College dodge ball

America’s college professors are nervous. Administrators want to turn universities into trade schools. The “market” – whatever and wherever that is – demands we train better future workers. University presidents wonder how we can “monetize” the intellectual work faculty do. When professors do the research they’re trained to do, these administrators ask: “How much of that can we afford?” 

It all makes me wonder if my talk with the Valic representative at my school made much sense. I have tenure. I get good evaluations from students. I publish so I’m not supposed to perish. But beyond that, the truth is that I passed up more lucrative options. Law school in particular. I spent a lot of years studying for a Ph.D. rather than getting a job and beginning 401k contributions when more practical classmates did. I make less than most people do with my level of education. Tenure’s supposed to save professors from being dismissed for controversial research; it’s supposed to guard academic freedom. But it also helps guarantee the employment of those who’ve bypassed more lucrative options in order to educate the nation’s young people and advance knowledge in our various areas. There’s a value in the humanities. Not an obvious one to the more bottom-lined oriented among the polemicists, but a real value. Without it, our society contracts, withers, suffers.

But my school’s administrators and trustees are reportedly interested in Coursera material. Everyone’s wondering what MOOCs will do. It feels as if we’re at a Malcolm Arnold moment. But the question isn’t whether we study the ancients or the moderns, or the best of culture as defined by the elites or a broader version as designated by a larger population. It’s more focused on ROI. Return On Investment. In a very brief time students have turned into customers, and schools are going out of their way to treat them as such.

This is a serious crisis. The points and shapes of higher education are under attack by people who have very little investment in knowledge, learning, inquiry, and the like.The administrators are in charge, and precious few of them care about the higher ideals that don’t have much of a place outside of a university. Some do. Don’t get me wrong. I know some well-intentioned administrators. We need them. But I know many more who want to force us all into a business model that doesn’t fit the work of the intellect, the life of the mind. I’m not starry eyed and simple. Universities have to have a purpose. But so much of that ostensible purpose is being ginned up by administrators looking for projects and committees to show off their relevance and validate their salaries. This is one of higher education’s leading crises.

One of the articles focused on the crisis at Rutgers gets to this point (See this New York Times article). We’ve seen a turn in the argument about the value of education move toward the administrators in the past couple of years. Ironically – or maybe not – the largest factor in rising university costs is directly related to an explosion in new administrators (interesting article from a group tied to former arch-conservative Barry Goldwater on this: Administrative bloat).

In short, we have more high-paid administrators. Fewer tenured or tenure-track faculty. More adjuncts. Many of these adjuncts would make excellent tenure-track faculty members. Many administrators would be better off back in the classroom, or moving on into the world of business with which they’re confusing education. That switch would be so much better than the headlong rush toward sketchy online alternatives to in-class education. I spent three hours today talking with students about their particular reading and writing problems. A video couldn’t have done it. An online interchange might have come closer, but still would have fallen short. College is a special four (or five) years. It isn’t training. It’s learning. Our society as a whole will suffer greatly if $125,000 administrators decide we can’t afford $50,000 professors to do this work.

But in the end it isn’t so much about guarding a structure so many of us have bought into. That isn’t nothing. But in the end it comes down to something my first dean told me. I was a first-year tenure-track English professor. He told me: “We’re not sure teaching is important.” That was a provocative statement, and a tough one for someone who’d spent five years on a Ph.D. But he followed it up with: “we know learning is.” He seemed convinced of the relationship between teaching and learning. Recent administrators seem less convinced of that.

Learning and/or teaching … It’s a fair question. It always will be. But our society’s been creating the most dependent generation of young learners in the history of humanity. They need to be driven everywhere, told how to think, how to read, how to say yes, no, maybe. I don’t think we’ve served them well by doing this, but they’re here, they’re uncurious, they’re lost.

And now we tell them that they just need to turn on a TV and watch a lecture?

In the words of Tom Wolfe:

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

The current system doesn’t have to stand. There will be another one that works better. But the rush to online, to MOOCs, and all the rest, is a bad rush.

Let’s teach them something interesting, intellectually stimulating, advancing. Let their employers pay for the job training. And let’s cut the administrators by half. That would cut tuition costs immensely.