The National Journal’s Fawn Johnson writes, “President Obama landed on some sweet talking points in his recent, somewhat rehashed, proposals to make colleges more affordable and more targeted on graduation and employment. “Higher education should not be a luxury,” Obama said in Syracuse, N.Y. “If a higher education is still the best ticket to upward mobility in America–and it is–then we’ve got to make sure it’s within reach.”

Johnson asks, “What’s not to like?”

I begin my invited response:

We in higher education deserve criticism for high costs and low graduation rates. But I have grave doubts about the goals and the solutions that President Obama proposes.

Consider two colleges. The first, which I will call “Harvard” (because that’s its real name), places almost all of its graduates in jobs or graduate schools. … The second college, which I will call “Local State,” enrolls students who live at home or off campus.  …. Completing a degree typically takes many years, if one manages to graduate at all. … Local State is the college we should subsidize and support.

The rest is on the National Journal’s Education Insider’s blog.

In The New Republic, Russell Jacoby names Stanley Fish as the academic who “raised careerism to a worldview.” “His writings incarnate the cheerful, expedient self-involvement that is part and parcel of contemporary life: everyone is out for himself. Fish has burnished this credo for the professoriate.”

I do not know if that is fair to Fish, but I do observe plenty of academic careerism. Here are ten signs of it:

1. You want famous academics to know what you’ve done, but you don’t know or care what laypeople think about the topics you study.
2. You can recite the professional achievements and setbacks of colleagues but don’t quite remember their arguments and findings.
3. If you could continue to accumulate praise and rewards without learning anything new, you would stop learning.
4. If you had a choice between a job where you could do better work and a job that had higher prestige, you would pick the latter.
5. You are primarily interested in who holds each theory, not whether it is right. And you mainly select topics to study because prominent scholars are currently interested in them.
6. You are most impressed by scholarly work that requires especially difficult techniques. You do not consider impact when you assess scholarship.
7. You can explain what you know and how you know it, but not why it’s worth knowing.
8. For you, a “good” university is one that attracts students and faculty who are already accomplished before they arrive.
9. You think that fully successful students are those who become professors in your field.
10. Like Fish, you don’t think taxpayers, students, and other laypeople have any right to judge your work.

It is a privilege to be paid to read, talk, and write. Many talented young people strive for a chance to join the academy but can’t find jobs. If you hold an academic position and have turned into a careerist, I believe you should quit and get out of the way.

Americans found colleges and universities. That tradition started in 1636 and it explains why we have nearly 4,500 degree-granting institutions today. Typically, periods of population growth and migration are marked by the founding of lots of new colleges and universities, which creates the opportunity for innovation. We’ve seen waves of new types: religious liberal arts colleges, Land-Grants, women’s colleges, research universities on the German model, HBCUs, “multiversities,” community colleges, and urban public universities, among others. Each wave also affects the older institutions. Harvard and Yale, for example, were founded as religious liberal arts colleges but adapted in imitation of the Germanic research universities and the state multiversities.

But look at the growth of postsecondary student enrollment from 1991-2011 versus the total number of colleges and universities. (Data from the Institute for Education Sciences; my graphs):

Some new institutions have been launched since 1999, but for the most part, the additional students are being squeezed onto existing campuses. For instance, the University of Central Florida was born in the 1960s, during the last burst of new college foundations, but its enrollment has grown from 1,948 in 1968 to 59,767 in 2012. The problem with that method of accommodating growing numbers of students is that it blocks innovation. Existing colleges are locked into their priorities and structures. We have also seen the rapid growth of for-profit colleges, like the University of Phoenix, which are included in the trends shown above. They innovate, but in ways that make me highly suspicious. Until we see the birth of a substantial number of new nonprofit or state institutions, I will be pessimistic about innovation in the sector as a whole.

I gave a plenary address by this title at last week’s American Democracy Project/The Democracy Commitment conference in Denver. I repeated a lot of what I had said in a North Carolina speech in February, but I updated and reframed that talk somewhat. Also, the questions from the floor were very good. The audio is here, and it includes the Q&A. My written text follows below the fold.

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