Reflections on the University Scene

Cover cartoon by Ramunė B. Adams

Published 2008

Reflections on the University Scene is available on the web at

webpage.pace.edu/wadams

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PREFACE

1     

The Nature of the University?

2     

Perspective on Higher Education

3     

Governance

4   

Limits of Dissent, Academic Freedom, and Freedom to Learn

5     

Tenure, or Not?

6     

Collective Bargaining

7     

Can Learning Be Measured?

8     

Liberal Education

9     

Diversity

10     

Admissions

11     

Higher Education and High-Tech

12     

Memorable Teachers and Teaching

13     

Further Reflections on Academe

To Veronika

PREFACE

As stated by its title, this book presents a sample of reflections on the university scene. Unless identified by my byline, the views expressed are not necessarily those of my own. For a portrait of the day-in and day-out life of an institution of higher learning, I recommend my companion book The Nitty-Gritty in the Life of a University (Xlibris; 2007).

To make Reflections on the University Scene widely available I have put it on the web at webpage.pace.edu/wadams

I should like to express my appreciation to my daughter Rasa for helping me to prepare the manuscript.

W.J.A.

1     

The Nature of the University?

The Classical Sense of a University

The University as a Corporation

Harold E. Lurier, History, Pace University

The Pace College Press, April 28, 1971

From its beginnings the university has been a corporate body of those who have come together to seek out, absorb, and disseminate knowledge. It is a corporation that differs from all modern corporations in that it does not exist to make a profit, nor to be an instrument to gain a further end. The ends and purposes of the university lie within its very existence.

To live properly the university needs a physical and procedural skeletal framework. Thus administrators fulfill an important function, but the university does not exist merely to provide for them an opportunity to administer, and those who so misunderstand the true aim of the institution are bad administrators who will destroy it.

The university includes a faculty that analyzes, improves and broadcasts the techniques whereby the university may live well, that is, a faculty’s true role is to dedicate itself to the seeking out and the teaching of successful ways to acquire knowledge. The university does not exist merely to provide the teachers with an opportunity to exercise their profession, and those who so misunderstand the true purpose of the institution are bad teachers who will destroy it.

The university must always be open to students, as a body to the very food on which its life depends. They enter as apprentices to learn from the faculty a set of basic tools, but from the beginning they are also absorbed into the university and are involved in its proper function. Some stay on in this corporate body and live out their lives as its teachers or administrators. Others leave it to pursue individual lives outside the university. They may now seek other ends, but in a broad sense they are always part of the university, for all their lives they will still follow its aims and continue their search for knowledge. The university does not exist merely to provide students with a miniature world within which they may try out a variety of life styles, nor does it exist as a haven for those who are afraid to or do not choose to live, and those students who so misunderstand the true purpose of the institution are bad students who will destroy it.

The university is thus composed of administrators, faculty and students, but it does not belong to any of them, as such, nor does it exist merely to provide any of them an opportunity to function, even in their proper ways. All come together to pursue a weighty end, the most important in this life, the pursuit of knowledge. The university is a voluntary association that belongs to all those who have involved themselves in it for the right reason, to have a share in that pursuit. There is no profit to divide up among the stockholders. There is no payment for labor. There is no fair return on investments. There are no bargains to be had for hagglers. The institution must live and therefore it must be solvent. It must have sufficient funds to provide its members with the means of living full and comfortable lives, whether these are salaries to administrators and faculty, or proper living and study facilities for students. But the university is not the market place, and even its financial life must be focused on its proper end. What it needs financially to achieve that end, it must have, whether the money comes from government, benefactors, prudent involvement in the general economy or from those who are willing to pay to be a part of it. If it is successful, and it becomes rich, then all its members share its wealth. And if it does not succeed and is poor, then all share its poverty.

