Aleph

 

The Sustainable University: Identity, Infrastructure, and the Academy

 

La universidad sustentable: identidad, infraestructura y la academia

 

David M. Callejo Pérez

 

Saginaw V. State University, Michigan

 

Recibido: 27/02/2012
Aceptado: 20/04/2012

 

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to create comparisons between two types of institutions (prestige seeking and prestigious). The organization of this paper is created around two broad themes: (1) exploring the realities of a research university, and (2) exploring exceptionalism in institutions that are already prestigious. The paper asks the reader to imagine the possibility of research and outreach by universities through Thomas Stewart's (2001) tripartite conceptualization of intellectual capital. Stewart defines intellectual capital as being comprised of (1) human capital, (2) structural capital, and (3) customer capital. Given the multiple contexts discussed in this paper, I conclude that universities need to change essential organizational behaviors in several important ways: (1) transition to evidence-based and data-driven approaches to decision making; (2) increase the transparency with which they serve the needs of the public; and (3) work more intimately with one another in planning strategically for and addressing the state's public-education needs.

Keywords: Higher education, research and teaching, faculty, university outreach, organizational theory.

 

Resumen

Este artículo intenta crear comparaciones entre dos tipos de universidades (las que tienen prestigio y las que buscan el prestigio). La organización de este artículo esta basado en la relación de dos temas: (1) exploración de las realidades de una universidad prestigiosa, y (2) exploración de la excepcionalidad de universidades prestigiosas. El artículo le pide al lector que imagine la posibilidad de investigación y extensión en las universidades a través de la conceptualización tripartita del capital intelectual (Thomas Stewart, 2001). Stewart define el capital intelectual como (1) capital humano, (2) capital estructural, y (3) capital social/económico. Teniendo en cuenta los múltiples contextos analizados en este artículo, concluyo que las universidades necesitan cambiar los comportamientos esenciales de su organización en varios aspectos importantes: (1) la transición a decisiones basadas en la evidencia y la investigación/evaluación, (2)aumentar la transparencia de cómo se atienden las necesidades de la sociedad, y (3) trabajar más estrechamente entre las universidades para planear estratégicamente cómo enfrentar las necesidades de la educación pública.

Palabras clave: Educación superior, investigación y docencia, profesores universitaritos, extensión universitaria, teoría organizacional.

 

Former Teachers College, Columbia University President Arthur Levine states, <<On most of our campuses this is a very scary moment. For us as a group, it's a time at which the answers are uncertain, but no generation will have the opportunity we have to put our mark on the look of education in the future>> (Johnston, 2000). However, the key component is that the competition for making the difference is being driven from outside rather than from inside the university. In Tenured Radicals (1990), Roger Kimball revisits his argument that yesterday's radical is today's tenured professor or academic dean. According to the 2010-2011 AAUP Faculty Salary Survey, reported on The Chronicle of Higher Education website (chronicle.com/stats/aaup/) on April 13, 2011, the most prestigious institutions, specifically AAU schools, frequently ranked near the top in most higher-education rankings, pay average salaries that are commonly 20 percent higher than those at prestige-seeking institutions. The competitive balance is not equal; in fact, it resembles the economic growth affecting the U.S. in general where the income gap has grown over the last 20 years.

Technical and vocational programs are usually more expensive than academic programs, and small institutions with a broad range of programs are more expensive than larger ones with fewer curricular offerings. Further, costs are impacted by expectations for faculty work, in particular with research as a normal part of the workload. In a sense, the public relies heavily on what <<the university's numbers show>> for a particular academic year, and it leads to a narrow interpretation of what a university should be. For example, the number of course sections taught, class enrollment, grants, and salary are a few of the measurements that can be easily reported.

Prestigious institutions tend to fund the liberal arts and focus on them not because they generate millions in external funding, but because they recognize that at the core of scientific knowledge is the ability to disseminate it, understand its ethical and social impact, and build consensus among the public for change. In other words, scientists alone will not solve science matters and the issues facing our world; they need to better communicate the importance of science and the impact of scientific research on society. For example, the public might not understand the significance of using federal dollars to support research to fund genetic research or chaos theory. Concurrently, when it comes to hot-button issues such as climate and economic dependency, scientists understand the causes—complex as they are—but are not as equipped to address the impact on people, society, or the globe as colleagues in the humanities and social sciences are. Nor can scientists disseminate the information or forward the development of new technology, as journalists and business faculty can.

Calls for change undergird this complex situation within which universities function. First, many are calling for a vocational focus in higher education. At the same time there is a new call for reduction of student-loan debt. Data recently released by the U.S. Department of Education confirmed what many people feared: more and more students are defaulting on their student loans. The student-loan default rate rose from 7 percent in 2008 to 8.8 percent in 2009. Second, many are calling for more impetus to ensure that college graduates can gain employment. A recent paper from the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (Martin & Gillen, 2011) argues that financial aid contributes to inflation in higher education: <<Colleges and universities charge what the market will bear>>. The Center describes higher-education funding as an <<arms race>> in which schools that fail to capture financial-aid dollars likely will suffer diminished stature and enrollments.

 

Contextualizing the University and Faculty

This paper is an attempt to create comparisons between two types of institutions (prestige seeking and prestigious) to introduce a conversation among key stakeholders. I believe that the changes that lie at the center of university reform and that are driven by policy decisions agitate fear in professors, departments, and universities, and create unfair competitive fields. The issues that emerged from the current political and economic realities have been, in many cases, created by our own inability to understand the social banality of higher education.

Blame should not be shifted from the corporate complex and its inroads into higher education or even the professoriate itself, which has as much responsibility for its own loss of influence. Rather, I seek to examine, from a multitude of experiences, the changing nature of the profession in higher education that is driven by the banality of participants in higher education— from the graduate student to the university president. It is easy to point the finger at universities and their administrators who make deals for external funding or at politicians who seek the approval of the public by controlling universities; but they were not the ones who founded and fostered alternative education to replace the basic tenets of the professions, nor were they the ones who deprofessionalized themselves in attempts to seek financial comforts (Kerr, 2001) through research and consulting.

