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Sunday, November 28, 2021

Two Views of Higher Ed

 I have been looking at two relatively recent books about higher education, both by successful academics.  The first, The Breakdown of Higher Education, came out quite recently.  Its author John Ellis, a scholar of literature, has been a vocal and trenchant critic of trends in higher ed in general and the humanities in particular for at least thirty years, contributing frequently to Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.  The second, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, comes from Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School.  Both of them argue that higher ed is on the wrong track, but for completely different reasons.  Both also propose some solutions.  Combined with certain other recent indications, they leave me with a strong sense of where my old profession is going.

Ellis began teaching at UC Santa Cruz early in the revolution, in 1966.  Although I think he oversimplifies academia's problems just a bit, I have come to agree with him on the essentials.  A left wing ideology, one that I have discussed many times here, now dominates nearly every college and university in the country.  It is obsessed with real or imagined power differentials between men and women, whites and nonwhites, straights and gays, and so forth.  That intellectual approach--or, as Ellis and I would agree, anti-intellectual approach--not only dominates the humanities and social sciences, but has also spawned a huge bureaucracy of administrators designed to encourage and enforce it.  Most important of all, colleges and universities now regard advancing a "social justice" agenda as their primary mission--not studying and trying to add to the intellectual heritage of the past.  Ellis also shows that this approach is making inroads into STEM fields as well.  

I differ somewhat from Ellis as to exactly why this has happened.  He sees it, really, as a vast conspiracy of leftwing scholars trying to transform not only academia, but society at large.  In support of his position, he quotes effectively from the founding document of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the 1962 Port Huron statement, which stressed the university's role in spreading values, good or bad.  Here is some of what that document said:

 "These, at least, are facts, no matter how dull the teaching, how paternalistic the rules, how irrelevant the research that goes on. Social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness, these together make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.

"1. Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools. The university permits the political life to be an adjunct to the academic one, and action to be informed by reason.

"2. A new left must be distributed in significant social roles throughout the country. The universities are distributed in such a manner.

"3. A new left must consist of younger people who matured in the postwar world, and partially be directed to the recruitment of younger people. The university is an obvious beginning point.

"4. A new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system. The university is a more sensible place than a political party for these two traditions to begin to discuss their differences and look for political synthesis.

"5. A new left must start controversy across the land, if national policies and national apathy are to be reversed. The ideal university is a community of controversy, within itself and in its effects on communities beyond.

"6. A new left must transform modern complexity into issues that can be understood and felt close-up by every human being. It must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles and organize to change society. In a time of supposed prosperity, moral complacency and political manipulation, a new left cannot rely on only aching stomachs to be the engine force of social reform. The case for change, for alternatives that will involve uncomfortable personal efforts, must be argued as never before. The university is a relevant place for all of these activities."

Fueled by the Vietnam War and the advent of the younger Boom generation, this document became extraordinarily influential over the rest of the decade, beginning with Mario Savio's speeches at Berkeley in late 1964,  which I have often quoted, referring to Berkeley students ruled just as severely by college bureaucracy as the black people of Mississippi were by white supremacy.  Activism on campus faded in the 1970s and particularly the 1980s, but it has returned over the last decade in particular, and I have to agree Ellis that these paragraphs now resemble the mission statements of many schools. I cannot agree however that all this adds up to a well-organized revolutionary conspiracy like Lenin's Bolsheviks (to be fair, I don't think Ellis actually makes that analogy).  Because the new left dedicated itself to self-expression, it repeatedly failed at organization--a tradition continued by its grandchildren in Occupy and BLM.  In my opinion, legions of mediocre academics--and the vast majority of today's academics are mediocre--have adopted social justice as a substitute for real intellectual achievement.  The most mediocre academics become administrators, and administrators have done this on behalf of their whole institution.  Hardly any college or university cares any more about offering a distinctive educational product, but they are all obsessed with diversity, equity and inclusion.  I have to agree, however, that the impact of the new academic ideology has now spread into the larger society, since it dominates the elite media, the entertainment industry, and, increasingly, the Democratic Party.  

Late in the book, Ellis talks revealingly about his attempts to get both his own university and the UC system as a whole to acknowledge the ubiquity of political indoctrination in the classroom, which violates long-standing regulations. The story he tells parallels many recent incidents of free speech controversies on campus.  On the one hand, faculty and administrators try to deny free speech to unfriendly ideas, or propagate specific political stances.  On the other hand, senior administrators insist on the record that their devotion to academic freedom remains unshaken and that they oppose politicizing the classroom.  That has in fact become their role: to stand between the ideologues on their faculty and in their administration on one side, and the broader public, including their trustees and major donors, on the other.  

What is to be done?  Ellis hopes that the legislatures of some states--presumably Republican ones--will use the power of the purse to defund politicized administrators and impose some requirements for intellectual diversity on faculties, where Republicans have nearly ceased to exist.  Once they have become more traditional and serious institutions of higher learning, he hopes, they can become a model for others.  Much as I have always admired Ellis, I can't share his optimism about this course of action.  Unfortunately we no longer have a cadre of young academics who could help restore the best intellectual and educational traditions of the west.   I was in the last generation of students trained to do this, and the most accomplished of us had little or no impact on the trends of the last 50 years. Instead, I think we should be focusing upon how to preserve the western tradition outside academia--but that is a subject for another day.

