Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 09:40:49 -0400 (EDT)
Random Thought: On Higher Education
This is sort of out of step with the theme of my last few
sharings. I'll get back to it. I'd like to step to a important sidebar.
What broke my cadence was an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times last week by
Michele Tolela Myers, President of Sara Lawrence College titled "Student
Is Not An Input." I've been thinking alot about it. In it Dr. Myers
talks, bemoans is a better word, of the invasion into the academy of
business practices and business-speak that talk of markets, competition,
students as consumers, professors as salespersons, outsourcing ventures
for profit (I guess that means research grants and not just sports
programs), brand value (that means so many Merit Scholars per student body
or level of SAT entrance scores or number of Nobel Prize winners on the
faculty) and brand recognition (winning sport national championships).
Ah, me. From Dr. Myer's comments you would think the immaculate,
pristine, intellectual, contemplative, ethical, moral Ivory Tower had
finally been breeched by the assault of invasing forces from the outside,
sordid, egotistical, greedy, immoral, oafish, unethical, materialistic
world.
I think there is a bit of irony in Dr. Myers grief, maybe even a
touch of disingeniuitys. It sort of reminds me of Milton Berle when in
response to applause he would hold up one hand in a stop gesture trying to
quiet the crowd while using the other hand, held down, with a beckoning
gesture to keep the applause going. So, I ask if this business-speak
really is a distressing new language or are the words lamenting because
they are more honest, more descriptive, more graphic, and less
euphemistic. Maybe we don't want to be reminded that that supposed breech
had been made long ago and we have been feeling, thinking, and acting as
Jabez Stones for a long, long time. Maybe what we are really sad about is
that we can't find a defending Daniel Webster now that the devil is
calling in his note. Maybe we are beating ourselves because we just don't
like to be reminded of that fact and shaken from our haughtiness and
delusional self-denial that we aren't as high above and far removed from
commercialization of academia as we tout ourselves to be.
What is it, then, that supposedly makes Higher Education higher?
Is it the training of more skills? Is it the transmission of more
information? Is it the granting of more degrees? Is it the generation of
more thinking? More is not necessarily better much less higher.
The answer lies in a set of simple questions that have
extraordinarily difficult answers: what are we trying to accomplish? What
is our mission? What is our purpose? What is our vision?
It would seem to me that the focus on the development of skill and
the transmission of information creates experts and maybe professionals.
In almost all aspects of the academy, from tracking in high school, to
college recruitment, to the divisive system of majors curriculae, to the
packing of major programs myopically with "courses appropriate to the
major," to demeaning students as input and faculty as units, to fighting
to eliminate those pernicious non-occupational, supposedly impractical
"what good are they" courses and curricula like history and philosophy and
literature and the arts, to cost-consideration of course and program
offerings, to grading and testing, to placement offices, to internships,
to business recruitment, to the diploma, to the GRE and LSAT and GMAT, we
tout a college degree as little more than an entrance ticket into the
job--oops, sorry, professional--market. Oh, some of those snappy looking
recruitment brochures may talk a good talk about living and down play job
skills, but our entire academic operation, from recruitment to graduation,
is geared towards the practicality of making a living. Is that what makes
Higher Education higher? Higher salaries? Higher social position?
Higher prestige? I think not. In the race to become wealthier, maybe we
become poorer; and in climb to be higher, we descend lower. To restrict
the "higher" to only more of the "lower" is merely to create a hive of
expert and professionl drones, those 50's obedient people in the gray,
flannel suits. We delude ourselves with self-denial to think otherwise.
We blame that "society made us do it." And don't like being reminded of
that fact of our collusion.
I don't think that an educated person is merely a skilled person,
that an educated person is merely an informed person, that an educated
person is merely a thinking person, and that an educated person is merely
an expert or professional. An educated person is, above all, a moral and
ethical person with all those skills and knowledge. An educated person is
an free, independent thinking person. An educated person is a socially
and communally responsible person who is acutely aware of how his or her
thoughts, utterances, and acts affects others. An educated person is a
person of character. That definition answers the question of what we
should be trying to accomplish, and raises the sights of academics and
students to the high heights of creating a more moral and ethical as well
as skilled and knowledgeable, world and not merely a more informed or a
more technologically advanced society.
I just say quickly that learning is not merely the gathering of
information and the honing of skills; learning is not merely the
utilization of those skills and information. Learning is how and to what
ends those skills and that information are applied. I'll say it again.
The Keatings and Milikins of this world were not college drop-outs, but
they were moral drop-outs. It is not an either/choice of intelletual or
entrepeneurial. It never has been. Maybe we can produce an moral,
ethical, free-thinking, intellectual entrepeneur.
Obsolete or naive thinking? Impractical and costly attitude? I
don't think so, not in a democracy such as ours, not if we want to remain
a free and vibrant society. What is truly naive and costly and
impractical is to think and act otherwise.
So, I ask. Is higher education really aiming high?