University teaching is currently on the public agenda because employers are complaining about the shortcomings of college graduates (Candy and Crebert 1991; Van Horn 1995). Employers and other key political constituencies are no longer willing to accept excuses by university representatives that shift the blame for these perceived deficiencies on institutions lower in the learning chain (Schmidt 1998). Universities are now increasingly faced by demands that they do something to solve this problem (Gardiner 1998).
Basically institutions of higher education can improve the quality of their graduates by:
All of these practices involve the exercise of power.
This paper uses the connection between power and knowledge to analyze the implications of proposed changes in teaching at the university level. Michel Foucault (1980), a leading authority on this relationship, treated power/knowledge as an inseparable couplet and looked at the various “helping” professions as new forms of disciplinary power. I take Foucault’s analysis one step further by treating power and teaching as inseparable (i.e., teaching/power). All teaching is the application of various techniques of power.
In an earlier paper (Malecki 1998), I presented a detailed review of Foucault’s views on power to explain why the technologies of power used in college classes are different from those used in public primary and secondary school classrooms. I then used this framework to project what can be expected if the technologies of power previously used almost exclusively in primary and secondary school classrooms were deployed in classrooms at elite research universities. The present paper, Teaching/Power: Part II, describes and analyzes the technologies of power that are and will be deployed in classrooms at comprehensive universities.
Historically, elite universities have used the power of exclusion as the primary means of controlling the quality of their graduates. If only high quality students are admitted, most graduates will also be high quality. Greater reliance on the power of exclusion is now being attempted by comprehensive institutions like the twenty-three campus California State University (CSU) system and some of the colleges of the City University of New York (Healy 1998). One of the major purposes of increasing admission standards is to eliminate remedial courses at the college level. Such modest attempts to improve the quality of the students who are admitted at these institutions have been challenged as racially motivated. Future attempts to raise admission standards even higher are likely to stimulate more political opposition, hence are less likely to succeed.
Even if comprehensive universities were able to adopt more restrictive entrance requirements, these standards are certain to be much less rigorous than those currently used at elite research universities like Columbia and the University of California at Berkeley. However, these schools are finding that, despite stringent standards, substantial minorities of the students that they admit have deficient writing skills (Yaffe 1998; Seymour 1998; Weiss 1998b). This suggests that to eliminate deficiencies at the input stage, comprehensive universities will have to develop entrance requirements more rigorous than those currently used by elite research universities. As a practical and political matter, this simply will not occur in the near future. Thus, comprehensive universities will not be able to guarantee the quality of their graduates by using the power of exclusion to ensure that only students who have the requisite skills are admitted to their campuses. 1
Flunking out students who were “mistakenly” admitted is another dimension of the power of exclusion that could be used by comprehensive universities to guarantee the quality of their graduates. To achieve this goal, however, comprehensive universities would have to increase the rigor of their current grading practices. This is highly unlikely. In the first place, comprehensive universities are under pressure to improve their persistence and graduation rates (Carnevale, Johnson and Edwards 1998). In the second place, probationary and part-time faculty, who teach most of the basic skills classes, are under increasing pressure to produce positive student evaluations as a condition of employment. Given the widely discussed connection between grade inflation and positive student evaluations (Gose 1997; Langbein 1994), these instructors are unlikely to cooperate in this strategy.
To help the many students, who are admitted despite deficient skills, comprehensive universities in the last two decades have increased the number of required courses focused on writing skills, critical thinking, and quantitative skills. For example, the California State University system requires that more than one-fourth of the sixty quarter units of lower division general education courses focus on building basic skills in writing, speaking, critical thinking, and quantitative reasoning. On top of that, individual CSU campuses require additional courses in basic skills (e.g., lower division writing courses outside of general education as well as upper division writing courses in all majors). Moreover, all the general education courses are required to include outside writing assignments and critical thinking components. These requirements were added to the curriculum to force students to take courses they might otherwise prefer to avoid. 2 In short, most of the comprehensive universities of the California State University system already have curricula that focus on basic skills.
The need for these courses is widespread: most CSU students have to take one or more remedial writing and mathematics courses. On some urban campuses, such as Cal State LA, where only a third of the students have English as their primary language, the percentage of students in remedial classes is 75 per cent (Weiss 1998b). To graduate, these students will have to pass at least two and possibly five additional courses in basic skills besides the five generally required. Since students are required to get a C or higher grade in each basic skills class to meet their general education requirements, many CSU students find that the classes in basic skills constitute an insurmountable barrier to graduation.