In a 2005 Educational Researcher article, Hostetler discusses the irony of this research in higher education. He writes that it focuses on production and methodology over the <<good>>. ForHostetler, <<good research is a matter not only of sound procedures but also of beneficial aims and results>> (pp.16-17). A second important criticism of higher education is the missing relationship between research and policy. In his conservative critique of the university, Impostors in the Temple, Martin Anderson (1992/1996) attacks scholars' <<dirty secret>> that <<much of what they write and hold up...as the highest form of expression of what they do is inconsequential and trifling>> (p. 85). Anderson continues to discuss how as an economic advisor to the president of the United States, <<refereed articles>>—never determined policy. Many academic researchers wrongly assume their research changes policy. In reality, politicians, critics, and media actually define the public's notion of education more than the university does. U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) provides one such example. Robert J. Morse (2007), director of Data Research at USNWR, writes, <<Rankings have filled a large void caused by greatly reduced high school college counseling resources at public schools>>. Parents and students are more and more left to fend for themselves to find out about colleges and the admission process, and in many cases they have turned to USNWR as a trusted source of advice and planning.

Illich (1971), Apple (1996), and Giroux (1988) each critiqued the changing nature of education as a direct assault on the agency provided by a professional education. Although they charge outside forces, Illich especially charged educators as tools of that system that wanted to deprofessionalize the professor. If degrees were awarded at a higher rate, then the market economy could reduce the value of a degreed individual. Sadly, this strategy was couched in the notion of accessibility for formerly excluded persons (women, minorities, etc.). Coupled with controlling of credentialing and ultimately determining the university curriculum (written and hidden), the academic professional increasingly ceded the power to control the content of what is taught and often how it is taught. The foci were placed on passing the state/ national exam or acquiring the <<correct courses on a transcript>>. Ironically, that force continues to permeate all credentialing preparatory programs across academic disciplines with the faculty themselves as willing participants.

Apple (1993) reiterates the looming presence of economic utility as a measurement of our intellectual worth by exposing how capitalism has now become the <<metric>> that is used to evaluate one's worth. He further states that anyone who falls short of the production of knowledge with economic value is subject to unpardonable <<moral condemnation>> for an inability to <<contribute to the failure of profit>> (Apple 1993, p. 5). McLaren (2007) portrays the school as a perpetuator of dominant class interests. Even as students are empowered to negotiate the alleys of social justice, they are also availed to an oppressive element, which craves <<obedience>> and <<docility>> (194). To this end, the schools' role is to afford students the <<requisite>> knowledge to fit in the wheels of the social division of labor. Giroux (1988) reiterates the schools' role in strengthening class dominance when he maintains that the disparity between the underprivileged and the middle and upper classes in terms of academic mobility goes beyond economic boundaries. The school, in concert with society, has created a limiting pedagogy that silences and disem-powers the underprivileged.

 

The context of Research and Selling Out for Publication/Survival

Recently, Lisa M. Shulman, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Miami, turned to a company to help her conduct research. She allowed the company to ghostwrite an article and then had it published it in a medical journal. The problem was that a pharmaceutical company employed the article ghostwriter. Concurrently, many of us have sat on dissertation committees where a student has had an editor review and help write the literature review. Other students have also hired statisticians to run their statistics and verify the results. Yet we still award these students doctorates for their work (or their ability to hire persons for their work). Historically, faculty (especially in the sciences and to a lesser degree in education) have mined their students' work for publications and research to further their careers. It's not uncommon for a professor to demand second or even first billing (if they are ballsy) on a student's dissertation. We have heard of cases where faculty refused to sign off on a study until the student added their names to the publication. It is doubly ironic that we celebrate these practices by rewarding the perpetrators and that it has become common practice toward building a faculty's resume and subsequent success. Dr. Schulman, for example, is seen as a victim in the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education; whereas we see her as a criminal who knowingly broke the most sacred of all academic rules: integrity.

Elliot Eisner (1990) emphasizes that learning exists in the hidden spaces of body and public conversations, and he questions quantified and measured learning feted by high-stakes performance and management leading to certification (Illich, 1971). In higher education, unlike in Eisner's example, the learning that occurs in hidden spaces is negative in that it seeks to teach how to use fraud to rise to a perceived level of success. Take the story of the humanities Ph.D. student, who after seven years of writing a dissertation with over 1,400 pages, struggles over the looming deadline for eviction from the doctoral program. Like Hesse's Goethe, the student is approached by the devil, who makes an offer—the dissertation will be finished and the student will pass his defense. The student will also win an award and the dissertation will be the basis of earth-shattering literature. And because the student has suffered so much, the devil throws in a Pulitzer— but warns that there is a catch. The devil states that for this to happen, the student must relinquish his soul as well as that of his partner and child. Puzzled at this remark, the humanities Ph.D. student asks: <<So, what's the catch?>>

Perhaps this story isn't as much of a fantasy as it may seem at first. Doctoral program attrition is as high as 40 to 50 percent, as reported in The Path Forward, a joint project of the Council of Graduate Schools and the Educational Testing Service (Wendler et. al., 2010). Attrition is highest in the humanities: 12 percent of doctoral candidates complete their degrees within five years, and 49 percent within 10 years.

Completion rates are higher in math and physical sciences (55 percent of candidates complete their studies within 10 years), social sciences (56 percent), life sciences (63 percent) and engineering (64 percent). We have been acculturated into this world where plagiarism, cheating, and blind allegiance is expected and celebrated because it increases chances for completion and success. We also have accepted that higher education, like world cycling, is wrought with cheaters who are willing to do anything to win. George Counts (1932) warned that we should protect the spirituality that legitimizes the learning experience as organic and not as a set of rituals stimulated by the hegemonic state of fear—political in the case of the university, and philosophical in the case of the faculty. In short, by disregarding our identity, we relinquish our humanity.

Deconstructing and reinterpreting the narrow historical narrative on higher education allows us to explore its boundaries. C. Vann Woodward (1993) writes, <<every self-conscious group of any size fabricates myths about its past: about its origins, its mission, its righteousness, its benevolence, its general superiority>> (p. 12). He goes on to argue that although groups believe themselves to be unique, they are not.

