Hardy - Campus Crisis

ALSO OF INTEREST AND FROM MCFARLAND

Light of My Life: Love, Time and Memory in Nabokovs Lolita,
by James D. Hardy, Jr., and Ann Martin (2011)

Baseball and the Mythic Moment:
How We Remember the National Game,
by James D. Hardy, Jr. (2007)

The New York Giants Base Ball Club:
The Growth of a Team and a Sport, 1870 to 1900,
by James D. Hardy, Jr. (1996; softcover 2006; large print 2009)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2910-0

2017 James D. Hardy, Jr., and Ann Martin. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover images 2017 iStock

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

To our spouses and children,
who have put up with an awful lot

We acknowledge a debt of encouragement and support to Mrs. Dorothy McCaughey, rector of the residential college where both authors teach. She gave us time to work and believed in the project. Her support was a very present help through all the years of working on the manuscript. We acknowledge also a debt to Professor Billy Seay, retired dean of the Honors College at LSU.

This book explores current academic issues, the most significant of which is funding, or the lack of it. American universities are chronically short of money, and since the crash of 2008, they are shorter yet. They lack the funds to enhance or sometimes even to maintain excellence. Public agencies, municipal, state, and federal, are not able to sustain support for higher education. Everything happening within the academy flows from that sad and simple fact. Moreover, lack of money is not a problem that universities can solve on their own. Tuition and fees do not cover costs and cannot be endlessly increased. Without substantial extramural funding, now mostly public, virtually all the 4,000 or so American colleges and universities would have to close their doors. Money, as Thomas Carlyle has noted, is miraculous, and that is never more so true than in university education.

This book also examines university structure and management, which have become contentious issues in a time of fiscal shortfall. Many voices have been calling for a fundamental restructuring of higher education. We cannot allow ourselves to be associated with that thesis. Actually, universities work well, and until the last classroom is closed, the last professor laid off, and the plant sold for scrap, universities will continue to function as they always have. Those who propose innovation, whether technological or administrative, have not shown a better way to educate millions of students at the university level.

Rules organizing the University of Paris in 1215 retain their effectiveness today. The basic university structure, which is hierarchical, anti-democratic, and non-egalitarian, sustains three fundamental university functions: collecting knowledge, teaching students, and educating the faculty. These three interrelated functions define a working university. There are, of course, in education as in everything, glitches, mistakes, and heartrending tales of woe. But generally, modern American universities are succeeding at their triple task. They do not stand in desperate, or even modest, need of internal reform. But they do stand in serious need of support.

We have examined American universities from both a narrative and an analytical perspective. Universities exist within the river of time, so we have considered them historically. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, universities were a product of creation; for us in the twenty-first century, they are a product of evolution. Leaving out their history, whether in Europe or America, gives the writer and leaves the reader with the impression that universities can be rearranged willy-nilly like a box of Legos. In our time, universities can be established but not created; they are now organic.

Universities are institutions, so we have analyzed them in terms of structure and function. We have found that neither politics nor technology can create a new university. A political university is merely an ideological re-education camp. Online technology can extend the reach of a university but cannot replace its campus or organizational structure; it can enhance only its function of collecting knowledge. And, if you start a university from scratch, you will build an institution with the structure and functions of the university we have now. The American university is the way it is and does the things it does because that is the way it works best.

Through all the history and analysis, we have asked a single basic question. Given the current (and inevitable) structure, given the current (and necessary) functions, given the current (and required) educational and research role in a democratic society, given all that, are American colleges and universities doing their job well? And the answer, it seems to us, is yes. American universities are doing their jobs quite well. They arent perfect. Nothing is. For every ointment there is a fly. And the proposed innovations? Will they help? Because universities are doing a good job generally, the innovations will affect higher education only at the margins, sometimes for better but all too often for worse.

Our examination of the academy, and our experience within it (we are both lifers) has led us to several overlapping conclusions. Some are pleasing, to us, anyway; others discouraging, but that is always the way of the world. The first group involves the institutional university, a medieval survivor that, fortunately, works better now than it did then. American universities are run well, contrary to a lot of current chatter.

True enough, universities are bureaucratic institutions; like all bureaucracies, they are run with a bias favoring routine over innovation and rules over people. This reality may be regarded as part of the human condition. But university administration is not really oppressive, though on occasion it is administratively intrusive. In spite of political correctness, academic freedom is generally respected, and administrators usually prefer achievement to incompetence.

Moreover, the basic university structure, inherited from medieval Paris, will remain intact. Professors will teach students as they always have. Students will be taught (and possibly learn) the standard academic subjects. Libraries will collect knowledge and university museums will preserve artifacts, all in the usual manner. The university will support research and publication by the faculty, just as before. These three basic university functions, teaching students, collecting knowledge, and supporting scholarship, seem permanent.

A second general conclusion involves credential creep, the slow but inexorable rise in credentials a person needs to compete in the job market of a knowledge society. After World War II, the bachelors degree was the social standard, but that standard continues to rise. In another working generation (4045 years), a bachelors degree wont be enough. Colleges and universities will benefit from this social trend, serving ever more customers, as some chancellors now call students, for ever-longer stints at the university. Students, of course, might see credential creep and its attendant costs a bit differently, but they will still need that next degree or certificate.