ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 21, 1995 TAG: 9512210032
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
VIRGINIA Tech's College of Education, born in controversy, may now be dying in controversy.
The college's uncertain fate is the kind of issue on which a measure of contentiousness is probably inevitable. But the situation was made worse by the university administration's mishandling of the issue - at best, a breakdown in communication with an Education College faculty that had thought its own painful restructuring had already satisfied demands for retrenchment.
The mishandling is unfortunate, for a couple of reasons.
First, the quality of change is influenced by the procedures for change. Imposed unilaterally from above, change rarely turns out as well as when reached through consultation with those who must implement it and work with its effects.
Moreover, the capacity for effective change in other parts of the university may be hindered if the example at the College of Education is perceived as a likely pattern. It also can be hindered, of course, if defenders of a status quo are able to block needed change.
Second, the administration's thinking about the college is in itself reasonable. Disputes over when who told what to whom have diverted attention from substantive questions embedded in the issue of the college's uncertain future.
One of those questions is much the same as the question posed by state planners a quarter-century ago: Is this college needed? The University of Virginia offers doctoral-level education degrees. Radford University, just a few miles from Blacksburg, has a traditional stress on teacher training and its own College of Education and Human Development. Would the commonwealth be better served if some or all of Tech's education programs were instead UVa's or Radford's?
There's a good chance it would. And even if the answer to that old question were no, newer questions need to be considered.
Might it not make pedagogical as well as fiscal sense to incorporate Tech's teacher-training programs into another college or colleges of the university, inasmuch as the trend has been toward integrating teacher training into the disciplines to be taught?
Or, conversely, would it not make marketing sense to move Tech's education programs - particularly graduate programs, geared to teachers and administrators already working in the schools - away from the relatively isolated Blacksburg campus and into the Roanoke Valley with its bigger population base?
While Radford is moving to make some of its degrees available to Roanokers without leaving the valley, Tech has held back. If Tech were farther along in such an endeavor, perhaps its College of Education would be less beleaguered.
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