Universities in Crisis? From Compartmentalization to Collaboration

In the last several days there has been a flurry of articles bemoaning the condition of American higher education. Two stand out. In the New York Times religion professor Mark C. Taylor enjoyed comparing American graduate education to the US automotive industry. Ouch. It was small relief that he seemed to be thinking mainly about a handful of humanities disciplines. In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco traced the steady erosion of the American promise of social mobility through post-secondary education. In the wake of a financial crisis that has drained endowments and led to decreased public support for higher ed, Delbanco wonders how America can prevent its best universities from becoming finishing schools for the rich. In this post I will comment on Taylor's view, and in a future post I'll write about access and social mobility.

Taylor's complaints about the American university really have nothing to do with the current economic crisis -- but by now we know that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. So, Taylor uses analogies to Detroit and to Wall Street to call for more regulation of academia and to deplore the exploitation of graduate students who at larger universities work for low wages and few benefits. It's no news that financially it stinks to be a grad student -- especially if you are paying tuition or commuting to several schools as an adjunct to offer classes at less than decent wages. But if you go to graduate school to continue your education, and if you are able to teach subjects (or work on experiments) about which you are passionate -- then graduate study as a form of labor is far better than many entry level jobs in our economy. By the same token, if the "entry level" of grad student teaching is the only level available to grad students for many years... then Taylor is absolutely right to emphasize the inequities in the adjunct teaching sector of education.

The main complaint that Mark Taylor has with the American university is that it is inflexibly compartmentalized in disciplines and departments. This breeds specialization that stifles innovation among researchers and promotes parochialism in the curriculum. Taylor is certainly onto something here: it's a danger that was already looming in the early 1900s when the sociologist Max Weber warned of "specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart". Departments often protect the weakest elements of their disciplines and create "trade barriers" that inhibit productive collaboration. Religion and political science , for example, need to be brought together to examine contemporary issues of weapons and violence in the Middle East, or, for that matter, in the United States. To successfully confront the challenges we face in providing clean water to people in need (another of Taylor's examples), we will require expertise from such diverse fields as economics and geology, political science and chemistry.

I am very sympathetic to Taylor's call for collaboration and his aversion to over-specialization. Perhaps we are both influenced by having been undergrads at Wesleyan University -- Taylor graduating in 1968 and I a decade later. Wesleyan had taken a stand against departments and the overspecialization of education in the late 1950s by creating the College of Letters and the College of Social Studies. For the last fifty years these programs have b0een exploring cross-disciplinary frontiers and fighting against narrowing professionalism. Soon Wesleyan plans to begin the College of the Environment with the same goal of organizing a curriculum in response to problems and opportunities rather than in response to departmental "coverage." Perhaps our heady undergraduate days gave Prof. Taylor and me a taste for an education that inspired students to expand their intellectual horizons in the service of effective idealism rather than to shrink them in the service of disciplinary "progress." But obviously, I am biased!

Despite my agreement with Taylor about the need for collaboration and the curricular reform that goes with it, I do not share his call for increased regulation (who would do the regulating?) or for the abolition of tenure. Tenure is surely an imperfect system, but I haven't found an alternative that provides sufficient protection of academic freedom. And although I think it important not to let disciplines rule the curriculum, it is quixotic simply to call for the abolition of departments. As David Bell pointed out in the New Republic, it doesn't make sense to call for cross-disciplinary programs if there are no disciplines. Expertise does matter in the humanities and in the sciences. From language training to quantitative competency, there are skills that can't be suddenly wished into existence when it comes time to share them with collaborators

Our universities continue to attract students from around the world in ways that break down the analogy to the automobile industry. At the same time, if we are going to provide a stellar post-secondary education experience in the future, our colleges and universities must find a way to promote forms of creative specialization not threatened by collaboration. Taylor is quite right to call for opening up our schools to more flexible networks of research and learning.

The mission of American universities should include providing students with specialized skills that include a thirst and capacity for innovative collaboration beyond the disciplines and departments that taught the skills in the first place. Fulfilling this mission will sustain higher education, but more importantly it will shape the culture of the future.

