Jan. 24: Higher ed signs on with new economy

By David Morrill

A side effect of our devotion to the market economy is the growing commercialization of American higher education. The primary role of colleges and universities, we are told by boards of regents, blue ribbon committees and state legislators, is to serve as research centers and incubators for commerce, while the educations they dispense are understood to be fuel for the country's economic engine.

Although the transformation has been going on for years, its pace has quickened to a veritable goosestep in the past decade or two. It is hard to ignore the fact that many universities have come to resemble corporations.

The corporate nature of universities is reinforced by the fact that many have grown to the size of cities. Burdened with the uniquely American notion that everybody deserves a college education, campuses of publicly supported universities have grown to 30,000, 40,000, even 50,000. University administrators have no choice but to put fiscal and governance issues before education.

Gone are the tweedy, avuncular college presidents of the first part of the 20th century who had the time to teach a course or two and stroll through the sycamore groves chatting with students and faculty (although they probably were never as tweedy or avuncular as legend has it). In their place is a new breed of CEOs, evangelists and boosters whose chief responsibilities involve fundraising and politics.

One of the more egregious indications of the bottom line mind-set in higher education is the obsession with rankings, such as those put out by U.S. News and World Report. Unfortunately for undergraduate students, there is an inverse relationship between high rankings and the quality of the educations. As universities rush money to bolster research, graduate and professional programs that count most in the rankings game, undergraduates are forced to take their classes in large auditoriums or endure the fumbling efforts of first-year graduate assistants. A fast-growing trend at many large universities, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, is the practice of teaching undergraduates on television.

While many college administrators acknowledge that undergrads get short shrift, they have little to offer but the party line: what is most important is the reputation of the institution that issues the diploma. The higher the rankings and the loftier the college's stature among its peers, goes the reasoning, the more the graduate's services will be valued in the marketplace.

The big loser in today's climate is the traditional liberal arts education. Students are not surprised by the fact an assistant professor of art history or archeology makes $45,000 while his or her counterpart in engineering and law fetches upwards of $90,000. The student that doesn't act on the lesson that the numbers tell, and chooses to pursue a career in the arts of so-called "soft sciences," must become hardened to the sneers of his or her fellows.

It would be a stretch to suggest there was ever a golden age of liberal arts education. Ninety years ago, Henry Mencken observed that university boards of trustees were typically composed of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank directors and politicians who viewed original thought with high suspicion.

What did exist, however, at least until the middle of the last century, was an understanding that a solid liberal arts education had value for its own sake, even if it was a tonic to be taken like castor oil. It was understood that it was important to understand the difference between Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, the causes of the World Wars or the change of seasons.

The reason such knowledge is no longer valued is due, in part, to the fact that today's decision-makers are themselves poorly educated.

One of the tragedies of the brave new world is the fact that academia has become a less hospitable place for the handful of superior scholars and artists who, in the past, would have been sheltered and nurtured there. What becomes of the genius that is lost when the composition of a concerto or the working through of an equation is subjected to a cost analysis by the fiscal department?

It is as difficult to imagine an Einstein, a Toynbee or an Auden surviving in today's university as it would to imagine Rembrandt creating action figures for a software developer.

What is less difficult to imagine is a cultural future of diminishing value.

David Morrill is a Florida journalist and Northern California native.