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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Bob ZemskyRecent Posts
Lessons From the Cost-Quality Curve | Comment [2]
Quality -- Reform's Fourth Horseman | Comment [4]
Access to Success | Comment [2]
Is Access Still the Question? | Comment [3]
Affordability: Devil in the Details | Comment [2]
Featured Articles By the Author
Into the Wind
I am back from two weeks in France and the Netherlands, where I spent part of the time bicycling into the wind — a 20-mile-per-hour headwind whose constancy loomed ever larger in my imagination. My survival solution was to spend as much energy as I could afford working through what I have come to see as a wondrous puzzle: Why should an enterprise devoted to rationality, clear thinking, and precise exposition spend so much of its time arguing about a set of words that have literally lost their meanings?
The words I have in mind belong to a set I have come to call the four horsemen of higher-education reform: access, accountability, affordability, and quality. In her charge to her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Margaret Spellings asked us to provide guidance on how to ensure that our American higher-education system celebrated those four qualities. I now realize that I never really understood what she was asking of us — and have become increasingly convinced she didn’t know either.
So, heading into the wind, I tried to imagine what each of my four horsemen might mean and just how seriously we ought to take — or not take — calls to make them the cornerstones of federal higher-education policy. I hope those of you who follow this blog will spend a little time thinking about what those terms mean to you. On Friday I will begin posting my cycling-induced notions as to what they might mean — and not mean.
Posted at 03:30:17 PM on April 29, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
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1) “Access”: Admin tries to satisfy whatever external lobby is yelling the loudest at a given moment.
2) “Accountability”: A set of invalid metrics that admin can use to justify increased control over faculty.
3) “Affordability”: A stick that permits legislators to justify budget cuts for higher ed, and admin to justify increased control over faculty.
4) “Quality”: See One through Three above.
— Elaine · Apr 29, 05:14 PM · #
“I now realize that I never really understood what she was asking of us—and have become increasingly convinced she didn’t know either.”
There’s the Spellings Commission in a nutshell. Thanks a whole helluva lot, Bob.
A famous writer whose name escapes me (hey! that shoulda qualified me for the Spellings Commission) once referred to the “hotel culture” of Americans who visited Europe only to congregate in one posh hotel after another in a succession of cities, and then came back to report to friends on the virtues and vices of Continental civilization. There’s a parallel species of academics, who acquire fancy titles, ascend to the directorships of hifalutin institutes or centers or foundations, jet around to far-flung confabs to talk to others of their kind (usually on somebody else’s tab—I’ll bet ol’ Bob’s sojourn in Gaul and a low country wasn’t paid for out of his pocket), and then issue reports and recommendations concerning the state of higher education…with about the same degree of knowledge about the situation on the ground.
Or do you think it’s just a coincidence that Bob Zemsky’s and Morris Zapp’s last names both begin with a “Z”?
— LuckyJim · Apr 30, 09:23 AM · #
Pretty harsh comments this morning. Must be near the end of the semester…
Yes, these are buzzwords. Our external constituents are pushing them constantly (e.g., Spellings Commission and legislatures), so there’s no harm in taking a moment to consider them beyond the lingo.
— Reasonable Center · May 1, 05:31 AM · #
In contrast to the anti-intellectualism of the early morning tarts, I look forward to an exchange on the meanings of four words that drive much of the controversy about higher education today. Maybe the complexity we attribute to the power of these words is more a product of our own political mindsets.
— Larry Gould · May 1, 08:10 AM · #
Let’s take several thousand instutions populated by several million Phds, led by several dozen institutions populated by 100,000 serious well funded and published researcher Phds. Now lets take several hundred highly opinionated people none of whom have Phds, all of whom have axes in need of grinding or heads to lodge in, who want to “improve” all that those millions and 100,000 are and do—that is, to reduce that to something they can understand, control, and direct towards their favorite inherited value sets—whatever their grandpapy told them while on his knee, for example. How nice!!! We have a Comission for the Omission of Higher Education—perhaps with colored ribbons attached!
In this esteemed context—definitions fly:
access = help me get elected by letting in more of some particular group I can get useful headlines promoting
accountability = educate ten million people a year so as to like and respect more my own individual values and greatness
affordability = price higher education not by what people are willing to pay, not by what it does to lifetime career income (and life satisfaction) but by how many middle class people I have left out of my republican tax cuts still have a chance to get in
quality = how those millions and 100,000 do to other people’s mind what I with my deep abiding greatness do to the people I lead.
If the overseeing commission is less educated, less esteemed, less Nobel-ed, less accomplished, less broad, less global, less profound, less eleemosynary than the million and 100,000 they oversee—we can expect “overseeing” to turn into reduction in quality to “my personal quality” which, since I am a pompous ass who sees nothing but greatness when I look in the mirror every morning, is nil.
We academics have a duty to scientifically demonstrate that the composition of all such commissions, in recent decades, have NOT reached a level of competence, representativeness, and sincerity of public interest, that qualifies them for admission to the very institutions they would oversee and “manage”.
