Avoiding the university ‘crisis’

Ed-xistential Crisis

By Adam J. Garzoli

When I was brainstorming the title for this column at the beginning of this semester, I had my hesitations about “Ed-xistential Crisis.” Granted, the alternatives “Hire (Me) Education” and “Ed Word” (which would’ve been great if my name was Edward) weren’t all that suitable. But not only is “Ed-xistential Crisis” awkward to pronounce, it also conveys that the subject matter — higher education — is in crisis. It’s a popular claim, but one that rings of sensationalism and deserves some examination here.

Crisis or not, the fact is that it would take a lot of effort (or hubris) to ignore the precarious state of our system of higher education, and more specifically of the University of California. While the university is always undergoing change, and while each wave of change will have its detractors, it would be unwise to discount current criticisms of the direction of the university.

The question of whether American higher education is in a state of crisis has been a fixture in public discourse for many years now. Just this past month, however, several prominent members of the University of California community have offered arguments for and against the existence of a crisis in higher education — with a focus on public higher education. On March 12, UC President Janet Napolitano’s opinion piece “Higher education isn’t in crisis” was published in the Washington Post. Last week, a UC Berkeley faculty panel was assembled at Mulford Hall to discuss “The University in Crisis: The Destruction and Dismantling of the University of California.”

Napolitano writes in response to two critiques of traditional higher education — Ryan Craig’s College Disrupted and Kevin Carey’s The End of College — which address the issues of noneducational expenses (real estate, intercollegiate athletics, etc.) in driving up costs for students and the role of technology in changing how we learn. For Napolitano, the more pressing concern is that states haven’t maintained funding for their public research universities, given enrollment increases. Her argument is essentially that American higher education has tremendous economic and research value and thus higher education isn’t in crisis, but state and federal mismanagement threatens to undermine the system.

Fair enough. State investment in public higher education is indeed inadequate. But two aspects of Napolitano’s piece strike me as particularly troubling. The first is how easily she dismisses Craig’s concerns about noneducational expenses at the university, and especially her remark, “We need to end conversations about colleges that linger too long on costs.” On the contrary, as a matter of fiscal accountability and responsibility — considering public universities’ reliance on taxpayer contributions — costs should and always will be part of the conversation.

More troubling is Napolitano’s suggestion that because American higher education is a strong business — that because it attracts so many students willing to pay extraordinary sums in exchange for its benefits and generates hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity — it isn’t in crisis. What this really means is that universities are very successful at branding, to the extent that they suffer no shortage of customers, whether high school applicants or private corporations. Clark Kerr, UC president from 1958 to 1967, observed in his book The Uses of the University that the “protection and enhancement of the prestige of the name are central to the multiversity.” But there’s a major problem when this aim has become so central that successes in university branding are offered as evidence that all is well in our system of higher education.

And that brings us to last week’s “University in Crisis” panel and back to the University of California. Beneath the sterling reputations of the University of California and UC Berkeley as world-class research institutions lies a less spectacular reality. Administrative growth, intercollegiate athletics and the expensive Memorial Stadium renovation, the governance of the UC Board of Regents, the curriculum and tuition increases were all concerns — familiar ones at that — raised by the faculty panel. It isn’t necessary to share the panelists’ concerns about the erosion of faculty governance or the selection, composition and tenures of the regents to understand that these are tough issues that need to be confronted across the university community, even if the ensuing debate reveals flaws in the university that its branding occasionally obscures.

Is there a crisis at our university or other public institutions like ours? I can’t say. But administrators would do well to take more seriously the chorus of students, faculty and others agitating for change in response to what they perceive to be a crisis in public higher education. Ignoring these calls for change or dismissing them offhand might be in the best interests of the UC brand, but the well-being of our university depends on more substantive interaction and vigorous debate among administrators, faculty and students about the state of the university and its future.

[Source]: Daily Californian