University faculty have forsaken teaching in the search for research money. This research money, controlled by funding agencies whose belief in what counts as education grows narrower each day, provides moneys not for liberating research but for training grants. According to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act report, 85 percent of National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health research grants go to less than 100 institutions. Further, the Association of American University (AAU) schools control about 70 percent of all doctorates at research universities and 65 percent of all federal funding for research. <<The median additional debt [the debt that graduatestudents pile onto the debt that they acquired as undergraduates] is $25,000 for a Master's degree, $52,000 for a doctoral degree and $79,836 for a professional degree. A quarter of graduate and professional students borrow more than $42,898 for a Master's degree, more than $75,712 for a doctoral degree and more than $118,500 for a professional degree>> (www.finaid.org/loans).

In universities, as costs soar, there are few controlled expenses. Thus, faculty becomes the one group where reduction of expenses can be regulated. There are fewer and fewer faculty jobs in higher education, not because there are too few universities, but because the number of available Ph.D.s vastly exceeds available jobs. There are too many Ph.D.s produced annually (see NSF data presented earlier) by programs—even with the ludicrous creation of the doctorate as the entry degree for management at the university or other jobs that have little to do with traditional research and teaching. Higher education asks that individuals in charge of admissions, enrollment, registrations, student services, dorms, etc., have doctorates with no reason and/or research that demonstrates that a doctorate creates greater aptitude to run, for example, a university food service.

As Apple (1996) writes, colleges profit from the overproduction of well-credentialed people frantic to find a teaching position who are also willing to be paid very little money, particularly given the reality that outside academe fewer and fewer jobs require a doctorate. The one major driving force apart from academe was K-12 education, but due to their own budget cuts and critiques of colleges of education, many school districts have reduced post-doctoral opportunities. In reality, most individuals with doctorates now work in part-time positions with no benefits or job security.

The 2009 State of the Faculty Report from the American Association of University Professors describes the situation:

In all, graduate student employees and faculty members serving in contingent appointments now make up more than 75 percent of the total instructional staff. The most rapid growth has been among part-time faculty members, whose numbers swelled by more than 280 percent between 1975 and 2009. Between 2007 and 2009, the numbers of full-time non-tenure-track faculty members and part-time faculty members each grew at least 6 percent. During the same period, tenured positions grew by only 2.4 percent and tenure-track appointments increased by a minuscule 0.3 percent. These increases in the number of faculty appointments have taken place against the background of an overall 12 percent increase in higher education enrollment in just those two years (AAUP, 2011).

Sadly, these jobs continue to be fought for by an increasing number of persons with doctoral degrees. As the 2010 National Science Foundation report on the doctorate showed, 49,562 people earned doctorates in the United States in 2009. Most of the increase over the previous decade was in sciences and engineering—specifically in applied fields, followed by education (augmented by the growth of for-profit schools like Phoenix and small undergraduate schools like Indiana Wesleyan or Barry University [Miami], which award Ed.D.). The report also showed that almost 40 percent of graduates in the social sciences and humanities failed to find permanent employment.

The Ph.D. has been cheapened by its commonness. While students in traditional Ph.D. programs at research universities now take on average about 10 years to finish their degrees, they are also part of the teaching force (75 percent of teaching is done by adjuncts, graduate students, and contractual faculty) of the university that grants their degree. Still others flood the marketplace with swiftly completed online and low-quality but accredited Ph.D.s. While these degrees will not get the individual a faculty position or respect within the academy, they nevertheless flood the market and remove opportunities for those with traditional Ph.D.s, for example, thousands of federal employees have paid millions for fake degrees that resulted in promotion (Lee, 2004). Others who already have positions use these institutions to provide mobility at the expense of a more qualified (per degree) individual who does not enter the job market at the entry level. In a sense, it is a win-win for the employer who can keep costs down by promoting internal candidates who cost less money.

Concurrently, we have devalued the doctoral degree by awarding it in all kinds of fields such as packaging, hotel management, physical therapy, leisure studies, and higher education. These fields are not only applied and have little to no room for research or theory, but they also ultimately devalue the role of the degree as well as the faculty and ultimately the professions. Then, a cycle is created: the profitable system requires more and more students, which leads to the lowering of standards for admission, coursework, research, and graduation. Instead of a traditional master's degree that required two years of increasingly more difficult coursework, a comprehensive exam, and a thesis, students can get their initial graduate degrees that form the basis for entry into doctoral programs with a C+ (2.5 GPA) and an undergraduate degree.

 

Possibilities for change

The organization of this section is created around two broad themes: (1) exploring the realities of a research university, and (2) exploring exceptionalism within higher education of research institutions. In each, we ask the reader to imagine the possibility of research and outreach by prestigious institutions. To re/ imagine possibilities in this paper, I turn to Thomas Stewart's (2001) tripartite conceptualization of intellectual capital. Stewart defines intellectual capital as comprised of (1) human capital, (2) structural capital, and (3) customer capital.

Arum and Roska's (2011; 2011a) recent work has forced higher education to look toward critical thinking as the crucial outcome of college, contradicting decades of research that sees it as just one part of the higher-education experience. The culture that led to the rebirth of the current modern university (Kerr, 2001) has journeyed through a short historical era (beginning in the 1970s) where technology created countless opportunities, leveling the once-wide gap between the elite and the proletariat. Yet a great divide still exists. A metaphor for this divide among universities is paralleled by the scholarly rivalry that occurred in the ancient Greek city. Here we take a look at the academe of Plato where he and Xenophon launched a relentless attack on Protagoras and other sophists for belittling knowledge. Kerr (2001) concurs that the Sophists had an <<evil aura>> that is associated with their personalities even to this day. As they taught rhetoric and logic, the sophists were not overly passionate about imparting knowledge for knowledge's sake; rather they had steep economic aspirations. Plato's academe, on the other hand, abhorred any interest in amassing wealth and rather delved deep into issues like truth while questioning the very essence of the human condition.

The rivalry between Plato and the Sophists is similar to our situation today; clearly, philosophies of education continually evolve until they finally meet market demands. The ambivalence that characterizes American higher education is glaring; the university's role in the market-centered economy is to feed the furnace of industry with the <<work hands>> as it leads the patronage of myopic curricula founded on a culture of essentialist needs. What we hope to do is to decipher what factors define the intellectual, structural, and human capital at the heart of prestige in higher education.