Professor Lani Guinier of Harvard Law became known to the nation in 1993, when President Clinton tried and failed to make her the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.  Her views on how to increase black representation in government were too controversial for those days even for leading Democrats to push her nomination--although today I doubt they would raise an eyebrow.  Her book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America is equally critical of institutions of higher learning, led by her own, but for different reasons, and her solutions are very different as well.

Guinier argues that the SATs, in particular, have created a "testocracy," rule by those who perform best on the SATs.  She also claims that the testocracy is the new means of maintaining an oligarchy of the wealthy.  That was certainly not the role that the SATs originally played.  When they became common in the 1950s they helped democratize higher education, although administrators, fearing that their campuses would be dominated by bright Jewish applicants who in those days were the top performers on them, balanced their impact with quotas and new emphases on "geographical distribution."  Guinier doesn't mention that today, Asian students are the top SAT performers--including many who are not from well-off families at all--and that their numbers are now restricted in the same way that the Jews' numbers were.  She does have a point that test preparation, which didn't exist when I took them in 1964-5, has given wealthier kids an edge.  That  problem could largely be solved, I think, by forcing the College Board to put together about half a dozen very different kinds of SAT tests, each using a different approach, so that students wouldn't know which test they would face until D-Day.  Few indeed would take the time and money to prepare for every one.  But Guinier isn't interested in improving the tests, only in doing away with them.  She would put admissions on a completely different basis.

Guinier argues that institutions like her own are wasting the education they can offer on rich, pampered kids who don't really need it because they have already learned so much.  They should instead focus on less well off students, many of them nonwhite, who could benefit more.  She even criticizes Harvard's affirmative action policies for admitting too many middle-class, biracial, and immigrant black students who do not reflect in her view the average black experience.   (I can't help pointing out that Guinier, who was two years behind me at Harvard, was that kind of admit herself--her father became the chairman of the African-American Studies department while she was there.) She also wants to transform how American education takes place by insisting on collaborative work among students, which she says has been extraordinarily successful in certain experimental high schools and individual college classrooms. She uses it herself, allowing her law students to collaborate on final exams.  This is the way, she argues, to allow students who do not do well on standardized tests to excel.  Finding opportunities for those students, she argues, is crucial for our democracy.  She also expects the cooperative approach to transform the way our society grapples with its biggest problems.  

Since 1950 or so, several new developments have transformed higher education in the United States.  First of all, the student population expanded several times over--and the faculty and administration expanded much faster than the student population.   Secondly, television, and now computers, replaced books as sources of leisure.   Thirdly, as Ellis points out, higher education became more politicized (and this has happened now in K-12 as well, particularly in elite high schools.)  All this has reduced the amount of time that students spend studying considerably.  Ellis cites a study finding that students spent about 21 hours a week studying in 1961, but only 12 or 14 hours per week studying in 2010.  Course workloads have fallen way down as well.  In my opinion, society would have been much better served by holding back the growth of higher education, while continuing the trend of 1933-71 that opened up better opportunities for a decent life for people who had not had it.  It also should never have allowed the continuing growth in faculty and administration that has more than tripled the real cost of college since the mid-1960s.  

I think that in the current context, the changes Guinier proposes are more mainstream than those put forward by Ellis.  The Chronicle of Higher Education is filled with articles on how to throw out more elements of our educational tradition, including one I just read explaining how the author grades students by offering them several options for how much work they want to do, and simply giving the As to those who perform the largest assignments in a satisfactory manner.  Higher education, I think, must provide means to identify and nurture the tiny minority of truly gifted intellectuals who can make unique contributions for us all.  A lifetime in education has taught me that those individuals come from every economic class, both sexes, and every race--that they are in fact scattered pretty much at random throughout the population.  Higher education must also train professionals, including K-12 teachers, and help everyone share in our cultural heritage.  Meanwhile, we must make a better life more accessible, once again, to those who do not need four-year college.  The current system is now fueled by debt that many students will never be able to pay, and shows signs of collapsing under its own weight.  That, rather than conservative legislators, might give a few creative leaders the chance to make higher education more effective again.

6 comments:

Energyflow said...

In Germany job training with payment to high school grads who learn most careers this way kn the job is better than purely academic approach leaving one with zero practical experience. A four year nursing degree before having been in a hospital ward for instance then fainting at the sight of blood would be silly or demanding years of work experience in the field before employing new grads.

The left wing overlay described by the first author is the second problem. The social environment creates such a background. It is now " jumping the shark" by not being theoretical specialty concept in a university course but integrated into every course at k-12 level. CRT is cultural marxism of the Frankfurt School of the 60s. I guess if I say Germans are practical I must admit high philosophical energy giving us many of the greatest. In practice marxism may not have translated well, leading to revolutions. CRT is 20th century version which focuses on race, sex, etc. Obviously a post colonialist, post modern self hate in The West wil be very divisive. Permanent revolution and self indoctrination of the masses to believe they are inherently evil due to their past could be as detrimental to caucasians as was apartheid in South Africa or slavery in the US to blacks. The pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction perhaps. Perhaps a blind worship by whites of everything minorities do in culture and history will give a new perspective after centuries or millenia of Eurocentrism. Perhaps this is being done heavyhandedly however by gogmatists whereas such a discovery of global culture was happening all allong in a natural manner as the Wdst wanes.

erik f storlie said...