Predictably not all students subject to remediation accept their advisers’ arguments that the skills taught in these courses are essential for them to do well in other courses and to get a decent job after graduation. Reluctant students are forced to take the courses, but this is an inefficient mode of power precisely because its exercise usually involves considerable costs (Dahl 1991). Even if only a minority of students persist in avoiding these courses (typically because they fear doing poorly since they know they are deficient in the skills that these courses cover), a small army of administrators, faculty advisors, and staff personnel is needed to force these students to take remedial courses early in their academic careers. In this case force is especially costly because in many instances enrollment in these classes does not ensure that students learn the material being taught.
To deal with this contingency, the California State University system mandates an exit writing examination for all graduates. For instance, students at Cal State LA have to take the examination before they accumulate 135 quarter units (of the 186 quarter units that are the minimum number for an undergraduate degree). Graduation depends on passing the Writing Proficiency Examination (WPE). 3
Test results over time reveal a very strong correlation between scores on the WPE exit examination and scores on the English Placement Test (EPT), which determines whether newly admitted students need remedial instruction in writing. Students admitted with strong writing skills as measured by the EPT achieve high WPE scores before graduating. Students admitted with weak writing skills who survive long enough to take the WPE generally have lower WPE scores. Their low scores on the WPE suggest that they still have weak writing skills, despite having taken one or more pre-collegiate remedial writing courses as well as ENGL 101 and 102, which are prerequisite to the WPE. Having barely passed the WPE, these graduates are still likely to be seen by employers (and many instructors) as deficient in writing skills.
In contrast to the marginal reduction of “deficient” graduates produced by curricular changes, raising the standards for passing exit examinations in basic skills is likely to significantly reduce the number of “deficient” graduates (i.e., students without the basic skills desired by employers). 4 For example, when the WPE was first required as a condition for graduation at CSLA, most of the students who took the test failed. The shock produced at CSLA by the large number of failures created strong student and faculty pressure to revise the grading rubric. The pressure succeeded. The rubric was subsequently adjusted so that most students pass the examination on their first attempt. This example suggests that significant increases in rigor are unlikely to be politically feasible if they result in the failure of most students in most majors. Faculty in disciplines with high rates of failure (e.g., engineering) complained that the English professors who had a major role in devising the test standards had unrealistic expectations.
Raising the level of basic skills possessed by the graduates of comprehensive universities is very much an exercise of power. Because such changes are contested by a variety of interested parties, no actor or coalition of actors can mobilize sufficient power to impose either the restrictive admissions policies or the rigorous exit examinations that will significantly reduce the number of students who graduate lacking the basic skills desired by employers. Moreover, it is unlikely that changes in the curriculum by themselves will produce such a result. Therefore, comprehensive universities are going to have to depend on changes in teaching modalities (i.e., modalities of power) to produce the type of university graduates that employers’ desire.
Professors teaching at comprehensive universities are expected to impart basic skills on a student body, which is largely resistant to acquiring these skills. For Foucault power and resistance are linked: where there is power, there is resistance. I hypothesize that where there is resistance, there is power. In contemporary comprehensive universities, it is precisely in courses and instruction focused on basic skills that power is most likely to be visible and to be resisted. This is consistent with Foucault’s insight that the key to understanding power is to be sought in the most routine and trivial relations.
Foucault emphasized that prisons, hospitals, clinics, schools, military barracks, confessionals, and the home developed techniques to identify and to control the “abnormal.” These same techniques necessarily also define and control the “normal”. Foucault (1965, 1977, and 1980) observed and described changes in the type of power used to control the poor, the mad and the deviant. He was less concerned with establishing whether these new forms of power were successful in every case than with describing changes in the patterns. He documented a shift from the discontinuous, dramatic use of force and violence to the widespread use of surveillance—the gaze and dossier—as a means to achieve continuous control. Who was exercising these powers was less important than their widespread deployment. The mad, the criminal, the perverted, the delinquent, and so on represent the Other. As Foucault so persuasively argued power/knowledge regimes differentiate the “normal” from the “abnormal” with the result that those characterized as “abnormal” are treated as deficient simply because they differ from the “normal.”
Obviously, university faculty and employers expect college graduates to possess a certain level of basic skills. To the extent that graduating college students are perceived as deficient in these skills, they will be viewed as deviant or “abnormal.” On the other hand, to the extent that it is typical for graduates from comprehensive universities to be “deficient” in these skills, they are the norm and therefore subject to a different set of power technologies. These contradictory characterizations of the graduates from comprehensive universities are reconciled in the diverse practices being deployed to rationalize higher education in the United States.
