Discuss: Destined for Failure

Thanks for advice Nina - for some reason the website only accepted part of the address. Here is the tiny url to the draft Barack Obama speech page
http://tinyurl.com/64w2nc

As a 6th generation WASP college grad, and a 5th generation post-secondary research/educator, I have college memories that go back over 60 years.  In the past 30 years, most colleges and universities have evolved from centers of learning, with fixed academic standards and headed by ex-faculty,  to financially- oriented corporations, headed by Administrators who couldn’t distinguish between Christopher Wren and Christopher Robin. In my Grandfather’s time at Wabash, and my Mother’s time at Carleton, college presidents knew all of their faculty, and entertained them at dinner at least once a semester.  Then the duty of the president was to act as a nucleus for faculty, as well as secure additional endowment.  Then the endowment was dedicated as much to faculty chairs and scholarships as to new buildings and athletic facilities.  Today’s corporate academic CEOs seem more concerned with building campuses than endowments.  Many don’t even know their own faculty members.  Because their new buildings and athletic facilities add operating costs, modern curricula and grading standards are lowered to guarantee tuition by preventing failure.  I hear TV’s Armanied talking heads rhapsodizing that America’s colleges and universities are the worlds’ best.  We wouldn’t even have most of our graduate schools of science and engineering if it weren’t for foreign grad students. I’ve stopped counting American grad students who can’t write a cohesive, persuasive, grammatically correct essay.

Thank you for confirming what I have long suspected, Mr. Leavenworth.  So what is the way forward?

Cadging a few million from well-to-do families to create small niche liberal arts colleges in varied settings which ignore accreditation and career preparation and simply get on with learning in a collection of homes?

Ignoring disciplinary silos and using Great Books or Great Ideas format undergraduate education curriculum?

Returning to the idea that faculty own and manage the college - the old Oxbridge model?  And that clerks exist to execute faculty set policies, not make policies for faculty?

Faculty focusing on teaching to the exclusion of research at the undergraduate level?

There is much to be done and little time to begin….

Thoughts?

I do have a couple of thoughts about beginning to reform higher ed.

First, governing boards should wake up and begin to defend the academic mission of their tax-sheltered institutions, whether private or public. And that includes the big bucks (“compensation”) committees that hand over sweetheart salaries to top administrators, administrators who now duck responsibility for either teaching or research.

Second, schools having, say, a minimum of a billion dollars in tax-sheltered endowment should—in this time of recession—apply both the annual yield and the required fraction of the principal to eliminating tuition for both newly admitted and continuing students beginning with fall 2009. This would free up millions of dollars in grants and loans for students at less privileged schools and give many middle-class families immediate relief. The alternative should be the loss of the gigantic tax shelter.

Peters is talking about a college degree that MATTERS? I like that idea. I’m reminded of Wendell Berry’s quote to the effect that what colleges and universities really should be doing is helping students figure out what’s important. And what better way to do that than to offer (or mandate) classes that study the things we cannot live without: food, energy, stable, healthy ecosystems?

I just graduated with Honours in Sustainable Development through a university in Australia. When I discovered this degree I thought I’d finally found The Degree that would formalise all the stuff I was doing and believing for the last 40 years (I’m a later bloomer!) Now I am employed in local government as a sustainability officer, and finding that although my degree has given me credibility insofar as it makes people think I have ‘the answers’ about how shall we live, they are rarely interested in committing to act on the recommendations they are paying me to make. Feels an awful lot like I am at risk of being a greenwasherwoman. My higher education has not taught me how to deal with these realities.

Leah wrote: “although my degree has given me credibility insofar as it makes people think I have ‘the answers’ about how shall we live, they are rarely interested in committing to act on the recommendations they are paying me to make.”

Generations of parish priests would sympathize with your situation, Leah, as would a range of workers in the helping professions.  Shaking an addiction is hard enough for motivated individuals: imagine the challenges for a society that has been addicted for more than half a century (three generations and counting). 

I agree that colleges should be places where students can figure out what’s important (universities are a different animal).  Trouble is, many things are important, and—if you think learning (as distinct from just knowing) is itself important—there are a lot of false starts, dead ends, frustrations, puzzlements, simple curiosity and wild pleasure involved.

Students are growing things, too, not just an industrial product: mandate all you want to, you still won’t get a standardized yield.

Leah (posting 22) notes that there is a discrepancy between having answers and getting anyone to listen much less implement them.

A few thoughts, Leah:

* If there is a community organizing school or institute in your area, contact them about their next round of classes and enroll. In the interim, find copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals - while you’re waiting for the books you might want to read

http://www.infed.org/thinkers/alinsky.htm

Next, look around the community you are serving as a sustainability officer.  Any garden clubs, Green Party folk, environmentalists, E.F. Schumacher “Small is Beautiful” devotees, urban homesteaders, local/indigenous arts and crafts retailers and producers? On the religious front how about Quakers, Mennonites, Brethren, Liberal Protestants, Jews, Humanists? They are your allies and may need you to be a catalyst for a grass-rrots movement.

Also, who are the primary grantmakers in your territory/state? Any chance you could get a demonstration grant to do a “Walden” like Thoreau to make your point?  For many folks seeing is believing….

Thoughts?