The piece notes that there are some 1600 private, not-for-profit colleges and universities in the US of which a remarkable 30% enroll fewer than 1000 students.
One might reasonably ask if America needs these tiny schools at all. After all, there are thousands of other options from the great land-grant public university systems to the community colleges the Obama administration is so fond of.
One might even ask why we need private higher education --- costly as it is --- at all.
I had some thoughts on this question a decade ago, which I believe are worth repeating now:
The December 8, 2000, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported that an article in the Denver Journal of International Law and Policy,
in which the authors had criticized the alleged behavior of Boise Cascade
Corporation toward workers in its Mexican facilities, was withdrawn by the
University of Denver after the corporation threatened a disparagement and
defamation lawsuit.
The report is reminiscent of earlier articles in The Chronicle and elsewhere concerning "slap suits"
against academics whose scholarship is critical of corporate interests, and other
forms of corporate retaliation against universities that have taken stands
against selling sweatshop goods. As the University of Denver's acquiescence
suggests, higher education's response to such corporate challenges to age-old
principles of academic freedom and social justice has been uneven at best.
The 21st century is no time tot faint-heartedness in higher education.
Rather, this should be a time when we champion free speech and social justice,
even at the risk of our own prosperity. No one else can do it.
In 1967, John Kenneth Galbraith, in The
New Industrial State, postulated a three-legged stool on which the
well-being of American society rested: Big Business, Big Government, and Big
Labor. These legs kept one another in check, a sort of socio-political
supplementation to the political checks and balances outlined in the
Constitution. Galbraith's thesis was correct in its fundamental features. But
by the 1990s, Robert Reich--in many ways Galbraith's intellectual successor at
Harvard--would express his concern in The Work of Nations about the failure of
that balance, due to the shift from a manufacturing to a services economy and
the decline of organized labor.
When Galbraith was writing, in the 1950s and 1960s, labor represented one
in three American workers, and a typical American CEO took home 40 times the
salary of the worker on the shop floor--a sum that, when reduced by our steeply
graduated income tax, amounted to only 12 times the worker's wages. By 1988,
the number of unionized workers in the private sector had fallen to one in 10,
and CEOs were enjoying 70 times more after-tax income than average workers.
In this brave new world, Reich concluded, the information
manipulators--in his terms the "symbolic analysts"--are the dominant
subspecies. Indeed, this is true even within the labor movement: The most
prominent private-sector unions in America are those representing professional
athletes and entertainers. Whatever happened to Cezar Chavez? Today's big name
on the border is NAFTA.
Let me suggest that higher education should aim at filling the vacuum
left by Big Labor in Galbraith's construct of The New Industrial State. Its
capacity to serve as a countervailing force will rest on one or more of the
following features of the contemporary university:
• Vastly increasing endowments, as we
see developing at the Ivies and universities of analogous high quality and
prestige;
• Expanding geographic reach via
multiple campuses--for example, Penn State's 1997 upgrade of 14 of its regional
campuses from two- to four-year colleges;
• Direct competition with the
for-profits, such as the University of Phoenix, in the distance-education
market, which is being more or less successfully attempted by some large
universities and systems; and
• Consortia of small colleges, and/or
small-college affiliations with a larger (possibly "hub")
institutions, a strategy being pursued, for instance, by a group of small
Catholic colleges in eastern Pennsylvania.
This suggestion and list of features, of course, conjure memories of the
critique of the "megaversity" that emerged from such works as C.
Wright Mills's The Power Elite. Admittedly, "mega" is a part of what
higher education must be if it is to be a co-equal member of the triumvirate
upon which 21st-century American society will rest. The small, independent
college will not be able to play this role except where it is unusually well
endowed or affiliated with a major religion or consortium.
If higher education is to perform the crucial task I have proposed for
it in 21st-century America, it must take a page from the history of organized
labor in the unions' heyday. Like Big Labor at its zenith, higher education
needs to become adept at shifting from the right foot of collaboration with Big
Business and Big Government to the left foot of confrontation. It must do this
even at the price of lost corporate and government support, and even in the
teeth of threatened litigation, when the issue is academic freedom or social
justice.