If the “deficient” graduates of comprehensive universities were to be treated as “abnormal,” then it would be consistent with Foucault’s analysis of the Other to expect technologies of power to emerge aimed at confinement and differentiation of this population. At the national level of power, this strategy appears to be evolving. For over fifty years, lists differentiating elite universities and colleges from less selective institutions have been published. Now, various agencies are developing lists of research universities. Conspicuous by their absence are comprehensive universities such as those found in the California State University system. Exclusion has implications for the graduates of these universities.
To the extent that comprehensive universities are differentiated from research universities by their mission, the type of education that they deliver will also be different. If the mission of the comprehensive university comes to be the production of graduates who possess marketable basic skills (as opposed to producing graduates who are subject-matter specialists), these graduates will be confined to social positions that emphasize the possession of basic skills. Moreover, to the extent that research activities are excluded from their mission, comprehensive universities will be unable to attract either research funds or research faculty. The absence of research faculty and research funds will then reinforce the emphasis on basic skills and guarantee that students graduating from comprehensive universities will be unable to compete for social positions that emphasize subject-matter expertise.
To the extent that all universities overproduce subject matter specialists, it is “rational” from a system’s perspective that technologies of power emerge to restrict this overproduction. From Foucault’s perspective, the wrong kind of agent is being produced and a new disciplinary regime must be established to produce the right kind. Changing the comprehensive universities’ mission is one means of creating a new disciplinary regime that will produce the appropriate type of agent.
If the mission of comprehensive universities becomes the production of graduates who possess marketable basic skills, the whole notion of basing a degree on the accumulation of units measured in terms of “seat time” becomes antiquated for students who already possess these skills when they are admitted. For students who already possess the requisite skills on admission, the university’s function would be simply to validate the existence of their skills. Classroom time could be eliminated and these students sped through the process as rapidly as their capacities could be assessed. Although such practices might make a comprehensive university degree appear second-rate in comparison to a research university degree, these degrees might still appeal to talented, lower socio-economic students who either need or want to obtain a degree quickly. This process of rationalization would reinforce the existing class bias between elite and comprehensive universities.
To the extent that comprehensive universities successfully modify their teaching modalities (i.e., modalities of power) to efficiently produce graduates with marketable basic skills, the classrooms in the comprehensive university will provide nothing to students who already have these skills. This type of comprehensive university will neither need faculty who are subject-matters experts (i.e., faculty with traditional Ph.D. training) nor have much appeal for them if research positions are available elsewhere. The new comprehensive universities will need faculty who know how to deploy new types of teaching modalities (e.g., active learning, distance learning) and who are eager to apply these new technologies of power. Because most of the professors currently teaching in comprehensive universities neither use nor are eager to learn how to use these technologies of power, they constitute a massive obstacle to the transformation of comprehensive universities.
Faculty resistance to the transformation of comprehensive universities ensures that the power struggle will be visible, but the logic of the situation skews power in favor of the forces of change. In the first place, the overproduction of doctoral students in the humanities and social sciences guarantees that there will be a large pool of pliable faculty to replace the existing faculty. In the second place, the demographics of the existing faculty guarantees that their resistance will be short-lived since a large proportion is approaching retirement age (Magner 1999). 5 In the third place, some Ph.D.-producing institutions are changing the content of their doctoral programs by including courses and instruction on new teaching modalities (Weiss 1998a); hence, future doctoral students will be prepared for the new mission of comprehensive universities. In the fourth place, a bipartisan consensus is forming on the new mission of comprehensive universities, which means that university faculty no longer can count on pro-labor sentiments in the Democratic party to protect them from these “business-oriented” directives.
The teaching challenge at comprehensive universities is similar to that at many primary and secondary public schools: get students to learn something that they would not otherwise learn. Of course, it is much easier to get people to do what they already want to do. Leaders have maximum authority when their followers already want to do what the leaders want them to do and maximum “persuasive” power when the audience already want to believe what leaders are going to ask them to believe (cf. Neustadt 1960). 6 Similarly, teachers are most successful when their students are eager to learn what the teachers are going to present to them.
