From the issue dated May 30, 2003
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Have We Lost the 'Public' in Higher Education?By ROBERT ZEMSKYDescriptions of higher education in the decades immediately following World War II often take on a dreamlike quality -- the kind of nostalgia in which one forgets what hurt and misremembers what mattered. Despite the attempts of critics of modern-day higher education to portray them as such, the 1950s and '60s were not a golden age. Those years were as often characterized by political numbness as by fevered commitment, and they ended in a spate of violence that included the bombing at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and, in 1970, the killings at Kent State and Jackson State Universities. But, at least in terms of the commingling of academic pursuit and public policy, that quarter-century differed significantly and, in many ways, positively, from today. It can still teach important lessons about the role higher education can -- and should -- play in pursuing broad societal goals. Take, for example, the two major higher-education initiatives that the federal government launched in 1945. The more celebrated, and hence better remembered, was the GI Bill of Rights and the educational benefits that it granted. A college education became the gateway to middle-class status for the veterans who flocked to American campuses in unprecedented numbers, and higher-education institutions served as prime platforms for national and regional economic development. The second initiative, now largely forgotten but no less seminal, was Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. In that report, Bush called on the federal government to make a massive and sustaining investment in basic scientific research. The agency of that research, Bush argued, should be the American research university, in part because of the role it had played in the war effort, but mostly because only a university and its research faculty were capable of achieving what the nation required. "It is chiefly in these institutions that scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity," Bush said. "At their best they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom. All of these factors are of great importance in the development of new knowledge, since much of new knowledge is certain to arouse opposition because of its tendency to challenge current beliefs or practice." Most of what Bush recommended, including the chartering of the National Science Foundation in 1950, became federal policy. It made the federal government the principal financial supporter of a scientific revolution that recast our knowledge of the world and gave science departments an often dominant voice in the ordering of their universities. Taken together, the GI Bill and Vannevar Bush's report helped make what colleges and universities, and their faculty members and students, did and said matter as never before. It made them subjects of controversy, of celebration, of scrutiny, and of sustained public interest. Over the next two decades, academic place and public purpose commingled in a growing number of ventures. Some enterprises focused exclusively on economic development, like the role that North Carolina universities played in the establishment of North Carolina's Research Triangle Park and its foundation in 1959, and, later, Stanford University's participation in the development of what would become Silicon Valley. College and university presidents became public figures, expected to speak out on issues of public concern as both witnesses and experts. It is interesting to note how easy it is today, more than 25 years after most of their presidencies ended, to generate a roll call of public presidents: Theodore M. Hesburgh of Notre Dame, William C. Friday of North Carolina, Clark Kerr of the University of California, and Kingman Brewster of Yale University. They all come readily to mind in a way that almost no current university president does. In the 1960s, colleges and universities also became important staging and recruiting grounds for many of the social and political movements that became the hallmarks of the decade: the civil-rights marches; the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley; the protests against racism and poverty that linked Yale and the city of New Haven; and the increasingly effective and virulent antiwar demonstrations that closed the decade. The rawness and violence of that period, both in memory and fact, has now faded. Perhaps the most telling change, however, is the recasting of the university in the imagination of the American public. In the 1960s and to a lesser extent the 1950s, campuses were public arenas -- platforms for political theater, recruiting grounds for social activists, and often the places public officials turned to for judicious expertise when sorting out vexing issues. While certainly not every idea discussed in collegiate settings really mattered, rare was the social, political, or economic movement that did not consider the college campus as a critical venue for the airing of viewpoints and perspectives. Today, however, colleges and universities are seen principally as providing tickets to financial security and economic status. Few people worry about higher-education institutions leading young people astray. If anything, the lament is that they have, in their pursuit of market advantage, become dispensers of degrees and certificates rather than vibrant communities of educators who originate, debate, and promulgate important ideas. What happened? In part, colleges and universities are what they are today because the 1970s began so badly. The killings at Jackson State and Kent State genuinely frightened most people on campuses. In the aftermath of those tragedies and a host of lesser ones, higher-education leaders wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. Students and faculty members began asking less about what others were doing or thinking, choosing instead to focus on their own preferences. Although it was a term that would not come into fashion for another two decades, the unofficial motto on most campuses became "Don't ask, don't tell." A changing economy also led a host of American institutions -- colleges and hospitals being only the most conspicuous examples -- to understand that survival depended on being more responsive to market forces. The growing importance of a college education in obtaining jobs and higher pay played its part as well, signifying to many that the real purpose of a college