The modern world provides a harsh climate for the university. Its strident cacophony is not conducive to study. Many impatient men, eager for social or political change would use the university as their tool, much as a housewife does when she uses a delicately balanced, finely honed knife to unclog the plumbing of her house. Their aims may be proper, but they destroy the tool. Others, angry, frustrated and fearful of the dangers and the loneliness of modern life, would vent their rage upon the university, so seductively near at hand and so vulnerable, and leave it crushed and ruined.

But this must not be allowed to happen. If the climate is harsh, if its foes and even its misguided friends would destroy it, yet the university must live. The university is not at fault. It is the world that is wrong, a world made up of those who have not understood the true role of the university, who have not been a part of it, who have not dedicated themselves to its ends. If such blind and arrogant men persist in their attempt to destroy it, if they live within it and do not have the decency to leave it and act out their lives elsewhere, why, then, the university must defend itself, not by resorting to the weapons of its enemies, but by being even more vigorously what it is in fact. It must rise up and in clear uncompromising terms make it known to all that it will continue to be what it has always been, a voluntary community of those who have come together to seek knowledge because they appreciate it for what it is. And if this means that the whole world will have to be converted, so be it. All men might then learn that the university provides the very lifeblood of the society at large, and that they become one as they pursue common ends. Then the whole society might know that it must fight to preserve the university as it would fight to preserve its very own life.

Profit from the Groves of Academe?

Higher Ed Inc.

The Economist, Sept. 10, 2005

The University of Phoenix’s Hohokam campus looks more like a corporate headquarters than a regular university. There is none of the cheerful mess that you associate with student life. The windows are made from black reflecting glass, the corridors are neat and hushed, the grass has been recently cut, there is plenty of parking space for everybody, and security guards in golf carts make sure all the cars are on legitimate business. The university is conveniently close to a couple of motorways, and ten minutes from the airport.

But the campus does not just look like a corporate headquarters; it is one. The University of Phoenix is America’s largest for-profit university (and indeed America’s largest university, full stop), with 280,000 students, 239 campuses and various offshoots around the world, including some in China and India. The Hohokam campus houses the corporate headquarters of the Apollo Group, the company that owns the university, along with the group’s corporate university.

The University of Phoenix was the brainchild of John Sperling, a Cambridge-educated economist turned entrepreneur. When he was teaching in San Jose State University in the early 1970s, Mr. Sperling noticed that adult students got scant attention from universities designed to teach people aged 18-22. That, he felt, was not only unfair but also unwise: in the new economy, workers might have to keep going back to university to update or improve their skills.

The University of Phoenix is designed to cater for the needs of working adults, who make up 95% of its students. The emphasis is on practical subjects, such as business and technology, that will help them with their careers, and on fitting in with busy schedules. One of the university’s golden rules is that there should be plenty of parking, and that students should be able to get from their cars to their classrooms in five minutes. In the early 1990s it became the first university to offer degrees online, and the internet is now integral to all its teaching.

But in designing a university for working adults, Mr. Sperling also introduced two other far-reaching innovations. The first was to concentrate power in the organization. In traditional universities academics are semi-independent contractors who devote as much time as possible to their own research. In Phoenix they are simply employees. It is the university, not the teachers, that owns the curriculum. Todd Nelson, the company’s boss, claims that this has allowed the university to become a learning organization: it is constantly improving its ability to teach by measuring performance and disseminating successful techniques. The only research it cares about is the sort that improves teaching.

The second innovation is to turn higher education into a business. The cost of a year’s education at Phoenix, at $9,000, is not particularly high for a private university, but the business ethos is unusually pervasive. Mr. Nelson cheerfully talks about the education industry, and boasts that enrollment is currently growing at 25% a year. The Apollo Group spent a staggering $383m on marketing last year.

Dollars and degrees

It is hard to imagine what von Humboldt, with his belief in research for its own sake, would make of the University of Phoenix. But for many people it is a vision of the future. Milton Friedman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, regards the triumph of the for-profit sector as inevitable, because universities are run by faculty, and the faculty is interested in its own welfare.