In colleges and universities today there are now far more administrators for every student than there are faculty--many of them DIE (aka DEI)enforcers. I began teaching at my newly created community college in 1965. By the 2nd year we had about 500 full-time students, 30 faculty, 5 counselors, and 3 administrators (one president and two deans). And janitors, support staff, a bookkeeper, etc. One administrator for every 10 faculty, one administrator for every 179 plus students. The goal was to keep tuition very low, to serve primarily first-in-family students, offer small class sizes, and to feed prepared students to four-year institutions.

Bozon said...

Professor
Very interesting and thought provoking discussion.
Higher education goes back a long way, not strictly in the West, by any means, but mostly, and mostly since 1500.

These are some remarks which do not necessarily fit into any category of comment in particular on your account, one way or another:

Leftism, back into the 19th, and 18th Century, generally had nothing to do politically with the lot, or the social status, or estate, of non white people, or even of women of any color, anywhere, who were almost uniformly considered by all whites, left, right, or center, as subject and subordinate peoples, civilizations, races, and sexes, whether they were enslaved, indentured, or free, white or any other color.

White missionaries, beginning in the 16th, took initiatives for religious conversion, paternalism, and against cruelty, but these were not equalitarian initiatives then or later.

Maybe that is enough for one comment. Implications are staggering.

All the best

Bozon said...

Professor
The issues re higher ed, troubling as they are, are connected with other problems, of liberal trade, Western driven globalized competition, the learned and unlearned professions, and political and racial rivalry.

Our higher institutions are a playground for mostly Asian rivals to contend and take what is left of this cultural and knowledge rich Western heritage, often for their very different and oppositional uses, and against ours and our traditions.
No point in candycoating it, really. You can kid yourself.

Here is a passage from my blog, touching on some of these related matters:
Steingart, "The War For Wealth"

Sunday, May 17, 2015
RE STEINGART
Steingart has a passage p 163 echoing my remark, "Never in the history of human conflict...."

"BUSINESS EXECUTIVES ARE LOATH TO DISCUSS..." GS

"Never before in history has there been such a massive transfer of knowledge--without war or conquest-- from one social group to another." GS

All the best,

Bozon said...

Professor

What, big picture, higher ed or any other fields, of real use or enrichment, culturally or civilizationally, to us, have we taken from contact and trade with China?

Jack squat!

All the best

Paul Zimmy Finn said...

Looking back from the perspective of my mid-30s, Millennials (I am one) were handed a Sophie's choice about higher education. The marketplace of opportunities and jobs in the post-industrial / information age economy, coupled with the costs of tuition, housing and other economic forces, presented a generation raised to be strident achievers in the 90s/00s with a sense of the need - indeed, the imperative - to shoot for best outcomes at any cost. For many of us that meant going to college, going to graduate school, taking on a huge debt, competing ferociously for unpaid internships, brushing up our resumes regularly to compete for an ever-shrinking slice of well-paying jobs, living in apartments which either exceeded the rent we should have been paying on our salary or which we shared with other struggling 20-somethings reluctantly, being constantly on the lookout for ways to confirm to ourselves and others that we were "conventional", and forgoing getting married, buying a home, and starting a family for a decade or more after completing our education.

I don't agree with historian Peter Turchin (author of Ages of Discord) about much, but one thing he was right about is that there has been a building "elite overproduction" tension in America for many years, particularly within the Millennial generation. Millennials are often accused (not without some merit) of being entitled, but what that criticism seldom accounts for, is that we always sensed, as a generation, that we had nothing to fall back on and nothing to look forward to if we didn't go to college, become credentialed, and "conventionally" succeed. And that fear is being borne out today.

Within the sphere of higher education, the years Millennials have moved through it has seen the overwhelming dominance of progressive liberal orthodoxy (and sometimes outright cultural Marxism) on college campuses coast to coast. Becoming the kind of conventional credentialed young person who would be successful in the 21st century economy, to a great extent, required adopting and reciting the progressive "change the world" mantras hook, line, and sinker. But of course, that milieu was one which many Millennials had absorbed earlier in our education, also.

I attended a university on the East Coast which in recent years has gone full steam ahead in making its entire mission sending out into the world activist 20-somethings armed with the determination to make everything progressive, politically correct, and equitable, even in contexts where doing so will surely affect more frustrations than good outcomes. It's clear to me, in retrospect, that my alma mater would rather have its students go into debt and spend the rest of their lives immersed in one worldview, than become the kind of truly informed and upstanding people who can make an impact by being autonomous and free-thinking on their own. Yes, I think it's fair to say higher education is headed for a full-on reckoning before this Crisis era is through.