I wish to see the day when colleges are led by people like you. You are the opposite of the spineless types that seem to have risen to the top at most institutions of higher education.
The problem is that teaching and researching is a lot more rewarding than being university president, that's why the people who can't do either end up in those positions instead. It may be cruel but perhaps the better approach would be to appoint someone against their will than picking someone who is crazy enough to want that job.
At one time, I thought I might be interested in college administration. My father told me this was a mistake. (He was a computer scientist who was forever being dragged against his will into administrative positions. He far preferred the creativity and independence of *doing the actual work.* Yes, the pay was better in administration, but the life was worse.) I didn't understand how right he must be until while chairing a committee to hire a provost, I learned that, for instance, the position had 15 direct reports that had standing weekly meetings of an hour each. And those 15 hours *every week* was a small fraction of the background noise of the job. I have known highly skilled, impressive, and charismatic administrators, and I don't know how they manage to be all those things while enjoying the job.
If you don't particularly like prestige or the illusion of power the only way to enjoy the job is probably knowing that you're doing it as a service to others. You do it so they don't have to.
Add to the endless meetings the possibility to be hauled in front of congress and made to look the fool in front of the whole country if you aren't careful, and somehow having to take responsibility or at least answer for anything that happens on your campus to the press.
It is tempting to apply that paradigm to political office, but it's still a problem of who gets to choose, as evidenced by bureaucratic appointments by the elected. We are finding ourselves in such a strange place now...
Well you would still have elections, just the candidates wouldn't be volunteers. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some work of fiction where this is part of the plot. Would be extra funny to see some people campaign against themselves.
"Would be extra funny to see some people campaign against themselves." Perhaps candidates would hire detective agencies to dig up dirt on themselves that they have forgotten, or chase down disgruntled former lovers and let them vent on camera...
Imagine going on a fake rant on Twitter about the moon being made out of cheese and everyone just reacting with a variation of "you're just saying that because you don't want to be president". Better to establish a track-record of erratic behavior while you're still young.
I have long considered that the desire for elected office should be prima fascia evidence of one's unsuitablility for that office. Aldermen, mayor's, congresspersons and even the President should be drafted, temporary positions with time off for productive performance. In 50 years I haven't figured out a way of doing so, alas.
I was, in a sense luckier than you or Bret. The attractions of academe left me fairly early before I had invested so much time, energy and finances in the system. I dropped out of HS to attend the local community college, which I was at for two quarters before I realized that my interest in marine biology equipped me for nothing but a teaching career. As the child of an academic I was quite aware of the limitations of such a career path. Diversity of origin has nothing on diversity of experience. It never ceases to amaze me how experience in one field can inform other areas of endeavor. I have been a landscaper, a commercial fisherman, a boat builder, a motorcycle mechanic, a welder, a computer operator, an electronics technician and made service calls on a lot of devices before retiring as a Building Automation technician for the local El-High school system. I just shake my head at the thought of being "trapped" in a job that was once interesting but had ceased to be long before I reached retirement age. I come from a family of MD's. I got to learn first-hand what a person with all the education in the world in a narrow discipline could damage by thinking he or she knows a lot (or anything) about things outside that field. Too happy for words to describe how happy I am to be a jack-of-all-trades. I can't do it all at my age, but I know enough to recognize good vs poor workmanship. That is what educational institutions should be doing instead of credentialing a crop of mediocre "yes-persons".
One thing that we should be teaching children, and encouraging in adults, is that being a generalist is valuable far beyond what you might imagine. You can be a jack-of-(many)-trades and, yes, sacrifice some depth if you had instead focused on only one, but the benefits in breadth are immeasurable. How valuable to know not just how one system works, but how many do. This holds for both physical systems, and social ones.
Higher education--actually any form of structured learning including hired tutors--began long ago with those who could afford it and it naturally became associated with wealth, and the a priori assumption became that access to wealth would be naturally associated with it as a sort of given, a sine qua non that has carried through to more recent institutions of universal education including K-12. I tend to think the possibility of gaining wisdom there has always been secondary at best, though those educators who aspire to 'liberal arts' values do generally claim to have that elusory/illusory goal in mind.
