Category Archives: academia

the campus building boom

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The New York Times reports today that “A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt.” It’s not hard to see why:

David K. Creamer, vice president for finance and business services at Miami University, said the importance of college rankings had pressured administrators to spend more and more. In some rankings, the effect of spending is direct because institutions with “the best dorms” or “the best athletic facilities” are singled out. The effect on other rankings is indirect: better facilities attract better students, and that ultimately raises rankings, Mr. Creamer said.

“There is nothing in there that says if you become more efficient, your ratings will go up. They will probably go down,” he said.

Of course, the problem is not the rating systems themselves, but the demand they serve. Students want to attend “good” colleges, and that doesn’t mean colleges that educate; it means colleges that attract particularly strong student bodies and faculties. Their preference is not irrational. “Good” colleges are prestigious, and being around well-prepared teachers and students is educational. But what causes prospective students and professors to flock to some schools and not others? Beautiful facilities help, as UVA, Yale, and Stanford have found over many decades. Lovely campuses are expensive, but lots of the best-prepared, highest-scoring prospective students can afford the price. They now come from wealthy backgrounds, in part because they benefit from escalating investment starting in infancy. Some of the most desirable students are not rich, but you can always set your full tuition costs high and use the margin to subsidize a substantial minority of non-wealthy students.

The results include social stratification and a lack of attention to actually educating students; you’re already successful campus if your admissions office brings you a high-scoring freshman class. Online and for-profit education is disrupting this model, but it will not threaten the high-end institutions, which sell prestige and network benefits. They also offer learning opportunities, but not efficiently. I continue to wonder whether there may be a niche for new institutions that sell membership in a genuine learning community without frills. I think you could offer a good liberal arts education for less than $10,000 if you didn’t worry about the “inordinately lavish” facilities described in today’s Times.

as Florida threatens to charge more for the humanities, those disciplines require a defense

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A gubernatorial task force in Florida proposes making state university tuition cheaper for students in “high-skill, high-wage, high-demand (market determined strategic demand) degree programs.” The task force suggests that those programs may include 111 different majors in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)–but no humanities programs. A petition organized by history professors “take[s] issue with the task force’s recommendations.” The petition turns quickly from an invocation of the “liberal arts” (undefined and undefended) to an economic argument:

The punitive differential tuition model will lead not only to a decimation of the liberal arts in Florida. It will also have a destructive impact on the essential and transferrable skills that these disciplines teach. Indeed, the Florida Council of 100 (a non-partisan organization of business leaders) submitted a lengthy memo to the task force in which the Council noted the pressing need for “liberal arts grads with superior analytical, critical thinking, and communication skills who can quickly learn and apply industry/company specific skills.”

The humanities and other liberal arts require a defense. We who teach or study them do not have an automatic right to the voters’ money. (I wrote the “voters’ money,” not the “taxpayers’ money,” because the public purse belongs to everyone on an equal basis, not just to the people who pay income or other direct taxes.) As representatives of the public, the Florida legislature is entitled to ask what it achieves by modestly subsidizing tuition in state universities and, specifically, in liberal arts departments. I don’t think that calling the task force’s proposal for differential rates uncultured would be helpful or adequate. For one thing, many cultures have produced and prized both arts and scholarship without having institutions like state universities.

Also, I am not completely against subsidizing education that has “market-determined strategic demand.” If there is demand for a skill, someone will teach it, but the reason to offer it in a public university is to give disadvantaged students a chance to learn it affordably. That is an equity-oriented argument for investing in subjects like STEM.

The argument for the humanities and other liberal arts could also be “consequentialist,” pointing to concrete benefits from studying these subjects. I am hoping to do some ambitious empirical research on the community-level benefits of participating in the humanities. I’d hypothesize that the benefits will be seen in areas like mental health.

But consequentialist arguments are a double-edged sword. Maybe the humanities do not pay off as expected–or maybe they have benefits, but something else is more cost-effective. That alternative could even be something that we also admire, such as making music. Once one begins looking for ratios of cost to benefits, it’s not a safe bet that history, literature, or philosophy will come out ahead.

In any case, one hopes for a good cost/benefit ratio because there is something about history, literature, and philosophy that seems intrinsically valuable. Imagine a society in which everyone had a secure and well-paying job (zero unemployment), but no one knew anything about the past. Presumably, that would be worse than our current society. Now, it doesn’t necessarily take subsidized tuition at state universities to produce and disseminate knowledge of the past–the History Channel also does that. But if we add considerations of excellence and equity to the mix, we start to make a case for the liberal arts in public universities.

