Aside from the debilitating wars of the last half century, no issue of public affairs has been more tragic than the institutional evolution of North American universities (including some American liberal arts colleges). Having lived close to this evolving “tragedy” for almost my entire life, my title is nothing if not understated. Critics could, with justice, call it the “decline and fall” of the university or the “end” of the university, and the words “corrupt,” “criminal,” “ignorant,” “self-serving,” and even “vulgar” would not be out of place in defining many aspects of the modern university.
It is important, before embarking on this indictment of modern universities, to remind myself as well as others that many good things happen in universities and liberal arts colleges. Many students encounter, and wrestle with, unfamiliar and challenging ideas. They meet persons with different beliefs from different cultures. Many exceptional professors still hold to the best academic ideals, and make every effort to guide students toward a true education. Some good research is accomplished, although not as much as many lay people and academics may assume. Modern universities have sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, promoted these good qualities, and I would not be so ungenerous as to claim that these things happen, as we say, “in spite” of the university. I do mean to say that the main purposes and goals of today’s universities, as institutions, is something other than the pure advancement of knowledge and the proper education of students.
A long list of negative things may be said about the institutional university, however, and I will try to compress some of these under a few short and general headings. Here they are:
1. Universities have no coherent idea about why they exist.
Ask any five administrators or faculty about the over-arching purpose of the modern university, and aside from vague hand waving over the word “education,” you are likely to get five different answers. They dare not say that universities today exist primarily to remain in existence, to grow if they can, and to increase intake and increase output. If that sounds like the same amoral goals of for-profit businesses or political parties, well then, you understand what universities today are largely about. After universities enthusiastically embraced the market economy and the corporate business model in the 1980s, they have seldom questioned or examined their intent or their motives in doing so, choosing instead to increase their marketing strategies and efforts. The corporate model drives most of the energies (and much of the money) of today’s universities, leaving them with little time or motive to come together to re-evaluate who they are and why they are here (a few do, especially private schools with deep pockets, e. g. Harvard; this is not to say that Harvard, which is a chief mainstay of the elitist establishment, has really risen above the crowd). Universities exist to award degrees, not to educate, and what they produce, most of the time, are students with credentials, not knowledge.
Evidence for this claim is everywhere. Because governments have decided to saddle students with enormous debt in obtaining their degrees (“credentials”), universities are in an often unspoken conspiracy with students to “process” them efficiently and swiftly. Good grades are much easier to obtain. Class sizes are inflated to take care of larger numbers of students in the corporate capitalist environment of today’s universities. Assignments are truncated to allow these larger numbers to flow through. And, students, who have now become “clients,” demand that they get the credentials they paid for. Intellectual growth, knowledge, and skills are incidental byproducts of this industrial model. The corporate university has attempted to counter this stark reality, in part, by claiming that we live in a complex “information” age, and that they hold the only key to unlock the sources of this “information”; they less often talk about knowledge. Any person with a library card and internet access can acquire “information.”
2. Today’s universities have become all things to all people.
Universities are enormous bazaars, hawking a huge variety of goods (i.e., degrees, programs, and majors) to their customers. They are “comprehensive” universities made up of semi-independent parts. They are “diversities,” not universities. There are few or no core goals for students that are shared among the scattered faculties and schools and programs, from the arts and sciences to health science to business to oceanography to mortuary science (make up your own list; it will take awhile). While some schools will parrot their support for such goals as critical thinking, quantitative and qualitative analytical skills, elemental scientific understanding, and good writing, you can look through calendars and documents and courses until your head hurts, but you will find little coordinated effort to implement these goals.
In the late 1950s, my brother was enrolled in an English course in the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Michigan (a prestigious school). In his first year he had to take a course entitled: “Honors English for Engineers.” What is that??? Is there a way to read Crime and Punishment and Tess d’Ubervilles (both of which he had to read) in a way appropriate to “engineers”?? Of course not, but the Faculty of Engineering at the U of M was a powerful independent state within the university that could duplicate in course form whatever subject they wanted.
Every hawker’s stall in the university strives to become a self-sufficient, autonomous entity. They offer their own statistics courses, their own philosophy and ethics courses, and their own history and sociology courses. If they lack some basic element, they either ignore it, or they make that basic element adjunct to one or more of their courses. I have read, and heard academics claim, that a “liberal education” can be got from many corners of the university, even from “Marketing” programs in a School of Business. It is hard for me to believe that “liberal education” is any more than a veneer in these cases.
In order to satisfy the appetites and wants of students who have usually not encountered enough of the breadth of fundamental knowledge to make an informed decision, universities offer not just courses but programs in narrowly specialized subjects. Are you still interested in dinosaurs and swimming with dolphins? Do not worry, universities have fashioned programs that will appeal to you.
In the process of becoming “credentialing factories” (as Jane Jacobs long ago labeled universities), and being all things to all people, universities have ventured even further into applied fields of study that used to be the domain of community colleges and trade schools. It is hard to tease out important elements of human knowledge, let alone intellectual rigor, in programs in “hospitality” or “equestrian” studies.
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3. Universities treat their communities poorly.
Students: Student loans have already been addressed, and universities are not so culpable in this matter as we citizens who do not demand more public financial support for public higher education. Unfortunately, students get less and less for their money. Undergraduates are less important than graduate students and academic research. Entering undergraduates are often taught by less experienced graduate students, rather than by senior professors, despite the fact that most first-year courses are among the most difficult to teach well, and are often the most important courses, especially for those taking these for breadth requirements only. Because most first-year courses are large, leaving students feeling anonymous, they become acculturated to invisibility and the lack of dialogue in their learning. My informal queries also lead me to conclude that first-year students are also acculturated to thinking that learning facts and information is the foundation of knowledge. For a much fuller discourse on the many, many ways in which we disappoint and disadvantage undergraduates, see Thomas C. Pocklington and Allan Tupper, No Place to Learn: Why Universities are not Working (2002).