For-profit universities are finding a growing number of market niches, particularly in America. Strayer University, one of the University of Phoenix’s biggest competitors, concentrates on telecommunications and business administration. Concord Law School, owned by Kaplan, which in turn is owned by the Washington Post, boasts one of the largest law-school enrollments in the country. All of its teaching is online. Cardean University, the brainchild of Michael Milken, offers online business education, including MBAS.

The Apollo Group’s corporate university marks another big educational change. The number of corporate universities, which provide education for their parent companies, has grown from 400 in the mid-1980s to more than 2,000 today. Some of these institutions, such as the McDonald’s Hamburger University, do not deserve the name, but others, such as those set up by Microsoft and Schwab, are more serious. A growing number of corporate universities are awarding degrees in conjunction with traditional universities.

For-profit universities are only the most dramatic example of a more general trend: the changing balance of power between the state and the market. For much of the 20th century the state steadily tightened its grip on universities. Now the market is beginning to get its own back.

The old-fashioned public universities are becoming ever more promiscuous in their pursuit of income. In America, public university is fast becoming a figure of speech. At the University of Virginia, the share of the operating budget coming from the state declined from about 28% in 1985 to 8% in 2004. As one university president put it, his university has evolved from being a state university to being state-supported, then state-assisted, next state-located and now state-annoyed.

In other countries too, public universities are becoming more entrepreneurial. Increasingly they are starting to charge fees, usually in combination with student loans. They are also transforming themselves into competitive commercial operations when it comes to attracting fee-paying foreign students or winning contracts with business. At the same time, new non-profit private universities are springing up. These have long been common in America, Japan and South Korea, but used to be rare elsewhere. In Portugal, private universities and colleges have grown from almost nothing two decades ago to account for two-thirds of all higher-education institutions and 40% of all students. All in all, private funding has grown faster than public funding in seven of the eight OECD countries for which data are available.

Another eye-catching change is the rise of the internet as a way of delivering tuition. The internet has all sorts of advantages, from lowering costs to opening up markets. MIT has struck up an innovative alliance with two Singaporean students to take part virtually in MIT lectures. The Virtual University of Monterrey, Mexico, uses a combination of teleconferencing and the internet to reach more than 70,000 students all over Latin America.

But for all the new technology and the marketisation of higher education, it is striking how little has changed. Traditional universities are raising money not so that they can do radically new things but so they can continue to do the same old things. For-profit universities are undoubtedly doing an excellent job in filling market niches, particularly for technical education, but their position in the academic hierarchy remains humble.

The internet is producing equally modest results. However good it is for transmitting information or reinforcing learning, e-learning is no substitute for brick-and-mortar universities. The e-learning bubble of the late 1990s burst with shocking speed. Fathom, a joint venture established by Columbia and 13 other universities, libraries and museums, closed down after raising revenues of only $700,000 in two and a half years. Caliber, the Wharton School’s e-partner, filed for bankruptcy. Temple University abandoned Virtual Temple without offering a single course. NYU Online has also pulled the plug.

New technologies generally prompt heady predictions that they will revolutionise higher education. Thomas Edison forecast that motion pictures would replace campus lectures; others have made even grander claims for radio or television. David Noble, a historian, compares the internet craze with the fashion for correspondence schools that bubbled up in the early 20th century. By 1919, more than 70 American universities had launched correspondence courses, competing against some 300 private correspondence schools. But the bubble eventually burst, partly because of poor teaching and high drop-out rates but mainly because the human dimension was missing.

None of this is to say that the idea of the university is carved in gothic stone. It is indeed changing, but by evolution rather than revolution. And the most important recent development in the world of higher education has been the creation of a super-league of global universities that are now engaged in a battle for intellectual talent and academic prestige.

Summa Cum Avaritia

Nick Bromell

Harper’s Magazine, Feb. 2002

If you despaired when baseball became big business, or when corner bookstores and small publishers disappeared into the maw of media conglomerates, take hope. If you were angered when deregulation in the name of increased competition rewarded us instead with brownouts and robber barons, take cheer. The principle that public policy should encourage maximal profits no matter what the consequences for the public sphere has indeed yielded positive results. In at least one area of American life—higher education—the ascendancy of the profit motive is a godsend.

