Reengineering the university

Reviewer: Doris Keefe Lidtke

This is a must-read article for academics. Tsichritzis points out why universities must change, discusses their current crises, and summarizes his view of how this change can occur. This view is based partly on experiments at his own institution, the Bonn-Geneva Distance Learning Tests. Though he clearly recognizes the difficulty of changing universities, he proposes major reorganization. He envisions a few talented, tenured professors who will “produce and evolve content” to be used locally and globally. Additionally, “each course has a course supervisor who defines, evaluates, evolves, and is generally responsible for the course. He or she also supervises all animators giving the course, markets the course, and imports/exports content.” Supervisors and animators are hired on 5-to-6-year and 2-to-3-year renewable contracts and will not need doctoral degrees. Furthermore, these professors will be the “partners (as in legal firms)” who run the university. Will these very, very busy people have any significant interaction with students__?__ While universities certainly should take advantage of new technology, the history of the impact of technology, such as movies and television, shows that little has really changed. The new technology may affect the delivery of education to adult learners<__?__Pub Caret>. However, for most 18-to-22-year-olds, college is a socialization process. Most traditional college students, particularly in the US, do not have the self-discipline to adjust to the educational environment Tsichritzis describes. Finally, the model does not address the training of graduate students.