Graduate students fare little better than undergraduates. They are often a source of cheap labor for their research supervisors; they are always a cheap source of labor for teaching tutorials and classes. Some are very, very good at these necessary tasks but the enormous profit margin they provide for the university as a corporate whole is the main reason they are in the classroom. In today’s economy, fewer and fewer are reaping any of the employment rewards from their period of indentured servitude, however. Supervisors and teachers are morally culpable (and this includes me) for not being more forthright and forceful in making clear that getting a master’s or Ph.D degree is not an easy avenue to appropriate employment. Because graduate school education provides the basis for hiring more faculty (in more and more esoteric fields), graduate student numbers cannot be decreased without reducing the size and profitability of the whole corporate university enterprise. This corrupt, inbred system of interlocking dependencies is not unlike the structure of society in France just before the French Revolution.
Faculty: Few outside the academic world understand just how difficult and competitive it is to get and keep academic employment, and then to advance within it. Fewer still, often including those inside the academy, realize what a large role luck has played in their fortunes (or misfortunes). In many fields, there are at least ten excellent candidates for every position available. If one is lucky enough to obtain a tenure-track position, there is no guarantee that tenure will follow. Publications (not necessarily good ones, in my experience) long ago replaced excellent teaching as the chief basis for getting tenure. Refusal of tenure is near to a death sentence; it means you have been fired, and you will not likely get a job elsewhere in the academy, even though your knowledge and skills are not easily marketable anywhere else. Tenure is no protection from dismissal, however; if a university decides to do so, for example, they can eliminate entire programs (as some U. S. southern schools have done recently in regard to programs like computer science, which are undersubscribed).
If a faculty member gets tenure, they must then turn their attention to getting promotion to Associate and then Full Professor. This never ending exercise of nit-picking evaluation means more research and publishing. If one cannot accomplish that, she will often be assigned to a fairly basic salary and to extra “duties” that may do little for her or the advancement of knowledge.
Those who climb the ladder to Full Professor do very well indeed. They have considerable prestige in their university and often in their profession. They have very good salaries. A recent study of income inequality in the U. S., places university professors among a small group of persons who, while they may not be among the top 1%, are among a very elite group of income earners. The statistics, however, were taken from full professors at very elite institutions like Harvard and Princeton, and they ignore the fact that it is a long hard climb to full professorship, leaving few years for many full professors to enjoy a high income. Unfortunately, this latter condition has led to another problem with universities. Senior full professors are holding onto their positions well past the age of 65, thereby depriving a younger generation to move up through the process. Senior professors do less and less teaching, however, despite the fact they have a much broader knowledge base than younger faculty, and presumably bring more “wisdom” to the subject.
Administration and Staff: There is no more vertical and rigid hierarchy in the annals of history than among the staff and administration of a university. Those at the bottom, maintenance staff for example, are like the invisible poor of the 17th century, despite the fact that most of them come into meaningful contact with students and faculty on a frequent basis. I know of one woman, now retired, whose employment was to make sandwiches and serve cafeteria meals, yet she had a big influence on students who were distressed or confused or who just needed some encouragement. Above this level of staff are those, as councilors and advisors and remedial studies providers, to name a very few, who often influence a student’s career in as profound a manner as do any faculty. They seldom receive meaningful credit for their accomplishments, and more importantly, they are an easy source to eliminate one by one or in whole sections when economic hard times hit, given that neither faculty nor graduate students can be easily eliminated.
Then there are the university administrators who differ from their business colleagues only in the degree of ambition and manipulation they bring to advancing up the corporate ladder (some are more vicious that the private economies players; some are less so). The majority are recruited early on in their faculty careers, after they have demonstrated “people skills”; these people skills might better remain tied to undergraduates in the classroom. Untutored in administration, they make mistakes that usually, ironically, have to do with interpersonal relations.
Upper administration are like titans, beyond the reach of ordinary staff and even faculty. In recent years, becoming a vice-president or provost or even being a long serving dean, means that you have acquired rights to a “golden parachute” when you retire. Even before you retire, you have supplements to your income and sometimes unvouchered, and always vouchered, expense accounts. Upon retirement, many months and sometimes even years of paid leave provide a happy sendoff to retirement. Equally problematical with upper administration in the corporate university is their clear lack of focus: are they fund-raisers, marketers, public relations officers, crisis interveners, or just plain business administrators? One thing they are not -- at least any longer – is educational visionaries and protectors of the intellectual life.
It is hard for me to review these elements of the modern university without despairing about the future of higher education. I believe that community colleges, despite sharing many of the problems outlined above, are, at least, more honest in their goals and purposes. Modern universities, however, are a long way from reform. There expense has led in part to their quasi-private status, thereby leading to their exploitation of students, staff and faculty. It is no surprise that for-profit, distance-learning institutions have made large inroads on public universities. Once these institutions can establish a better claim to providing their “clients” with more sound “credentials,” public universities will be in a difficult competitive environment. The decline and near disappearance of the idea of the public interest also militates strongly against any reforms. So, in general, and in my field of the humanities and history in particular, much of what universities are assumed to provide – intellectual stimulation, critical thinking, problem-solving, integrative knowledge – will be got by persons discovering things on their own, or in new institutions that will address the loss that has so clearly occurred in our mega-institutions.