Before you know it, almost everything you dislike about colleges and universities will have disappeared. Bluebook exams, windbag professors, tedious classroom discussions, even classrooms themselves, all are headed for extinction. Higher education in the United States is finally becoming a big business in search of big profits. And as learning becomes a revenue stream, not a path toward enlightenment, customer satisfaction will finally come. Life is about to get much, much easier for every college student in America.

If you’re asking yourself why big business would want to go near the musty halls of academe, you’re probably unaware that higher education in this nation takes in revenues greater than $200 billion each year. That’s more than five times the revenue generated by the steel industry. Yet, incredible as it sounds, only a tiny trickle of this current of cash—just more than 2 percent—finds its way to for-profit schools. Meanwhile, as globalization creates an enormous worldwide demand for the passport to prosperity an American degree confers, this $200 billion revenue stream is likely to swell dramatically over the next decade or two. That is why business innovators such as Michael Milken have invested heavily in the future of for-profit higher education. That is why hundreds of for-profit firms are lobbying state and federal officials to privatize public higher education. Now we can hope that higher education will finally become a paying member of a nation whose business, after all, is business.

Perhaps this prospect worries you. Perhaps you wonder how we can turn a blind eye as this country’s longstanding commitment to disinterested learning is absorbed and digested by an insatiable free market. Perhaps you balk at the idea of simply giving away to corporations the enormous public investment we’ve made in our colleges and universities. Perhaps you’re fearful of what will happen to knowledge when it’s regarded as a commodity, or to freedom of inquiry when all professors are on the payroll of corporations like Disney and Microsoft.

If so, let me confess that I used to feel the same way. I’m a professor myself, after all, and a professor of English at that. I’m not Mr. Chips—I went to college in the 1960s, and I’m more interested in Toni Morrison than T.S. Eliot—but, like the professor I studied with thirty years ago, I believed for a long time that my job was to help students think for themselves. My particular calling, I imagined, was to help them speak their latent convictions, as Emerson would have put it, to help them fully express, and thus be, themselves.

Alas, this is why for years my perspective on the world of higher education was pathetically narrow compared with the sweeping views commanded by higher-education experts working for corporate-funded think tanks and foundations. From where I and my students toiled away, in our steadily deteriorating classrooms, it looked as though Americans had simply lost the resolve to support higher education. Year after year, it seemed, the tax relief conferred upon our wealthiest citizens was eviscerating the funds for my and many other state universities.

When I arrived here fifteen years ago, my department had more than seventy faculty members. Now, thanks to quiet downsizing, it has fewer than fifty. Students can’t get into the classes they need to take, we offer fewer and fewer electives, and classrooms are as crowded as subway platforms.

Although sentimentalists claim that such reforms have been a disaster, the truth is that the whole enterprise of students and professors meeting face-to-face is but a sad anachronism, better swept away. After all, Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, has announced that Classroom training is a nineteenth-century artifact—if not an artifact of medieval times. Michael M. Crow, the executive vice provost of Columbia University, has explained that We are expanding what it means to be a knowledge enterprise. We use knowledge as a form of venture capital. (Lie quiet, Professor Trilling.) Utah governor Mike Leavitt has told us that In the future, an institution of higher education will become a little like a local television station. Efficiency, profit, variety, and entertainment: who but a professor would be opposed to those blessings?

But if, like so many of my colleagues, you still have worries, let me offer an example of the old system’s inefficiency. This afternoon, a student came to visit me in my office. Patrick is a polite and likable young man who does his homework and contributes ably to class discussion. He is earnest, hardworking, mature. What I wanted to talk about, he says, settling into the chair opposite me, is the paper that’s due next Thursday. I’m not sure exactly what you’re looking for.