degree was to confer advantages to individual students. Experiences became more important than ideas. It was an age of personal experimentation with drugs, sex, and alternative lifestyles -- in which the doing was more important than the explaining or justifying. Yet the principal responsibility for making colleges and universities less places of public purpose than in the past belongs to the public itself, or the voters and the officials they have elected to national and state offices. At the federal level, the evolution of financial aid as a subsidy to student "consumers" has reinforced the notion that a college education is principally, if not solely, an investment in personal advancement. It was as if the GI Bill had been designed to aid only individuals and not to help America transfer from a wartime to a peacetime footing. In state capitals, the willingness of legislatures to encourage tuition increases in place of state appropriations -- a pattern that is repeating itself this year as states again face drastic declines in tax revenues -- has helped privatize public higher education. Legislators and governors everywhere have become accustomed to letting higher education pay its own way -- reminding those who balk at ever-higher tuitions that, from the perspective of a return on investment, nothing beats a college education. Having left the nation's colleges and universities largely to their own devices, most state policy makers are also willing to let those institutions focus almost exclusively on their own agendas -- not the public's. A glaring example is the degree to which higher-education institutions, in the face of the continuing deterioration of public schools, have been seen as neither part of the problem nor part of the solution. California demonstrates just how detached the different levels of the educational system have become from one another. California generally ranks among the top five states in its support for higher education. But it ranks in the bottom half in expenditures per elementary- and secondary-school student and in the bottom fifth in its teacher-to-student ratio -- and the schools' quality reflects that. Equally telling is what has not happened. A friend and former university president heard me say that, in most state campaigns to promote adult literacy, publicly supported universities play only tangential roles. Not happy with that aspersion, he bristled back, "Believe me, if the governor and the chairs of House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees told me that adult literacy was a priority, I would have found a way to make it ... [my] priority." And that's the point. The governor and legislators never asked, probably never thought to, having decided in their own minds that supporting higher education was what they did to help the citizens of the state -- as individuals who also happened to be voters. Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a Republican from California who chairs the U.S. House of Representatives Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness, recently proposed legislation that would punish institutions whose price increases exceed federally established maximums. That should remind us all just how much public policy has come to focus on prices -- and what some see as the failure of the market to ensure fair and effective competition. Leave aside, for the moment, that what McKeon is proposing is a system of federally mandated price controls and that his proposal reads better as a press release than a piece of serious legislation. What the congressman has in mind is what everybody knows: A higher education is primarily a consumer good. The question hardly ever asked now is just how colleges and universities are spending their tuition income or whether that money can or should support public purposes. The new initiative that Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts has announced is even more disheartening. He has proposed, among other things, to privatize three campuses. The message is clear: Leave the commonwealth's universities to their own devices. The result is likely to be equally clear: a set of colleges and universities that have come to believe their futures are best served by satisfying the interests of their customers, even if that ultimately means becoming increasingly self-interested and detached from broader public goals. The slope has proved to be an increasingly slippery one. As more people have viewed colleges and universities as providing principally personal advantages, institutions have been able to charge even higher prices to provide those advantages. The result is that public colleges and universities are less dependent on public appropriation -- to the point where many of the nation's best-known public institutions have become like private ones. And university presidents, recognizing that being successful now and in the future requires them to become skilled managers of billion-dollar enterprises, see little advantage, either personally or institutionally, in pursuing the visibility that comes from leading a university that defines itself in terms of its social and economic contributions to the community, state, or nation. At this point, some people may well want to ask, "What's wrong with what we have? Modern colleges and universities are working fine, teaching students, pushing the frontiers of new knowledge, serving their communities principally as engines of economic growth. Why long for an earlier time that was not nearly as romantic or progressive as today's critics of higher education would have us believe?" The answer lies in what is lost when higher-education institutions are shaped almost exclusively by the wants of students seeking educational credentials, and businesses and government agencies seeking research outcomes. When the market interests totally dominate colleges and universities, their role as public agencies significantly diminishes -- as does their capacity to provide venues for the testing of new ideas and agendas for public action. What is lost is the understanding that knowledge has other than instrumental purposes, that ideas are important whether or not they confer personal advantage. What can be done? Government and higher-education officials must work more in partnership to pursue public goals. Last year, for example, Governor Ronnie Musgove of Mississippi and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges played host to a summit that brought together legislators and other government officials and business and education