I think the most controversial claim I made in my original post about this year’s Modern Language Association is that literature professors tend to equate the humanities with the “Academy,” hence the dedication of the first day of the convention to “The Academy in Crisis.” I didn’t mean that, as many seemed to think I did, as an attack on the humanities. Rather, I meant that the institutional makeup of postsecondary education in the U.S. has changed significantly over the past three generations—dramatically, in fact, since the advent of for-profit higher education in the 1990s.
This transformation has been driven almost exclusively by financial considerations, by the rapidly rising cost of college. Everyone is aware of this phenomenon, but its consequences have perhaps not been sufficiently thought out. Almost every high-school graduate is convinced that a college education is the best path the professional success, but we are eventually going to reach a point where a four-year college degree will be unaffordable to any but the richest high schoolers. This has long been the case for selective private colleges and universities, which sport tuitions in excess of $30,000 a year. But tuition at public universities has actually been increasing at a faster rate in recent years. That trend is certainly likely to continue, as states struggle with financial troubles resulting from the perma-recession in which we now find ourselves. Ohio State’s E. Gordon Gee is clearly not alone among state university presidents who are predicting that a tuition increase this fall is very likely.
What does this mean (and here I’m separating economic consequences from the intellectual missions of colleges and universities)? In short, it’s forcing students to opt to attend community colleges, attendance at which has soared in recent years. The Pew Research Center notes that between October, 2007 and October, 2008, the number of 18- to 24-year olds attending community colleges rose from 3.1 million to 3.4 million, and that, during that period, enrollments at four-year colleges essentially remained flat. It’s a shrewd choice for so many students: far less expensive, and requiring a two-year rather than a four-year time commitment. Thus the trend is certain to continue.
What happens when community colleges run out of options for expanding their physical plant and simply run out of space? It may seem unthinkable, but just last year Columbus, Ohio’s only community college reached capacity and had to lease classroom space from nearby Franklin University. The answer, I believe, is that students will turn to for-profit universities, if only as an educational option of last resort.
Here most academics and other interested parties have tended to focus on the most recent news: an all-out attack on some of the irresponsible and unethical practices of the for-profits, spearheaded by Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, and embarrassing undercover investigations by the GAO. Hopefully that pressure will continue, but if one takes a longer view, things look quite different: Between 2004 and 2008, undergraduate enrollment at for-profit postsecondary schools rose by a staggering 96%, dwarfing the increases at any other type of institution (for example, enrollment during that period at four-year public universities increased by 7.73%).
What all of this means is that the humanities occupy a smaller and smaller slice of the higher education pie: Community colleges typically have a minimal commitment to the humanities; for-profits have none at all. As a humanist, I find the trajectory I’ve just described to be heartbreaking, but I don’t see how it can be reversed.
Next time: the Counter Conference.
4 Responses to A Second Look at the MLA, Part 2
22122118 - February 2, 2011 at 9:14 am
Thirty years ago (I think I have that right) I attended a conference at SUNY New Paltz on the theme “The Liberal Arts in Crisis.” As Ronald Reagan had just begun his triumphal march (further) into the history books. A generation if not more later, we’re still in, if not deeper in, “crisis.” One of the more interesting moments at that conference came when Stanley Aronowitz (“from steelworker to sociologist”) observed, to an audience of several hundred, “We’re all Marxists here, of the left or of the right” and then gave a dynamite address.
Time for self-reflexivity, or as (left) Marxists would have it, self-criticism? Maybe that’s what the recent and continuing (and sometimes ponderous) discourse is trying to be.
tappat - February 2, 2011 at 11:37 am
If the pie changes, which it seems to have done on Mr. Donoghue’s menu, the ingredients change. Genuine education will always be humanities driven, even if it becomes a very, very small part of the society, even if becomes dormant in society. Most of history is of people living in societies without the humanities, which is why, as someone or some collective once reported, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and now for something completely different. In the dark, any number of things can be served and called pie.
sand6432 - February 2, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Maybe, if more of higher education becomes vocationally oriented, high schools will need to spend more time giving students the grounding they need in the humanities? My gripe about humanities education in universities is that it is done with little thought to systematic education. Students are allowed to select, within very broad distribution requirements, from a smorgasbord of courses that are not designed to be interrelated with each other in any way that will provide the average student with a really coherent education. Thus a student might take a course on medieval philosophy or early modern philosophy without ever having had to study Plato or Aristotle first, or a course on 20th-century U.S. history with no prior exposure to colonial history. This results in a fragmented set of facts and partial narratives that does not add up to a coherent whole that a student is much more likely to retain over time. If humanities have a role to play in higher education in the future, efforts should be made to enhance the coherence of it.—Sandy Thatcher
perpetual_student - February 2, 2011 at 1:47 pm
We recognize the connection between quantification and commodification, which benefits the “objective” disciplines. The humanities might benefit from exploring the connection between commodification and the subjective.