editorially speaking The Faculty Role in Educational Reform: Business as Usual? The winds of change associated with education reform are everywhere and unmistakable. Yet, it is not a t all clear that change will occur. And, if it does occur, will that change be characterized as reform? The faculty certainly has a legitimate interest in education reform movements, hut will;hey be pre-empted by a myopic, but understandable, self-interest in research-focused disciplinary issues? Reform movements can evolve from a number of primary causes that may not produce equivalent or, indeed, compatible outputs. For example, a strong reform movement has grown from the discontent of a numher of legitimate constituencies-students, faculty, and the administration-about the nature of entry-level science and mathematics courses. These courses have come to he regarded as deterrents or barriers to some students who might he interested in pursuing science-orientedor technological degree programs. To change these courses, faculty must create new instructional strategies to meet the needs of today's diverse student body. Strategies appropriate for one institution may not be appropriate in other teaching environments, hut in all cases the administration must provide the resources necessary to develop new instructional approaches. Whether or not the data that have been gathered and the arguments engendered by those data are to he believed, it is clear that curricular reform is afoot in the land. Such reform should not be confused with changes directed at containing the cost of an education, which has risen much more rapidly than can he accounted for by the usual inflatiouam armunents. Administrative reform that is focused only on containing costs will almost certainly adversely affect curricular reform. Furthermore, ifthe f:icultv, whlch is the link between the curriculum and the administration, is overly involved with discipline-oriented research issues, meaningful reform cannot occur and the idea of the academy as a place of intellectual purpose will be in serious jeopardy. There can be no successful reform in a college or university that does not involve its faculty as primary change agents. Among faculty there is a paramount need for vision, a need for faculty to lead, to assess their own circumstances, and to create an environment where decisions can be made on behalf of the entire institution. An important first step in transforming the culture of an institution is to overcome the perceived boundaries separating faculty from the administration. It is critical that faculty and administrators work together to define a strong unifying vision of the institution's mission and to establish goals that
will provide the basis for change. An institution where the faculty and administration cannot, or will not, work together to defme a common vision will not succeed in any kind of significant reform. Indeed, reform movements will become paralyzed under such conditions. Vision, leadership, and incentives are the minimum precursors to institutional reform. Each requires concerted dialog and action of the academic community. Faculty have a special stake in making certain that their institution has sufficient authority to act collectively, even when protecting that authority means relinquishing some of their own independence. Ultimately the faculty become the principal beneficiaries of institutional autonomy. As part of the reform process, faculty must delineate those elements that constitute essential knowledge in a discipline, as distinguished from those that represent specialized research or political interests. They must define the minimum core concepts of the discipline that students should know and understand. Chemistry faculty bear an added burden in the current reform process because of the impact of the molecular revolution on associated sciences such as biology and material science. Reform in the chemistry curriculum must not only recognize the changes that have occurred in the discipline itself, hut must also reach out to other sciences for which the concepts associated with molecularity has become important. Clearly this kind of reform requires chemistry faculty to engage not only administrators but faculty colleagues in other disciplines that require an understanding of many aspects of chemistry. The present academic environment encourages tenured faculty to teach courses that represent their own research specialties and, a t research universities, to teach a t the graduate level. The critical task of teaching the fundamentals has increasingly fallen upon apprentices, adjunct faculty, and temporary faculty. Establishing key (core) courses taught by tenured faculty would ensure that a department's principal talents are engaged in undergraduate instruction and would probably reduce the numher of specialized courses, thus simplifying the curriculum. If faculty and the administration can work together to bring about reform, wlleges and universities could become more than producers of employable students. They could become more effective organizations with a clearer sense of their true mission-education for life-long learning.
JJL
Volume 70 Number 7 July 1993
521