We might also think in terms of moral and civic outcomes. Presumably, studying history, literature, and philosophy is important for a voter, a juror, and a community-member. But that also requires some investigation. Is there an empirical link between the humanities and good citizenship? Or is the link intrinsic?

The philosopher Anthony Laden argues that civic engagement is essentially about “engagement,” i.e., genuine dialogue among peers that involves listening and responding as well as mere communication or action. Thus voting does not count as civic engagement unless the voter acts on the results of authentic engagement with other people. The humanities could be defined, in turn, as genuine engagement with other people’s ideas as mediated by words and images. Then the connection between civic engagement and the humanities is definitional, not empirical. The interesting empirical questions might be qualitative, e.g., how many citizens who have studied the humanities actually listen to other people before they vote?

Protagoras argued that the humanities were particularistic and evaluative. They dealt with particular cases, richly described and morally judged, whereas Socrates’ form of philosophy offered broad generalizations. So then the question becomes: should a good citizen generalize, or be primarily attentive to particulars? The social sciences offer methods of generalizing, and they tend to avoid value-judgments. Recently, the Danish theorist Bent Flyvbjerg has taken a very hard line against the social sciences: “No predictive theories have been arrived at in social science, despite centuries of trying. This approach is a wasteful dead-end.” He advocates phronesis, practical wisdom, which is about particulars and is judgmental. Phronesis looks like the political application of the humanities disciplines. On this theory, employing the humanities as phronesis is civic engagement, but the value of civic engagement depends on whether it improves policies and institutions. (Note that this is also an argument for some humanities disciplines and not for others–for history and literary criticism but not for philosophy or literary theory.)

Some see the humanities as sources of moral uplift and challenge. Then they should influence communities by calling citizens to act according to higher values rather than interests and prejudices.

Of course, it is controversial whether communities should aim for higher values. But everything about social outcomes is–and ought to be–controversial. Who says that we should expand the economy? Such topics need deliberation, and the humanities may have a crucial role in teaching people to deliberate.

Note, finally, that merely teaching and studying the humanities shouldn’t count; the point is for students and the public to learn. Unless actual learning goes on, the case is weak.

centers for politics in higher ed

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I am spending today at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, NH. I will give a public talk here and also meet to discuss the Institute’s programs. I’ve done much the same thing (i.e., speak and consult) at several similar centers, including the Graham Center for Public Service at the University of Florida, PACE (the Political and Civic Engagement Program) at Indiana University, and the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement at University of Illinois-Chicago. I also serve on the advisory boards of the Center for Civic Literacy at IUPUI in Indianapolis, Cambridge University’s Forum for Youth Participation & Democracy; the Center for Engaged Democracy at Merrimack College; and the California Civic Engagement Project at UC-Davis. I am recently back from the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at Penn, and I work full-time for the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts.

In reflecting on these centers (and many others that I know more vicariously), I see some common themes and strategic choices:

They are all nonpartisan efforts, but they are concerned, in part, with explicitly political participation. They challenge two prevailing trends. In political science, politics is treated remotely and dispassionately, as something to be analyzed but not practiced by the political scientist or student. Meanwhile, in community service and service-learning, explicitly political action is often marginal or even discouraged. In contrast, most of these centers cite political action in their mission statements.

They almost all seek to combine practical experiences for students (such as internships or service projects) with academic study, plus intellectually challenging events and discussions, faculty-led research, and collaborations between the college or university and its neighbors.

They are almost all physical places on campuses that attract people with political and civic interests, but without a bias toward a particular ideology or party.

The differences among the centers are also significant. They indicate the choices one would have to make in starting or reorienting a center like this:

  • Geographical scope. Local, regional, national, or international?
  • Type of engagement or participation. Should the center emphasize deliberation (as at Colorado State’s Center for Public Deliberation)? Or preparation for public service careers? Or activism for social justice? Or policy analysis?
  • Place in the curriculum. Should the center offer a a certificate, as at PACE, or a minor, as at the Graham Center? One specialized course or short list of courses, like “Education for Active Citizenship” at Tufts? A co-curricular leadership program, like the Graham Center’s Civic Scholars, or the Bonner Network‘s more than 75 programs nationwide?
  • Role of faculty. Does the center promote research on politics and policy, broadly defined? Or research on citizen engagement in politics, as at Illinois-Chicago? Or research on civic education, as at IUPUI? Or research that requires civic engagement, such as participatory-action research?
  • Public programs and products. The Graham Center, for example, serves the whole state by offering high-profile conferences on state and national issues. Harvard’s Institute of Politics does the same with a national and global focus. The California Civic Engagement Center produces reports on topics like voting rates in California counties. The Illinois-Chicago center maintains a web portal for Chicago citizens.

