CHAPTER 2: Why is Crossover Pedagogy Important?

In a nutshell, here is what I have learned about the process and content of education on a college campus: In a project as broad, deep, and challenging as preparing our students for the confoundingly complex, hyper-pluralistic world of the 21st century, educators on a college campus—administrators, faculty, and staff members—are co-owners of the intellectual life and rightful heirs of the liberallearning ideal. I have become a shameless endorser of increased collaboration among faculty and student affairs educators in order to help students face the overwhelming personal, professional, and global challenges (many of which we have yet even to conceive) of the coming decades. Helping students to do all of this constitutes what I believe is “visionary intellectual excellence.” Anything less is “regressive intellectual mediocrity,” perpetrated, wittingly or unwittingly, by an outdated, faculty-dominance hierarchy. Yes, this is harsh, but it is also what I believe after spending nearly half a century doing what I love.