Clark Kerr, President of the University of California, famously coined the term the “multiversity” to capture the expansion of universities in mid twentieth-century America to the point that they contained multiple and often competing (and indeed conflicting) goals, interests, and trajectories. While Kerr waxed eloquent about the value of the multiversity, he worried about the loss of community and purpose he associated with the smaller undergraduate college – especially in relation to undergraduate education. In particular, he worried that incentive structures for faculty led them to focus on narrow research as well as their own entrepreneurial opportunities outside the university, while they became more detached from undergraduate teaching on the one side, and more resistant to administrative leadership and guidance on the other. I follow up on the tensions between administrators and faculty and the ways in which disciplinary structures impede both intellectual openness and institutional experimentation.

This chapter focuses on the practice of engaging in argument from evidence. In each chapter, the practice is dissected into distinct and clear learning tasks that can be used as process goals. These tasks are then examined within the context of a self-regulated learning cycle. A multistep coaching strategy explaining points for instruction and assessment is provided using the example of a design challenge for students in grades K through 2. The design challenge asks students to identify a problem to solve from a picture book and use the engineering design process to solve that problem. The tasks (process goals) are reassembled into two case studies – one positive and one negative – to demonstrate how the learning tasks can be used by students.

In this chapter I make recommendations for change in the university, breaking down the disciplines and their “holding” departments – especially for organizing undergraduate education but also for research – while also opening up other university structures, from the conventional barriers between high school and college to those that prevent genuine collaboration among universities. I argue for more institutional differentiation of postgraduate institutions – a goal that is frustrated by overreliance on rankings and that could be facilitated by creating more networks linking and coordinating work across institutions, while also creating easier on and off ramps for students throughout their undergraduate educations (and beyond, to genuine “lifelong” learning). I suggest ways to break down the “guild”-like nature of the faculty described by Kerr, as well as to control some of the costs of higher education while not cutting back on research interests of faculty or for that matter on the working conditions of faculty.

This chapter focuses on mathematics and computational thinking. In each chapter, the practice is dissected into distinct and clear learning tasks that serve as process goals for learning the practice. These tasks are then examined within the context of a self-regulated learning cycle and coaching strategies for instruction and assessment are emphasized. The instruction and assessment strategies are contextualized for students in grades 9–12 and focus on conducting an investigation on the factors influencing the period of a pendulum. The data practices for the investigation are infused with computational thinking. The tasks are reassembled into two case studies focused on the heating curve of water– one positive and one negative – to demonstrate how the learning tasks can be used by students and how teachers can support students learning how to plan and carry out investigations.

This chapter is dissected into distinct and clear learning tasks. These tasks are then examined within the context of a self-regulated learning cycle and points for instruction and assessment are emphasized. The tasks are reassembled into two case studies – one positive and one negative – to demonstrate how the learning tasks can be used by students. Teacher educators may be interested in the first three parts of each chapter, although they could also use the fourth part to inspire action research projects. Educational researchers may be interested in all four bullet points in order to understand the concepts and variables in the research project design.

The introduction sets the mise en scene for the book in a narrative introduction, raising some of the questions the book will be addressing around: crisis of the university, higher education, student protest, intercollegiate athletics, tuition, governance, the cost of higher education and student debt, liberal arts and humanities, the defunding of public universities, sexual assault, sexual harassment, free speech, hate speech, race, intellectual diversity, college closures, culture wars, neoliberalism.