As Heather says it is only found in experience, while higher education has become as likely to detract from as it is to add to it, depending mostly on the individual and to a lesser extent upon the teacher, the best of which might hope to enhance wisdom's potential in more than a few. I'm just saying that wisdom can grow from experience no matter what you do. I do not think institutions of higher ed necessarily generate wisdom any more than any other path. And they currently may be generating wealth for fewer and fewer--and certainly generating debt for more and more.
Historical and Bureaucratic constraint. I am so happy to learn these terms! I have been searching for a way to describe organizational stagnation over time and to get at why it happens.
I do think it's a useful framing. I showed an early draft of this piece--in 2018--to the former provost at Evergreen, an evolutionary biologist himself, and the first casualty of the Bridges administration, back before any of the rest of the world had heard of Evergreen (Bridges fired him because he insisted on speaking truth to power). The former provost / current evolutionary biologist was also taken with this framing, which helped reinforce my sense that it could be usefully deployed more widely.
Historical constraint is a concept that more attention should be paid to. I was first introduced to it with Richard Dawkins' "evolutionary plateaus". A real "slap my head" moment when I got what he meant.
Spot on, as usual. You never disappoint. I’ll be long gone before the faltering ship of higher education rights itself, but it's heartening to know there are wise voices like you and Dr. Weinstein taking on the charge of enlightenment.
I think that to get "better" market forces need to come into play.
The cost of an education should be closely tied to the return on investment - ROI.
Then let colleges adapt or fall.
A great start - that would require 60 conservatives in the senate - would be that the colleges themselves finance the student loans. Oh , and we need to go back to bankruptcy as an option for broke grads.
I'll bet 10 cents that those 2 changes would would cause colleges to get very practical in 10 years.
Yes, yes, yes! I'm convinced we got ourselves into this student loan pickle because the colleges have no skin in the game. If they can pack their halls with debt-ridden students, it's a big win for them, but they face no loss if those students later cannot pay off those loans.
How much of the college administrator overhead is really just the counterpart to the federal bureaucracy? Get the Feds out of higher education completely. No more funding, no more Title Whatever, no more loan guarantees.
I firmly believe that if we don't believe in freedom of speech even for our enemies, we don't believe in it at all. Wrong ideas ought to be allowed to die an ignominious death in the court of public opinion, and that, perhaps a bit ironically, requires freedom of speech.
That said, it takes a great deal of faith in the common man to trust the court of public opinion to get things right when we are being led by college presidents who cannot bring themselves to utter the words, "agitating for genocide goes against our Code of Conduct," and a Supreme Court justice insists she can't tell what a woman is because she's not a biologist.
However, I DID smile when reading this otherwise depressing post. The line, "faculty trolls hiding under Bridges" assures me that all is not yet lost.
Modern education—hand in hand with the legacy media—has corrupted the label. However, the prior position of Benito Mussolini was the journalist/editor of the Italian Socialist Party's paper Avanti!. Mussolini split with International Communism over the Internationalist part. His thinking was that to be an internationalist was to be a colonialist ... but that's neither here nor there.
Mussolini founded a social justice based government, where unnamed violent protestors attacked those who questioned the government policies, the police arrested the victims, the media denounced the victims as attacking the just order of society.
Beautifully, painfully written. From my low-level perspective on higher ed., I've been saddled with managing graduates (over at least the last 15 or so years), who can barely string together several sentences that convey the intention of their communication, cannot analyze beyond the most superficial evidence to dig into the root cause of an operational infraction, display an obtuse inability to apply logic to the identification of a control gap... I'm dyin' 'ere!! My instinct is to look askance and ask these little dunderheads how tf they expect to excel when every thought, analysis, interpretation, correlation, etc. is demanded to be handed to them, pre-digested. I remember an experiment that tested which dog breeds demonstrated the highest intelligence - their ability to select the correct cup in which a ball had been hidden, was the challenge. To keep some semblance of sanity, I've resorted to thinking of these fraudulently awarded graduates (under grads AND advanced degree holders). as the mutts of the pack. To all of you academics, PLEASE stop! The dilution of the requirements to be awarded a college degree has made its value, meaningless.
