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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. The public finds universities and colleges insufficiently concerned with the physical and intellectual safety of their students. Every public crusade or cause finds a focus among the students, faculty, and staff of these institutions.
Most observers and participants are long on complaint and short on solution. The complexity and variety of universities and colleges offer endless opportunities for critical displeasure. Something, somewhere will incite the ire of this or that observer or participant. 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. Colleges must pay close attention to the lives and anxieties of their students. They must respond to the varying enthusiasms and concerns of the public that frequently find resonance in politics, law, or the media. Long time participants in American higher education find that much of the literature of complaint is 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 is also some place that will do something that many people dislike. But there are no institutions that do it all, or in the eyes of the public, do it all right. In our eagerness to please our many constituencies, we often promise more than we can 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. No university or college can insure that everyone who attends will find a completely secure environment free of personal or ideological risk. 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 influenced oppression. 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 exclusion, of ethnic diversity and equity. Although the heat of some of these issues have faded, many of the old battles, with some of their warriors and new recruits, remain unresolved in American higher education, feeding from time to time a renewal of critical attacks echoing the same or related themes. Are universities too expensive? Do they exclude or give unmerited advantage to individuals by considering race, class, ethnicity, or gender? Do they follow politically correct guidelines for discussions and behavior related to key social, political, ethical, and environmental issues? 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 themselves 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 posed by many public school systems in America that find it difficult to produce college-ready graduates. Open admission universities and colleges admit many students whose chances of success, given their previous preparation, are low. The institutions that give these students an opportunity encounter criticism because not enough of their 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 the inclination, aptitude, or preparation of the student. This critique 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 indicator has its base, as do many higher education values, in the elite liberal arts college. In such a college, all admitted students come highly motivated and well prepared. Most come from stable economic and social backgrounds, and the elite college lavishes individual attention on its students. These elite liberal arts colleges will graduate over 80 to 90 percent of the students who begin there. The residential campus, the close supervision, the elaborate scholarship and financial aid programs, 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 guarantee students that any college they attend will come close to 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 minimal competencies. Few engage the politically incorrect notion that when we must admit everyone, when we must graduate almost all of them, then we are unlikely to maintain 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 sciences 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 of student performance may be seen as subjective (unlike the scientists whose mathematically based data provide much less easily challenged reference points). 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 or create classes and curricula that require substantially less effort. In recent times, especially in public institutions, the critics have fastened on the question of cost. Believing that colleges and universities should be more efficient and less expensive they attack every element of institutional 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 or substantially changing 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 service industries such as health care, accounting, or similar activities, we find that higher education and these other individualized service industries have similar cost and price curves. 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. A common complaint by students at a large public university (which is seeking efficiency through scale) is that the students have become "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 contingent faculty), colleges can reduce costs. By using Internet based education and removing the opportunity for personal interaction between faculty and student, colleges can reduce cost. In the case of Internet education, it takes a large scale operation to produce education at a lower cost because the infrastructure and management of the technology is non-trivial. Most success here has been with 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 to 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 in serious crisis if not beyond repair in their current form. 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 behavior, 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. Some 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. Others 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 endless 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 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 insightful they appear on paper, will satisfy the parents and students whose choices about higher education determine the shape of the industry.
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