Indeed, many public university systems are striving to build their
alumni support and endowments so as to gain a measure of independence from the
strings attached to government purses. And many church-affiliated institutions,
especially Catholic universities, are returning to their religious roots and
for the first time in a long while are publicly celebrating--even
marketing--their moral and doctrinal orientations.
What of the prospects of success for
higher education in the sometimes-confrontational posture I am proposing? In
his sweeping survey in Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto says that the monasteries that survived the Dark Ages
triumphed only by being needed. They also survived by being distinct from
government and the marketplace. The more that colleges and universities morph
to match their for-profit competition, the more they incapacitate themselves to
act as a counterweight to those other powerful forces.
In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia's Arthur
Levine listed nine "inevitable changes" that colleges and
universities experience in the coming decades, such as competing with
"more numerous and diverse" providers of higher education. But the
more readily they accept Levine's nine changes as "inevitable" and
collaborate in their coming about without carefully considering the merit of
each--followed by a conscious decision to accept or oppose it--the less they
will be able to function as free agents influencing American society.
As David Halberstam observed in The
Next Century, America is more than ever an "entertainment-driven
society." A felling example is the contrast between the media coverage of
the Vietnam War and the coverage of the Gulf War some two decades later.
Stanley Karnow wrote of the 1968 Tet offensive, "After years of viewing
the war on television, Americans at home had become accustomed to a familiar
pattern of images....The screen often portrayed human agony in scenes of the
wounded and dying on both sides....[M]ostly it transmitted the grueling reality
of the struggle...punctuated periodically by moments of horror."
By contrast, the Gulf War was quick, high-tech, and portrayed on
American television as if it were a video game. Satellite photos were combined
with simulations to feed American viewers sanitized images, depicting no more
real blood and pain than a quick game of "Space Invaders."
Thus, barbarism passed beyond the merely banal to the visually alluring.
The film industry has responded to, and in turn reinforced, its audience's fascination
with the visually unusual and compelling. From George Lucas's breakthrough Star
Wars films of the 1970s and 1980s to The Perfect Storm last year, special
effects--and, increasingly, computer-generated visuals--are at the heart of
most blockbuster hits. If it can be imagined, it can be depicted.
This power is potentially hazardous. Severo Ornstein, writing in the
journal Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, points out,
"Today the art of simulation has developed to the point that it has become
necessary to identify television simulations as artificial, so we won't think
we are seeing the real thing....When employed for political purposes, illusion
becomes diabolical and deception becomes downright dangerous."
If higher education must differentiate
itself from business and government in order to serve as a counterweight to
them, one of the fundamental ways it must do so is in adhering to a strict code
of truth-seeking and truth-telling. Even if particular institutions of higher
learning are unwilling to take unpopular stands on controversial issues, they
must share consensus on this code or run the risk of abrogating their claims to
being genuine educational institutions. Are we not entitled to expect a higher
level of integrity from our universities than we anticipate when we turn on our
TVs?
This expectation of integrity means that when universities use the power
of technology to lie as governments and businesses do, it seems more
scandalous. Witness the University of Wisconsin's embarrassment when it was
"exposed" in a Chronicle article on Nov. 24, 2000:
The cover of its new admissions brochure displayed a photograph of happy
U.W. students attending a football game at their home stadium--a photograph
that turned out to have been doctored. The original picture contained no black
faces, but U.W. officials had desperately wanted their admissions materials to
reflect a diverse student body. So, using photo-design software, the director
of university publications and the director of undergraduate admissions simply
asked their staff to add one.
Coming now full circle, let us consider in greater depth the University
of Denver's decision to withdraw an article previously published in one of its
law reviews, when faced with a major corporation's threat to sue. Let us begin
by agreeing, if we can, that the remedy for bad speech is more speech. And let
us assume--purely for argument's sake--that the censored article is inaccurate,
or even that it is defamatory. What ought the university to have done, or
offered to do, in the face of Boise Cascade's threatened legal action? Let us
compare what it did do to what Cornell University did when faced with a similar
situation.
