I may simply not have had a good picture of student life at the time of the writing.
The last reason for stopping in the writing is that I knew the overall effort would have to fail. I did bring multiple instances of failure at a lower level into the story. Nothing like this is ever just smooth sailing. But I found those more painful to write as I needed to not just talk about the problem but then I had to have a follow up to explain why it wasn't fatal. Thinking through the fatal problem in what is meant as an uplifting fantasy simply wasn't attractive to do.
If any of my friends in higher ed who were around circa 2000 and are still working read this, I wonder how much they would find the story quite dated versus how much it remains still relevant. I'm too out of it now to make that determination myself.
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