What percentages of graduates pursuing a liberal-arts degree have job prospects as opposed to those in the social sciences, business, and the sciences? The contention is that society is suffering from an inertia born out of a helpless marriage to economic utility. Universities' reliance on the capitalist rungs has not only tainted the curriculum, but it has also re-oriented students to accept a new kind of reward: <<economic utility>>. Thus, kids are told to study not for knowledge's sake, but to get <<well-paying jobs>> in the future(Postman,1995, p. 27).

Lamdin (1999) writes that education <<must be relevant: it must have implications for the four-fifths of a person's life that is spent outside of formal schooling; it must make clear the connection between history and tomorrow's headlines, between economic theory and the debate in Congress over tax credits, between literature and life and death>> (p. 71).

Dewey (1916/1944) further contends that the purpose of any education is to juncture the continuation of life. As humans, he contends, the sociocultural underpinnings that define the nature and character of our societal beliefs and norms are transmitted to the young through a calculated didactic simulation of the workings of the democratic society (p. 2). These simulations are a far cry from rote learning as they grant the immature <<ability>> to negotiate the pathways of the past and present experiences (pp. 76, 77).

Freire (1970) and Giroux's (1988) idea of critical vernaculars as an act of freedom as opposed to an act of domination humanizes the <<immature>> (Dewey, 1916/1944) by awakening them to the fact that there is an inalienable connection between consciousness and the world, or vice versa. Further, Postman (1995) argues that American education in general is the pivot on which nationalism and patriotism revolves (p. 14). He also asserts that schools help us re-invent ourselves by allowing us to <<.. .exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future...>> (p. 7). Schools, it turns out, help us define our identity through the staging of intellectual conversations aimed at imbuing the qualities of critical thinking in the youth. Lamdin (1999) asserts <<students should be encouraged to engage in introspection to discover their real as opposed to socially assumed objectives, their personal affinities, intellectual biases, cognitive strengths and weaknesses>> (p. 75).

In light of these images of what education should be, Postman (1995) paints a somewhat cynical picture of what education has become. In a metaphorical rendition of the market-centered economy as a god and education as a worshipper heading to the sacrifice, Postman delineates our helpless marriage to an industrial model of education.

 

Access to Higher Education

The industrial model of public schooling found its way onto college campuses in the United States, particularly after the GI Bill of the Servicemen's Rehabilitation Act after World War II afforded returning veterans—regardless of gender or race—an opportunity to experience higher education (Zemsky, Wegner, & Massy, 2005). The burgeoning numbers on university campuses somewhat coincided with a redefinition of the role of the university in society. University faculty in the hard sciences also began what became a long-standing partnership in federal research endeavors that was the genesis of the chasm between prestigious universities and prestige-seeking schools. As the numbers on university campuses exploded, so did the different tasks and roles of the faculty. The faculty's service component, especially in the hard sciences, was advanced by the 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier written by Vannevar Bush. Bush, who reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had convinced the Executive Office to invest generously in scientific research. The crux of this research recommended that the foundation of the scientific complex should be the American Research University, partly because of the way they had proven themselves during the war and more importantly because of their efficacy to meet the scientific needs of the nation. This new partnership provided mixed blessings for the research university. Zemsky et.al. (2005) posit that this new responsibility was met with <<controversy, celebration and scrutiny...>> (p. 3).

The 1960s marked another epoch in the life of the university as it redefined the mission, curriculum, and the disposition of the university. Kaplan (1983) contends that the 1960s were characterized by an <<extraordinary openness>> (p. 8). The period saw the growth of federal student aid and a proliferation of community colleges, which in turn triggered <<diversity and innovation>> (p. 8). More importantly, it redefined the university curriculum structure as electives, new courses, and individualization took the place of the essentialist rigidity that previously characterized it.

Hall and Kelves (1983) consider that the 1960s and the events that followed World War II created a diverse body politic in the United States. This diversity permeated the traditional halls within higher education, particularly with major changes in undergraduate studies, as groups holding dissenting views (namely, feminists and the black power movement) wrestled for recognition in the university and its curriculum and pedagogy. They write that the period saw further involvement of university faculty in research—at the expense of teaching—and a relentless pressure for departments to mirror the economic, sociopolitical, and cultural bedrock of the business world, leading to iconic changes such as increased doctoral students and part-time faculty teaching—a delineation of the labor force that resembled the private sector more than academia.

Pressure from the federal government as a result of federal grants and discreet preferences expressed by industry—always tied to deliverables such as patents and research and development—watered down the quality of undergraduate education (Hall & Kelves, 1983). A recent report from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) (2007) agreed with Hall and Kelves that undergraduate education lost much of its intellectual commitment at the expense of a pedagogy that thrived on <<vocational preparation>> (Hall & Kelves, 1983, 19; AACU, 2007).

The modern American university has indeed undergone a radical transformation: leveling of the color and gender barriers in the 1960s (Wilshire, 1990), involving more women and particularly older students on college campuses in the 1980s, and introducing credit-based programs that allow for flexibility in subject choice and schedule as well as duration of degree. Each of these has changed higher education over time—especially when enhanced by the growth of online/distance education. However, even more dramatic is the birth of grants as line-item funding, faculty specialization in subject areas, and accreditation procedures. Each of these demands has further corrupted the meaning of the university's mission—the implications of which are seen in the first section of this paper that describes prestige-seeking universities. Kerr (2001) argues that over time, colleges and universities have subtly discounted the undergraduate teaching process (p. 49) at the expense of their entire enterprise. He further quotes a Brookings study that sees federal research undertakings and the phenomenon of the bureaucratic, compliance, and financial culture that has risen and labeled itself as an outcrop of prestige. Kerr sees this as the <<long-standing depreciation of undergraduate education at large universities* (p. 49). Hall and Kelves (1983) reiterate the devastation caused by the emergence of the federal grants and their contemporaneous research obligations for faculty:

As a result of this cloning, the undergraduate years began to lose their distinctiveness as a time to develop an understanding of self and community and world and the intellectual abilities to use that perspective for personal and social purposes. Consequently more and more undergraduate study was transformed into a vocational preparation to enter graduate school (p. 19)

Perhaps the answer to the university's oscillating mission lies in what Dunne (1999) describes as the emergence of a new economic order. This new economic essentialism determines what sort of skills are going to be useful for the productions of knowledge, which is then labeled <<economic worth>> and ultimately provides the curricular path that undergraduate education must take. Barnett (1994) obviates that <<academic competence>> is no longer about being learned, but rather about having <<operational competence* in a vocational world. Muscatine (1983) further suggests that the nature of the current curriculum makes rote learning the norm rather than teaching critical thinking, a crucial skill for college graduates (Arum & Roska, 2011; 2011a; Bok, 2006). Students are schooled into a passiveness that shies away from critical thinking or questioning, and are thereby given way to the acceptance of a <<superficial consumerism>> that cripples the student from making informed decisions (Muscatine 1983, p. 105). These conditions, which now permeate undergraduate education, build upon the philosophy of No Child Left Behind, which emphasizes testing and focuses on preparing students for work in the labor market. This state of mental lethargy provides a generative ground for <<our form of government and essential to our conduct of business>> (Muscatine, 1983, p. 105).

