OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Invisible Adjunct finds some special pleading by UIC's Stanley Fish (registration required) about the difficulties of being a university administrator these days. "You're telling me that state funds are being withdrawn at the same time expenses are exceeding tuition by a factor of three to one. How can you stay in business?" Dean Fish would rather whinge than do what the times call for. His reaction to some proposals to cap tuition increases is interesting: "And now, on top of this, comes the threat of Mr. McKeon's bill. First of all, it seems curious to find members of the free-market Republican Party advocating price controls. In fact, it is downright unbusinesslike. Because if a business were to find itself with rising costs and falling revenues it would lop off unprofitable lines, close units, downsize the work force, relax quality control and, of course, raise prices to whatever level the traffic would bear. In university terms, this would mean offering fewer courses, closing departments, sending students elsewhere, skimping on advising, hiring the pedagogical equivalent of migrant workers, eliminating remedial programs, ejecting the students for whom remedial programs are necessary, reducing health and counseling services, admitting fewer students and inventing fees for everything from registration to breathing." In Dean Fish's world, the remedial programs are necessary, not a drag on the education enterprise. Likewise the therapeutic offices. Presumably, the diversity boondoggles and the assessment of the obvious are all Totally Necessary. Not only that, Dean Fish is reluctant to raise tuitions. To repeat: the private benefits to a university degree recipient are large, and universities ought not be ashamed to make that point, and harvest a share of those gains from trade for themselves.

Swarthmore's John Burke notes, "What [Fish is] wrong about is the implication of his rhetoric, that sweeping threat to all programs and services, that higher education must choose to cut everything indiscriminately, that there cannot be a systematic logic to the reduction of its mission." I've put my little list out for all to see and to react to. Via Milt's File (another newsie who has yet to discover permalinks) I discover a Manhattan Institute working paper (warning: think tank with a point of view) that claims "Only 70% of all students in public high schools graduate, and only 32% of all students leave high school qualified to attend four-year colleges." The problems confronting the government-assisted universities will not be solved until the problems of the government-operated schools are solved. Moreover, Professor Burke, in attempting to link Dean Fish's plea with New York University President John Sexton's proposal (also requires registration, via The Little Professor) that professors become more active in teaching. Burke's fear: "[Sexton is] not talking about the reduction of higher education, but at least on the surface, about its expansive re-invention. If many are skeptical when they read his proposals, it may not be because they have any particular reason to doubt Sexton's sincerity or even the conceptual attractiveness of his ideas, but because they know that established and powerful interests within the NYU faculty will not permit those ideas to be implemented in their most desirable and idealistic form. Sexton might say that a new 'teaching faculty' ought to be viewed as the peers of the traditional tenured research-oriented faculty, but even if he desperately wants that, the established faculty will rapidly subordinate and denigrate such faculty as being second-raters.

"Such a faculty would have no external source of validation to draw upon: no publications, no peer networks, no reputation capital. Or worse yet, their only source of external validation would derive from academically oriented Departments of Education, which would simply draw a teaching faculty back into the usual hierarchies of academic value, as experimental animals for education researchers. A 'great' teacher in John Sexton's new NYU would only be great in my estimation by what they did in the classroom, and there are and can be no external standards commonly agreed upon that would allow us to compare one such great teacher with the next, to create a platform for the accumulation of reputation capital that would put Sexton's teaching faculty on an equal plane with the established ranks of academic scholars."

Both The Little Professor and Apt. 11-D weigh in with comments on the Sexton proposal and the Burke editorial, raising similar questions about the creation of another job classification that is essentially steerage. Perhaps a review of some history is in order. Long ago, there were the famous research universities (Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Yale, Chicago), the land-grant universities (Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan State), the finishing schools (Macalester, Carleton, Middlebury), and the normal schools (Superior State, Northern Illinois, Indiana State.) I might have to spend some time in the archives looking at the job descriptions, tenure criteria, teaching and administrative responsibilities, and research output among these types of universities. These at one time coexisted yet were different (I have no way of judging what sort of social pecking order would have existed among those institutions.) More recently, I perceive them as becoming more alike in their strategies, their requirements of faculties, and their problems. The NYU president's recent proposal might mean nothing more than a rediscovery by some of these institutions, including my own, of their original roles.