For example, even when parochial primary and secondary schools serve a largely low-income population with few native English speakers, they are much more successful than their public counterparts in preparing their students for admission into college and universities (O’Connor 1998). Moreover, they do this with teachers who are paid much less than public school teachers, quite often because parochial school teachers do not have a certificate to teach in the public schools. In other words, parochial school teachers have had much less teacher training than their public counterparts but are more successful in preparing their students for college. Now, public school teachers quite correctly point out that private and parochial schools, unlike public schools, still enjoy the power of exclusion and therefore can restrict enrollment to students who are ready, willing, and able to learn. That is precisely the point: compared to the effects produced by the power of exclusion, the effects of teaching/power are severely limited. Successful teaching and learning are more dependent on getting the right audience/student body in the first place than they are on classroom teaching modalities. Since comprehensive universities cannot restrict enrollment to those willing to learn, their faculty has to become more effective teachers.
All teaching is power and the various modalities of teaching are simply variations in the exercise of power. Teachers can use persuasion, authority, inducement, coercion, manipulation and force to get students to learn. Of course, this language is not used in schools of education. Because schools of education are typically uncomfortable with the language of power (Connell 1994, 131-132), they do not describe teaching methods as technologies of power. Moreover, unrealistic notions of democracy discourage schools of education from identifying these practices as modes of power (cf. Henry 1963: 283).
Nevertheless, teachers in elementary public schools must use a wide variety of power techniques (i.e., teaching modalities) to maintain order in the classroom and to get their students to listen and to learn. For example, making the classroom environment interesting and attractive by adding plants, fish, and hamsters is not seen for what it really is. Such “enhancements” are either a form of manipulation (e.g., in the same way that advertisers use beautiful models to present their products), inducement (e.g., “If you do well on your reading lessons, I will bring a fish aquarium to school”), or coercion (e.g., “If you don’t line up, I will take the hamster home”). Discussions of lesson plans emphasize that good planning contributes to learning rather than focusing on the similarity between lesson plans and strategic planning and organization, both of which are standard tools of power. Giving new names to various forms of power does not make “active learning” any less manipulative than the introduction of “human relations” in the adult workplace. Just because new forms of power, when first introduced, are associated with higher levels of learning (or workplace productivity) does not mean that they cease to be forms of power.
Teaching future teachers how to control relatively inattentive audiences is the primary mission of schools of education. Professional schools of education correctly place more emphasis on teaching methods than on subject matter in their training programs. The methods these teachers use require a lot of planning to be effective. Good primary and secondary school teachers have to think less about content of the material than about how to get students to learn material they would not otherwise learn. This student-oriented approach requires teachers to provide plenty of feedback to students, which means that effective teachers must devote a lot of time and energy to reading and correcting student work. From a power viewpoint, primary and secondary public school teachers have to use a lot of resources to get classrooms of reluctant learners to do what they would not otherwise do. From an economic perspective these methods are labor intensive.
In elementary schools, most learning is expected to take place within the classroom. Primary school students are assigned homework, but in most public schools, it does not constitute a significant time commitment. Primary school students attend class five days a week. Typically, they begin their day at 8:00 A.M. and are dismissed at 2:30 or 3:00 P.M. During this time they are subject to the teacher’s surveillance and control techniques. The same thirty students have the same teacher for the entire year. Thus, after a few weeks, the teacher has a good sense of each student’s skills in a variety of areas and can use this comprehensive knowledge to develop an overall strategy for enforcing learning objectives for each student. Because students and teacher are together for every school day of the academic year, the teacher can use peer pressure to enforce discipline and learning.
In contrast, at the college level, most learning is expected to take place outside the classroom, since for any particular course, students are typically in a class only three or four hours per week. Students have different teachers for each course and typically have much larger classes than those in primary schools. College teachers in basic skills classes do not get a comprehensive view of their students. Because of federal legislation protecting the privacy of student records, they are discouraged, if not prevented, from systematically obtaining such information outside of the classroom. College teachers do not routinely coordinate their activities with one another as part of a strategic plan aimed at developing specific skills for each student in their classes. Moreover, since faculty at comprehensive universities typically teach 200-300 students each academic year, they cannot develop detailed individual learning plans for each student in their classes. In addition, because students individually plan their schedules, those in one general education class, for instance, are never identical to those in another, which limits the instructor’s use of peer pressure as a means of enforcing learning goals. 7 Given these factors, most learning at the college level has to take place outside the classroom.
Students would learn more quickly outside the classroom if they accepted constructive criticism, did all the required and recommended reading and assignments on their own, and sought timely feedback (which means that they did not procrastinate). Unfortunately, there are relatively few students in comprehensive universities who perform in this manner and submit material in stages so that sources, notes, drafts, outlines, and so on precede the submission of final drafts. Few students in comprehensive universities spend enough time studying material outside of class. 8 Moreover, many students employ poor study techniques when they are on task (Gardiner 1998).
