A Pixar Interlude
What planet is higher education reform ... on?
“Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on. Once a week, usually on a Monday, I’ll have something new.
Almost 40 years ago the University of Pittsburgh Law Review hosted and then published a scholarly symposium on the future of intellectual property law in the face of the new, new thing of that era: computer software. (The event was convened by the prescient Pam Samuelson, then a Pitt law faculty member.) The legendary computer scientist and AI pioneer Allen Newell, at Carnegie Mellon University (just down the street!), contributed a paper whose thesis was summed up in its pithy title: “The Models are Broken, The Models are Broken!” He wrote: “The confusions that bedevil algorithms and patentability arise from the basic conceptual models that we use to think about algorithms and their use.”
I take Newell’s judgment as my theme, if not his context: when it comes to confronting problems and opportunities associated with higher education today, the basic conceptual models that we have become accustomed to use in thinking about my ongoing topic - colleges and universities - are broken.
That was brought home to me the other day at lunch with a football coach, of all people. An American football coach (coach of American football), who has had a long, successful career at high schools and colleges across the US. This was partly a reconnection from across the decades; as a young teacher, he was my coach for a year in high school. But inevitably, since he isn’t much older than I am, the conversation turned to the present day and our very similar diagnoses as to what ails higher education – based on very different experiences.
Try, for example, some common, classic framings: “College is meant to prepare students to thrive in productive careers.” Not good enough, not by a long shot. “Universities are meant to support professors in researching at the frontiers of knowledge.” It’s a throwback. How about “universities are among a handful of socially and cultural critical ‘infrastructures’ that generate spillover effects at scale – better educated citizens, advances in both ‘truth’ and productive knowledge, sounder communities and countries that benefit from both – largely by being permitted to follow a kind of ‘third way,’ exempt from ‘ordinary’ rules that define ‘legitimate state action’ and ‘the discipline of market capitalism’”? Hmmm. Call me a sympathetic skeptic.
As Buzz Lightyear said to Woody in the original “Toy Story”: “We’re not on my planet. Are we.” The usual rules don’t apply.
The problems are wide as well as deep. My conversation with my old coach motivated me to catalog them here, departing from my plan to summarize one more heuristic for thinking about contemporary colleges. (I’ll return to that next week.) I don’t know that there is a new model (or probably better, models) buried in thoughtful responses to all of them; in fact, it’s probably right that the answers in some cases involve excluding the theme from being considered at all. Maybe higher education has come to be tasked with too many of some things and not enough of others.
Movie character references are included to try to add a modest amount of lightness to a down-seeming essay.
[1] John Anderton and the nature of knowledge: Generative AI (love it, hate it, or fear it) is raising important questions across the entire college and university enterprise about what we know and how we know it, leading to deep questions both about institutional and disciplinary values and about teaching and research practices. GenAI in the university is, in a way, a salient and politically and culturally fraught extension of anxieties and opportunities surrounding “Big Data” in the research world, a phenomenon that dates back at least a couple of decades. During all of that time, long-standing ecologies of expertise and elite status have been quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) turned upside down, as “data” and “digital” have made their way from the margins to the center and from the bottom to the tops of a lot of old school academic hierarchies. “Classic” fields within the humanities and the natural sciences are no longer always front and center on the disciplinary stage. Welcome, data science! Bioinformatics! And whatever comes next from the jumble of interest that AI is attracting and generating.
[2] Oliver Twist and the cost of attendance: Higher education in the U.S. is partly the story of massive expansion of student access and opportunity over the last 150 years, from the land grant program of the late 1800s through the post-WWII GI Bill through the mid-1960s Pell Grants legislation. For better and often for worse, the cost of running a college or university has outpaced federal and state governments’ willingness to underwrite those costs, leading to both staggering increases in the amount of student debt, both collectively and individually, and to enormous barriers to large number of students’ even imagining attending a college that would suit them well.
[4] Jim Blandings and the cost of operation: It’s easy (and often right) to blame excess administration (bloat) for the cost of attendance and for a variety of other things that critics don’t like about colleges and universities. It’s more challenging but equally important to recognize that the legacy of higher education democratization – lots of state university campuses in out of the way places, and sometimes in not so out of the way places – is that hard questions are coming about whether it makes sense to keep those doors open. The litany of closures of small colleges, and closures of professional schools yet to come, speaks to the same point: relative to changing demographics and other factors affecting student demand and financial capability, the higher education landscape is simply overbuilt.
[5] Vivian Ward, looking for love in prestige hierarchies: Far too much public conversation about the future of universities is anchored in worries about Ivy League universities and their close cousins at Stanford, MIT, and a handful of other private elites. Far too little public attention is paid to state systems of higher education, including rural and semi-rural campuses, to community colleges, and to distinctions and linkages among all of them. What happens in Cambridge or West Philly affects what happens in a depopulated rural county in northwest Pennsylvania, and vice versa, even if there is no “one size fits all” model that captures all of the higher education “ecology.”
