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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

University Tradition and Alumni Relations

The infrastructure of higher education is remarkable. Over the years I have been astonished to learn how many formal organizations there are that network specialists of one sort or another in university administration. And of course there are at least as many informal networks. One of them is a group that calls itself “Ivy Plus,” a multiple network of administrators in the Ivy League, MIT and Stanford.

In September I am addressing the Ivy Plus session for development officers. On Tuesday I spoke to the Ivy Plus alumni-relations specialists. The theme of their meeting was “tradition and modernity,” and they asked this question: “How do our institutions preserve and perpetuate the best of our pasts, while still remaining flexible and agile enough to respond to changing circumstances and maintain our positions of leadership?”

I thought it was a good question, especially since it is easy for the faculty to dismiss alumni relations as little more than the soft side of university fund raising — if we can bring the alums back to campus annually to drink and wear funny costumes, perhaps they will be more generous in their annual giving. And there is no doubt that is a key purpose of investing in alumni-relations programs. But I was impressed by the seriousness of the group, and by their concern to understand which of their traditions are genuinely worth preserving. One of their break-out sessions was entitled “How Do You Know When it’s Got to Go?” and that struck me as a very good question to ask. (But I confess that I left after my own talk and before this session.)

I suppose that universities are constantly engaged in a process of inventing tradition. After all, this is one reason why so many colleges and other institutions of higher learning have recently relabeled themselves as “universities.” This puts them instantly into a tradition they can market to students (and others). But of course the Ivy Plus institutions (apart from Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and Stanford) have genuinely old traditions as colonial colleges. But they did not become universities until the late 19th century or later. And even then they were engaged in reimagining themselves — Harvard and Yale established Oxbridge-wannabe residential college systems in the 1920s and 1930s, just at the time they were actually becoming more like Humboldtian-German universities in actuality. And Princeton did not attempt a similar move until 1982. Instant traditions, and good ones for collegiate education.

My argument to the Ivy Plus group was that if their institutions truly wanted to preserve the tradition that best characterized the historic mission of the Ivies, they ought to focus on the primacy of undergraduate education — on the college within that generated the modern university. That is of course a message that would resonate with alumni, since the core of any institution’s alumni is its former undergraduate students. But, alas, this is a tradition that I doubt we can sell to presidents, trustees, and faculty. When it comes to undergraduate education, it may be that modernity has already triumphed over tradition — that the university has swallowed up the college.

Posted at 04:49:58 PM on June 26, 2008 | All postings by Stan Katz

Comments

  1. > the university has swallowed up the college

    But we can have both (as you know of course). Fear that the university was swallowing up the college and causing a decline in the quality of undergraduate education was the very thing that drove the creation of the residential college systems at Harvard and Yale in the 1930s (first proposed by Woodrow Wilson for Princeton twenty years before). The new professors of the Americo-Humboldtian universities, Wilson wrote in 1909, “do not think of living with their pupils and affording them the contacts of culture; they are only accessible to them at stated periods for a definite and limited service; and their teaching is an interruption to their favorite work of research.”

    To remedy that situation, Wilson and others in the early 20th century sought to revive the undergraduate college precisely by dividing it up into smaller, more humanely-sized units. This idea is now undergoing a major international revival, with residential college systems (also called house systems) being established in universities large and small, public and private, wealthy and less so, across the United States and around the world. (Watch for Hong Kong to be one of many leaders in this.)

    This is a good opportunity to mention an important book that has just become available online. Mark Ryan’s A Collegiate Way of Living: Residential Colleges and a Yale Education is the best book available on the life and purpose of residential college systems within larger institutions. You can view the table of contents and download the complete volume as a pdf file on the page linked above. (It was originally published in print in 2001 for limited circulation.) Ryan was for many years the dean of one of Yale’s residential colleges, and he helped to establish a new residential college system at the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico.

    — R.J. O'Hara · Jun 26, 07:52 PM · #

  2. “College” really doesn’t mean anything in particular in an international context. [ “Oxbridge,” sure — that’d be the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. ] The Ivies have all, to varying degrees, at least maintained some focus on undergraduate, even “collegiate,” education, in ways that the truly humboldtian US universities, Chicago and Johns Hopkins, did not.

    — Mr Punch · Jun 27, 01:00 PM · #

  3. As an Anglophile, I love the idea. As a former fund-raiser, I see danger. I’m not sure that this idea is helpful to fund-raisers who want to get real money from real donors. Donors have the money; the university’s job is to get it from them. Doing this involves a negotiation between what the donor wants to do and what the university needs. I worked for a decade in university and arts development, including an Ivy, before going to grad school and over to “the other side” (the faculty). At every place I “cultivated” and asked, our biggest and most necessary gifts came from business- and technology-school alumni and were given to undergraduate education, the arts, and libraries. Making a major gift is an emotional, personal, and symbolic act for alumni who do it; a good fund-raiser can find match the meaning to the giver. Often, this means discovering the “I wish I could have…” and “I have always believed in…” within the donor. Alumni relations and annual giving build a bridge between the college experience and major giving; the groundwork is established early, but the relationship often takes years to grow. The idea and feeling of “the university” is the bridge between the donor’s academic experience and the university’s need. For non-alumni donors—and every university has some important ones—the college means little or nothing. The ideal “ask” works only if the university co-ordinates the from-this-to-that; it doesn’t work remotely as well if the donor controls the process or the colleges and schools compete against each other.

    — LC · Jun 29, 08:10 PM · #

  4. Undergraduate education is NOT how you maintain their Ivy traditions—it is how you kill them off as institutions. Derek Bok’s acquisitions editors excepted, most of us understand that undergraduate education was a frontier worth fighting for at a certain time in social development in US history and the history of the West. In the name of undergirding democracy and taming nature’s wildness inside born people, an institution was erected that helped create a world among people, inter-est as Hannah Arendt says. We need a world between people inter-est, today, in the form of communities not of practice, that is, something to bind our growing separation into distinct fields of knowledge and corresponding professions. Undergraduate college does NOT do this job and it is the wrong age of students for doing it. We need a Second College experience between 28 and 32 or between 38 and 42 years of age, wherein people already competent inside a discipline/community/field/profession get competent across various of them. Orthogonal fields cutting across traditional fields and determining what excellence is in all of them, are one proposal for what the content of College 2 might be. See articles/books on these proposals I have gathered at www.scribd.com/people/view/310309 and at https://www.youpublish.com/richard-tabor-greene.
    One can argue that 28 to 32 now becomes graduate experience, that is, professionalizing knowledge engagement within a chosen field, so that 38 to 42, when people, successful within fields, are promoted to higher positions involving bigger scale works across fields, would be best for College 2’s emphasis on orthogonal work across fields and creating a world inter-est, among us all.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Jun 30, 05:57 AM · #

  5. I’m surprised that L.C. in comment 3 says that gifts from business and technology-related alumni went to undergraduate education, the arts and libraries. From my experience that is amazing! Among other things, libraries have no alumni (please remember that, you development people) and I have not seen that the arts (and presumably the humanities) have much of a constituency at all. I’m glad L.C.‘s experience is different.

    — S. · Jun 30, 01:34 PM · #

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