I finished a Spanish degree this summer during a study abroad. My original degrees, a BS and minor in German were completed in the 80's. I was horrified at how dumbed down the in person instruction was. Most of my fellow young students were ill prepared for academic work. Courses that are now 300 and 400 would have been 200 back in the day. There were no more highly specific courses, all were survey courses. With my German minor we would devote an entire quarter to one author or shorter time period so we could dig deeper. No more.
Before my summer classes all my classes were online and those were far more rigorous. The students were mostly older in the online program with jobs and other obligations. The online program is run parallel to the campus program as a private business and there is no tenure. The primary goal of most of the students was to learn and as almost all communication was in wiriting, I was well prepared for essay tests and the like.
We were told all students would pass no matter how bad their work and some was truly awful. The one professor who was frustrated and more strict got in trouble from the administration. I felt my degree was deeply degraded by low standards.
There was no drill or practice of grammatical forms to speak of, if I had not already known Spanish from living in Latin America, it would have been worse. A grammatical topic was introduced, used a few times, then dropped. For me it was not nearly enough practice and I plan to go back and study in one of the little language schools to improve further.
BTW what is the deal with the 5 paragraph essay? Could anything be more boring?
Feeling your frustration - especially since your hard-earned degree has the same value as any other.
Perhaps keeping that gravy train rolling right along, bursting with admission dollars, is justification enough to turn a blind eye. Not discouraging a middling student body with high expectations, and propping them up with a passing grade for placing their name on the test sheet (anachronistic reference alert!) is purely a business decision - one with a dire societal impact. Any more nefarious rationale is too disturbing to even consider.
I often got the feeling that with school and university it's not really about teaching people how to think critically, how to learn or how to be disciplined from within. Instead what a lot of people learn is obedience, how to "guess the teacher's password" to get rewarded with grades - it's more important to have the right answer than it is to be able to deduce it from first principles. Also a dependence on authority figures is fostered. This reminds me a lot of the Prussian education system where the main goal was to produce obedient subjects and soldiers and keep the children out of the labor market so they're healthy enough to fight in wars for the monarchs.
I was lucky in a sense that I had the internet (and prior to that the library) to learn stuff on my own, otherwise I'd be a lot worse off. I think that's a lot more difficult these days since social media, porn and video games offer the better dopamine hit, although there is also a lot more and better educational content - you can learn from the best people in the world instead of the poor schmuck that chose to be a teacher at your school.
As part of a mid-life crisis, my husband went to graduate school at 39 and obtained a PhD in math at 42. He solved an unsolved problem in his field and is still be cited. Going in he wanted to teach, but the experience soured him on academics. He said he had never seen so many deeply arrogant people who had never accomplished anything in their lives. Most had a poor work ethic as soon as they had tenure. There was lots of academic theft and his thesis advisor taught him how to prevent it. My husband would get all teary eyed when students emailed him with thanks because they had never truly understood the concepts before. He is a phenomenal teacher, but was driven out. He also would have had to start at ground zero as an older white man because all of the patents he filed in his prior work count for nothing in academia. He went back to industry where people were nicer. For the record, he went to granduate school after a stint at Microsoft in the 90's and he considered that environment far kinder.
"We need look forward, rather than back, but we arrived here on the shoulders of giants, and we ought to learn from them. In 1871, at his inauguration as the president of the University of Michigan, James B. Angell, who has been credited with overseeing Michigan’s transformation into an elite public university, gave a speech that is still worthy of our consideration. Angell argued that an institution should “never insist on [the faculty] pronouncing the shibboleths of sect or party.”23 All modern institutions should heed his words well."
Ah, a thousand times YES.
And so we ought to be looking back to learn from the giants - we seem to have forgotten they left us lessons.
I mentioned on your post on X RE this piece that I'm finding myself looking back to the University of Munich, both prior to and during the White Rose Resistance Movement. It feels as if the ensuing 80 years haven't happened at all. I'm chilled to the bone that this is even possible.
I wish to see the day when colleges are led by people like you. You are the opposite of the spineless types that seem to have risen to the top at most institutions of higher education.
Too many of the spineless are rising in all institutions.
The problem is that teaching and researching is a lot more rewarding than being university president, that's why the people who can't do either end up in those positions instead. It may be cruel but perhaps the better approach would be to appoint someone against their will than picking someone who is crazy enough to want that job.