The situation is difficult but not hopeless. All students learn better when they are interested in the material. Faculty teaching basic skills at the college level face the challenge: How can the material be made more interesting? No one approach will work with all students. Fortunately, university students, unlike primary and secondary school students, have a major, which they usually select because they have some interest in the content. This suggests that it is more likely that students will be interested in learning basic skills taught within the context of their chosen major than in learning basic skills in a general education course. A serious problem with this approach is that the professors in most disciplines are neither capable of, nor interested in teaching basic skills. Thus, the existing faculty will either have to be forced, induced, or persuaded to retool, or they will have to be replaced by new faculty with different skills and interests.
Assuming that the problem of interest can be partially solved by teaching basic skills within major courses and by finding faculty willing to do so, instructors teaching basic skills in the major still are faced with the problem of getting students to learn. To deal with the problems of poor study habits and techniques, many universities have developed introduction-to-higher-education courses for their new students. Such courses aim to teach students time-management skills, note-taking skills, effective study habits, examination skills, and so on. Instructors in the introduction-to-higher-education classrooms try to persuade, induce, coerce, command, and/or force students to spend more time on the coursework they are supposed to be doing outside the classroom. Although Upcraft, Gardner & Associates (1989) indicate that students who take these courses have higher persistence rates than students who do not, introduction-to-higher-education courses do not directly increase faculty control over student learning outside of class.
To increase that control over students, some universities have developed learning communities (Smith 1991). The learning community curricular model links coursework to promote coherence and intellectual interaction for a group of students. The four basic models of learning communities are linked courses, course clusters, freshman interest groups, and coordinated studies. Frequently, these efforts are combined with collaborative teaching. The development of collaborative teaching in higher education involves team-coordinated teaching and team teaching (McDaniel and Colarulli 1997). Both learning communities and collaborative teaching increase the amount of information and control instructors have over students. Borden and Rooney (1998) review evidence that indicates that learning communities can be effective and offer a feasible solution for different issues and diverse institutional realities. The main problem with this mode of increasing institutional power over the learning process is that it is too labor intensive and expensive as a general solution to the problems faced by comprehensive universities. Therefore, educators and comprehensive universities have turned to technology with the hope that it will provide faculty greater control over the learning process in a cost efficient manner (Dede 1998; Garson 1999). 9
Widespread student access to computers and the internet together with the development of sophisticated software, such as WebCT, permit faculty to put syllabi, study questions, lecture notes, self-administered quizzes and examinations, and research resources at a web site readily accessible to their students. Students can access this material at any time of the day (i.e., whenever they have the interest). Students can raise questions with the instructor at any time (although the answers will not usually be provided immediately). Because the students have to ask the questions, take the quizzes, and sift through the research sites, they are more actively engaged in the learning process than if they are just sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. Still, the agenda is set up by the instructor, which means that the students’ “freedom” is limited, and this may negatively impact their interest. Nevertheless, WebCT can provide faculty with information about which students visited the site and how long they remained. Thus, web-based courses can perform a surveillance function for the instructor.
Initially, faculty and students who already have the basic computer and keyboard skills to use a web-based course are the ones most likely to use these new technologies. Predictably, the initial users have liked this mode of learning and achieved better learning outcomes (in the sense of readily measurable outcomes) than students in traditional lecture classes. The system has already created missionaries, like Peter Denning at George Mason University, who will actively push for the expanded deployment of technologically mediated instruction at the college level as the way to modernize comprehensive universities (Garson 1999).
Of course, those familiar with Foucault’s studies know that modernization is simply a description of the deployment of a different set of power technologies than those formerly deployed. Modern technologies of power are aimed at creating agents who will be useful and productive in modern society. Ironically, the elite research universities, which have been associated with the deployment of scientific and technological knowledge facilitating new technologies of power, have followed a different path.
Historically, elite universities in the United States have been modeled on an Americanized version of the classical European model. In contrast, normal schools and technical schools were created on an industrial model. However, with the explosion of college enrollment after World War II, many normal and technical schools were converted into universities of the traditional type. Moreover, many traditional universities expanded their offerings and added schools of education and technical schools. The distinction between the two models became blurred. Now, restructuring of American higher education reinstates the original distinctions.