Clearly, no single recipe is best, but these are some of the tradeoffs and choices that any institution must address.

 

the Netter Center for Community Partnerships

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(Philadelphia, PA) I am at the University of Pennsylvania along with about 500 colleagues who have come here to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. The Netter Center connects an Ivy League University to the civic life and social problems of a great but distressed American city. The Netter Center encourages and supports research and service-learning, known at Penn as “Academically Based Community Service.” At the heart of its work are about 60 courses each year (enrolling a total of about 1,700 students) that address social problems in West Philadelphia. These separate courses contribute to a coordinated approach that Penn develops and refines in collaboration with the community. The Center was founded in 1992, near the start of the current movement for community-university partnerships and civic engagement in higher education. It has always set the standard.

a university’s impact on society

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An important discussion is underway at Tufts about how to enhance and evaluate the university’s impact on society. Here is my emerging view:

A university can have “impact on society” by doing things that benefit people outside of academia. For example, Tufts veterinary scientists contributed to eradicating rinderpest, also known as cattle plague, which had caused suffering among nomadic peoples around the world. We should be proud of that kind of impact.

But a different kind of impact occurs when faculty, students, and staff engage with people outside the university in productive dialogues or collaborations that benefit both sides. I see three reasons to emphasize that kind of “impact” in our strategic planning, even as we continue to celebrate and support academic work that simply benefits society.

First, participating in and strengthening public dialogue is a moral imperative. A university has no right to define good impacts unilaterally, to choose priorities for any society, or to select appropriate means to attain desired outcomes. These are questions of value, and other people (from Medford, MA to the globe) must help to decide them. But because we handle ideas with sophistication, we can strengthen the public dialogue.

Second, “impact” encompasses the whole university if it is understood as intellectual and practical engagement with society. Liberal arts professors are unlikely to discover the equivalent of the rinderpest vaccine–a concrete benefit that can be transferred from the university to society. But liberal arts professors and students certainly contribute to public dialogue and debate.

Third, if impact is defined as public engagement, it is a comparative strength of Tufts. To be sure, many fields–from bioethics to international development, from museum studies to city planning–are now focusing on public dialogue and collaboration. Therefore, most universities now employ people who are interested in engagement. But Tufts is particularly rich in such work. This highly selective list of examples could easily be expanded:

  • The Tufts Community Research Center has won several large federal grants for sophisticated science. TCRC has a unique governing committee composed equally of Tufts faculty and community leaders; all of its projects involve collaborations with community groups, and many of its research grants originated with ideas from NGOs.
  • Classic professor Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of Tufts’ Project Perseus and a pioneer in the digital humanities, has shown that classics offers excellent opportunities for diverse people to construct new knowledge together. For example, Crane enlists Muslim seminary students in the Middle East to help annotate the classical Arabic texts that are essential for our understanding of Greek sources.
  • The Lincoln Filene Center for Community Partnerships within Tufts’ Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service cultivates durable and reciprocal partnerships with NGOs and public agencies in Medford, Somerville, and Boston’s Chinatown. These partners then collaborate with Tufts on teaching and research projects.
  • The Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, the Eliot Pearson Department of Child Development, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service are among the departments, programs, and schools at Tufts whose formal mission statements highlight public engagement.

If this analysis is correct, it raises some interesting questions about how to encourage, strengthen, and assess “impact” across a whole university. I don’t have the answers, but I would want to head off several misconceptions.

First, impact is not simply about expanding the scale of our engagement. We do not necessarily want more of our faculty to become “talking heads,” influencing public discussions through the mass media. That can be valuable, but it is not appropriate for everyone. Engagement is important at all scales and in many venues.

Second, engagement is not “service,” understood as an additional requirement above research and teaching. Engagement is a dimension of research and teaching that can strengthen a scholar’s core work.

Third, engagement does not mean the same thing across a university that promotes the liberal arts, the applied sciences, and several professional disciplines. But engagement can have significant (if diverse) meanings for all those parts of the university–and can help bring them together.