Last fall Long Island University in the midst of a labor dispute took the nearly unprecedented step of locking out its unionized faculty, when the collective bargaining agreement expired. Nearly a full academic year later, Inside Higher Ed reports, the faculty have been given a mandate to revamp the core curriculum by the fall of 2018.
Last week I posted on the trials and tribulations of New Jersey's Drew University, which two years ago instituted a 67% tuition discount in order to enlarge its freshman class. The tactic worked, but Drew reportedly faces significant deficits at least out to 2022.
Two different stories... and yet these are the same story. And it's a story we shall be reading about again and again during the decade in front of us. Last year it was Philadelphia's LaSalle University cutting its tuition drastically in order to try for an enrollment bump. Last week it was Rider University announcing it would divest itself of the Westminster Choir College and its campus.
The Fifth Wave is crashing upon private, non-profit educational institutions. And the wave seems to have come ashore on the east coast first. Public institutions aren't immune. Take the Pennsylvania university system as an example. The beleaguered 14-school system is talking seriously about mergers. Negotiation of a new, system-wide collective bargaining agreement last year led to a strike. And one weak sister, Cheyney University, is on life support. The difficulties have multiple causes, but the aggressive expansion of Penn State University, under the leadership of the now-disgraced Graham Spanier, was a contributor.
And that underlines the dog-eat-dog nature of the scramble for students and... survival. Every institution, no matter how small and poor, now wants to be designated a "university." Every institution wants to offer all manner of majors and in all manner of instructional-delivery methods and time-frames. We should remember the words of Gilbert and Sullivan: "When everybody's somebody, then no one's anybody."
The free market may be a commendable means of driving efficiencies. But... at a time when higher education is called upon to be the guardian of the truth in a nation governed by habitual liars; to provide islands of safety and sanity in a mad, mad world; to educate the citizenry to cope with the onslaught of AI and the tsunami of job loss it will entail... our institutions must be as strong and sure footed as possible. ANd they must present a united front.
Now is the worst possible time to be undergoing disruption and "rationalization."
We need national leaders of the quality of John Dewey to maximize higher education's resources and influence on the nation's course. Instead we have Mr. Spanier's sorry story as a reflection of what we may have become. One can only hope it's not too late.
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