Dan Clawson - The Future of Higher Education

The Future of Higher Education

Dan Clawson
Max Page

Higher education is more important than ever, for individual success and for national economic growth. And yet higher education in the United States is in crisis: public funding has been in free fall; tuition has skyrocketed making colleges and universities less accessible; basic structures such as tenure are under assault. The Future of Higher Education analyzes the crisis in higher education, describing how a dominant, neo-liberal political ideology has significantly changed the U.S. system of higher education. The book examines the contemporary landscape of higher education institutions and asks and answers these questions: Who is able to attend college? Who pays for our system of higher education? Who works at and who governs colleges and universities? The book concludes with a plan for radically revitalizing higher education in the United States.

Dan Clawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author or editor (sometimes with others) of seven books and numerous articles, including Public Sociology (2007) and The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (2003). He is a former president of the UMass faculty union and serves on the board of the statewide Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Max Page is Professor of Architecture and History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The Creative Destruction of Manhattan (1999) and The Citys End (2008), is a former president of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty and librarian union at UMass Amherst, and serves on the Executive Committee of the 110,000-member Massachusetts Teachers Association.

The goal of this new, unique Series is to offer readable, teachable thinking frames on todays social problems and social issues by leading scholars. These are available for view on http://routledge.customgateway.com/routledge-social-issues.html.

For instructors teaching a wide range of courses in the social sciences, the Routledge Social Issues Collection now offers the best of both worlds: originally written short texts that provide overviews to important social issues as well as teachable excerpts from larger works previously published by Rout-ledge and other presses.

As an instructor, click to the website to view the library and decide how to build your custom anthology and which thinking frames to assign. Students can choose to receive the assigned materials in print and/or electronic formats at an affordable price.

Body Problems
Running and Living Long in a Fast-Food Society
Ben Agger

Sex, Drugs, and Death
Addressing Youth Problems in American Society
Tammy Anderson

The Stupidity Epidemic
Worrying About Students, Schools, and Americas Future
Joel Best

Empire Versus Democracy
The Triumph of Corporate and Military Power
Carl Boggs

Contentious Identities
Ethnic, Religious, and Nationalist Conflicts in Todays World
Daniel Chirot

The Future of Higher Education
Dan Clawson and Max Page

Waste and Consumption
Capitalism, the Environment, and the Life of Things
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

Rapid Climate Change
Causes, Consequences, and Solutions
Scott G. McNall

The Problem of Emotions in Societies
Jonathan H. Turner

Outsourcing the Womb
Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market
France Winddance Twine

Changing Times for Black Professionals
Adia Harvey Wingfield

Why Nations Go to War
A Sociology of Military Conflict
Mark Worrell

Dan Clawson
Max Page
University of California, Riverside

First published 2011
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Taylor & Francis

Typeset in Garamond and Gill Sans by EvS Communication Networx, Inc.

The rights of Dan Clawson and Max Page to be identified as authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Clawson, Dan.
The future of higher education / Dan Clawson, Max Page.
p. cm. (Framing 21st century social issues)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Education, Higher. 2. Universities and colleges. I. Page, Max. II. Title.
LB2325.C594 2011
378dc22
2010028383

ISBN13: 978-0-415-89206-3 (pbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-83418-3 (ebk)

The world in the early 21st century is beset with problemsa troubled economy, global warming, oil spills, religious and national conflict, poverty, HIV, health problems associated with sedentary lifestyles. Virtually no nation is exempt, and everyone, even in affluent countries, feels the impact of these global issues.

Since its inception in the 19th century, sociology has been the academic discipline dedicated to analyzing social problems. It is still so today. Sociologists offer not only diagnoses; they glimpse solutions, which they then offer to policy makers and citizens who work for a better world. Sociology played a major role in the civil rights movement during the 1960s in helping us to understand racial inequalities and prejudice, and it can play a major role today as we grapple with old and new issues.

This series builds on the giants of sociology, such as Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Parsons, Mills. It uses their frames, and newer ones, to focus on particular issues of contemporary concern. These books are about the nuts and bolts of social problems, but they are equally about the frames through which we analyze these problems. It is clear by now that there is no single correct way to view the world, but only paradigms, models, which function as lenses through which we peer. For example, in analyzing oil spills and environmental pollution, we can use a frame that views such outcomes as unfortunate results of a reasonable effort to harvest fossil fuels. Drill, baby, drill sometimes involves certain costs as pipelines rupture and oil spews forth. Or we could analyze these environmental crises as inevitable outcomes of our effort to dominate nature in the interest of profit. The first frame would solve oil spills with better environmental protection measures and clean-ups, while the second frame would attempt to prevent them altogether, perhaps shifting away from the use of petroleum and natural gas and toward alternative energies that are green.