leaders to develop a cooperative framework for the state's educational, economic, and social progress. Among the outcomes: a renewed statewide focus on early-childhood education. Even in this difficult economy, many more efforts like that should occur throughout the country. Although they may have to reduce appropriations to higher-education institutions, governors and legislatures must still ask public colleges and universities to play more visible roles in pursuit of public goals. Take, for example, the challenge that Gray Davis confronts as governor of California. Even in his revised budget, the state's community colleges face a $285-million or 5.6-percent reduction in state support. But that amount, as substantial as it is, is still $246-million less than the reduction the governor originally proposed. It is worth asking what might have happened if he had paired his good news of a smaller budget cut with a request -- or even a demand -- that the state's community colleges play a more substantial and organized role in the delivery of state services. Why couldn't such colleges provide, for example, counseling centers for newly arrived immigrants who require health screening, job-search skills, and English-language training, or, more generally, offer one-stop access to state agencies? Understandably, the institutional response would have been: A budget reduction, even one that has been cut in half, still means less money to spend on the programs and people already in place. How are we to pay for the additional services that the governor is talking about? Isn't he asking us to make additional cuts in the budgets of existing programs -- or to impose higher tuitions and fees? The answer is that the governor would have been asking the community colleges to do both, as a trade-off against an even more diminished state appropriation. But that trade-off would also send an important message: Although it must become a more self-supporting enterprise that promises personal advantages to its student consumers, the community college remains a place of public purpose and public service. University presidents, particularly those who lead the nation's flagship campuses, have a similar obligation to look for opportunities to make their institutions more relevant to public pursuits. They must lead their institutions in identifying public concerns, contributing to the public good, and demonstrating the value of those contributions. When faced with the kind of revenue shortfalls that now confront higher-education institutions, however, most presidents hunker down, choosing to remain frozen in place. The unspoken message is that preserving jobs is the top priority -- that they are far more important than public initiatives that could, in fact, serve potentially many more people. The irony is that when an institution hews to this largely conservative strategy of across-the-board cuts and postponed investments, it ends up making itself even more market dependent. It comes to rely on tuition and enrollment increases as the sole response to declining state appropriations and earnings from endowment. The University of Michigan is one institution that has been bucking this trend. In the 1980s the university identified ways to encourage its schools and institutes, as well as individual faculty members, to develop new markets to offset the declining value of state appropriations. Michigan not only gained more mastery of the market -- to the point that even those at the university came to talk openly about "Michigan, Inc." -- but it chose simultaneously to play the major role in the decade's most important national controversy concerning higher education. In their defense of the university's race-conscious admissions policies, James Duderstadt and his successor, Lee Bollinger, demonstrated just how much a tough-minded and persistent president can accomplish when committing his or her institution to the defense of public principle. Regardless of how the U.S. Supreme Court rules this summer, the first result of the Michigan case is a reinvigorated debate over social inequity and its causes in modern-day America. Not incidentally, it is also a reminder to the citizens of Michigan that their university remains a place of public purpose. Alas, most of the news today suggests that the University of Michigan may remain the exception. The recession and the war in Iraq will have deep and long-lasting consequences. No one should suppose that state coffers will suddenly be filled with new money or that colleges and universities will receive more, rather than less, of what may well be diminishing resources -- in part, at least, because unlike most public and quasi-public agencies, institutions of higher education can recoup some of the losses in government appropriations by raising tuition. The immediate future then holds more of the same: more privatization of public institutions, more emphasis on higher education as a private good, and less movement toward colleges and universities as places of public discourse or initiative. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush defended his choice of the university -- as opposed to the industrial lab -- as the best place for the federal government to make its investment in research by noting, "Industry is generally inhibited by preconceived goals, by its own clearly defined standards, and by the constant pressure of commercial necessity." Sadly, it is a description increasingly apropos of the modern academy as well -- a place that has learned well to be market-smart, yet often at the expense of being mission-centered. The question left hanging is, "Can colleges and universities, at this late date, still choose to be places of public purpose?" The answer should be a resounding "Yes!" But to do so, we will need more higher-education leaders who want their institutions -- as institutions -- to play public roles. No less important, we will need political leaders who ask more of their colleges and universities -- again, as institutions -- even if that means increasing their public appropriations. Most of all, we will need a reaffirmation of the principle that the American university is an educational asset that can powerfully serve not only private, but also public, purposes. Robert Zemsky is chairman of the Learning Alliance, a think tank that advises college and university leaders on management and policy issues, based at the University of Pennsylvania. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 38, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education