| Higher Education Commentary I |
|
|
|
| Written by Ron Willett | |
| Saturday, 26 May 2007 | |
|
U.S. Higher Education: Intellectual Camelot This is part one of a two-part series on U.S. higher education, focusing primarily on its more challenged players, our so-called state or public universities. It is a sequel to our three-part series on the challenges faced by our K-12 public schools. But there is a major difference. Since 1983, and the publication of “A Nation at Risk,” it has been generally conceded that our K-12 educational bureaucracy has repetitively dropped the educational ball, is still riddled with mediocrity, and has been misdirected by concessions to the educational unions, by developmental failures of our schools of education and by K-12 systems’ bureaucratically-driven rigidity. In contrast, a majority of our public thinks our universities are doing just fine. For example, a very recent survey of Hoosiers by Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, found that 69 percent of the sample said the quality of Indiana’s public universities was “very high” or “high;” 83 percent said higher education is “more valuable now than 20 years ago.” The results are typical of such surveys of the general population. But the pattern of findings is also a paradox, because the sharpest critics of public higher education are people who have been in “the academy,” and understand what a public and even an institution’s students generally do not perceive or comprehend. Additionally, the aura of the “college degree” has in fact slipped a bit in those two decades, becoming less symbolic of career-readiness, as myriad other ways of acquiring knowledge have developed, and creativity and entrepreneurship have replaced the formal educational experience as success factors. Consequently, this first piece will seek a balanced perspective about the great and the not so great about our universities, and why their status has changed markedly in a half-century, but in ways little noticed by our general public. The writer brings to this assessment 20 years as a member of a Big Ten university faculty, with a stint as an administrator, and lastly as a faculty member also responsible for training future university faculty members. Winning or Losing American public universities are not, comprehensively, the major cause of our educational woes in a world that has overtaken the U.S. educationally, and actually eclipsed our once leadership position. K-12 comes closer to qualifying for that claim, because it is, formulaically, far more homogeneous in its infrastructure and in dogma practiced. Our colleges and universities have, first, far more internal control of their strategies and tactics than K-12 institutions, and second, are far more diverse. That’s good and bad. The good is that our private colleges may still be some of the highest caliber sources of higher education in the world, committed to teaching prioritized ahead of most faculty research, to amateur athletics rather than big-time sports, and to “an education” as opposed to narrower professional training objectives. The bad is that we also harbor universities that have chosen to emulate the corporate organizational model, where market power and the revenue to become a self-sustaining enterprise have eroded core educational values. The bad is equally represented by states’ misguided attempts to export alleged higher education to every corner of their real estate, for example, in Ohio. Ohio’s local and regional campuses – the Lake Campus of Wright State University is a palpable example – are in many cases no better than 9-12 on steroids; they are not competent collegiate programs, lack competent faculty, reek of being little fiefdoms, and basically undercut quality higher education in the state. On balance, however, the principal state universities in the U.S., even with their cults of sports dominance, manage to employ generally well-trained faculty, and still embrace enough of traditional academic values that they field respectable curricula in the major academic disciplines. Also, on balance, they have turned out human resources relevant to, and demanded by our present private and public sectors. Our corporate community has become a major source of financial inputs as well. This financial support has been increasingly focused on our universities’ B-schools, where endowing schools has become a symbol and ego trip for some who have had market financial success. Both increased governmental and corporate grants have been applied more productively to collegiate science disciplines, where the hope has been that technology-driven products can ultimately result. The above observations do not even scratch the surface of the bundle of variables and situations that frame where our higher education system resides. Over 25 years there have been repetitive blue-ribbon commissions that have carefully looked at higher educations’ successes, foibles and soaring costs to the student and parent. This review has no chance of covering the scope of the assessments for improvement that have been advanced by very competent critics of higher education; however, a selective review of recommendations from, and links to those studies will be provided in Part Two. The one safe generalization that can be rendered about that 25 years of assessment is that our public universities, almost to a fault, have deflected if not thumbed their noses at the recommendations for improvement and cost reduction, regardless of the quality of the critics or the level of the agency issuing the critiques. Why that can happen is worth some exploration. The Rise of University Autonomy Four forces appear to at root explain why our public universities have been able to deflect legitimate critique over decades: How our universities are led; the alumni game; demand for the diploma; and the evolution of university funding. The human resources that administer our universities at and close to the top are, by definition, very smart. They are generally smarter than the people chosen or elected to provide their