At one time, I thought I might be interested in college administration. My father told me this was a mistake. (He was a computer scientist who was forever being dragged against his will into administrative positions. He far preferred the creativity and independence of *doing the actual work.* Yes, the pay was better in administration, but the life was worse.) I didn't understand how right he must be until while chairing a committee to hire a provost, I learned that, for instance, the position had 15 direct reports that had standing weekly meetings of an hour each. And those 15 hours *every week* was a small fraction of the background noise of the job. I have known highly skilled, impressive, and charismatic administrators, and I don't know how they manage to be all those things while enjoying the job.
If you don't particularly like prestige or the illusion of power the only way to enjoy the job is probably knowing that you're doing it as a service to others. You do it so they don't have to.
Add to the endless meetings the possibility to be hauled in front of congress and made to look the fool in front of the whole country if you aren't careful, and somehow having to take responsibility or at least answer for anything that happens on your campus to the press.
That strikes too close to
home. My mother was ABD (all but dissertation) when she grabbed an administrative opening and never looked back.
It is tempting to apply that paradigm to political office, but it's still a problem of who gets to choose, as evidenced by bureaucratic appointments by the elected. We are finding ourselves in such a strange place now...
Well you would still have elections, just the candidates wouldn't be volunteers. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some work of fiction where this is part of the plot. Would be extra funny to see some people campaign against themselves.
"Would be extra funny to see some people campaign against themselves." Perhaps candidates would hire detective agencies to dig up dirt on themselves that they have forgotten, or chase down disgruntled former lovers and let them vent on camera...
Imagine going on a fake rant on Twitter about the moon being made out of cheese and everyone just reacting with a variation of "you're just saying that because you don't want to be president". Better to establish a track-record of erratic behavior while you're still young.
I have long considered that the desire for elected office should be prima fascia evidence of one's unsuitablility for that office. Aldermen, mayor's, congresspersons and even the President should be drafted, temporary positions with time off for productive performance. In 50 years I haven't figured out a way of doing so, alas.
I was, in a sense luckier than you or Bret. The attractions of academe left me fairly early before I had invested so much time, energy and finances in the system. I dropped out of HS to attend the local community college, which I was at for two quarters before I realized that my interest in marine biology equipped me for nothing but a teaching career. As the child of an academic I was quite aware of the limitations of such a career path. Diversity of origin has nothing on diversity of experience. It never ceases to amaze me how experience in one field can inform other areas of endeavor. I have been a landscaper, a commercial fisherman, a boat builder, a motorcycle mechanic, a welder, a computer operator, an electronics technician and made service calls on a lot of devices before retiring as a Building Automation technician for the local El-High school system. I just shake my head at the thought of being "trapped" in a job that was once interesting but had ceased to be long before I reached retirement age. I come from a family of MD's. I got to learn first-hand what a person with all the education in the world in a narrow discipline could damage by thinking he or she knows a lot (or anything) about things outside that field. Too happy for words to describe how happy I am to be a jack-of-all-trades. I can't do it all at my age, but I know enough to recognize good vs poor workmanship. That is what educational institutions should be doing instead of credentialing a crop of mediocre "yes-persons".
One thing that we should be teaching children, and encouraging in adults, is that being a generalist is valuable far beyond what you might imagine. You can be a jack-of-(many)-trades and, yes, sacrifice some depth if you had instead focused on only one, but the benefits in breadth are immeasurable. How valuable to know not just how one system works, but how many do. This holds for both physical systems, and social ones.
Higher education--actually any form of structured learning including hired tutors--began long ago with those who could afford it and it naturally became associated with wealth, and the a priori assumption became that access to wealth would be naturally associated with it as a sort of given, a sine qua non that has carried through to more recent institutions of universal education including K-12. I tend to think the possibility of gaining wisdom there has always been secondary at best, though those educators who aspire to 'liberal arts' values do generally claim to have that elusory/illusory goal in mind.
As Heather says it is only found in experience, while higher education has become as likely to detract from as it is to add to it, depending mostly on the individual and to a lesser extent upon the teacher, the best of which might hope to enhance wisdom's potential in more than a few. I'm just saying that wisdom can grow from experience no matter what you do. I do not think institutions of higher ed necessarily generate wisdom any more than any other path. And they currently may be generating wealth for fewer and fewer--and certainly generating debt for more and more.