In 1998, Professor Kate L. Bronfenbrenner of Cornell's School of
Industrial Relations was sued by Beverly Enterprises, Inc., one of the nation's
largest nursing home chains. Beverly accused the professor of lying about the
company's labor relations record to members of Congress and in her published
scholarship. Bronfenbrenner reportedly told Democratic Congressmen at a town
hall meeting that Beverly had a "long-established record of egregious
labor-law violations in the context of union-organizing campaigns." The corporation sued her for
defamation. Cornell hired attorneys and successfully defended the suit on its
faculty member's behalf.
In the wake of Beverly Enterprises, Inc. vs. Bronfenbrenner, faculty
around the country were understandably concerned that "slap suits"
would become more common. At Rider University, the American Association of
University Professors (AAUP) came to the negotiating table in summer 1999 with
a proposal aimed at ensuring that the university would defend any faculty
member who was named in any such "slap suit." The university, to its
credit, agreed to a new provision in the collective bargaining agreement that
will provide such protection, and then obtained the appropriate insurance to
cover any such claims.
In short, my contention--which I hope is shared by the great majority of
my readers--is that a university must do at a minimum two things to think of
itself as a real university: seek the truth and defend those who try to tell
the truth under the institution's auspices. Absent a strict adherence to these two
baseline principles, an institution ceases to be a university, no matter how
many sports teams it fields, how many academic programs it offers, or how many
campus amenities its students enjoy. The institution may be an information
purveyor or a training school or a research center, but it has forfeited the
right to call itself a university.
Now comes the hard part, where I expect that many of my readers and I
will part company. For I argue that the two baseline principles outlined above
are only that: credentials that qualify an institution to call itself a
university. But while a labor union must fairly and vigorously represent its
members, a great union will also put its resources at risk in order to organize
unrepresented workers. A great university likewise will reach out and actively
oppose injustice.
This is not the view of most universities today. Just as many unions
have long since circled their wagons, emphasizing preservation of existing
power bases over the organization of new constituencies, so too have
many--perhaps most--universities taken the path of cautious conservatism.
Father Theodore M. Hesburgh, former president of Notre Dame University, wrote
in the February 2 issue of The Chronicle,
When I was a college president, I often
spoke out on national issues, even when they didn't pertain to academic life.
Yet nowadays, I don't find many college presidents commenting on such issues on
the front page of The New York Times or in any of the country's other major
news outlets. Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to
the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional
amendment for the 18-year-olds' vote, but I wonder whether we hear them taking
stands on similar topics now.
Father Hesburgh cites a recent American Council on Education (ACE)
report, which concluded, "[T]he vast majority of Americans rarely hear
college presidents comment on issues of national importance, and when they do,
they believe institutional needs rather than those of the students or the wider
community drive such comments." He offers several reasons why this has
happened. Among them is "that presidents must play an ever-larger role in
raising money for their institutions--and often from supporters who have strong
views on what presidents should or shouldn't say to the press."
Today colleges feel free to draw their CEOs from the ranks of
development officers, a practice that to my knowledge was almost unheard of
even two decades ago. In current searches for college presidents, it seems that
the absence of the initials "PhD" after the candidate's name is not
necessarily an impediment if the fund-raising record is substantial.
Our students, too, have for the most part been quiet since the
tumultuous late 1960s and early 1970s. The 1980s witnessed a rush to law and
business schools for JDs and MBAs, then on to the M&A (merger and
acquisition) practices of the nation's big accounting, law, and investment
banking firms. During the latter half of the 1990s, undergraduates couldn't
wait--and sometimes didn't--to establish their own dot-com business ventures.
But as the last decade of the last century of the old millennium came to
a close, there were stirrings in at least some of our student bodies. Students
at universities across the country became energized--at least temporarily--by
the anti-sweatshop movement. Initial corporate responses to these new stirrings
of student unrest included withdrawals of sports sponsorships. But these
punitive reactions were rapidly replaced by the formation of the Fair Labor
Association, an anti-sweatshop consortium consisting of such major
manufacturers as Nike and Reebok and some 140 institutions of higher learning.