Patrick doesn’t know it, but this is the question I’m asked more frequently than any other. Nor can he know what it indicates—that he’s at a perilous crossroads, on the brink of stepping from one world into another. Throughout his schooling, he has learned that the right answer is the one the teacher is looking for. It has been a precious insight, almost infallible. In the system of higher education I used to believe in, my perverse task would have been to detach Patrick from this reliable strategy and orient him toward another goal: finding out what he himself thinks. I would have spent the hour’s conference—and perhaps several more conferences as well—trying to help him discover that he already has ideas of his own, and that these—not some regurgitation of his class notes—are the answer I’m looking for.

As a convert to higher-education reform, I don’t have to go through all that nonsense anymore. I’ve downloaded a single right answer on the website I’ve created for the course. I tell Patrick that all he has to do now is click the Right Answer icon, which will lead him to a concise summary of class discussion and lectures on the subject. I point out that if he needs more help he can always buy a term paper from EssayWorld or one of the other Internet companies that sells such products. Clicking an icon is something Patrick is very good at, so he’s visibly relieved when he gets up to go.

Innocent lad! If he only knew how close he’s come to tumbling into the dark waters of his own thoughts! But of course I denied myself the pleasure of telling him. We who work in the new higher learning have a rigorous code of propriety to uphold, one dedicated to preserving the radical innocence of our students—that is, our customers. The only satisfaction I allowed myself was to note on my desk calendar that I kept our appointment to just under three minutes. Now that’s efficiency.

Or so I used to imagine, anyway. For consider that my cinder-block office must be cleaned, that the light over my head needs electricity, that the building around me has to be heated in winter and maintained all year—even when my students have gone home for the summer. Consider the time I waste walking from my office to the rooms where I teach. Consider the secretary who makes my appointments and sorts mail into the faculty mailboxes. Consider the lawns outside, the trees dropping their leaves in the fall, the miles of asphalt paths cracking after each hard winter. Consider the students’ dorms, occupied for just twelve hours a day, barely eight months of the year.

Don’t you see it? The beauty of the quest for more efficiency is that it has no theoretical endpoint. We could devote our whole lives to it. As James Carlin, former head of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, has declared,

Colleges and universities, in general, are grossly inefficient and ineffective in terms of how they manage their enterprises. You’ve got underutilization of the physical plant—you’ve got tenure—which basically ties your hands on how you can manage your work force. You have irrelevant research. You’ve got extremely low teaching loads for tenured and untenured full-time faculty.

Just think of all the work to be done!

Thanks to Carlin, I’ve started to see waste almost everywhere I look: students standing around in the lobby (chatting about what?), classrooms designed for just twenty desks (the same course material could be taught to hundreds, even thousands), the much-vaunted seminar or discussion section (do those discussions ever lead to a conclusion?), professors doing irrelevant research (why should we read recovered works of African-American literature?). It’s about time we allowed multimillionaire corporate managers like Carlin to step in and take charge of things. Under their leadership, everyone would be a winner. Unchallenged by their professors, students would be more satisfied. Undistracted by needless research and unencumbered by antiquated sentiments about learning, we faculty would finally stop wasting prodigious quantities of time and money. And as its reward for helping us through this difficult process, the education business community would finally get what it obviously deserves: 98 percent of the pie, not 2.

Better Learning Through Technology

Today, if you know where to look, signs of improved efficiency through profit-seeking are visible at virtually every campus in the nation, public and private, prestigious and obscure. Much of the credit for this progress must go to the pioneering intellectuals who have devised a strategy to promote and implement corporate investment in higher education. Foremost among these is the Knight (formerly the Pew) Higher Education Roundtable. Since 1992, the Roundtable has persuaded more than 180 institutions to join its Collaborative, now known as the Knight Collaborative. Nearly all of these schools have conducted on-campus roundtable discussions, facilitated by members of the Knight Collaborative staff, with the aim of bringing themselves into the twenty-first century as part of what’s now called the knowledge industry.

