GOOD QUESTION.

Inside Higher Ed columnist Rachel Toor asks, "Can we in higher ed, the true 'life-long learners,' think hard about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit our mistakes without shame and then change and adapt to the world we all now live in?"

Perhaps the continued apologetics for all wokeness, all the time, have ceased to persuade.

Every scientist worth her NaCl knows a theory is right until it’s proved wrong. That’s why she keeps experimenting. But in higher education, we tend to treat our current crisis—declining enrollment, loss of public trust—as a “failure” of the market or demographics or even the political landscape. We rarely stop to ask if we are fundamentally wrong about the model we are using.

I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right.  That's not where she's going.

We confuse the aesthetic of academia—the gorgeous campus, the passionate faculty, the dorm-living young people that represents the small college liberal arts experience—with the institutions that serve the 70 percent of students who fall outside the traditional, fictional Wheeler ideal.

Watching this, I was reminded of a story my late uncle, Seymour Benzer, a geneticist at Caltech, once told me. He had been invited to Oxford to give a talk and was walking the quads with a colleague. They passed workers scraping soot off the ancient buildings. The witty Brit he was with turned to him and said, “We put that in bags and ship it to Yale for their buildings.”

It was an apt reminder that we’ve long mimicked the ancient Oxbridge model, importing not just the architecture, but the “soot”—the assumption that tradition itself confers value. That might work for elite institutions where students are buying social capital. But for the rest of higher ed? In today’s world, faculty who cling to their lectures and red pens don’t serve our current students.

We are busy scraping the soot off the past and applying it to the present, rather than admitting that the building itself might need a redesign.

Higher ed in the U.S. has been one of our country’s greatest achievements. But maybe we can think about what we’ve gotten wrong, admit it without shame, and then learn and grow and change? Some of us must out of sheer necessity if we want to keep our jobs.

It's not the institutions that are selling that social capital that confront shrinking enrollments and opt to close down.  The U.S. News guides continue to sell.  I doubt that Ms Toor is seriously suggesting not bothering with providing at least the rudiments of that social capital to matriculants who for a variety of reasons do not seek admission at the elite institutions.

I concur in part and dissent in part with her suggestions.

Here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head, not-very-nuanced list of things we might work together on: Shared governance is essential, but as currently practiced it’s a twig in our bike spokes. The credit hour, with its devotion to seat time, makes no sense as a measurement of learning in the age of living online. General education creates a shopping experience at best, giving students an excuse to cheat because they don’t see the value. Majors? Don’t even get me started on how dumb they are in an integrated and complex world. We’re still organized around 19th-century disciplines. And let’s not forget how we’ve labeled commuter students, adult learners, and part-timers “nontraditional” when they’re actually the majority.

It hurts me to say this, but maybe we were wrong in how we presented DEI. Not about how it’s an essential value for our democratic society, but that the practice toward inclusion has been undermined by often badly led, punitive, compliance-driven training that has pissed off many within the academy as well as those on the outside.

And anyone who’s set foot in a classroom recently knows that we are wrong if we think students are the same as they were even six years ago and we can keep teaching them as we always have. Plus, we need to do something for all those who left with some college, a boatload of debt, and deep animosity toward those of us who told them they’d be unemployed losers without a degree.

Shared governance might have become a disaster because of administrative usurpations, adverse selection with mediocre suck-ups to the administrators (career campus politicians, if you will) eschewing library or lab for the comforts of the faculty senate, and the propensity of academics to peacock and strain at gnats, which might be useful techniques in scholarship but lead to painful and tedious hours in shared governance.

General education might have become an exercise in rent-seeking as each department has to wet its beak and get a few courses in the cafeteria that is the course catalogue, to the exclusion of anything resembling a core curriculum that everyone, whether matriculant or professor, ought at least know the outlines thereof.  Serious thinkers knew of the trivium and quadrivium long before the nineteenth century.

Her complaint about "nontraditional" matriculants is complex.  Is she referring to what I call the Wayne State open access model of enrollment management, which produces a lot of dropouts?  Or is she conceding that such language carries an implicit deficiency among such matriculants, when contrasted with the matriculants on the high-school-to-residential summer camp campus track?

As far as "badly-led, punitive, compliance-driven training," well, that's what human resources departments do, isn't it, in order to ward off lawsuits?  That's internal and more of a concern among the faculty and the deanlets.  The Student Affairs curriculum is another matter.  Perhaps it's asking too much of anyone writing for Inside Higher Ed to concede that telling white guys they're toxic wasn't a good move.

Unfortunately, her concluding passage doubles down on more of the same.  "Maybe the public skepticism that we’re not responsive to today’s society is not entirely wrong. We’ve all chased the same narrow definition of prestige and how faculty productivity should be measured ... instead of asking if excellence might look different for different institutions serving different students."

I predict sales of U.S. News guides and the like will not be affected any time soon.