Historical and Bureaucratic constraint. I am so happy to learn these terms! I have been searching for a way to describe organizational stagnation over time and to get at why it happens.
I do think it's a useful framing. I showed an early draft of this piece--in 2018--to the former provost at Evergreen, an evolutionary biologist himself, and the first casualty of the Bridges administration, back before any of the rest of the world had heard of Evergreen (Bridges fired him because he insisted on speaking truth to power). The former provost / current evolutionary biologist was also taken with this framing, which helped reinforce my sense that it could be usefully deployed more widely.
Historical constraint is a concept that more attention should be paid to. I was first introduced to it with Richard Dawkins' "evolutionary plateaus". A real "slap my head" moment when I got what he meant.
Spot on, as usual. You never disappoint. I’ll be long gone before the faltering ship of higher education rights itself, but it's heartening to know there are wise voices like you and Dr. Weinstein taking on the charge of enlightenment.
I think that to get "better" market forces need to come into play.
The cost of an education should be closely tied to the return on investment - ROI.
Then let colleges adapt or fall.
A great start - that would require 60 conservatives in the senate - would be that the colleges themselves finance the student loans. Oh , and we need to go back to bankruptcy as an option for broke grads.
I'll bet 10 cents that those 2 changes would would cause colleges to get very practical in 10 years.
Yes, yes, yes! I'm convinced we got ourselves into this student loan pickle because the colleges have no skin in the game. If they can pack their halls with debt-ridden students, it's a big win for them, but they face no loss if those students later cannot pay off those loans.
How much of the college administrator overhead is really just the counterpart to the federal bureaucracy? Get the Feds out of higher education completely. No more funding, no more Title Whatever, no more loan guarantees.
Stanford has more administrators than students.
An option I've proposed is to make the debt a 3-way split if the graduate can't get a job: 1/3 each for the college, the student and the bank.
I firmly believe that if we don't believe in freedom of speech even for our enemies, we don't believe in it at all. Wrong ideas ought to be allowed to die an ignominious death in the court of public opinion, and that, perhaps a bit ironically, requires freedom of speech.
That said, it takes a great deal of faith in the common man to trust the court of public opinion to get things right when we are being led by college presidents who cannot bring themselves to utter the words, "agitating for genocide goes against our Code of Conduct," and a Supreme Court justice insists she can't tell what a woman is because she's not a biologist.
However, I DID smile when reading this otherwise depressing post. The line, "faculty trolls hiding under Bridges" assures me that all is not yet lost.
Modern education—hand in hand with the legacy media—has corrupted the label. However, the prior position of Benito Mussolini was the journalist/editor of the Italian Socialist Party's paper Avanti!. Mussolini split with International Communism over the Internationalist part. His thinking was that to be an internationalist was to be a colonialist ... but that's neither here nor there.
Mussolini founded a social justice based government, where unnamed violent protestors attacked those who questioned the government policies, the police arrested the victims, the media denounced the victims as attacking the just order of society.
Kinda like what happened at Evergreen.
Beautifully, painfully written. From my low-level perspective on higher ed., I've been saddled with managing graduates (over at least the last 15 or so years), who can barely string together several sentences that convey the intention of their communication, cannot analyze beyond the most superficial evidence to dig into the root cause of an operational infraction, display an obtuse inability to apply logic to the identification of a control gap... I'm dyin' 'ere!! My instinct is to look askance and ask these little dunderheads how tf they expect to excel when every thought, analysis, interpretation, correlation, etc. is demanded to be handed to them, pre-digested. I remember an experiment that tested which dog breeds demonstrated the highest intelligence - their ability to select the correct cup in which a ball had been hidden, was the challenge. To keep some semblance of sanity, I've resorted to thinking of these fraudulently awarded graduates (under grads AND advanced degree holders). as the mutts of the pack. To all of you academics, PLEASE stop! The dilution of the requirements to be awarded a college degree has made its value, meaningless.