oversight. Whereas our K-12 establishment has never been accused of fielding intellectual “rocket scientists,” or in many cases exceptional administrative competencies, our universities (for example, Purdue’s new president) are on occasion managed by rocket scientists. University leadership also has typically come from the inside, or from short lists of the academies’ “good old boys club,” now good old boys club with a few women. Because of the rules of the game in higher education, those who rise to the upper echelons of university management through the academic ranks likely share more values than any profession except religion and possibly the law. Tacit collusion among university leaders to disdain and reject external critique is not only possible, but also very frequently the rule. There are, screened from general public view, multiple academic equivalents of trade associations, just as effective as many trade groups in creating common missions and overtly lobbying for or against laws and action that will advance their causes or provide protective cover. Parenthetically, intellect, and being an academic, do not make one immune to Lord Acton’s historical dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is also leadership in American universities that can be as counter to the professions’ nobler goals, and the universities’ missions relative to public good, as in corporate ethical departures – it is just harder to dig out, and one must get by the image of public service and assumed altruistic values that have historically been associated with higher education. A second factor that has served to insulate our universities from critique is the studied efforts to seek and solidify alumni support. As occasional vignettes demonstrate, the most effective and productive administrative components of most universities are frequently its alumni office and operations. Tied to sports supremacy as a core appeal, a loyal alumni group in a state – many of whom may be the majority of a state’s legislature – is a highly potent lobbying group for a state university, for more tax dollars, and to blunt any threats to the institution’s autonomy or even to accountability for dollars received. Factor three is the continued demand from part of our economy for human resources with “the diploma.” Interestingly, this demand – especially from our private sector – may have less to do with the college degree’s intellectual “value-added” than because the diploma is a surrogate for testing to sort talent made illegal by the 1991 Civil Rights Act. Increasingly, our corporate sector employs completion of, for example, a business degree less as an expression of expertise – where much of that training is either factually wrong, or obsolete by the time of its potential use – than a test of interest and general aptitude for business. The training to actually work productively will ultimately be supplied by corporate in-house or vended on-the-job or development training. Lastly, the fourth factor reflects the evolution of public higher education funding over the last 50 years, reducing the fraction of revenue universities now receive from their states’ general funds. Basically, as our states over time reduced their direct funding for our state universities, with those states under pressure to fund ever more services (and unfunded federal mandates) and hold down taxes, our public universities responded. They did so, over time not with the pandering for funds seen in virtually every local K-12 school levy, but by aggressively adapting to the environment -- including employing professional lobbyists -- and seeking alternative sources of funding. As the spiraling tuitions of our public universities testify, they found part of the answer in colluding and simply emulating other monopolies by raising prices. Another part of the answer was aggressive recruitment of alumni dollars, and endowments by those who attribute their subsequent success -- more often than not inappropriately -- to those halcyon undergraduate days of freedom, sex, alcohol, drugs and a smattering of learning. The burgeoning demand for science and technology produced another area of windfall; federal, corporate and state investments were made in university research assumed to be hopefully convertible into state economic development or market dollars, or technology applicable to various federal activities, including defense. Whether the academic genre can produce in those venues or whether, if it does, will in multiple ways diminish the university’s legitimate role in basic research, remains an unanswered question. Lastly, many of our universities found “marketing religion” and greatly expanded their educational and service product lines to tap post-collegiate and adult education markets. The true bottom line, our so-called state universities currently receive roughly one-third of their total revenues from states’ general funds. But, along with that diminished state support has come diminished oversight and accountability. This can be seen in our own region in the toothless and politicized higher education Board of Regents in Ohio, and in an equally impotent Higher Education Commission in Indiana. Our “state” universities consequently have become nearly autonomous entities, in some cases with great power in a region, and with few checks and balances on their choices. Their elections, whether it’s to build edifices, or ignore calls for reform, or to hire competent top management, or to control their costs and work to achieve greater productivity, see little external review. Faculty loyalty is purchased with tenure and salary increases not matched by improvements in productivity or other performance, and only in rare circumstances – such as a recent faculty revolt at Indiana University that finally unseated its prior president – is there internal pressure for reform. A Paradox Wrapped in an Enigma The sum of the many diverse effects above is U.S. higher education that is a complex mix of: Good educational performance, occasionally excellence; ...naiveté that varies across