In The Learning Paradigm College, John Tagg champions the argument that because high school students have changed, undergraduate colleges— i.e., those colleges “both within and independent of universities, the institutions that prepare students for the baccalaureate degree” (p. 5)—must also transform their educational approach. He then sets out to explain how.

In the book’s foreword, Peter T. Ewell writes of reviewing an early version of Tagg’s explanation as the executive editor of Change, a publication of the American Association for Higher Education. Ewell describes how an article co-authored by Robert B. Barr and John Tagg (1995), “From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education,” was “arguably the most widely cited piece that Change has ever published” (p. ix) and how Tagg’s follow-up article became the book reviewed here. Barr, the director of institutional research and planning, and Tagg, an associate professor of English, had collaborated on the article while colleagues at Palomar College, a public two-year community college located near San Diego, California.

The Learning Paradigm College is written from the perspective of a veteran classroom teacher. Yet, in restating the case for a paradigm shift in undergraduate education, Tagg argues that all who work in colleges, including “the teachers and administrators, the librarians and registrars, the deans and counselors who do the daily work of higher education” (p. 4), must begin to see their own organizations through a new lens:

The real root of our most persistent and pernicious problems is the invisible enemy, the one we don’t see because we see it every day: the organizational paradigm governing our institutions. Our organizational paradigm is like a lens: We don’t see it; we see through it, but it determines how we see everything else.” (pp. 4–5)

The organizational transformation to a new model for teaching and learning represents a challenge that has been difficult to accomplish to date. However, “The Challenge” (as Chapter 1 is titled) is also a compelling proposition that reflects changing economic, political, and demographic patterns in American society over time. Similarly, the learning paradigm reflects new theories of learning and organizational behavior. Planners with an interest in the history of science or those familiar with the American research university’s role in technological development during the Cold War will remember Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) discussion of resistance to paradigm shifts in science. In the history of American higher education, the Carnegie unit, or student credit hour, “emerged late in the 19th century as a tool to achieve both quality control and increased efficiency for colleges” (p. 16) and facilitated the rise of the “instruction paradigm” (Barr 1995), which became entrenched through the post-World War II expansion of American higher education. Under the instruction paradigm, which includes “a standardized national framework for the transfer of credit, similar course requirements, and nearly identical course design” (p. 15), the effective mission of most colleges and universities today is to provide instruction, i.e., to offer classes. According to Tagg, irrespective of published institutional mission  

Sandra L. Kortesoja. 2008. Review of The Learning Paradigm College, by John Tagg. Planning for Higher Education. 37(1): 59–61.