The End of Higher Ed as We Know It

This morning's Chronicle for Higher Education reports on a panel discussion this week at the American Political Science Association about what is happening in higher education today. If, indeed, we are experiencing a fundamental shift in the nature of our work and if our jobs are undergoing a permanent shift, Cary Nelson, quoted near the end, is right. Faculty need to be out working to make our case.

My experience, however, tells me that most faculty are passive. Until they feel a direct impact on their job, few people will act to say anything about their campus priorities or to take part in the work (and it is work) of shared governance. Faculty too often make excuses. As Mr. Nelson advocates, we need to be demanding our institutions account for the funding we have. But most years we leave it to administrators and claim powerlessness.

We need to take control again. We are the ones in the classrooms everyday. We are the ones who can speak directly to students about what education is, what is happening to their education, and why priorities need to change. We have the skills to get out there and write op ed pieces, talk directly to the public, and speak to our legislators. If we believe, really believe, that we have lost the way, what is holding us back?

September 2, 2010

Public Higher Education Is 'Eroding From All Sides,' Warn Political Scientists
By David Glenn
Washington

The ideal of American public higher education may have entered a death spiral, several scholars said here Thursday during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. That crisis might ultimately harm not only universities, but also democracy itself, they warned.

"We've crossed a threshold," said Clyde W. Barrow, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. "Higher education is no longer viewed as a public good in this country. As tuition at public universities becomes more expensive, middle-class parents say, 'I'll bite the bullet and pay this for four years, but I don't want to pay for it a second time with taxes.' And families who are frozen out of the system see public universities as something for the affluent. They'd rather see the state spend money on health care."

The mid-20th century suddenly appears to have been a golden age for higher education, said Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley.

"That era offered not only literacy but liberal arts to a mass public," Ms. Brown said. "But today that idea is eroding from all sides. Cultural values don't support the liberal arts. Debt-burdened families aren't demanding it. The capitalist state isn't interested in it. Universities aren't funding it."

The danger, Ms. Brown said, is that the public will give up on the idea of educating people for democratic citizenship. Instead, all of public higher education will be essentially vocational in nature, oriented entirely around the market logic of job preparation. Instead of educating whole persons, Ms. Brown warned, universities will be expected to "build human capital," a narrower and more hollow mission.

And faculty members are unlikely to resist those changes at a time when two-thirds of them are on contingent appointments instead of the more secure tenure track, said Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. They simply do not have enough power within the institution.

During a plenary lecture earlier Thursday, Mr. Nelson, who is also a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said he believes that the era of "incremental state funding for public higher education is basically over." For the foreseeable future, he said, the traditional battles for higher state appropriations are bound to be losing ones.

"Complaining about the amount of external funding the university gets is a kind of amoral starting point," Mr. Nelson said. "The first question should be how your institution spends the money it already has."

His own campus, Mr. Nelson said, has recently seen several multimillion-dollar projects that were favorites of administrators but were not endorsed by the faculty.

"Without these boondoggles, they could pay contingent faculty more," he said. "They could hire more tenure-track faculty. If they weren't chasing these fantasy projects, there is a lot that could have been done to build the university's educational mission."

But Mr. Nelson did not take any of this as a reason to retreat. Instead, he said that faculty activists should open up a more basic debate about the purposes of education. They should fight, he said, for a tuition-free public higher-education system wholly subsidized by the federal government.

"Higher education needs to be reconceived as a public good and a human right," Mr. Nelson said. "The only battle worth fighting now is a battle over fundamentals, not crumbs."