What is a university?

Lost in SIUC’s year-long logorrhea about budgets, furlough days, and various administrative restructurings has been any serious discussion of what a university is, fundamentally and essentially. Lots of chatter about “economic engines,” graduation rates, enrollment, and retention, but nary a peep about what this place actually does, what a university—as opposed to a college or community college—is for. The result of this lacuna is the blithe assumption that we all know what a university is and that we’re just discussing different ways to attain the same ends. As usual, such sanguine ecumenism is sorely misguided: the changes advocated by the current administration at SIUC actively and fundamentally change what universities do. They change what research is and they change what teaching is. They change your job, not just how you get compensated for your job.

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So what is a university? Universities make and evaluate knowledge (research and scholarship) and transmit this knowledge and its values to students (teaching). Period. That’s it. No elaborate dragon of ambiguity to be slain. But that does mean that knowledge is the principle of value, not utility, feasibility, or popularity. And thus, valuing has a substantive content and does not reduce to a merely equanimous weighing of pros and cons. Learning means not just knowing, but also evaluating from the standpoint of this knowledge—and solely from this standpoint.

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Well, why would one need a union, or collective bargaining, or even tenure to do any of that? Tenure protects faculty from capricious dismissal as a result of their professional evaluation of students. It also retards (but sadly does not prevent) the evaluation of programs and departments based solely on extraneous measures of value, like profitability, popularity, and utility: frankly, such evaluations reek of hubris insofar as they assume that one can see into the future. Again, that’s it. No mystery. No byzantine paranoid delusions of McCarthyite political surveillance are necessary to justify it. Sure, there might still be the occasional concern about politically controversial speech, but assaults on academic freedom in the research domain are much fewer and farther between than the daily pressures of grade inflation and retention. In other words, tenure and union protections, contrary to every single popular discussion of these issues, are what makes real teaching and learning possible. It is what makes learning and not just the appearance or “outcome” of learning possible.

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In contrast to this model, our current chancellor, like other administrators interested in optimized efficiency, hopes to “incentivize” many activities on campus. Everything from the distance education plan, to the assessment office, to the general union busting at this institution is part of this broader plan. This corporate incentive impulse is not new: it is the default paradigm of value at all American higher education institutions. In that sense, these aren’t really changes at all, but more of the same devaluing of academic work. Yet it does no good to indict, once more, the “corporatization” of the university, or to insist that a university is not a business. The problem is not that the university is treated as a business, but rather that the current administrative structure misunderstands what sort of business it is. It thinks that we produce graduates, enrollment dollars, prestige, or “learning outcomes” whereas what we really make is learning and knowledge.

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It is also not the case that an administration imposes measure on a disordered and unreflective faculty activity. This corporatizing impulse does not ask us to measure the unmeasurable, as if we’re doing something mysterious in our research and teaching that exceeds all human comprehension. It is absolutely not the imposition of quality control or accountability where none existed before. The problem, instead, is that every single one of these measuring and incentivizing schemes is a way to substitute some other system of evaluation for that of an autonomously acting scholar and teacher who knows what she’s talking about. We all know the most efficient way to solve the problems marked by the words “retention” and “graduation rates” and we all know that in an institution where efficiency—not knowledge—is the primary principle of value these terms mean only one thing: make it easier and make it cheaper.

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Let’s take just one general example: assessment. Regardless of whether the entire assessment movement is tainted at its origin as an attempt to deprofessionalize scholarship and teaching (which I tend to think it is), in its application it essentially amounts to a lazy surveillance of instructors. That is, we evaluate, measure, and reflect on student achievement all the time, but to oversee and synopsize this evaluation and measurement, one would need to park an assessment officer on a faculty member’s shoulder for fifteen weeks. Assessment seeks to impose weak measure, the illusion of real measure and evaluation, for the strong measure that we do all the time. The same general process occurs in the use of graduation rates, student retention, or student engagement as a means of evaluation. In other words, this purportedly changed institution, the future SIUC, wants to do your job and do it lazily and badly.

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Perhaps we can learn to live with this elaborate con, to pretend to teach while students sometimes pretend to learn. However, in addition to being craven, this seems hopelessly short-sighted. Students are not dumb: they will not believe that there is value in Marvell’s “The Garden” or geology if the institution in which they are ensconced is constantly insisting that what really matters is increasing enrollment, producing a more flexible workforce, graduating them more quickly, or extracting yet more athletic fees from them. This institution over the past nine months (a conservative estimate) has tacitly authorized and validated any student who resents gen ed courses as unnecessary, any student who views professors and instructors as irritating obstacles on the way toward a more important goal. In short, what passes for a discussion of the future of the university, from faculty and administrators, has demonstrated that we’re all liars, that we don’t really care about any of the things we claim to care about.

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I can hear feasibility’s jet-propelled chariot hurrying near, insisting that we must accept the world as it is, that students and legislators and society want us to act this way, that we must bow to necessity. This is the voice of unimaginative fatalist cowardice and every administrator and faculty member who speaks it demonstrates a hatred for the ideals of truth and value that a university—not a vocational school or a diploma farm—embodies. A university is a machine for making and evaluating knowledge and for teaching students how to value knowledge. The hard part isn’t defining what it is, but doing the actual work of making and teaching, all while beating back the systematic attempts—from administrators, legislators, and even our own depraved angels claiming silent majorities—to celebrate “good enough.” As Dave has so expertly shown in recent posts, approximation is the new excellence.

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So when we read the second motto for this week’s installation festivities—“Advancing a Culture of Excellence”—we should not smugly scoff at its pollyannaish emptiness. Its vacuity isn’t a boneheaded accident: it’s by design. Even the recent approval of an infantilizing and hollow “student success” course (opposed, presumably, to all those student failure courses currently on the books) bespeaks this commitment to emptiness, contentlessness, a teaching imagined as nothing more than the repetition of a bland ukase about success and excellence. Given the future we have seen—University College, distance education, program elimination through reduction in force, first-year experience, increased centralization of assessment, a library increasingly digitalized and denuded of books—the goal of a culture of excellence can only be the evacuation of value and evaluation, of faculty’s role in determining, making, and transmitting knowledge in their own disciplines. It is the fantasy of a world in which faculty are all merely contract players and content providers, with no real say or expertise in the distribution of their knowledge, the means of its transmission, or the evaluation of its acquisition. It is the fantasy of a servile world in which someone else, a president, a board, or a legislator, will tell us that we are valuable, in which we will be recognized for our contribution but in so doing cede our autonomous valuing, of our own knowledge and our students’ learning.

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This world has its attractions, of course, otherwise we wouldn’t be living in it, but it is beneath the dignity of independent research, knowledge, and teaching and a university that claims to foster them. The incentivized and optimized culture of excellence that we are promised is a culture of empty glad-handing, back-slapping, and bowling trophies, the comforting illusion that I’m doing something important because someone else says so, that students are learning because they say that they are learning. A superdoubleplusplus culture of excellence then tells us and our students that value resides in an empty reciprocal transaction—you pretend that you’re learning and I’ll pretend that I’m teaching—judged with equally empty measures—assessment, graduation rates, retention rates, cheers, boos, likes, and dislikes. That is, it creates the very mercenary students—those who substitute demography for truth, whim for fact, fame for value—about whom all faculty members rightly complain. Perhaps we can trick them into participating in this navel-gazing, grab-ass scam forever. Perhaps they want to participate in it. But for the sake of what little dignity the profession has left, we should really stop describing it as “learning,” let alone “a university education.”