Zemsky et al. (2005) argue that colleges and universities should be mission centered and only remotely concerned about an amassment of wealth. Their goal, Zemsky writes, should be maintaining the sanctity of intellectual thought and imparting landscapes of knowledge to the citizenry. However, colleges and universities face the daunting power of the market, partly due to the shortage of public funds that makes them more dependent on private dollars for operational budgets. Thus the university has entrapped itself with what he labels the three C's of the market affliction: (1) Competition, competing for students, faculty, and athletes; (2) Commodification, becoming a degree mill/ certification producer; and (3) Commercialism, intensive marketing of research to generate income and recoup losses generated by expanding administrative costs related to both salaries and expansion. He makes a provocative argument, writing that a

college education has become a key to personal economic success. Although colleges and universities have changed little, the import attached to their basic products has undergone a radical transformation. Like merit badges sewn on a sash of green, a progression of degrees—from associate to bachelor to master and doctorate—have become signals of achievement and hence access to the pathways of personal success (p. 162).

The surging impact that the market is having on higher education is not unique. As Postman (1995) writes, measuring the worth of any educational experiences using the <<metric>> of economic utility erodes the efficacy of the educational experience. Freire (1970) also sees such formal education as limiting and intellectually abrasive. Freire's description of the arrested intellectual (1970) is augmented by Illich (1971), who contends that our very destinies are punctuated by a lens of economic utility. Lamdin (1999) asks faculty once again to encourage students to engage in <<introspection>> as a way to negotiate the pathways of reality, as opposed to artificially set boundaries of <<assumed objectives>> (p. 75). In this regard, Lamdin believes that the university degree should highlight individuality, helping students aspire to an educational experience that mirrors emotional, social, cultural, cognitive, and political ecologies that ultimately lead to engagement in lifelong learning. On their website, the Association of American Medical Colleges explains to prospective medical students that:

a liberal arts education is a key ingredient to becoming a physician, so it's important for your college experience to be well-rounded. Taking courses in the humanities and the social sciences will help you prepare for the <<people>> side of medicine. The ideal physician understands how society works and can communicate and write well. (www.aamc.org/students/considering/gettingin)

Similarly, Freire (1970) contends that an authentic education frees the learner and teacher from the <<twin thralldom of silence and monologue>> (p. ix).

All in all, higher education has not been the same since Windows 95. The problem is one of self-expression. Given the changes in curriculum and democracy discernible in higher education, the problem is one of considering the consciousness of conscious; as Freire (1970) writes, institutions can become dehumanizing. In the case of the U.S., where we have so few institutions we can all share, it stands to question: Can any of those institutions survive the onslaught?

 

Why Higher Education: Does It Matter?

Unclear anger has come to dominate many individuals' reactions against the cultural changes occurring—including strong challenges to deep-rooted beliefs about higher education. This unclear anger is shared as the experience driving change in our institutions these days. In Eugene Robinson's Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), he speaks of the black experience as carved into four categories. As blacks in general prospered economically and politically after the 1960s, anger toward the Abandoned (those who were poorest) has grown and defined <<the problems with America>>. Writing about how we deal with race today (blame the poorest for the success of the race), he explains that anxiety over the economic and educational future of the nation is blamed on the hegemony of higher education. Many of the factions eroding the place of higher education, such as those driving the Tea Party view on race in the U.S., are exaggerated rhetoric without facts. Examples include Waiting for Superman's unsupported facts about schools, which celebrate myths about charter schools and have a simplistic view of teaching (Dutro, 2011); or some state legislators and governors (in Iowa, South Carolina, and Wisconsin, for example) who portray professors and tenure as an imperfection of a market economy that needs to be remedied. Rhetoric without facts can be dangerous and more powerful than the data that shows that less than 30 percent of all faculty nationwide are tenure or tenure line (Bradley, 2009).

Increasingly, a language of hostility, discontent, and rage has become our response to the unraveling of economics and the perceived failure of universities to prepare graduates adequately while instilling the un-American behavior that has led to our decline. Ironically, this occurs during one of the most significant moments in our history—the election of Barack Obama, whose rhetoric and ideas we believed would signal a new era of American politics. For many of us in higher education, we wondered about the changes he would usher in, such as lifting bans on federal funding on medical research, funding the humanities and arts, and creating a new climate for change in our youth. We were moved by the activism of our students who mobilized and exercised their political power, just as Richard Nixon hoped in the 1970s when he backed the 18-year-old vote—for different reasons of course. Then, much like today, College Republicans were the largest and most organized youth organization in the U.S.

Yet while the anger toward universities in some ways transcends their mission, it is important to understand that, in many ways, it is deeply rooted in contemporary conservatism found within education. In many ways, the conservative movement in education has provided the intellectual business model and milieu against American <<liberalism>> as defined by Thomas Jefferson—a model developed with language we now use to define and debate our political, educational, and moral choices (Jefferson, 1961). However, within the conservative movement, there is a growing rupture about the role of government in American life. As a result, anger exists over what people view as the superstructure of the state—as Antonio Gramsci (1971) defines it—including universities, schools, and public enterprise. They see big government and its benefactors creating an anti-American view for our children, and this is the underlying theme espoused by those seeking to raze higher education. The myth-based rhetoric is couched in what is increasingly seen by the media and society as an inability to compete, failing market supremacy, and political power. Business and their political interests—Democratic and Republican—have used the atmosphere to promulgate an active war against American institutions that seek to empower the masses—this being the position of higher education. This is not to pass blame for the actions taken by American universities: privatization of public services, overpayment of executives in athletics and administration, and marketing of a failed system that seeks to replace on-the-job training. Rather, we feel it is important to point out that by lying in this bed, higher education has sullied itself and is now paying the price of the proverbial <<walk of shame>>.

