spokesperson for higher education reform to headline the MSI Success Summit | Information Center

In the 1860s, technology and industrialization reshaped the world. This included academia, widely criticized at the time for being too elitist, impractical, and not preparing students for the modern age.

Seems familiar? Well it should, says Cathy N. Davidson, author of “The New Education.” In her 2017 book, Davidson compares the modern university to that of the late 1860s, and she says today’s leaders should embrace redesigns or face an irrelevant future.

Davidson will headline the UNLV inauguration on September 24 MSI Student Success Summit. Hosted by President Keith E. Whitfield, the event presents a vision for student success at UNLV and the institution’s duty as an institution serving minorities, Hispanics and Asian Americans and Native American of the Pacific Islands.

Davidson and Whitfield have a long professional relationship dating back to when they were both faculty members at Duke University. Davidson is now Professor Emeritus at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY).

CUNY, like UNLV and other universities, welcomes an increasingly diverse student body. Davidson explains that these demographic shifts present challenges for many universities because higher education presents structural barriers to the success of these students.

“Most of our schools just aren’t set up to deal with the changes we’re going through,” Davidson said. “Students work more, sometimes full time, and balance other obligations.”

It is a similar challenge encountered in the 1860s when Charles Elliott, president of Harvard, wrote “New Education”, a two-part essay, arguing for a more egalitarian approach to the university not entirely focused on literature, the philosophy and religion.

Davidson’s book borrows the title as well as the urgency expressed by Elliott. She advocates for a more flexible college experience, designed for students from diverse backgrounds to be successful. She says irrelevant curriculum, fear of technology, and respect for tradition are all barriers to student access and success.

Education, she argues, should focus on preparing students to face the problems of the future that we cannot yet anticipate.

“People tend to think there is vocational training versus general humanities training,” Davidson said. “What we do know is high level training and high level thinking, which is basically what you get in the humanities, is, in fact, one of the things most likely to guarantee your success. , not just during your first term or your first job, but beyond. “

His speech at the MSI summit will describe his assessment of the woes facing colleges, but all is not pessimistic. Davidson is busy writing a second edition of “The New Education”. It includes praise for the professors who quickly embraced the change during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“No one on earth would have thought that heavy academics, in two weeks, would put all their courses online,” Davidson said of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rush to accommodate distance education. “We had two weeks, and 18 million students went online in two weeks, including by professors who had never taught online and barely knew distance education.”

While some students have found distance learning off-putting, others have recognized it as a way to balance their life and educational aspirations. For Davidson, this illustrated that reform is possible.

“The pandemic was a crisis, but I would say all education is in crisis now,” Davidson said. “We have a 19th century form of education that is not suited to the students we teach, and we need to make a change. This is a positive side of the pandemic. It got us thinking about what we can do. change and what we need to change and how we can do it. “