American universities are largely free from many of the problems that plague K-12 education.  Having spent a year each in four universities abroad--Macedonia, France, Bulgaria, and Morocco--I always come home thankful for the experience, but reminded of how strong our university system is and wanting to tell students how very lucky they are to be a part of our system, especially with its flexibility and resources.  In the foreign universities where I taught, the students had no choices about what classes they'd take, when they'd take them, or what professors would teach them.  The libraries, if they existed at all, were pathetically inadequate.  Grading was often harsh and arbitrary.  And there were rarely any second chances.  The students were eager and usually hard-working despite the sad conditions.  But the systems themselves led to constant frustration for both students and professors.  (I see a blog entry about one of these years abroad in the future.)

Probably the direst problem faced by American universities at the moment is the cost.  As a chair advising students, I'd be horrified by the huge amount of debt that students had accumulated--and Washburn is a comparatively inexpensive school.  But I want to focus today on a couple of examples of how the business model is gaining purchase in American universities: as I said last time, students are viewed as customers who shop around for schools as if they were looking for the most comfortable new Nikes.  In a business model, the bottom line is just that: the bottom line, i.e. profit.  Marketing becomes more important than curriculum.  A student welcome center is a higher priority than an expanded library.  Reliance on adjuncts and non-tenured lecturers becomes more economical than a stable, experienced, and tenured faculty  And because many people love to teach, we were always able to find enthusiastic and dedicated teachers who would move to Topeka to teach four classes a semester for $30,000 a year.  All that is not what education ought to be about. 

Example #1:  One semester when I was chair of the English department, there was suddenly enormous pressure to remove our cap of 22 students in each section of freshman composition.  The administration demanded a justification, since the more bodies in each class, the greater the profit.  So I took time out from teaching and administering to make the case, including, of course, what I thought was the self-evident notion that small classes, especially in a labor-intensive course like composition, made for better teaching.  That propostion wasn't self evident to those in charge, so I was asked to supply a bibliography of sources that supported the idea.  That required more time to compile.  Grousing silently, I made a list with annotations.  And the response from the president's assistant was, "I hope you don't think the president has time to actually read these sources."  Was there one argument I made that got attention?  Yes.  I suggested that instead of removing the cap, we lower it to 19.  The U.S. News ranking of colleges, which, whatever its validity, can be (and is) used as a key marketing tool, gives universities extra weight for the number of small classes--and  <20 is the cutoff point.   In the long run, however, I was just stubborn, knowing that after awhile, the administration would have other things to worry about, and the focus would move elsewhere if I didn't give in. 

Example #2.  The most unpleasant experience I had in my nearly 40 years at Washburn was the two years I spent on an ad hoc committee on general education.  The second most unpleasant had been a similar committee to revise general education requirements twenty years earlier.  At that time, our committee began work by literally throwing the two years' work of the previous interation of the committee into the wastebasket.  I had thought the previous gen ed requirements worked very well; they provided both rigor and flexibility, but the administration had decided it was time for new ones.  It was, until 20 years later, the most acrimonious committee I'd ever been on.  Much of our time was spent in a power struggle between the faculty member who was the putative chair and the vice-president for academic affairs who wanted to--and eventually did--control the outcome.  My continuing argument with the VPAA--and one I lost--was whether general education courses had to be limited to those taken in the first two years of college.  In what we produced, a student couldn't get general education credit for Shakespeare or American literature or any majors course, but could get credit for science fiction.  As in so many academic discussions these days, the what, the content was less important than a set of consistent, if arbitrary rules.

The ad hoc committee I was a part of twenty years later was formed because the Academic Affairs committee had been trying for two years with no success to revise the general education program.  The main motivations for the revisions were marketing (with so many students transferring, how could we make our gen ed program less onerous and therefore more attractive) and "accountability," which equals making sure that we pleased our accreditation agency by making everything "assessable."  The VPAA who formed the committee was new and had little sense of the history of the debate and less of the vested interests that were involved.  Her degree was in nursing.  Now, after the last 14 months, I have enormous respect for nurses, who are a valuable part of my treatment.  But her speciality did mean that she had never taught a general education course or even worked in a department that taught gen ed.  She was a nice person (I use the past tense because she was soon fired) who simply didn't understand the issue.  She trusted me and would sometimes come to my office to discuss what was happening, or more accurately not happening.  But no matter how much I explained, her most frequent response was, "I can't seem to wrap my head around that."  To head the ad hoc committee, she appointed a professor who held an endowed chair in the business department.  In addition to his being the single most disagreeable colleague I ever worked with, he, too, had no experience with general education.  One of the first things the committee did was rule all discussions of curriculum off the table.  We were also told that just like in a corporation, we had to be team players and present a united front.  When I wrote a dissenting opinion to my fellow committee membes, he hit 'reply all' to say that he would no longer read my e-mails and recommended that my other colleagues just delete them as well.

After two years of frustration, the committee declared itself a success and sent the issue back to Academic Affairs, where it had originated.  It is now six years later, the VPAA has been sent packing, and here's what the committees have accomplished:  the word 'skills' (since curriculum wasn't being considered) was replaced by 'learning objectives.'  The number of skills, er...learning objectives, was reduced from nine to seven.  They are all formless and vague; most of us could come up with a pretty good approximation in a few minutes--critical thinking, ability to analyze and synthesize, appreciation of diversity, etc.  It's not that they're objectionable (unless you're a Texas Republican who doesn't approve of critical thinking); it's that they have no shape or content.  And finally, instead of having to satisfy three of nine, new courses must satisfy only one of the seven "Single Learning Objectives."  Hanging over all six years of argument was a fear of our accrediting agency, once called the North Central something-or-other, now renamed the Orwellian sounding Higher Learning Commission.  The first question that greeted any proposal during the six (and counting) years of debate was would the HLC view it as assessable.  Innovation was always suspect.  And how were courses like freshman comp. to be assessed?  The buzzword was rubric.  For composition or literary analysis, just reduce the qualities to a checklist, each given a numerical value.  Once everything has been reduced to a number, every student, every teacher, every class can now be assessed with a certain assurance. 

I'd like to think that my two examples aren't representative of current thinking or that if they are, the pendulum will swing again, and universities won't succomb to the business model of profit and "accountability."  But as economic pressures increase, especially at public universities, I'm not optimistic that a turnaround is about to occur.