disciplines; ...clever growth strategies and some not so prudent; ...intellectual self-centrism; ...indifference to many of higher education’s traditional core missions; ...many pockets of good or great research, and much research that is marginal or intended to be journal filler for seeking promotion and tenure; ...many pockets of marginal teaching, and a few of great teaching, though the great teaching is weakly rewarded, or never buys one tenure; ...sports excesses, sometimes bordering on hysteria, that have the sports tail frequently wagging a mediocre academic dog; ...unabashed quests for power and autonomy; ...mission creep; ...preoccupation with building infrastructure, and with bricks and mortar; ...a ubiquitous lack of self-assessment, especially about long standing issues of faculty tenure, rewards and productivity, and the continuing relevance of many programs and even disciplines; ...success in reaching major and expansible areas for funding independent of state control; ...the occasional burst of sound advocacy of education’s most noble values; ...bureaucratic growth as size has increased, coupled with aggressive defense in response to attempts to get greater financial or operational transparency; ...spiraling costs and either a lack of incentives or courage, or ambiguity about how to mediate those costs; ...the absence or ineptitude of external oversight; ...and, critically, a form of myopia about the trajectory of higher education that may be the leading edge of its future challenges. And this complexity better than anything else underscores why our institutions of higher education have not yet been fully sucked into the whirlpool of criticism currently directed at, and richly merited by our public K-12 establishment. Perhaps the greatest risk for our public universities, among all the wisdom that permeates their organizations, is the caveat that very small changes compounded over a long period of time can produce substantial effects. The eventual vectors and scope of those changes are frequently masked for many in university leadership positions, who become engrossed in the tactics of operations and thrive on contemporary challenges and success, deflecting or even erasing the felt need for continuous strategic evaluation. Hence, the “duh?” factor one sees from even intelligent leadership, when large systems reach some form of tipping point, presaging challenge or decline. Need for Selectivity Lastly, a critical component of any critique of public universities has to be, that it be selective. There are segments of our universities that have retained both theoretical rigor and application to their operating worlds. Others, for example, our intellectually bankrupt schools of education, and parts of our schools of business are overdue for searching examination. This also illustrates the further complexity, that the rigid historical departmentalization of many of our academic disciplines requires great specificity to cull the academic losers while leaving valid intellectual subjects and accomplishment in place. Both our education and business professional schools have an extended history of variability in what constitutes their disciplines. One could argue that our schools of education need to be disassembled and rebuilt from new footers, based on evolving findings about learning from neural psychology, or eliminated completely in favor of training future teachers with true subject matter competence, topped off by limited work on methods for those destined to populate our K-12 systems. Half of what now passes as subject matter discipline in our B-schools has been made obsolete by a half-century of change in the environments of our economic and market systems. The other half so naively portrays (and researches) the operating complexity of those disciplines that the results are limited for training of its future practitioners or even as a source of theoretical insight. Schools of business were last turned inside out in the period 1959-60, to inject “basic disciplines” into their curricula. That curricula has over the ensuing decades become so divorced from organizational and market reality -- along with research that is frequently delusional, about imaginary issues in fictional markets -- there needs to be another national program of business school core self-evaluation. Similar assessments across all disciplines, hopefully and ideally coming from inside “the academy,” and acted on, rather than superimposed on our institutions, may be the way Peter Drucker’s prediction is proven wrong; it is very likely that management icon and quality academic, who helped formulate much of American management practice, would have been quite happy to see himself thus proved wrong. Part Two Part two of this series will review the findings and recommendations of the major critiques of American higher education that have been conducted over several decades, and look at their recommendations for reform and change. One of these critiques was cleverly titled, “Declining by Degrees.” The bottom line may well be that our public universities have had their strategies and quality of performance bruised and dented, but not thus far trashed. The good news is, that before that tipping point is reached, restoring or changing the strategic factors that can improve their educational performance, increase productivity, and control costs and tuition may also be a matter of improving by degrees, rather than tossing the baby out with the bathwater. Note:
Ron Willett is a former Indiana University business professor and
administrator, and former corporate executive and CEO. He holds BS and
MBA degrees from Miami University, and a doctorate in business
administration from Indiana University. He is the creator
and editor of TNBJ. (Articles
are the property of their authors and may not be reprinted, copied or
electronically copied for other than personal use without permission.
For permission to reprint, contact TNBJ by email to:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
.)
|
|
| Last Updated ( Saturday, 24 April 2010 ) |