Anthony Grafton on the crisis (“if there is a crisis,” as 1984-era Hal Riney would say) in higher education. One thing that’s sure: the effort to crack into the top athletic tier isn’t the right answer. At least, it’s not the answer if the question is, “how do you make colleges better?”
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The system runs, in part, on its failures. Administrators count on the tuition paid, from borrowed money, by undergraduates who they know will drop out before they use up many services. To provide teaching they exploit instructors still in graduate school, many of whom they know will also drop out and not demand tenure-track jobs. Faculty, once they have found a berth, often become blind to the problems and deaf to the cries of their own indentured students. And even where the will to do better is present, the means are often used for very different ends.
In many universities, finally, the sideshows have taken over the big tent. Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.
When critics argued that it made no sense to support football at the expense of teaching, an official spokesman replied: “The university’s direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of the Rutgers budget.” Presumably he counted on readers not to know that in any large organization’s budget, the entire amount of money that is not committed years in advance is no more than 1 or 2 percent—or, to put it more specifically, that athletics has swallowed the money that could otherwise have been used to improve the university’s core activities. Christopher Newfield is not the only sober, informed observer who believes that political elites are deliberately attacking middle-class education.
16 comments
November 5, 2011 at 10:37 pm
ari
I’m afraid that Tony Grafton doesn’t understand excellence.
November 5, 2011 at 11:14 pm
andrew
Vernon Parrington understood.
November 6, 2011 at 1:44 pm
eric
Does Joe Paterno understand excellence?
November 6, 2011 at 2:17 pm
jim
I was up at Penn State this weekend for a conference. At breakfast this morning saw a guy with the local paper. Banner headline: “Sandusky Arrested.” Front page, not back page.
November 6, 2011 at 4:06 pm
JWL
It sometimes seems to me that academia is a little more than a collective conceit.
November 6, 2011 at 5:28 pm
ari
It sometimes seems to me that academia is a little more than a collective conceit.
Do you have a newsletter? Is there subscription information available?
November 6, 2011 at 8:03 pm
JWL
“Do you have a newsletter? Is there subscription information available”?
No, Ari. I don’t.
If you’re being sarcastic, I dig it.
November 6, 2011 at 8:36 pm
ari
Nah, I was half agreeing with you, half making light (but not sarcastically) of your observation, and half wondering what you meant exactly.
November 7, 2011 at 11:15 am
Dave
Part of JWL’s point may be that ‘the university’, a thing that academics are noted for pontificating about the golden past, present crisis, and threatened future of at great length, never existed. US private colleges are businesses, Oxbridge is a cloister of privilege, the Sorbonne is an outpost of a vast state bureaucracy, German universities run on quasi-feudal clientage relations, etc etc…
Google “future of the university”, and you get about a 50/50 split between individual mission-statements, and vague generalities. Our tragedy is to think that the latter are more important than the former. And when I say ‘us’, I mean that academia which is only a conceit…
November 7, 2011 at 1:00 pm
V J Cleary
Speaking of nonsensical subsidized intercollegiate athletics, why are there such things still prevalent at the US military academies? Other than for the entertainment of the testosterone driven egos of the warrior class and their trucklers.
November 7, 2011 at 4:39 pm
Erik Lund
Oh, hey, good to see that you guys are back. I may not have much standing to have a conceit, but I do work in an entirely unacademic industry where I imagine myself to be seeing see some disturbing trends with implications for universities.
Specifically, I’m talking about a near complete collapse of career opportunities due to a huge block of Generation X middle managers, themselves baulked by boomers who can’t retire. You can see the implications of that for income growth and social mobility, but my larger concern for this demographically-induced washout of merit is that if you don’t think that you can get ahead on merit, why would you try at all?
The alternative that we’re seeing is top-down micromanagement right across the retail industry. (That is, in my direct experience of corporate follies and major vendors.) You see, for example, Hostess reducing facings of ranks and ranks of its best-selling products to introduce weak product lines. And everyone says the same thing: don’t complain. There’s no-one listening.
This sort of thing really hurts productivity. Literally: the more half-cases you have to stock, the harder it is to make labour targets. But it is clearly doing so in a way that is invisible to the managers who are calling the shots. There’s no feedback up the chain, because there’s no-one to give it.
I don’t know what that says about varsity athletics. Nothing, I guess. I just wanted to get it off my chest. It’s not the institutions. It’s in the numbers. Demographics. That stuff. Working itself out in ways far more pernicious than anyone would have expected until the trends were on top of us.
November 7, 2011 at 7:35 pm
Chris Johnson
“Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians.”
What? That is truly bizarre.
Great to see you guys back.
November 7, 2011 at 7:56 pm
eric
It’s not sufficiently bizarre that it didn’t happen at the UC. Or were you kidding?
November 7, 2011 at 8:47 pm
Chris Johnson
Not kidding — just shocked. To a non-academic outsider like me it looks like simple harassment. Was it seriously explained as a money-saving measure?
November 7, 2011 at 9:08 pm
eric
You bet!
November 7, 2011 at 9:17 pm
Chris Johnson
Good Lord. That’s the lamest thing I’ve heard of in quite a while.