The Roundtable’s seminal 1994 essay, To Dance with Change, begins by asserting the existence of a seemingly irresistible impulse on the part of policy makers and public agencies to rely on markets and market-like mechanisms to define the public good. The key work here is irresistible. It eases us away from a futile search for so-called options—such as churlishly refusing to define the public good in terms of market values, or quixotically making the case that higher education has its own values—and guides us gently onto the path of progress. Once we see clearly that higher education must submit to the irresistible nature of the profit principle, we can begin to take advantage of the benefits this trend will confer.

The first of these benefits is technology, crucial because it demands that we reconceive knowledge as information, and it is through the sluice of this clarification that the highly efficient forces of the market will be allowed to purge higher education of waste and sloth. No one needs professors to dispense mere information; machines can do the job as well or better. And once the sellers of computer hardware and software supply the means through which education is delivered, they will occupy the critical position of the middleman: no one will be able to give or to get an education without going through them.

Soon thereafter we will experience the same efficiencies of scale we’ve witnessed in the telecommunications industry, which has learned that it is much more profitable to own both the product being delivered and the means of delivering it (that’s what the AOL Time Warner and other mergers have been about). Once the purveyors of instructional technology control both the content of instruction (course syllabi, lectures, handouts) and student access to it (computer hardware and software, the Internet), mumbling professors with their mystique of knowledge will have no place in the new university. This is what it means to dance with change.

Just eight years later, signs of success abound. University administrators now accept and second Robert Reich’s assertion that the traditional classroom tends not to be tailored to the needs of a particular individual, whereas, [w]ith e-learning, you can go at your own pace and do training when you need it and when it’s convenient for you. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that a prepackaged distance-learning course that gives you a limited field of options to click is more tailored to your needs than a trained teacher standing in the room with you, a person who can misread your expression and ineptly judge whether he or she is effectively communicating? Such increased instructional effectiveness explains why, by 1998, 48 percent of American colleges and universities offered distance-learning courses; by 2000, that number had climbed to 84 percent.

I understand, of course, why many Americans are still reluctant to think of education as an industry. The quaint, precapitalist myth that a culture’s values can be located somewhere apart from its profits has astounding tenacity. Reformers understand this, too, which is why they tend to avoid using words like profit in connection with the introduction of technology. At my own university, for example, our former chancellor, David Scott, wisely asserts that the underlying motive of distance learning is not profit or even efficiency but democracy and accessibility. On the home page of the university’s distance-learning business, he tells us that

The institution of our virtual campus is another step toward the ultimate goal of bringing education to everyone, everywhere, anytime. The innovative technology available today allows the University of Massachusetts Amherst to extend its reach far beyond the boundaries of the campus. Access to the excellence of the University is now within reach of all those who have been unable to become part of our residential community.

What will make this possible is a happy pairing of UMassOnline with a for-profit company called eCollege, whose own home page promises that it can create and deliver a complete online campus, including training of faculty and administration, typically in 60 business days. Why spend decades or more building an actual university when we can get a virtual equivalent in two months? Why limit ourselves to revenue gained through tuition at a campus when we can charge fees to everyone, everywhere, anytime?

Not surprisingly, the nation’s most elite institutions are in the vanguard of the movement to reform higher education. The University of Chicago has entered into an agreement with UNext.com (controlled by Michael Milken) whereby the school allows the company to use its name in marketing jointly conceived online courses and, in return, receives royalties. The agreement was doubtless facilitated by the fact that Andrew Rosenfield, the head of UNext, sits on the university’s Board of Trustees. And it probably helped that several prominent members of the university community had invested in UNext.

But you don’t need to be a University of Chicago Nobel Prize-winning economist to perceive that there’s a lot of money to be made here, and some reformers hope that the revenues and savings generated by distance learning will eventually free public universities from their dependence on public funding. According to an article published in Ohio State University’s student newspaper, David Brennan, the chairman of the Ohio State Board of Trustees, believes that one million students added through distance learning could give Ohio State University a $3 billion budget and would eliminate asking the state for money and charging higher tuition.