The Fair Labor Association may be compared by critics to the company
unions that proliferated in the early part of the 20th century, before they
were outlawed by the 1936 passage of the National Labor Relations Act. The
Worker Rights Consortium, a more militant anti-sweatshop organization, operates
independently, and--perhaps not surprisingly--has come under fire from
corporate members of the Fair Labor Association. Said a Nike spokesman of the
consortium recently, "It's just parachuting into a country, conducting a
few interviews, and writing a report in a few days. Thorough monitoring
involves culling through records, matching up pay stubs, getting a sense of the
local practices and culture. There is a lot more involved in auditing and
monitoring than what that report represents."
The important point for my purposes here is not whether the Fair Labor
Association or the Worker Rights Consortium has got it right about any
particular allegation of sweatshop abuses. What matters here is that the two
groups appear to be engaged in dialogue and debate about the truth behind such
labor-abuse accusations. This is precisely the sort of conversation that is
denied to higher education's constituencies when a corporation threatens to sue
or to withdraw sponsorship and the targeted institution bows to the threat.
Slowly but surely, however, at least
some of America's several thousand institutions of higher education are
manifesting a willingness to use their virtual global reach to identify and
help address the inequities that proliferate beyond their campus boundaries.
The record to date suggests that such
initiatives are not nearly as risky as some may fear. Just as American
companies in the 1940s and 1950s reached accommodations with organized labor
because they needed the workers represented by those unions, so too does the
quick creation of the Fair Labor Association suggest a recognition among
apparel manufacturers like Nike and Reebok that they need big-time college
athletics. By extension, corporations need our graduates, our scientists, our
consultants--in short, our knowledge. Knowledge is capital. As such, it affords
us leverage.
Does higher education possess the collective will to exercise that
leverage? I do not know. But let me suggest that many big issues of our times
cry out for us to demonstrate that will. Father Hesburgh points to affirmative
action and "developing education programs that seek to improve the status
of women--especially in Asia, South America, and Africa, where many are
second-class citizens"--as issues he would address, were he still a
university CEO. Women's rights, affirmative action, and the anti-sweatshop
movement can all be characterized as battles in a global struggle to end the
exploitation of human beings. Environmentalism, community outreach, and health
research are related issues on which higher education could also speak out.
A key question in my view is, How will higher education use its global
reach and knowledge capital, particularly as those have been enhanced by
communication technology, in the 21st century?
To date, the
discourse has been a self-referential one, centered on the displacement of
traditional classroom teaching by distance learning. To borrow the words of the
ACE report, it has focused on "institutional needs rather than those
of...the wider community." Much less discussed is the potential for the
Internet to make American higher education a force for fair play and human
dignity in the international arena. Global reach brings with it global
responsibilities. Knowledge is not only capital--it is power. Whether that
power will be focused upon the narrow concerns of individual institutions or
combined for the good of "the wider community" is a defining choice
for higher education.
• Basinger,
Julianne. "500 Academics Sign Petition Protesting Lawsuit Against Cornell
U. Professor," The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 1998, p. A14.
• Clegg,
Roger. "Photographs and Fraud Over Race," The Chronicle of Higher
Education, November 24, 2000, p. B17.
• Ebo, Bosah.
"War as Popular Culture: The Gulf Conflict and the Technology of
Illusionary Entertainment," Journal of American Culture, Fall 1995, pp.
19-20.
•
Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years,
New York: Scribner, 1995, pp. 56-59.
• Galbraith,
John Kenneth. The New Industrial State, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1967,
pp. 262-282.
• Halberstam,
David. The Next Century, William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1991, p. 104.
• Hesburgh,
Theodore M. "Where Are College Presidents' Voices on Important Public
Issues?" The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2001, p. B20.
• Karnow,
Stanley. Vietnam: A History, New York: The Viking Press, 1983, p. 523.
• Levine,
Arthur E. "The Future of Colleges: 9 Inevitable Changes," The
Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2000, p. B10.
• Mills, C.
Wright. The Power Elite, New York: Oxford University Press, 1956.
• Monaghan,
Peter, "A Journal Article is Expunged and Its Authors Cry Foul," The
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2000, p. A14.
• Ornstein,
Severo M. "Simulation and Dissimulation," Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility, Summer 1989, Vol. 7, No. 3, p. 1
• Reich,
Robert B. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism,
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
• Van Der
Werf, Martin. "Labor Violations Found at Factory Used for College
Apparel," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2001, p. A20.
