As we head away for a long weekend, I share the invitation below. Participants at our Frontiers of Democracy II conference deliberated about the role of higher education using an issue guide created by the National Issues Forums Institute and its partners. Many other citizens across the country have also begun to use that guide. Next Tuesday in Washington–and online–the national discussion will be formally launched.

Shaping Our Future: How Can Higher Education Help Us Create the Future We Want? 

 Watch the launch online

Join us online on Tuesday, September 4 to kick off Shaping Our Future, a year-­long national dialogue on the future of higher education. Through this initiative, students, faculty, administrators, employers, and members of the general public will reflect on how colleges and universities might help the country tackle some of its most vexing problems. Shaping Our Future is organized by the American Commonwealth Partnership and the National Issues Forums. The kick-­off event will include information about forums now being planned on campuses and in communities nationwide.

  Presentation and Panel Discussion

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

 9 to 11 a.m. Eastern Time, National Press Club

 Speakers and Panelists:

Martha Kanter, U.S. Undersecretary of Education

Nancy Cantor, Chancellor, Syracuse University

Muriel Howard, President, American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU)

Bernie Ronan, Chair, The Democracy Commitment

Kaylesh Ramu, President, Student Government Association,

University of Maryland Baltimore County

Scott Peters, Co-­Director, Imagining America

Harry Boyte, National Coordinator, The American Commonwealth Partnership

Bill Muse, President, The National Issues Forums

David Mathews, President, The Kettering Foundation (via video)

Click here to watch the launch online, September 4, 2012, 9 a.m. (ET)

Big-time college sports are corrupt–not only in the sense that leading programs often break the official rules, but also because institutions that follow the rules may corrupt their characters as universities.

So I would propose, but I am not fully satisfied with the argument. It may depend on the premise that playing quasi-professional sports before large audiences isn’t an appropriate activity at a public or not-for-profit university (in contrast to teaching, scholarship, R&D, policy analysis, ethical leadership, clinical health care, public dialogue, performance and studio arts, archives and collections, and economic development, which are worthy functions). Since playing basketball or football at the Division I level is an impressive achievement, and since the other activities of a modern university are rather miscellaneous, I fear that this premise may hinge on a subjective value-judgment.

Some signs that big-time sports are corrupt: Winning coaches have such strong market positions that they cannot be disciplined by academic administrators. The average football program on the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) list generates $11 million in net assets for its university per year.*  Salaries for even offensive and defensive football coordinators exceed $1 million. Athletes are not paid, but they lose their scholarships if they cease to play. Sometimes a significant proportion of the low-income students of color on a campus must play sports on TV to stay enrolled. Graduation rates are poor. Young athletes are enmeshed in elaborate rules regarding recruitment and money, yet they seem immune to general rules regarding academic performance.

But these points do not demonstrate corruption, at least not one by one. (Maybe they accumulate to an indictment.) After all …

Other individuals on some campuses are too valuable to be disciplined, starting with high-wattage professors. The late Mancur Olson, one of the founders of rational-choice theory, negotiated a contract with the University of Maryland that guaranteed him $1 more than any other professor in the state’s system, to save him the trouble of seeking competing offers. As far as I know, he acted with perfect integrity, but (like the basketball coach) he was “too big to fail.”

Other parts of universities also make profits. Research, in particular, can pay very nicely because of patents. Stanford’s net return from patents was $62 million in 2006, about twice the total surplus generated by Penn State’s athletic department.

In addition to athletes, other students are required to perform services to their universities. The federal government, for example, subsidizes nursing scholarships for students who serve as nurses in selected (needy) facilities. I think nursing is much more valuable than football, but football may be more attractive for participants. It’s not clear that the athletes are more exploited than the nurses–to say nothing of the university’s blue-collar workforce.

The graduation rates for big-time sports programs don’t always look bad in the context of higher education in general. For example, 87% of Penn State’s football players graduate within 6 years, two percentage points better than the student body as a whole.

For the most part, these are tu quoque arguments: in other words, “Don’t criticize Division I sports, because the same problems are seen elsewhere in higher education.” Put in those terms, it’s an illegitimate argument–why not expand the critique to encompass other parts of the university? But note that the critique then becomes very broad, and it’s not clear that what’s left (pure teaching and scholarship) is sustainable outside the elite universities.

In other words, big-time sports do not adulterate a pure substance; they are part of a complicated mix. So we may have to decide whether the intrinsic merits of Division I football and basketball are worthy of support by universities. I would say no, but is that just because I am no longer much of a sports fan?

*Matheson, V.A., O’Connor, D.J., and Herberger, J.H., “The Bottom Line: Accounting for Revenues and Expenditures in Intercollegiate Athletics” (PDF).

(Hyannis, MA) There was some discussion today about whether the value of diversity should have pride of place in academic settings. I have recently suggested that “diversity” is a problematic value if what you really want is equality–but to increase equality is good for some and bad for others. Also, equality is an explicit value commitment. In general, value commitments make people nervous because we are taught to be moral relativists (to believe that values are mere opinions). Diversity seems safer because it is framed as a matter of respecting everyone’s opinions and contributions. I think the underlying motivation for diversity is actually egalitarianism, and it would be better if people could acknowledge and defend that principle. It is not just an opinion but a real good, albeit one that can trade off against liberty, security, efficiency, and other values.