Nor has Wall Street been blind to the promising profitability of a more efficient university. While technology stocks in general took a dive in the first quarter of 2001, companies specializing in education were still doing well. Stock in many education companies is hovering near 52-week highs, reported Rachel Konrad on CNET News.com in March.

Although investors dismissed the for-profit education industry in the mid-1990s as dull and risk-averse, it has roared back into favor and is enjoying the spotlight as a reliable, recession-proof haven for those who have grown weary of technology stocks’ hair-raising volatility.

Obstacles To The New University

For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans quite willingly believed that higher education was not about efficiency. They were persuaded of quite the opposite: that the most fundamental value of higher education is the perspective a student gains by stepping outside the play of market forces and inhabiting, if only for four short years, what former Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti called a free and ordered space. Not a cloister or an ivory tower, to be sure, since society itself was always one of the principle concerns of those who congregated there, but a place where a certain kind of thinking and inquiry could be nurtured. The goal was to learn to think outside the box, as we might say today, whether one’s field of inquiry was physics, business administration, history, or nursing.

It is, of course, perfectly clear to the mind of the profit-seeking managerial re-engineer that nothing is more inefficient than this antiquated conception of higher learning. It amounts to shutting down the assembly line and saying, Let’s think about what’s going on here. And yet some people persist in the belief that the creation of better assembly lines may depend, in the long run, upon minds that have learned to think for themselves. This is why the efficiencies promised by higher-education reform will first require a thorough re-engineering of the typical college student.

In his or her traditional manifestation, the student is an atavism, a throwback. He or she comes to the university in the spirit of humility, hoping to learn from a faculty that has something special to offer—not just information but knowledge, perhaps even wisdom. For decades the basic mechanism enforcing this set of values was ingeniously simple: grading. The professor’s power to grade students was the means by which a crucial message could be sent: You still do not know what you need to learn. Faced with a B—or a C or a D at the bottom of an exam or paper, the student always had a choice: continue without fundamentally changing his habits as a learner, or seek to understand why his work was still unsatisfactory and strive to grasp what that eccentric professor was trying to get across.

Now two forces have worked in tandem to dismantle that system: Back in the 1970s, professors learned that they could teach more efficiently by using the carrot rather than the stick. At the same time, the administrators of many colleges and universities began to realize that good grades made for happy students—and generous alums. When I attended Amherst College in the 1960s, its most famous teacher was known to scrawl huge red lines down the page of a student’s paper and write NO! in the margin. Today, young Amherst faculty coming up for tenure grade more charitably, knowing that the administration will ask every student they ever taught for his or her opinion. Consequently, Amherst students are much better than in my day: more than three quarters of them now graduate with honors.

Today, grades at most colleges and universities have been similarly adjusted, so that only the clearest messages are sent. Today, we mete out mainly As and Bs, telling students either that they’re brilliant or that they’re very good. This is quite a step forward: In 1969, 7 percent of students nationwide received grades of A—or higher. By 1993, this proportion had risen to 26 percent. Grades of C or below moved from 25 percent in 1969 to 9 percent in 1993.

Because they grasp so well the blessings of tuition and alumni goodwill, elite schools like those of the Ivy League have been especially successful in reforming their grading standards. At Princeton the median grade point average for the class of 1973 was 3.078. The median GPA for the class of 1997 was 3.422. At Dartmouth, the average GPA rose from 3.06 to 3.25 between 1977 and 1994, with 47 percent of current grades now registering as A or A-.

It’s hardly surprising that the school with the largest endowment shows the most improvement. At Harvard, 49 percent of the undergraduate grades given during the 2000-01 year were A and A-, more than double the figure for 1966. The percentage of C+ grades and below has fallen from 28 percent in 1966-67 to 6 percent in 2000-01. Harvard now graduates fully 91 percent of its seniors with honors.

