The question on the table is from my last posting, “Can Only Insiders Change Higher Education?”
Richard Hersh and John Merrow spent more than a year compiling a two-part documentary and accompanying volume of essays with the provocative title Declining by Degrees — Higher Education at Risk. To save the enterprise, Merrow and Hersh, each a prominent outside-insider — promised to blow “higher education’s cover.” Their avowed model was the 1983 report “A Nation at Risk,” which made fixing elementary and secondary education a national priority. Now it was an “insidious erosion of quality” across higher education that “places this nation at risk.” Finding a remedy would necessarily begin with “a national conversation about higher education. No longer can our colleges and universities be allowed to drift in a sea of mediocrity. The stakes are high, but we know that many Americans want the crown jewel of our system restored to its former glory.” Like most lamenters, Merrow and Hersh believed that starting that conversation required an up-close-and-personal examination of higher education’s failures and foibles. The results? Zip. Their television program was a non-event, though their volume of essays did provide fodder for first-year graduate students just beginning their study of higher education.
Charles Miller, chair of the Spellings Commission, had the same idea — issue a sufficiently strong indictment of higher education to shock and shame even the faculty into paying attention to what the public seemed to be saying about higher education. The problem, as Miller would discover, is that the public is not concerned. As the most recent poling by Pat Callan’s Center for Public Policy and Higher Education makes clear, American higher education, a year after the convening of the Spellings Commission, continues to get “high grades” from the public. More than half (51 percent) reported four-year colleges were doing a good to excellent job; two out of three indicated that “college is worth the money despite the high cost”; and most surprising of all given the increased focus of whether colleges and universities were still places of quality, the proportion of Americans who believed higher education was “teaching students what they need to know” increased from just over half in 1998 to two-thirds in 2007. Even on the question of affordability, two-thirds of the public strongly agreed with the proposition that “anyone who really wants to go to college can find a way to do so, if they are willing to sacrifice.”
Miller was also wrong in assuming that outsider-insiders like himself (Miller was a highly effective chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents) were the best positioned to change higher education for the better. Despite considerable personal charm and political acumen, Miller and his nostrums have been largely ignored by those inside the academy. Despite the imprimatur of a well respected Secretary of Education and an all-star cast of Commissioners, the Spellings Commission will, at best, prove little more than an interesting footnote in the history of American higher education.
The bottom line? Rhetorical firestorms produce heat without change.
Next up: Can’t committed outside-insiders can use the levers of public policy to change the academy?