In the meantime, ire will increasingly be seen as the theme dominating the educational discourse. And as the anger permeates from state legislature to legislature or from governor to governor, and where we become toughened to social change and welfare, the collateral damage threatens to fracture the fabric of equality portrayed by Jefferson and Washington in their call for American universities. It was not that long ago—in the 1960s— that universities arose and were swept up in the democratization process of American higher education. These institutions became places the public could attend to experience the prosperity ofintellectual capital and obtain entry into the American middle class. Nevertheless, higher education as we know it will be defeated—not because of its successes or failures, but because it represents a powerful and increasingly discredited movement: access and democracy.

The narrative being put forth revolves around the idea that <<America>> was just fine before it changed—forgetting the economic collapse that began in 2007, violations of civil liberties after 9/11, and the growing schism between the poor and the rich in American society portrayed by the economic bailouts—and we elected social radicals to the highest offices. Since the elections of 2008, many in the U.S. believe that they are now on the outside, and that these new leaders are accompanied by a loss of power, expanded government, shrinking private sector, and apologetic foreign policy that downplayed U.S. exceptionalism. According to this storyline—based on myths—the expansion of the welfare state represented an attack on states' rights and freedoms to such a degree as to constitute treason. Cultural conflict, immigration issues, the deep recession, and perceptions of American power ebbing have created a perfect storm for anger, and at its center is American higher education. The anger that permeates our culture has developed into a dark, angst-ridden, and hopeless view of identity. For many, the decline of economic security came in the form of home foreclosures, stock-market volatility, unemployment, and the resulting economic crises that rattled the status quo. This makes sense in any era, but this restlessness runs deeper because the country is changing culturally. What it means to be an American is shifting profoundly. Sexually, ethnically, religiously, the country is much different than it was a generation ago.

Anger, as it may be portrayed, is not always so personal. Instead, universities are seen as complicit partners in the anti-American <<socialization/Europeanization>> we have embarked upon. It is used to signify weakness, depravity, and a loss of moral foundation—where the American Dream is subverted and perverted. Ironically, those institutions that were key in the ability of children of immigrants, factory workers, laborers, and the working classes to achieve that supposed dream (i.e., the university, federal government) have since been portrayed as destroying it. The narrative looks toward the past romantically—prior to 1965 when schools were supposedly better—without fully acknowledging that in that romantic era we excluded many of our population: blacks, women, Hispanics, and disabled persons. We blame the country's leaders, minority groups, national enemies, and our institutions much the same way A. J. P. Taylor (2001) wrote about the perceived failure of German nationalism and its entry into World War I and World War II. So we see, political discourse about institutions serves little purpose for action if we cannot create a <<straw man>> to blame.

 

Who Is to Blame: Why We Fail to change

German, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian, Austrian, French, Spanish, Dutch, and English nationalists have taken to blaming, socialists, immigrants and outsiders, social democracy, and economic decisions for their current situation, and they see these elements as threats to their nations based upon a vast collection of conspiracy theories, resulting in actions such as deportation of minorities groups and segregation of schools. The anger seen in Europe and the U.S. is also manifested by the growing subcultures in our schools and universities (similar to that of punk rock and rap), a surge in conservative politics, and fascist street/grassroots movements. It is easy to see the humor in Sean Hannity's outrage, Fox News' anti-immigration stands, and Sarah Palin's soccer-mom nostalgia; but it is also easy to see the danger. Their desire to return to some glory days are echoed by deindustrialization, job loss, racial strife, etc.

Our anger seems to be wrapped in a fatalistic wrap that, as Marx (1993) wrote, will cause democracy to succumb to tyranny, and as Dahl (1970/1990) echoed, revolution into chaos. However, what we see in our media, arts, churches, and institutions leaves us with little hope—and as Freire (1970) reminds his readers, that lack of hope is at the core of the dehumanization inherent in oppression. Thus, the issues of poverty experienced in the industrial cities of the East and Midwest in the 1970s continue to vex us; however, our solution is to not help the disenfranchised but continue to help the very richest.

According to the Gallup Poll between 2008 and 2009, more than 60 percent of Americans believe we are on the wrong track, and many more do not trust their leaders and institutions (www.gallup.com/poll/118204/americans-satisfaction-doubles-january.aspx). We still believe that American democratic institutions are robust and resilient—as we have seen in Wisconsin as public employees and supporters pushed back against the authoritarian state. But it is at least plausible to envision a setting in which, after years of high unemployment and declining living standards, those institutions no longer exist or are seen as failures. One such case is the underfunding and privatization of the American university—as is proposed in many of our states. If the election results of 2010 are a sign of what is to come, a brand of radicalism at the center of society could fundamentally change our identity. It could create an anti-intellectual, anti-foreign, and assertive superiority that is unwilling to engage environmental or social policy, nuclear disarmament, or human-rights culture, in order to dismantle any institution seen as perpetrating change/socialization. Critics contend that tenure is ruining education, and that universities are too bloated, rely too much on theory at the expense of the practical, and are a haven of radicals. The trend, as AAUP argues, is manifested in loss of tenure lines, budget cutbacks to the liberal arts, investment in sexy fields (i.e., STEM), and increasing administrative costs, usually based on increasing administrator salaries. Like the current political culture, the rage against the universities is based on what its practitioners oppose rather than support. Unlike positive anger—which births rage in order to cause changes and new institutions of governance—the anger we are living within offers no real alternatives to the status quo.

 

Tenure, Anger, and the Professor

I have spent significant time thinking about higher education. We've read the scathing critiques that dominate the cultural conversation, books such as Hersh, Merrow, and Wolfe's Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk (2006); Hacker and Dreifus' How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—And What We Can Do About It (2010); and Taylor's Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (2010). In the anger underlying the attacks on institutions, it helps to find a person or a group of people to blame. This has historically been the case in post-World War II nations such as Germany, Russia, China, and Japan. Critics did not have to look far. The tenured and overpaid liberal professors embody such humanization of fear and eroding institutions.