The beauty of grade inflation is that it turns disgruntled students and anxious parents into happy customers. In the old medieval system, low grades were used to punish students; tough grading fostered a spirit of humility to which all but the cockiest goof-offs had to defer. Now our campuses are democratized and our youth are empowered: they can now expect to get something in return for their parents’ money. But the deeper virtue of grade inflation is that it allows all schools to become automatically more efficient. Better students get better grades, do they not? And does it not then follow that higher grades mean the institution is attracting and producing better students? Does a professor who writes A in his grade book cost more than one who writes B-? Of course not. Thus do higher grades satisfy the magic formula of efficiency: increased output without a corresponding increase in input.

Now that I’ve come to understand what the Knight Higher Education Collaborative explains about higher education, it’s embarrassingly obvious that I and my colleagues were previously being lazy, avoiding the truth when it was staring us in the face. How could we not have known that we were serving a clientele? Without the hard data of the sort best supplied (and best graded) by multiple-choice tests, how could we have been sure that we were accomplishing anything at all? All the cant about teaching people to think for themselves just concealed from our students, our administrators, and ourselves the fact that we were no longer really relevant.

Enemies Of The New University

So it is with a regret bordering on shame that I report to you that most of my colleagues still believe in the old system. They continue to read student essays with care and spend hours grading and commenting on them. They continue to insist on treating each student as an individual, with an individual’s learning style. And they continue to regard higher education as a place apart, exempt from the inexorable laws of the market. Protected by what James Carlin so aptly calls the absolute scam of tenure, they peer over the crenellated walls of the ivory tower and refuse to join the dance. Carlin knows quite well that these people need to be shocked, not coaxed, out of their complacency. Now there’s going to be a revolution in higher education, he tells them. Whether you like it or not, it’s going to be broken apart and put back together differently. It won’t be the same. Why should it be? Why should everything change except for higher education?

Luckily for the next generation or two of American college students, higher education is indeed being broken apart, and professors as we have known them are on the way out. Reformers like Carlin have learned the hard way that getting rid of tenured professors is difficult, no matter how inefficient they might be, but they have also figured out a brilliant way around tenure: we simply stop hiring tenure-track faculty and instead fill vacant positions with adjunct and part-time faculty working on contract. These folks don’t talk back to the boss!

Part-timers now make up 43 percent of instructors nationwide, compared with 22 percent in 1970. The proportion of full-time professors working on non-tenure-track contracts climbed from 19 percent in 1975 to 28 percent in 1998. And truly innovative universities have found ways to cut the number of full-time tenured faculty even further. A friend tells me that her community college has upped the average teaching load to five courses per semester and started describing its faculty as classroom managers who will show videotapes of professors from more prestigious schools (e.g., the University of Chicago, via Milken’s UNext) instead of teaching themselves. The online division of the University of Phoenix has no full-time professors on its payroll and relies instead on 3,400 practitioner faculty, who can be dismissed with ease and who receive no benefits. Students there are reportedly quite satisfied.

How, you might be asking, can a computer program or a video tape of a famous professor’s lectures actually teach students skills—how to articulate problems in their own terms, how to devise their own solutions, how to imagine their way outside the box of orthodox teaching? The answer is simple: They won’t. They won’t need to. Education reformers have thankfully deemed such skills irrelevant. The whole standards movement, after all, is about restricting learning to what is actually useful: the memorization of information, the streamlining of knowledge to what can be evaluated by a standardized test. By curtailing the excessive autonomy of K-12 teachers and requiring them to teach to the tests, we are preparing future college students for a brand of higher education designed and administered by the savviest segment of our society: for-profit corporations. Soon, the thousands of dollars you pay for tuition will go straight to the people who run these companies, and not a penny will be wasted on teachers and classrooms.

Why not take the advice offered in a recent online article, title Corporation Learning: A Paradigm for Learning in the 21st Century, and turn the whole affair over to businessmen? They’re the ones with the expertise in job training, which is what reformed higher education is all about. Students who are really customers deserve teachers who are really businessmen.

When I was a kid, I used to dream that scientists would invent a knowledge pill. I’d take one every night before going to bed, and the next morning I’d run outside to play with my friends instead of trudging off to school. Meanwhile, painlessly and miraculously, I’d be learning everything I’d need