Disappointed

What do we talk about when we talk about the challenges facing higher education

Otto (Kevin Kline), in “A Fish Called Wanda,” discovers that his criminal co-conspirators have “moved the loot.”

“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.

The world is melting in so many ways and in so many places and at so many scales that - like a lot of people - I’ve had a difficult time catching my breath and focusing on some here-and-now. I usually post here on Mondays. Today is Wednesday. We’ll see how this goes.

On the higher education front:

Last Thursday I spent 90 minutes online, along with hundreds of other people, watching and listening to the first of a series of panel presentations organized by the Faculty Senate of the University of Pennsylvania on the theme: “The Future of American Universities.” The particular focus of Thursday’s event was “Higher Education and the State: How Politics are Reshaping America’s Great Universities.” It was recorded, of course; you can watch the video at that site. I also generated a transcript for myself, because I wanted to be sure that I didn’t misunderstand anything.

The panelists were all-stars: John Sexton, the transformative former president of New York University and former dean of NYU Law; Michael Roth, the extremely pragmatic and currently very public president of Wesleyan University; and Irene Mulvey, a faculty member at Fairfield University and immediate past president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

They played their parts well. Essentially the entire 90 minutes was given over to discussion of how colleges and universities of all sorts should respond to the onslaught of ongoing and current attacks on higher education, beginning but not at all ending with what is currently coming out of Washington, DC. Pressures of the immediate moment - stripping funding (both structural and operational), attacking people, fields, and academic freedom - took center stage, for understandable reasons. On the whole, the panelists were thoughtful and articulate in defending values, principles, and practices of the college and university system and of themselves and their leadership colleagues.

Why, then, do I lead this essay with the headline “Disappointed,” borrowing from Kevin Kline’s Oscar-winning performance in “A Fish Called Wanda”?

Because the sum and substance of the panel’s wisdom on “how to fight back” can be summed up in the phrase: “It’s all about us.” The citizens of the academy have lost the plot, the panel explained, when it comes to describing to various stakeholders - citizens, the media, politicians, alumni, and donors - what awesome things happen on the university campus and in the lab, the library, and the classroom. We have a messaging problem. We’re inward-focused and arrogant. What will save us? Reasoned discourse about progress toward that always elusive and uncertain destination: truth, and the good life that comes with pursuing it, in the footsteps of whatever ancient Greek philosopher we might choose. (My own add-on: If we’re thoughtful, we’ll choose Socrates, who was much less of a know-it-all than Plato, with some Aristotle on the side.) Reasoned discourse will chart the path to coalition-building around our collective importance and to the keys to the public purse, which will pay for it all.

I’m a Boomer, so I’ll pause to invoke a comic icon of an earlier Boomer-ish era: Chico Escuela. If you know, you know. And you know that Chico is out of favor. But I will not avoid borrowing and re-purposing his line, which I think sums up the panel reasonably well: “The Enlightenment has been very, very good to me.” Universities are suffering slings and arrows, it seems, because the world doesn’t appreciate the good that we are doing. We need to speak the people’s language, not academic jargon, to explain ourselves.

Ahem.

I get why veteran academic experts recite that narrative. In my experience university leaders are so constrained by the “interpretive communities” that they have dedicated their careers to that they have lost almost all of the capacity for real, deep, imaginative leaps about what they are, in fact, called to do. Careful readers with a long-standing interest in academic criticism will note that I am evoking Stanley Fish, the author of (among many, many things) a late-1980s paper titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.” Dennis Martinez, a real baseball player, is mostly forgotten, so I’ll illustrate Fish’s argument with a reference to a fictional counterpart. Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), in “Bull Durham,” taught Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), that the only way Nuke would succeed in the major leagues was by playing baseball, and talking baseball, and experiencing baseball, like major leaguers do. Nuke learned; he got promoted. (How about a little “Caddyshack”? “Be the ball, Danny” is a semi-serious Fish-ism.) Fish’s point was that there was, in a sense, nothing else either Crash or Nuke could have done. They were each playing by the proverbial rules of the game - not just baseball itself, but the whole kit-and-caboodle, magic phrases for reporters and clean shower shoes included.

Similarly, university presidents don’t keep their jobs and their status as spokespeople for higher education by talking about how higher education systems are massively ill-suited to the large- and small-scale demands of contemporary society. Is the problem rooted in deep structural dysfunction? No! It must be that the world doesn’t see us for the wonderful folks we are. We need to be better public communicators.

(I hasten to add that this is a general observation. I have never met John Sexton, Michael Roth, or Irene Mulvey, and based solely on their performances at Penn - plus some prior knowledge of their records and reputations - they are each deeply to be admired in many, many respects, including for their willingness to speak, and to speak as they did, on last week’s panel.)

Stanley Fish was wrong, in part, to discount the possibility that the human brain is capable of more fluidity and flexibility than he seemed to account for, and that “interpretive communities” evolve, sometimes slowly, sometimes abruptly. We sometimes make our groups and their habits; we do not always simply find them. So: while I’m not an expert in Fish’s fields, as a law student years ago and in the early years of my own academic career I was impressed by a response to Fish by Steven Winter, also a law professor. Winter wrote: even in “interpretive communities,” self-consciousness is possible, and the only way to steer institutionally out the status quo and deal effectively with the dynamics of power and morality is … to imagine different structural arrangements, and to activate imaginations and capacities to build them.

I’ve devoted a lot of time and a lot of words here over the last few months excavating different aspects of a critique of higher education. I’ve got a few more shovel-fuls to go. But my experience with the folks at Penn - who were extraordinarily generous in livestreaming an event with an appeal and significance that was obvious, at least to me - prompts me to tee up a different direction for coming “Everything in Between” attractions: the things that ail higher education, encompassing both present-day political pressures and large-scale, long-standing structural ones, have much less to do with academic self-absorption (though that is real, and problematic) and much more to do with failing to understand or anticipate macro- and micro- social needs and what colleges and universities ought to do about them.

I’ll be back. Next Monday. I hope.