 

Combating the Anger Narrative: Issues Professors Need to Discuss

These are not new tendencies, but the attacks on the professoriate have become more malicious. Traditionally, we have countered the simplistic call to arms and manipulations by using and working with data, information, and providing multiple views to issues. Because anti-intellectualism is too rampant, and examining problems is seen as too much like socialism, people can be corrupted by words; they respond by saying that what universities offer is not practical. For example, teacher education and medicine should be applied and practical, and we should not murk that practice with ideas of ethics, contexts, or cultural theories. Echoing the politicians, who have stated that universities are anti-American because of the approach to social problems, emerging conservative grassroots movements, organizations, and political groups have proposed publicly—usually through social media—that professors and universities are largely biased and politically motivated against <<American Values>>.

As a journey, our roads are intertwined, and we are part of a larger and interrelated group that makes the fabric of the nation we live in. The anger that flourishes in the U.S. is primarily a result of not understanding that the differences that abound in our nation are actually strengths, not weaknesses. As a nation, it is in our interest to educate and care for all, for it is when we worry about those who are oppressed that we become better (Freire, 1970; Adams,1999; Fain, 2007). When we lead with equity, when we solve problems for the most vulnerable, we also solve problems for society. In speaking to this issue and about the economic crisis, in Uncommon Common Ground (2010), Angela Glover Blackwell, Stewart Kwoth, and Manuel Pastor write that <<the damage, as the nation quickly discovered, was not limited to communities of color.. .African American and Latinos have borne the brunt of the foreclosures and layoffs...but whites have hardly been insulated from the soaring rates of unemployment, the drop in consumer spending, and depleted tax revenues>> (p. 23). It is almost trite to suggest that fundamental to the character of our nation (the U.S.) is our unexamined but deeply held belief that all Americans are entitled to basic rights that ensure liberty and freedom. For many educators, the dream is to make a difference; that an inkling of what have to share might spark social change and lead to greater personal peace and a more respectful societal awareness. To this end, in To Know as We Are Known (1993), Parker Palmer states,

Most of us go into teaching not for fame or fortune, but because of a passion to connect.... But when institutional conditions create more combat than community, when the life of the mind alienates more than it connects, the heart goes out of things and there is little left to sustain us (p. 54).

Assuming that many professors enter the university and professoriate filled with the dynamic passion to which Palmer eludes, why do we not fight for a system that allows such expression to exist? Why do we rapidly burn out, as Parker Palmer and Mary Oliver claim? Why are we—the informed and experienced sector, the transformative intellectuals—not empowered and angered enough to demand more of the educational system of which we are so collectively integral? We must know our strengths, individually and collectively, as educational leaders. Second, we must be acquainted with the audience for which we seek to provide a quality educational experience. We must provide educational experiences that are endowed with knowledge to serve each learner for a lifetime.

With this in mind, if we begin to treat our universities as communities, then we need to adopt principles of responsive evaluation that improve them. As practitioners (professors), we need to address the relationship between scholarship and communities' needs, and emphasize the role of universities as community leaders. One of the new things faculty will be doing soon is large-scale knowledge management. Given that knowledge is now central to society (Kerr, 2001), the field of knowledge management has emerged as a framework for designing an organization's goals, structures, and processes so that the organization can use what it knows to learn and to create value for its customers and community (Dalkir, 2005). Therefore, programs need to change essential organizational behaviors in several important ways: (1) transition to evidence-based and data-driven approaches to decision making; (2) increase the transparency with which they serve the needs of the public; and (3) work more intimately with one another in planning strategically for and addressing the state's public-education needs. Clark Kerr (2001) noted new knowledge as one of the great moving forces in society (p. 132); and that as the main producer and retailer of knowledge, the university cannot escape service (p. 86). The critical service we must provide and the competency we must demonstrate is not limited to the production of knowledge, but also to its free dissemination (Wheatley, 2006, p. 110).

 

Understanding the Research University: Prestige

Given the multiple contexts discussed in this paper, it is fitting to now create an environment where these issues come to life and form an interesting and yet tenuous environment that functions purposefully and ethically in spite of varied interests and pressures —unlike within prestige-seeking universities where individual interests can hijack an institution. Among many things, faculty who, in principle, are conducting research within their fields, in many cases are leaders within their disciplines, and are in competition to increase institutional and personal visibility. This competition for visibility and advancement of their fields is altogether different from the pursuit of prestige.

There are personal demands on time and energy, pitfalls of violating unwritten codes and turf, competition for precious resources, and battles to be published. All in all, it is a culture driven by production of deliverables, albeit based on research. In a sense, what separates prestigious universities from prestigeseeking universities is that the pressure to generate production weighs equally on the philosopher as it does on the scientist. Like the humanities Ph.D. student we described earlier, the culture of the research university is not always meant to be humane, protect one's family life, or even provide respite between projects. It is not for the faint of heart. Think of a Phillip Roth novel, filled with betrayal and irony. Or the situation beautifully exposed by Jane Smiley in her 2005 novel Moo, where department chairs want to kill deans, English professors eavesdrop on colleagues, liaisons are part of the everyday, and research is plagiarized from students.

Finally, there is failure all around: losing a grant competition, not achieving tenure, not getting published, not being named director, etc. However, there is an excitement—a unique tenseness that drives faculty in their research life, where risk is a matter of course. There is an infrastructure—graduate students, directors, writing centers, grant experts, administrative staff, and travel dollars. This does come at another price. Anything received from the institution must be paid back. The irony of this experience is that it is possible to belong to a department where no one gets along, but will nevertheless appear to support each other at a brown-bag luncheon or critique. There is an odd sense of commitment to colleagues, at least at the intellectual level.

Another notion unique to prestigious institutions, and one we hope will emerge in the case studies that follow, is in the dissemination of knowledge (discussed earlier in this paper). Recognizing the full ramifications of research is not a prerequisite to being a researcher, but it is critical to recognize the differences between those who engage in legitimate and meaningful research and those who do not - a distinction that can be compared to the difference between fresh crab legs from the morning catch to those you get at a ubiquitous all-you-can-eat buffet. Research (versus shallow publications designed to earn tenure but little else), for example, is real. It involves people who care about ideas as much as they care about life's most important rituals. It is also important to understand that the ideas (such as string theory), no matter how esoteric, have an impact that will be social, economic, or political. The ownership then of that idea belongs not to the individual creator, but to the entire academy, which will analyze and reanalyze what will ultimately be consumed by practitioners and the public.