Next time: access to higher education and social mobility

Comments

[elmerfude]

If there is an institution in America more in need of reform than the banks, it is higher education. Our state college has a president who is paid $ 600 K a year and is slated for a $ 500 K bonus. He also has a mansion and two cars provided. This is the same man who hired a provost after spending over $ 100 K on a head hunter. The provost lasted a few weeks before getting into a physical confrontation at a meeting. Because the president had signed a contract with the provost without apparently reading it, the provost is now teaching a single course in Russian history at a branch campus to 12 students and getting paid $ 240 K. In the meantime hundreds of teaching positions are going unfilled, tuition is going up, enrollments are being restricted and programs eliminated. When some irate taxpayers tried to speak at the regents meeting, we had to get the governor to intervene to get five minutes. We were basically threatened not to contact the governor again or show up at regents meetings (public meetings). College administration is an unaccountable, closed guild--a socialism of the well connected.

[fetchezlavache]

College administration is the highest form of life that seems to reproduce by fission. You hire a dean, and shortly afterwards there are assistant deans and associate deans, each with his or her own complete staff. You hire a provost, and then he develops a provost's council and eventually multiple councils, each member of which has a staff. What were formerly a few vice presidents have now fissioned into veeps for every function remotely imagineable, with multiple staffs. All of these administrators demand endless paperwork, most of it redundant. There are multiple levels of assessment, all of which overlap. Administrators and staff overwhelm the numbers of teaching faculty, who become report-generating personnel and little else. Academic programs are eliminated, tuition is raised, and no one even considers eliminating the jobs of the more parasitic administrators.

[jeanrenoir]

To get an insight into the collapse of educational ideals among the richest, most cynical American college students during the Age of Investment Banking, just check out the permanent orgy in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. These kids often grind out A's to get their i-bank jobs and get into Harvard B-school and Wharton, but their narcissism makes them cynically immune to anything a liberal education might have to offer, no matter how specialized or interdisciplinary their school might be. Wolfe was educated at W&L in an era (late 40s-early 50s) when the humanities truly meant something. Too bad all we can say now is, "Good-bye to all that." I write this as an English professor at a decent small liberal arts college who's been teaching for almost forty years.

[KillTheMessenger]

The time when I was a grad student was the best time in my life. The pay was not high, but it gave me board, food and the occasional flight to the US, which led to my current life circumstances.

If I could do it again, I would. Not once but all over and over and over again. And I wish everybody to have a similarly pleasurable experience at least once in their lives.

[NordicSci]

"It was small relief that he [Taylor] seemed to be thinking mainly about a handful of humanities disciplines". That was the same impression I got when I read Taylor's article. But this post didn't really elaborate, so allow me. There is more interdisciplinary interaction going on within professional schools and fields, for example, dealing with the environment, agriculture, and natural resources where people often trained in diverse natural and social science domains must work togther -- often with difficulty -- within the same department. In my experience reaching out to and collaborating with faculty colleagues located within "disciplined" departments is often difficult because their instinct is to "disicpline" the problem whereas the "professionally" trained tend to examine the problem as it exists in the real world of practice. Discipline has its virtue, but it is the "undisciplined" practition­er/profess­ional who is often more skilled (or at least practiced) in the art of cross-disciplinary collaboration.

[ScreenName05]

If we are going to have stellar colleges, then we are going to have to change how students go to college. Far too many students (old and young) are trying to go to college while working full time. While it is okay to get a quick business degree that way, it does not work for the arts or the sciences. Might suggest why we are declining in both areas. Money is important, and if all you worry about day and night is money and how you are going to pay next terms tuition, you aren't going to be a serious student. I had the leisure of getting a BA in Philosophy, during which I worked minimally and read voraciously. Not many students do that these days. When I got my MBA I was working full time, this left no time for extracurricular study, so I got exactly what was taught and nothing more. When I went back to law school at 51 years old, my wife was supporting me, so I had both the resources and time to learn. Without money and time, no student can excel or learn more than what is in the books in the class. This is what needs to change first, who the professors are and how they are organized has little or nothing to do with a real education. Put the horse in front of the cart, and the cart will go somewhere.

[KillTheMessenger]

The solution is easy: free college and university education for everyone who qualifies intellectually. It's a great system practiced in many countries and it leads to not only academic excellence but a generally better educated public.

[drymartini1]

agree partly KTM.

but free education in what? who chooses you can get education in what field?

should i as a taxpayer be subsidizing someone trying to study something in which there is no future prospects. How do i determine the economic value on the field that someone wants to study.

[hulagirrrl]

No not really KillTheMessenger, I do agree with free college education, but to tell the truth, my nephew studied law in Heidelberg for a very very long time, and I think that it is better to have the student pay at least something so that they do not become career students, as now many countries are starting to charge a fee.