Sometimes the goal of “diversity” initiatives is to make sure that students know they live in a racially, ethnically, and culturally pluralist world marked by frequent oppression. In at least one liberal arts college that I know, everyone is basically required to study the history or culture of a traditionally oppressed group in the United States. I agree that good citizens recognize pluralism and oppression. But we also live in a society whose core principles are idealistic and valid. In other words, the coin has two sides: rights and injustices; excellent institutions and social failures; unity and diversity. I don’t want young Americans to graduate from school or college without understanding oppression. Equally, I don’t want them to graduate without understanding the Bill of Rights, a market economy, and the rule of law. So if one side of the coin is required and emphasized, I’d vote for the other side, too.

This is partly a matter of respect for the truth, because our society actually has two faces. But it’s also the best way to engage diverse students. We are at grave risk of segregating ourselves ideologically to the point where we can’t learn how to live together. If some colleges advertise themselves as places to study diversity, while others teach great books and the Constitution, students will sort themselves into the environments that they find most congenial. Then the courses about oppression will basically just reach liberal students, while only conservative students will read James Madison with appreciation. Both will miss the best opportunities for learning.

David Brooks’ column entitled the “Service Patch” is insightful in several respects. Brooks is right that highly successful students nowadays see two options: “crass but affluent investment banking” and “the poor but noble nonprofit world.” They show “little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, [or] government service.” I frequently ask young liberal activists–people who favor expanding the government–whether they would work for the government, and they almost all demur. Incidentally, if there are two political movements in America: the people who argue for government but would despise working for it, and the people who argue against government, the latter will win most elections.

Brooks is also right that the phrase and concept of “community service” has replaced thinking about character, justice, and social impact. “Service” means unpaid or not-for-profit activity that helps people who can’t afford to pay. That is not necessarily good for the world, and it is certainly not the only way to advance justice. Like Brooks, I think that deciding what makes a good life “require[s] literary distinctions and moral evaluations.” Finally, Brooks is wise to follow the work of Rob Reich (“not the former labor secretary, the other one”).

I would push Brooks’ points a little further. People have much less capacity than they believe they have to make the right decisions once they are in a particular situation. The general finding of social psychology is that context determines behavior most of the time. So if you work for a hedge fund, you are going to do what hedge fund managers do, which is influenced by economic opportunities and local norms and expectations. You are not going to become the heroic exception who does good while everyone else does well.

But you can decide which situations to place yourself in. Wall Street and an urban public school both present opportunities and temptations, but they are very different. You are not going to strip industrial firms for short-term profit if you teach elementary school, but you are not going to neglect needy kids if you work for a bank. So you have to decide what opportunities and temptations you want to face. That will determine the quality or value of your life. It is a matter of deep and reasoned introspection, which should be an essential function of college.

Tufts, for example, educated JP Morgan Chase executive director Jamie Dimon; he majored in pysch and econ here. I don’t think Tufts could have taught him much that would have changed his decisions once he took his job, but I do think we could have helped him to think about whether to start on the path he’s on. To switch universities: in 1970, 5 percent of male Harvard graduates worked in the financial sector. In 2007, 58 percent of male Harvard seniors said they were heading for finance jobs. I think that is an indictment of higher education not because the financial industry is unnecessary (we do need it), but because four years of reasoned introspection about the good life should not end with a majority of students choosing the same path: “crass but affluent investment banking.”

Why might you favor racial and gender diversity in education?

1. As a matter of distributive justice. Places in colleges or universities convey political and economic advantage. Thus you may think they should be distributed equitably with regard to race and gender. To reach this conclusion, you may have to criticize other rationales for distributing places in college, such as arguments that grades and test scores reflect relevant merit or dessert.
2. To obtain desirable social outcomes later. You may believe, for example, that we will be much better off as a society if we have plenty of Latino doctors, female police officers, and African American lawyers, which requires distributing places in college equitably.
3. Because learning requires deliberation (or the construction of knowledge together), and deliberation requires diversity, and race and gender contribute valuable diversity of perspective.

Setting policy based on the first or second argument has been pretty much barred by the Supreme Court. These are also unpopular arguments because they appear to be zero-sum. If someone else’s kid deserves a place in college, that implies that my kid may have to give it up.

The third argument offers an appealing alternative. It presumes that colleges and universities are communities that engage their members (students, staff, and faculty) in producing knowledge together and in shaping common values.

I think the typical view of the liberal arts is quite different: the student learns skills or ideas from the material (e.g., from great books) and from the professor, who is also paid to create knowledge. Other students are basically competitors for the professor’s time, which is why student/faculty ratios are so often cited as measures of quality. Education is understood as modular: you learn ideas or skills from each course–actually from each reading or lecture. That is why there is so much enthusiasm now for online and “distance” learning, and it’s why students and families are OK with transferring from one college to another until they have accumulated enough credits to graduate.

The vast majority of college students do not get anything like a deliberative liberal  education. They sit in gigantic lecture classes, they commute to large and defuse public institutions where they are anonymous, they interrupt their college careers to work (picking up credits over time), and they study vocational fields. One conclusion might be that many more people need to be offered real liberal arts educations in diverse learning communities. But another conclusion might be that this is really an elite opportunity, and therefore the third argument for diversity (above) is irrelevant to most people. The demographic composition of the student body is not particularly helpful for an individual’s learning if that person studies accounting at the University of Phoenix or even chemistry in a big lecture class.

A liberal arts education based on deliberation and collaboration is expensive. Few Americans have experienced it, and its benefits are relatively intangible. So unless people come to understand learning as collective and deliberative, they aren’t going to pay for a residential liberal arts education (either through tuition or taxes). Nor will they accept the argument that learning requires diversity. A diversity agenda in higher ed will look like a mere matter of redistributing scarce resources. This is why the fundamental argument has to be about the collaborative nature of learning and of knowledge itself.