More organically, the prestigious research university is an institution dedicated to the creation of new knowledge as well as to pursuing and disseminating this knowledge; it is not merely about applying knowledge, but also creating new knowledge. A prestigious research university is ultimately distinguished from prestige-seeking universities by the qualified importance it places on the creation of new knowledge as well as its impact. Contrary to popular culture, the emphasis on research and graduate studies is not greater, but about the same as that on undergraduate education. The common misconception has come from the use of graduate students as teachers in prestigious universities, as compared to prestige-seeking universities that tend to use adjuncts because their funding structures do not provide enough dollars to hire a cadre of full-time teacher graduate students (AAUP, 2011). This creates two unique labor forces: one predicated on grooming for careers in academia and the other a static labor force whose labor is predicated on being rehired if they receive positive evaluations. According to AAUP (2011), tenure <<represents a commitment on the part of a college or university to a faculty member that he or she will have the support necessary to do the job well. Tenured faculty members have a greater stake in the success of their institutions and their graduates than do those without tenure; being a tenured faculty member at an institution that is failing is worth very little>>. The report continues, *Faculty members serving in contingent appointments, on the other hand, do not have the protections of academic freedom that come with tenure. They do not have institutional support for pursuing the scholarship that serves as continuing education for college and university professors and often do not have the freedom or the time to research controversial topics. Contingent faculty members find that renewal of their appointments depends more on their ability to please students than their ability to conduct rigorous classes that force students to think critically about the material they are learning>>.

As stated earlier, the mission of these universities speaks to the primacy of research as one of the foundational goals. Reasons for this primacy relate to the idea that these institutions provide the education for future leaders who will continue the process of discovery and creation of new knowledge. Inherently, research becomes the application of knowledge to solve important social problems—such as how to increase necessary social structures and economic viability that will, in turn, help the almost 3 billion people worldwide who live in poverty (The World Bank defined extreme poverty as living on less than US $1.25 per day, and moderate poverty as less than $2 per day). In a unique enterprise, universities and researchers take on problems as foreign to their lives as can be because at the core of understanding, research shows that infant mortality in Africa has an impact on the planet's quality of human life. Thus, in tackling these problems or others, such as providing access to technology, researchers and colleagues in prestige universities are driven to work with new ideas and products to change society (for example, Google).

One major and understated difference between prestigious and prestige-seeking universities remains infrastructure. Regional and prestige- seeking universities tout their new facilities and buildings, but they rarely speak about the faculty-to-secretary ratio or the number of grant writers and coordinators. It is not only about physical plant; it is also about facilities within the physical plant. For example, how many volumes does the library own? How many databases does the university have access to? Do the librarians possess the research knowledge to aid the faculty in using databases? Does the infrastructure provide the freedom to discover, debate, and disseminate knowledge? In a unique situation, a prestige-seeking university prevented faculty in a department from releasing research about abuses of an energy company because that company had provided funding for several buildings on campus. The same issue emerged at a major research university where medical faculty discovered that drug research had brought into question one of their corporate partners' products. The debate occurred openly and faculty decided to create a new protocol for medical uses of the products. The company protested and tried to influence the outcome, but it soon was evident that they needed the university research and development more than the university needed them. This brings us to the last aspect of infrastructure: sustained and sufficient funding. Prestigious research universities are using this sustained and sufficient funding to increase the separation between themselves and prestige-seeking universities by proposing closed relationships between the university and their partners, such as the unique partnership formed by Carnegie Mellon and the Department of Defense to develop weapons (Cohen, 2001).

Prestigious universities are aware that technological developments have created a more even playing field, including universal and immediate access to knowledge with online journals and electronic books, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Open Courseware (OCW) (http://ocw.mit.edu), and the ability of prestige-seeking universities to allow private enterprises to build labs in research parks that provide access to equipment and resources that were previously available only to prestigious research universities. Access to travel, international partnerships, and technological advances in communications (i.e., remote labs) are allowing prestige-seeking universities to compete on a certain level. The playing field is not even by any means, but it is close to even in certain areas. The one remaining advantage is still sustainability. A prestige-seeking university might be able to hire an elite professor or an entire department (i.e., George Mason in Economics), but the prestigious research university can hire elite faculty across all departments.

The competition still is fraught with pitfalls for both types of institutions. Opportunities for research, consulting, and financial benefits lead to less emphasis in teaching (especially undergraduates), and they can create a dependency on funding that can confuse the loyalty of the funder rather than the discipline. And of course, even in prestigious research universities, research policy and its implementation (i.e., Institutional Research Board and Research Compliance) can create conflicts of interest for the individuals and the institution. Some of these have included the proliferation of harmful technologies (land mines), unethical |behavior by scientists (stem cells), environmental/human/ecological impact of inventions (hormones in animal feed or altered foods), financial misappropriations (Stanford University in the 1990s), and emphasis of doctoral education at the expense of undergraduate education.

Other issues that prestigious research universities have not escaped are the overspecialized departments and faculties that hinder the cross-disciplinary efforts necessary for advancing knowledge. Crossing these boundaries (anthropology and genetics) is proving impossible. However, when they are crossed, largely at the prestigious research universities, there are exciting discoveries occurring. This is a direct result of a more heterogeneous leadership that includes faculty not only from science but also from the entire spectrum of campus. In the end, upper-division administration at prestigious universities tends to reflect the university, whereas in prestige-seeking universities, applied scientists who do not see the broad implications of the whole university drive leadership.

 

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INFORMACIÓN SOBRE EL AUTOR:

David Callejo Pérez. Doctor en Educación, Florida, EU; distinguido con la Cátedra Carl A. Gerstacker Endowed Chair in Education en Saginaw V. State University, Michigan. Ha escrito diversos libros, capítulos de libro y más de 50 artículos arbitrados; fue presidente de la Asociación Americana para la Enseñanza y el Currículo, y ha dirigido evaluaciones para escuelas distritales y universidades.