WHY IT MATTERS.

Two items that generated many a post on the academic weblogs this week highlight a central theme of these pages, namely that higher education ought to be higher education. Start with the commotion about junior faculty looking for new jobs. Let's break this down. As long as departmental hiring committees have the responsibility for identifying people to hire, and as long as departmental promotion committees do the initial recommendations for tenure or promotion, junior faculty recognize that their primary responsibility is to be competitive in the discipline. That means establishing a reputation as a scholar.

Perhaps the people who manage higher education might want to re-examine whether the German model or the land-grant model of scholarship is the best one to apply to higher education, but as long as the reward structure is as it is, it ought not come as any surprise that faculty members respond to the incentives it provides.

Why, then, might faculty members wish to leave? I'll concede that securing a more visible position in the academic food chain is part of it. I'll note, however, that the food chain is probably more skewed than it ought to be, and some of the responsibility for that skewedness rests with senior faculty who are indifferent or hostile to their colleagues' ambitions. There is no shame in making a promising colleague look good enough to be raided away by some other program. There is nothing but shame in thinking that the success of a colleague somehow diminishes your own work.

Some responsibility for that skewedness must rest with administrators whose mindset is "We'll never be as good as College X and there's no point in even trying," particularly when that mindset mutates into the more virulent forms of access-assessment-remediation-retention and the lowered expectations that come in train. There is nothing quite like the intellectual challenge of keeping one's mind sufficiently sharp and focused to produce the kind of research that will be rewarded in the discipline after one has spent some time attempting to reason with Rate Your Students fodder. Does it come as any surprise that the sites run by the anonymous jobseekers that set off the conversation also have a goodly number of gripes about unprepared or unmotivated students? Improve the working conditions and people will be less disposed to want to publish their way out.

And that leads to the now-suspended Delaware reeducation camps. As I noted in that post, using freshman orientation to inculcate some humility and to make the point that the privilege of a university education brings responsibilities with it is an honorable tradition. Somehow, in the Delaware materials, that mission mutated into consciousness-raising about how American society is a machine for the replication of the existing system of social stratification. I'm not persuaded of that: there is the Spielberg effect at work.

I wonder whether that consciousness-raising doesn't turn a bad theory into something like a self-fulfilling prophecy (I'm at Delaware while my richer neighbors are at Swarthmore or Princeton: what point effort?) Such thinking is, again, likely to further skew the academic food chain, and contribute to the excess demand for the places that show up at the top of the U.S. News (what happened to the World Report?) rankings. It's also likely to raise the resentments against affirmative action that much of the Delaware material addresses. (Sure, it's a thoughtcrime to mention that, but you can't speak of a machinery for replicating social stratification and at the same time expect people whose test scores are higher but who were not admitted to a better part of the machine to like it.)

Doesn't it make more sense for all concerned to recognize the excess demand and provide working conditions for the faculty and classroom conditions for the students under which all are challenged to excel rather than led to believe that their status is somehow second- or third- class? I'd expect that there'd be less job-hopping for a better fit (read research prestige and intellectually stimulating students) under those circumstances.