However, higher education reaps what it sows—it is top 10 colleges, in their schools of business, who created the monster that is now tearing up portions of the world economy, with greed driven egotistical self promotatory “managing” of things. If Mintzberg is only 1/3 right—higher education has “educated” a set of monsters graduated from their business schools that now, extend their greed-driven economic-model limited stupid view of the world and its people onto universities and higher education. It is time to stop whining about how evil bad managers are theatening higher education and start creating something less monstrous out of higher education schools of business—a kind of “management” that does not rip to shreds anything standing in the way of personal wealth attainment and that is capable of seeing and measuring things beyond the silly circles of mathematically tractible models that defines the boundaries of economists. We created the monster 30 years ago when, to up status of schools of business, they all together made the collossally stupid decision to make economics the core of business—so people ,apparently, were never core!!!!!! We reap what we sowed. We sowed that—in our elite snobbishness. We now reap it—divine justice I say.
access, accountability, affordability, quality
— Richard Tabor Greene · May 1, 09:51 AM · #
As a largely retired educator I have become increasingly interested in the history of education, especially relative to the support or no-support it receives from the public. The work of scholars like Lawrence Cremin and Susan Jacoby’s recent THE AGE OF UNREASON have helped me realize how fragile and even ambivalent the public “investment” in education is. Also, a PBS documentary and accompanying text, DECLINING BY DEGREES, demonstrate how diminished that investment has become and how the social contract that increased higher education’s accessibility has shrunk: we now see education as we see any other commodity—- something whose quality and very purchase depend on one’s income or, as is so often the case, one’s willingness to fatten bank coffers by taking out huge loans. All of this is tragic.
I am struck by the use of “market” in the author’s self description and wonder whether he, like so many others these days, has deified this term as the omnipotent-nothing-to-do-with-human-agency-force used so often to explain what should or should not be done.
One wonders, when gobs of jobs requiring high levels of training, are shipped abroad, just how colleges and universities are supposed to be forever sensitive to this allegedly predictable “market.” Now as I see it, the US is definitely in need of some clear thinking leaders who can speak to us as if we were not suffering from amnesia and were not merely customers awaiting our next star on the horizon. And what do we get? Have all the courses in leadership and management made our life better? Have the public airwaves blossomed with intelligent political talk because our citizenry has been educated enough to find stupid and toxic so much chatter on these airwaves that it makes the better unkarlrovish voices more prominant and influential? I don’t think so, any more than I think this so-called educated citizenry has anything close to an adequate sense of history, much less any adequate understanding of the US Constitution and the debates which formed it. So I guess on the quality question, I’m pretty gloomy.
I’m afraid all we need do, Professor Zemsky, is look at the standards of rationality, clear thinking and exposition espoused by the current regime and led by someone whose powers of articulation are an embarrassment, to understand where the problems lie. If the leaders themselves and even political candidates espousing “change” insist that slick and degrading marketing strategies are the best means of political education for its citizens, then the complete “marketization” of public life and the triumph of business school ethos must be admitted.
I do commend you, Professor, for acknowledging the utter vacuity of Spellman’s attempt at “leading” us to some intelligent conversation about what education is for other than, of course, the agreed-upon goal of securing employment. If Jefferson was right about the quality of a democracy depending on the quality of education available to its citizenry, does not one have every right to shudder not only at recent conditions, but to be quite fearful of the prospects the future holds—- especially if we elect a President who has no trouble speaking about bombing a country to the tune of a classic Beach Boys song (bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran), or, if you prefer the alternative, someone who blithely uses the term “obliterate” in threatening any country foolish enough to mess with us.
— George K · May 1, 12:27 PM · #
Yes, it does look like the semester’s end is upon us, when academics begin wondering what to do with their minds after their grades are in. I look forward to reading further postings on this subject. While I wait, let me comment that the answer to the question “What does X mean?” is “It depends,” for nearly all the important words I can think of. Here X might be liberty, or democracy, or good, or evil, or God, or accurate, or education, or many, many other words. Their meaning depends on who asks the question, for what purpose, and in what context. An intellectually honest and thorough answer to any version of that question requires a substantial tome. Bob’s four horsemen could each provide the basis for an impressive doctoral dissertation.
— Don Langenberg · May 1, 03:43 PM · #
Government’s role in limiting accessibility in higher education has little to do with its higher education policy. Bob Zemsky’s own research has shown that the number one predictor for a student’s access to higher education is the zip code of their place of birth.
Accessibility is controlled by admissions standards, set by university faculty, not by federal budgets. The deplorable state of K-12 education is the greatest limiting factor for students. Those denied access to higher education come from school systems where quality has fallen steadily for years, even as expenditures per student have risen. Look at the student’s zip code at birth and compare it to the quality of public K-12 education available there and you’ll have your accessibility answers.
In Wisconsin this morning the news highlighted a story about truancy . . . among K-12 faculty. These teachers, with their union’s support, maintain that they should be able to use their sick days to take off Fridays and Mondays. Their argument is that “sick” really doesn’t mean “ill,” just “personal”. Their “personal choice” is to teach 3-4 days a week. Maybe.
Do you think that such practices in unionized public education might explain why urban public school children find it difficult to gain access to schools like UW-Madison?
— Michael · May 1, 04:40 PM · #