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Opinion
Commencement 2004
6/4/2004
The students who go on to law, medical, and business school do so with reasonable confidence about the careers that follow: retention rates are high and career paths are fairly direct.In contrast, and regardless of discipline—for example, philosophy, psychology,
or physics—the degree completion rates and career paths are less certain
for the students lured by the siren song we may sing about life in academe.
The 2004 grads have come of age in an era of technology. In their roles as
research and teaching assistants over the next few years, and when they assume
their first academic appoint ments at the end of the current decade, their new
colleagues and hiring institutions will assume they “know” and “are
comfortable” with technology—as a tool for research, scholarship,
and instruction. It may not be a fair assumption, but it will be there, an inferred
part of the portfolio, an essential tool for the next generation of faculty.
We know that the technologies will change—get faster, better, less expensive—in
the coming years. The 1980s gave us the microcomputer; the 1990s brought us
the Web. A few years from now the conventional wisdom may be that the compelling
technology of the first decade of the 21st Century was wireless networks, fostering
anywhere, anyplace, anytime connection—nothing but ‘Net, no strings
attached.
But then again, some other new technology—something interesting, something
compelling, something way cool—may also be lurking in the digital shadows,
ready to emerge and to shake our world, as did the microcomputer and the Web.
We do live in interesting times.
Is there a special wish for the 2004 grads who will take their first steps
on the path to the professoriate when they begin graduate school in the fall?
Absolutely. Let us wish them lots of job offers, good jobs, great pay, engaged
students, and engaging colleagues. Let us hope the emerging technologies of
this decade prove to be compelling, engaging, and less expensive. Let us hope
that our new colleagues—our current students —benefit from definitive
research documenting the benefits of information technology as a resource for
teaching and instruction.
Let us hope that as our graduating students assume faculty positions at the
end of the decade, the formal and informal algorithm for review and promotion
will not penalize them for their interest in technology as a resource for teaching
and instruction, and that their departments and institutions will acknowledge
and accept IT as a useful resource in the portfolio of scholarship, teaching,
and service.
And over the next decade, let us also hope that the great aspirations unleashed by the “computer revolution in higher education” that began in the mid-1980s find realization in the routine instructional activities of faculty and the daily experiences of college students.
Kenneth C. Green, visiting scholar at The Claremont Graduate University, is the founding director of The Campus Computing Project, a comprehensive, continuing study of the role of information technology at higher education institutions in the United States (www.campuscomputing.net).
View more articles by Kenneth Green.
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