Failure to launch the history of higher ed is littered with big ideas that never quite took off.

AuthorMurphy, Tim
PositionEssay

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

People who pay attention to the field of higher education like to joke that it took decades for the overhead projector to make its way from the bowling alley to the classroom. Of course, this being academia, no one can quite agree on just how much time passed--some say thirty years, some say ten, some say forty--but the point generally goes unchallenged: colleges are conservative to a fault when it comes to incorporating new ideas. Up until the late nineteenth century, most American colleges were still feeding their students a curriculum developed in medieval Europe; faculty are still employed on a tenure system whose sole purpose seems to be to reward good work by taking away any incentive to ever do it again.

Nevertheless, ever since the first professor fell asleep during his own lecture, educators have been trying, and failing, to overhaul the system. The history of American higher education, for all the system's enduring institutions, is littered with next big things, those game-changing innovations that were almost certainly going to add a new dimension to the Quadrangles--until they didn't. Think of them as the Segway motorized scooters and Dippin' Dots ice cream of higher education. So as we wait for the Internet to wash away the Ivory Tower, here's a quick look at some of the paths not taken.

Let the people rule. Few big ideas have failed as fantastically as the one that turned administrative affairs into a Hobbesian state of nature. At the University of Wisconsin's Experimental College ("Ex-College"), founded in 1927, students lived with their professors (known as "advisers") and were encouraged to create their own democratic system to govern the two-year school. Alexander Meiklejohn, the program's founder, believed that a liberal arts education would strengthen his students' democratic ideals. Instead, his students rejected the idea of government entirely (although Meiklejohn could take small consolation in the fact that they at least reached their decision by democratic means). The move was indicative of a student body that, at least in the public eye, seemed so firmly resistant to convention that allegations of radicalism ran rampant. Wisconsonites took notice when an ExCollege alum, serving a one-year sentence at the Milwaukee House of Correction for fighting a police officer at a labor demonstration, announced a run for governor on the Communist Party ticket from his cell. An all-male student production of the sexually explicit comedy Lysistrata only compounded conservative Midwesterners' suspicions.

Students weren't likely to get much more structure from their academic pursuits, either: classes were...

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