Monday, February 27, 2012

Satan and Higher Education

Yes, that was the teaser headline over at Inside Higher Ed to an article on recent remarks by Rick Santorum, who has managed to lose the lead in Michigan over the past week by attacking contraception and higher education, the two pillars of our modern society. Of course the incumbent president has himself made some controversial remarks on higher education, essentially jumping on the performance based funding bandwagon. 

Dominus noster
Santorum's argument appears to be that (a) there are decent, hardworking people who can and should make fine lives for themselves and their families without going to college and (b) the arch-liberal, Satan, has taken over Higher Ed.

(a) isn't unreasonable, and all professors at places at SIUC have heard and made plenty of complaints about the strategy of making college accessible to all by letting everyone in to college only to have many of them fail. 12 years of decent education, culminating in a high-school education that goes beyond mere job training (but includes that), could well be enough. But I don't know if this ideal is still practicable given the increasingly high-tech workplace out there and the chronic problems facing our K-12 educational system.

(b) I can't comment on, as I, like many readers of this blog, have taken a blood vow to remain silent about my fealty to Our Great Master. But Santorum's remarks do lend a certain weight to those arguing that we ought to change the name of the College of Liberal Arts, lest it be taken for a College of the Dark Arts by a certain sector of the population.



Obama's policy is rather more rational. It is certainly reasonable for the federal government to start concerning itself not only with providing financial aid to get students into college but with making sure that they (a) graduate from college; (b) aren't forced to pay too much for college (on college costs, however, recall this contrarian view); and (c) get a decent enough job to pay back their college loans. But the problems with the performance based approach are clear enough. We demand that colleges admit everyone (for everyone should get a college degree, right?); we demand that they graduate everyone; we demand that they do so in a timely and economical way. It's not hard to conclude that the only practical way of meeting all these objectives is to become a diploma mill.

My fear is that we are starting to make the same sort of demands of colleges that we've long made of the K-12 system: they are to cure all of society's woes. Just as no public-school system can be expected to transform a dysfunctional neighborhood, so too no university system is going to be able to take ill-prepared students and turn them into economic gold in four years, on the cheap. While the government has every right to ask universities to be more efficient, incessant criticism and unrealistic demands could end up reducing the public higher ed system to the status of the public K-12 system, which is so routinely (if unfairly) regarded as a uniform failure. Add the ideological attacks of a Santorum, and we'll get homeschooled PhDs in, say, creation science.

17 comments:

  1. What an election year! Bring back Pailin if only to return Tina Fey to Saturday Night Live.

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  2. Dave,

    Your last line about public schooling OR home schooling (admittedly in context of "homeschooled PhDs") hits close to home. We have made a great sacrifice in income because a) the private school (Catholic) choices ran out at the high school level here for our older child; b) the government school was shortchanging our younger child (long story); c) my wife has been home schooling and giving up her job to do it. And, no, we aren't "creation scientists" (as the son of an evolutionary biologist I was exposed to too much science growing up). We are just taking the only route possible where we live.

    Part of SIUC's problem (and that of other big universities with low admission standards): K-12 has no incentive to provide "decent education" that challenges students to _compete_ for college slots. Why? Because every kid in high school knows there is some college that will take them! We faculty may understand the difference between competitive colleges and the No Names but many/most people do not.

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  3. Jon, there are plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the public schools, and plenty of reasons beyond ideology to want to home school. Many well-educated parents could no doubt give their kids a stronger education than that the public schools provide--especially given the ability to tailor lessons to individual kids, rather than having one teacher struggling to teach 25 at a pop. But most of us are unwilling or unable to take off years from our professional lives to devote to home schooling. And you are of course right that Carbondale doesn't exactly offer a rich array of private school options.

    My own understanding, as it happens, is that the Carbondale district does a pretty good job of educating faculty brats and getting them into competitive schools. Consider the success of the scholar bowl team as one example. This isn't to say that I'm confident my own faculty brat (aged ten) is being consistently challenged in school--he isn't, but that is in part of result of the fact that he's pretty bright and pretty intellectually supported at home, so can't be the sort of kid teachers focus on. I can indeed imagine a better school for him, but given the constraints the local district deals with I'm not unhappy with what they have to offer. It's rather like our own classes: if we teach in the way best suited to the top 10% of the class we're going to miss the bottom 50%. That's a conundrum that will face any public school system with limited resources.

    Re competitive and less competitive colleges, I wonder if "many/most people" truly don't understand the difference. I thought that one concern raised by our marketing people was that people understood this distinction all too well--classifying SIUC as a party school. I would guess that most people have some idea that a college degree from UIUC means something different, on the average, from one from SIUC. I'm not quite sure how you would solve this aspect of SIUC's problem. We could of course raise admissions standards in a major way--but that might well result in putting many of us out of work. The question facing us, and it is a real one, is whether we can deliver a meaningful college education to the students SIUC admits. Not the same education received by students able to meet UIUC admissions standards, but a decent college education nonetheless. I remain relatively optimistic that we can (in part because so many of our students do have the capability to do college work worthy of any university's standards)--though there are certainly times when I have my doubts.

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    Replies
    1. Expansion of the honors program -- participation and offerings -- (which seems to be happening) can help mitigate the one-size-fits-all problem...

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  4. Your last sentence is well taken, Dave. However, due to recent events I don't think it will be too long before there is little difference between SIUC and UIUC due to the way business is conducted in this State.

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  5. Speaking of Satan, the talk is that SIU is thinking of retaining Chris Lowery. Don't know why you would do that as the contract is a sunk cost at this point. We're guaranteed to make more money by firing him due to fans coming back. Dumb administration - then again I know I'm preaching to the choir here.

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  6. Can someone explain to me why faculty who become administrators are dumb, but faculty who don't, aren't?

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    Replies
    1. Because FA is a watch-dog for Admins, while there is no watch-dog for FA. FA can says Admins are dumb, but Admins cannot do the same thing. When a false statement is repeated a thousand time, it becomes truth.

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  7. If Lowery is to be fired this afternoon as AP reported then Poshard should be made to contribute to whatever buy-out is arranged as well as higher administrators who supported Lowery over the past year. The money should not come from SIU's educational budget.

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  8. I'm sure it will come from the athletic budget....like it always has.

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    Replies
    1. A budget that isn't subsidized by administrative fiat, ever. Oh wait. Except it is. As detailed here and in the Chronicle of Higher Education: see Deo Volente post 6/28/2011 (sorry, my cut and paste appears not to be working for some reason).

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  9. We hope? Remember, sIU has "no money" so be prepared for further furloughs and layoffs.

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    1. Are you saying that the Admins hide a lot of cash under their tables?

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  10. SIU stands to make more money from firing Lowery and paying off his contract than keeping him. Our basketball program was once great (and a great source of revenue) and now the fans are leaving because of Lowery's failure. Moccia should go too!

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    1. I think now it the time for Lowery to join the union. He should file a grievance if he got fired, and complains that why Admins have a lot of money but he cannot have some of them.

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  11. One can be fired without a severance packet in academia if one performs one's job poorly. Lowry has clearly done this. Why should he get a golden handshake from this corrupt administration?

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    1. Because the administration shouldn't have given out the contract in the first place. The final payoff can be talked down if Lowery wants to be an assistant somewhere else next year. You still have to honor the contract - I think the President who pushed it should resign!

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