Today, modernization of the comprehensive university means that old priorities are being displaced by new priorities. Traditionally, research faculty recruited on the basis of their research specialties viewed general education courses as simply a series of hoops through which students had to jump in order to show that they were ready for the serious work in their discipline. In contemporary comprehensive universities, general education and basic skills are paramount. Modernizing administrators increasingly view the disciplines in comprehensive universities as obstacles. In comprehensive universities, academic disciplines are increasingly subjected to learning outcomes assessment that require departments to show that their major programs are helping students learn basic skills. In elite research universities, however, subject-matter research remains paramount. In modernizing comprehensive universities teaching will be supreme and pedagogical research more highly prized than subject matter expertise. These differences will be reflected in the recruitment patterns and the reward structure of the modernizing comprehensive university.
From the perspective of senior faculty in the comprehensive university, these changes are likely to be painful, unwelcome, and pedagogically suspect. However, even widespread concern that these new technologies will be unable to produce the type of agent suited for modern industrial and commercial needs does not mean that the technologies will not be deployed. As Foucault (1977) forcibly brought home in his studies of the development of modern prisons, failure to rehabilitate the inmates has never stood as a deterrent to building more prisons. What is predictable is that the new regimes of power deployed by and within the modernizing comprehensive university will not be officially described in those terms. Instead, the new technologies of power will be heralded as pedagogical innovations aimed at helping students learn the basic skills that they need in order to be productive citizens in a global economy. Moreover, faculty who oppose these modernizing trends will be marginalized as archaic Luddites who should retire and permit a new generation of modern college teachers to do their stuff.
Support for the deployment of these technologies will come from the commercial institutions that develop and sell the products used in their application (Garson 1999). A whole network of industries and workers will depend on the continued deployment of these technologies. Under these conditions, success is more likely to be measured by the extent of the deployment of the new technologies than by the amount of learning actually achieved by their use. Because divisions within the ranks of faculty are predictable, faculty in comprehensive universities will be unable to stop the deployment of these new technologies and the modernization of their institutions. In the meantime, social science and humanities faculty at research universities still beholden to the classical model will debate the meaning of postmodernism in the leading professional journals for their disciplines.
1. Even though stiffer standards will undoubtedly improve the overall quality of graduates from comprehensive universities, it should be noted that employers are complaining about graduates from elite research universities. Thus, modest improvement in overall quality of graduates from comprehensive universities is unlikely to stem employers' complaints.
2. This is a deliberate paraphrasing of Robert Dahl's (1991) definition of power.
3. Students who fail the test on their first attempt are permitted to repeat the test. If they fail again, the can still graduate if they successfully complete an additional course in writing.
4. It is easier to show that the current cohort of college graduates is quite different from the cohort of students who are hiring them than it is to show that the current cohort is objectively weaker in basic skills. (Malecki 1998). I place quotation marks around "deficient" precisely because employers' complaints are at least partially based on generational and cultural differences in the definition of good writing.
5. For example, less then 15 per cent of the faculty teaching at comprehensive universities within the University of Wisconsin system are under 40 years of age and almost 36 percent are 55 and over (Office of Policy Analysis and Research 1999). If historical retirement rates hold, close to 40 percent of the UW faculty members systemwide will retire in the next decade.
6. From this perspective, Neustadt's argument that the power of the president is the power to persuade emphasizes the wrong dimension of his careful analysis of presidential power. As he notes, presidential power is maximized when the president has broad public support. However, broad support is less a sign of the president's power to persuade than a sign that the president has found a receptive audience. The whole point of modern election campaigns is to find out what the voters want and then to give it to them. The problem for most want-to-be leaders is that the public does not know what it wants, leaving "leaders" followerless and, therefore, powerless.
7. A number of universities are developing group-scheduling plans for freshmen who are placed in a cohort that moves from class to class. Preliminary research suggests that students in these "learning communities" tend to perform better and are more likely to persist in school than students who individually schedule their classes (Leonard 1996; Tinto 1998). It should be noted that one of the byproducts of choosing a major, especially in a discipline with relatively few majors, is the greater likelihood of finding the same cohort of students in different classes. The instructors teaching these classes may indeed build a more comprehensive view of student abilities as these students move from one of their classes to another, and the students experience greater peer support and pressure. Thus, one of the reasons why students seem to learn better in their major courses than in courses outside their major may be due to the differences in the power situation of these two types of classes.
8. At urban comprehensive universities, like CSLA, most students work and many have family obligations which greatly reduce the total time available for study. Moreover, many of these students have difficulty finding a place at home where they can study free from distractions.
9. Garson (1999) strongly argues that quality distance education costs more, not less than traditional teaching.
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