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Week 2: The University and Its Critics While Americans love their universities, they also love to criticize them. Parents and citizens see the university or college as a provider of culture and values, and they worry endlessly that these institutions may not provide the right values and culture to their students. The public worries that universities cost too much, operate inefficiently, or fail to provide adequate intellectual or practical content.
Most observers are long on complaint and short on solution. The complexity and variety of universities offer endless opportunities for critical displeasure. Something, somewhere will incite the ire of this or that observer. While it is easy to reject the critics as irresponsible, as many are, it is not so easy to reject some of the fundamental themes of the critical literature. Universities do need to pay attention to cost and accountability. Institutions do need to understand the content of their curricula and they must recognize the dangers of seeking benefit from the marketplace. Long time participants in American higher education find that the literature of complaint is often very repetitive. In part that reflects the belief of many that universities and colleges should be all things to all people. Partly this is the result of the widely diverse nature of American higher education. There is, indeed, someplace that will do anything educational that anyone wants. But there are no institutions that do it all. However, in our eagerness to please our many constituencies, we often promise more than we actually deliver. Not all universities and colleges can guarantee that everyone who enters will graduate or that everyone who graduates will find a satisfying and rewarding job. Not all universities or colleges can provide every skill that anyone would need to be successful in the world. At different times, the critics focus on different themes, often reflecting the issues of the day in society at large. When America found itself in the middle of a crisis about its values during the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities found themselves in the middle of what we called a culture war. Some though the university a center of radical thought determined to erode fundamental American values. Others thought the university was a bastion of conservative corporate or government influcenced opression. We argued about the inclusion or exclusion of voices expressing different values. We struggled over what books and writing should be required of all students. We fought over the inclusion of minority authors, third-world authors, and counter-culture themes. Enhanced by the bitterly controversial Vietnam war, universities became battle grounds for issues of cultural inclusion and exculsion, of ethnic diversity and equity. Although the heat of these issues have faded, many of the old battles, with some of their warriors, remain unresolved in American higher education, feeding from time to time a critical attack. Are universities too expensive? Do they exclude or give unmerited advantage to individuals by considering race, class, ethnicity, or gender? Other critiques turn on more operational issues. To some extent an outgrowth of the battle for accessibility to universities and colleges for people of all types and backgrounds, the university and college found itself caught between two conflicting notions. On one side faculty and students wanted to see everyone gain access to the higher education experience that defines in the minds of many the good life. On the other side outside observers wanted to see universities become ever more efficient and graduate all those who entered. This conflict is confounded by the challenge of many public school systems in America that find it difficult to produce college ready graduates. Non-elite universities and colleges admit many students whose chances of success, given their previous preparation, are low. The university that gives these high risk students an opportunity encounter criticizm because not enough high risk students succeed. The critics place the blame for student failure on the institution and its instructors, believing that it is the institution's responsibility to ensure success no matter what the inclination, aptitude, or preparation of the student. This critique of course confuses the process of education that requires as much commitment and preparation from the student as the teacher. The symbol for this notion that every student should succeed if they enter college is the much misused graduation rate statistic. This simple-minded statistic has its base, as do many higher education values, in the elite liberal arts college. In such a college, all students admitted are highly motivated and very well prepared. Most come from stable economic and social backgrounds, and the elite college can lavish much individual attention on its students. These elite liberal arts colleges will graduate over 80 to 90 percent of the student who begin there. The residential campus, the close supervision, the small classes, and the well prepared students all support this outcome. Most other institutions cannot reach this goal, and it is a goal only relevant to four-year, residential, full-time student, campuses. Nonetheless, legislators and critics cry out for reforms that will ensure the graduation rate of all colleges will rise towards this ideal goal. The goal, of course is not reachable, and the statistic is unreliable for almost all but the most elite institutions. While demanding better results, another challenge comes from those who see the modern college or university as abandoning standards, failing to produce graduates who can read, write, count, and reason. They want standards enforced, they decry what they believe to be the inflation of grades into meaningless reference points, and they often call for standardized tests to ensure minmal competencies. Few engage the politically incorrect notion that when we must admit everyone, and when we must graduate most, it's not likely we'll be able to maintain very high standards. Further complicating these issues is the decline in the authority of the faculty. Once regarded as the last word on quality and standards, today the faculty often find themselves encouraged by student evaluations and other pressures focused on the appearance of student success to inflate grades and reduce the rigor of their courses. More prevalent in the humanities and social sicences than in the mathematically based sciences, this pressure to produce the appearance of good results for students is much more powerful than most want to admit. Especially vulnerable are the humanists whose evaluations may be seen as subjective (unlike scientists whose data provide a much less easily challenged reference). Many students do not accept a grade below an A with grace and charm, and often argue, petition, and otherwise lobby to force faculty to raise a grade deemed lower than optimal. In recent times, especially in public institutions, the critics have fastened on the question of cost. Believing that universities should be more efficient and less expensive they attack every element of unviersity operations in hopes of finding the silver bullet that will reduce cost. While it is surely possible to reduce cost, and while there are some inefficiencies in university and college operations, the scale of cost reduction possible without damaging the product is small. Many point to the dramatic reduction in the cost of such things as consumer electronics and computers, and demand similar efficiencies from higher education. However, this comparison is meaningless because higher education is, above all else, a service industry that depends on highly skilled employees. If we track the costs of other similar service industries such as health care or accounting or similar activities, we find that higher education and these other individualized service industries have cost and price curves that track very closely. This is because personal service industries using highly skilled professionals cannot readily increase the scale of their operations because the products they sell are, by definition of the marketplace and the consumers, individualized products. The biggest complaint of a student at a large public university (which is seeking efficiency through scale) is that the student is "just a number." Many innovations that do reduce cost also reduce quality in one form or another. For example, by reducing the qualifications of the instructional staff (through the use of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty), colleges can reduce costs. By using distance education and removing the interaction between faculty and student, colleges can reduce cost. In the case of distance education, it takes a very large scale operation to produce education at a lower cost because the infrastructure and management of distance education is non-trivial. Most success here has been with very large scale operations, niche programs that serve populations unreachable by standard higher education institutions, or specialized programs that charge high prices. The challenges of cost reduction are not likely to be resolved soon, but the importance of the discussion is real and requires good data and better analysis rather than the simple wish that costs would decline. Costs can decline, but not without consequences. Two major themes dominate this conversation. The first seeks to reform existing universities, make them better by improving their operation. This perspective, often pursued by those who believe the university is fundamentally sound, speaks to tradition and values and attempts to adjust those to the practical realities of contemporary economic circumstances. The second theme sees universities and many colleges as beyond repair in their current form or at least in serious crisis. In developing this theme, critics tend to see the institutional and faculty values of the traditional university as corrupt and self-serving, destructive of good moral and intellectual values, and generally debased from some ideal archetype. Depending on the spirit of the observer, these critics either seek the replacement of existing university structures with much different learning organizations, or else they propose radical or reformist proposals that would clean house, change standards, and impose new ones. Often they come from a profoundly conservative perspective that seeks to create in the university an engine for the promotion of values and attitudes believed to have been current in a more glorious past. Sometimes they come from a profoundly radical perspective that seeks to create a different future by deconstructing the university's fundamental texts and replacing its meritocratic values with more socially conscious prescriptions. In the literature of complaint and reform, and in the endles reports from distinguished groups identifying a crisis in some element or all of higher education in America, a key defect is the absence of practical solutions. It is very easy to find problems in as complicated and diverse an industry as American higher education, but it is much harder to find solutions that, however clever and insighful they appear on paper, will appeal to the parents and students whose choices about higher education determine the shape of the industry.
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