[6] Edward Lewis, looking for love in all the (wrong) prestige hierarchies: The NCAA largely invented the ideal of the “student-athlete” as a way of insulating the NCAA and its allies from the scrutiny of academic administrators, faculty members, and government regulators. College sports will college sports, however, and legal changes have changed a lot of “student” athletes into legitimately highly compensated employees of their universities, functionally if not technically. Why should a college athlete bother with homework, except as a form of resistance? The many ways in which a peripheral part of the classic 20th century college experience is swallowing the dominant part – whole – are evidenced nowhere better than in this crusade to allow college students to “major” in sports. Traditionalists may be horrified by that idea; in practice, the proposal is far from as crazy as it seems. For all practical purposes, a lot of college students are already majoring in their sports careers. Sports management is already a course of college study. Why not end the charade?
[7] Rod Tidwell and the nature of free agency: Athletes aren’t the only campus “citizens” with only the most tenuous connections to a stable institutional identity. At both the high end and lower ends of the range of university scholars/teacher hierarchies, tenured researchers in many fields are setting themselves up as quickly as they can as semi-autonomous intellectuals-for-hire. Look at websites for a lot of schools and departments and their rosters of faculty, then search for – and find – the social media accounts and standalone websites of a lot of those same people. Motivations for detaching oneself from institutional identity vary a lot. Some people want to be “brands” (that is, public intellectuals, with market-based compensation sometimes to follow); some like a little celebrity and validation that they might not get from their schools, money aside; some are on the lookout for moves to other schools or other careers. The loss of institutional identity hits differently for so-called “contingent” faculty – adjunct faculty members, lecturers, and so on, who are excluded from paths to job security and tenure – who may separate themselves from institutional identity out of economic and professional necessity. They’re out for themselves and their students rather than for Wossamatta U. Increasingly, their response to the deterioration of the department or school as a “home world” is not free agency but precisely the thing that (in the world of professional sports) made free agency possible: collective bargaining. If the university is going to treat its teachers simply as a cost of industrial educational production, then the teachers are going to do what workers have done for centuries: organize, and bargain for better treatment in the name of producing a better “product” – student learning.
[8] Will Hunting, and what it’s all about: The broader social, cultural, and political purposes of colleges and universities have been contested for centuries, not decades. Whatever one thinks of what may be happening or should be happening today – as to powers of free expression, institutional governance and “neutrality,” so-called “indoctrination” and the like – little is truly novel, at least conceptually. The song is the same; the instruments and notes are modestly different. Read up on Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, and relations between the state and universities at Cambridge and Oxford in the mid-16th century.
[9] Willy Wonka, and who pays for all of this: In the early nineteenth century, U.S. universities were much less sharply divided between “public” and “private” institutions than they were by the century’s end, and beginning in the early 20th century the “private” institutions set themselves quite explicitly on a path of independence from state-based support via raising private endowments. They were encouraged in that by, ahem, private philanthropies holding the investments of many of the 19th century’s best known industrialists and financiers, and the blending of “charitable organizations” and their university partners was accelerated by federal law that affirmed the tax-exempt status of nonprofit organizations, such as private colleges and universities. Even today, however, only a relatively small number of U.S. colleges and universities hold and rely on significant (tax-exempt) endowment. Likely the more important feature of contemporary government entanglement in U.S. higher education is research support provided through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other federal (and sometimes state) agencies. That financial support dates to the 1950, following the imperatives of a newly-industrialized postwar U.S. economy that needed to scale up research and development without paying for all of it entirely via the private sector, and the threat posed by Soviet science. (In universities that house medical schools, clinical medical practice is often a related economic enterprise, deeply embedded in the architecture of federal law, that also generates massive amounts of university income). Quite apart from the scope and scale of private endowments (though sometimes, of course, the workings of a private endowment operate hand in glove with a university’s dependence on federal research sponsorship), U.S. research universities are, today, significant engines of national commercial enterprise. That’s because the Bayh-Dole statute of 1980 sharpened the tip of the federal government’s spear, by making federally-financed university research eligible for university faculty patenting. The modern technology transfer enterprise was born, turning big swaths of many top-line research universities, and many wannabe top-line research universities, into industry adjuncts with classrooms on the side.
Add a football team to that mix, a legion of academic leaders with only the most tenuous grounding in research and teaching practice (or, sometimes, lots of grounding in classic academic work but little grounding in leadership and management), and decision making systems whose complexity often takes stasis as the norm, and it is no small wonder that a football coach and a law professor would each look at the modern university and ask: how do we fix this deeply broken world? Can it be fixed? Should it? Take nothing for granted.
Buzz, er I, will be back.