I finished a Spanish degree this summer during a study abroad. My original degrees, a BS and minor in German were completed in the 80's. I was horrified at how dumbed down the in person instruction was. Most of my fellow young students were ill prepared for academic work. Courses that are now 300 and 400 would have been 200 back in the day. There were no more highly specific courses, all were survey courses. With my German minor we would devote an entire quarter to one author or shorter time period so we could dig deeper. No more.
Before my summer classes all my classes were online and those were far more rigorous. The students were mostly older in the online program with jobs and other obligations. The online program is run parallel to the campus program as a private business and there is no tenure. The primary goal of most of the students was to learn and as almost all communication was in wiriting, I was well prepared for essay tests and the like.
We were told all students would pass no matter how bad their work and some was truly awful. The one professor who was frustrated and more strict got in trouble from the administration. I felt my degree was deeply degraded by low standards.
There was no drill or practice of grammatical forms to speak of, if I had not already known Spanish from living in Latin America, it would have been worse. A grammatical topic was introduced, used a few times, then dropped. For me it was not nearly enough practice and I plan to go back and study in one of the little language schools to improve further.
BTW what is the deal with the 5 paragraph essay? Could anything be more boring?
Deliberate irony? ;-)
Feeling your frustration - especially since your hard-earned degree has the same value as any other.
Perhaps keeping that gravy train rolling right along, bursting with admission dollars, is justification enough to turn a blind eye. Not discouraging a middling student body with high expectations, and propping them up with a passing grade for placing their name on the test sheet (anachronistic reference alert!) is purely a business decision - one with a dire societal impact. Any more nefarious rationale is too disturbing to even consider.
I often got the feeling that with school and university it's not really about teaching people how to think critically, how to learn or how to be disciplined from within. Instead what a lot of people learn is obedience, how to "guess the teacher's password" to get rewarded with grades - it's more important to have the right answer than it is to be able to deduce it from first principles. Also a dependence on authority figures is fostered. This reminds me a lot of the Prussian education system where the main goal was to produce obedient subjects and soldiers and keep the children out of the labor market so they're healthy enough to fight in wars for the monarchs.
I was lucky in a sense that I had the internet (and prior to that the library) to learn stuff on my own, otherwise I'd be a lot worse off. I think that's a lot more difficult these days since social media, porn and video games offer the better dopamine hit, although there is also a lot more and better educational content - you can learn from the best people in the world instead of the poor schmuck that chose to be a teacher at your school.
As part of a mid-life crisis, my husband went to graduate school at 39 and obtained a PhD in math at 42. He solved an unsolved problem in his field and is still be cited. Going in he wanted to teach, but the experience soured him on academics. He said he had never seen so many deeply arrogant people who had never accomplished anything in their lives. Most had a poor work ethic as soon as they had tenure. There was lots of academic theft and his thesis advisor taught him how to prevent it. My husband would get all teary eyed when students emailed him with thanks because they had never truly understood the concepts before. He is a phenomenal teacher, but was driven out. He also would have had to start at ground zero as an older white man because all of the patents he filed in his prior work count for nothing in academia. He went back to industry where people were nicer. For the record, he went to granduate school after a stint at Microsoft in the 90's and he considered that environment far kinder.
"We need look forward, rather than back, but we arrived here on the shoulders of giants, and we ought to learn from them. In 1871, at his inauguration as the president of the University of Michigan, James B. Angell, who has been credited with overseeing Michigan’s transformation into an elite public university, gave a speech that is still worthy of our consideration. Angell argued that an institution should “never insist on [the faculty] pronouncing the shibboleths of sect or party.”23 All modern institutions should heed his words well."
Ah, a thousand times YES.
And so we ought to be looking back to learn from the giants - we seem to have forgotten they left us lessons.
I mentioned on your post on X RE this piece that I'm finding myself looking back to the University of Munich, both prior to and during the White Rose Resistance Movement. It feels as if the ensuing 80 years haven't happened at all. I'm chilled to the bone that this is even possible.
I frequently make reference 'intellectual incest' and academic 'inbreeding'.
What kind of personality type has any desire to be part of what 'higher' education has become?
I don't know if I can share this link or not, but I'm going to try; I think it's definitely on topic.
Ex-DEI Director Speaks Out | Glenn Loury & Tabia Lee | The Glenn Show https://youtu.be/zEVaao8wzYc?feature=shared