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A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part II

Is the world of American Higher Education coming unraveled? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In my most recent post A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I, I introduced ten disturbances that rocked the world of American Higher Education in the 21st century. I concluded that post with the indication that my next post would continue the story with additional troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters. Here are ten more. In reality, I feel that the twenty features that I selected to spotlight in my two posts only touch the surface of the current problems plaguing American Higher Education. However, they definitely indicate the breadth and depth of the difficulties facing American Higher Education.

Numerous crises have hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There has been no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In this post, I will follow the pattern as my previous one. I begin with a short explanation of the problem, followed by an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is again in chronological order according to the publication date of the article that I reference.

  • In 2003, Derek Bok offered a groundbreaking look at the Commercialization of Higher Education in his visionary book Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education.  This tour de force asks the question: “Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right?” Bok’s answer is that the answer is too often “yes.” In today’s economy, Bok suggests that too many American universities are attempting to profit financially not only from athletics but also from those areas that touch the heart of the academy, research, and educational content.

 

  • The April 2007 Inside Higher Ed Opinion Second Thoughts About Professionalism by Jeffrey Ross paints a dark and menacing picture of the Professionalization of Education, particularly at the community college level. The first sentence of the article by Ross screams skepticism: “I’m not sure what is meant by professionalism. I suppose it has something to do with knowing what you are supposed to know on the job.” Is Ross talking about students and their education or the faculty and administrators leading our community colleges? It’s not until his fourth paragraph that he finally states “I sense that professionalism at the community college has to do with a code of behavior, a belief system, which defines how instructors and administrators should act.” Here’s where Ross and professionalism part company. He admits that “the current educator-as-professional movement…has created a somewhat misfit work culture for educators…” To describe what’s wrong with the community college culture he invokes an 18th century Jonathan Swift metaphor: “Like the learned scientists at the grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver’s Voyages, we are focused and employed. So focused we can’t be distracted–even by the day-to-day realities of those persons whose intellectual needs we are employed to meet. So many valuable student interactions displaced by urgent meetings!” Ross calls for a new voice to speak for and lead the community college community.

 

  • The concept of Academic Freedom is considered one of the foundational principles of modern academe. The origin of academic freedom can be traced back to at least 399 B.C. when Socrates defended himself at his trial before 500 fellow Athenians against a charge of impiety and corruption of youth. He vigorously argued that the gods had bestowed on him the freedom to think. With this freedom, he was entrusted with the responsibility of the freedom to teach his thoughts. It was a duty he owed to the gods and a benefit he must confer upon the state. This idea has never been universally accepted. Socrates was found guilty and sentenced to death. The next appearance of academic freedom must wait until the 12th century when Frederick I Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, issued the writ Privilegium Scholasticum. One of its provisions protected faculty and students in their pursuit of knowledge from the intrusions of all political authorities. However, instead of creating a safe harbor for faculty and students within the halls of the University of Bologna, it fermented strife and turmoil amongst them and the Roman Catholic Church. The battles lasted for two centuries until the University formally established a School of Theology. For the next five centuries, the Church was a dominant force in the life of the University. For the first several centuries of higher education in the United States, many colleges were controlled by religious thought which limited what could be taught. In 1940 philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was denied a professorial position at the City University of New York because he was “morally unfit.” This charge was primarily due to his public views on extra-marital sex, marriage, divorce, and birth control. As soon as the announcement of his appointment to the CUNY faculty became public, William Manning, a bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, sent a letter to the New York Times denouncing Russell as a recognized propagandist against both religion and morality. The Board withdrew its offer and the city withdrew funding for the faculty position. in 1988 Les Csorba of Accuracy in Academia claimed, “academic freedom on college campuses is nothing more than a useful device which gives license to some people and silences others”. In a December 2010 article Defining Academic Freedom in Inside Higher Ed, Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors, attempted to clear up confusion about academic freedom. He outlined a dozen points of What it does do and a dozen points of What it doesn’t do. In spite of Nelson’s article, arguments about academic freedom constantly rage both on and off campuses.    

 

  • Public Support for Higher Education Is Shrinking. Tell us something we don’t already know! Since 1980 state and local financial support of higher education has dramatically decreased in multiple ways. This shrinkage is happening both in terms of real dollars and the share of support received by public colleges and universities. In a Winter 2012 report State Funding: A Race to the Bottom from the American Council on Education, Thomas Mortenson claims that if states do not change their funding patterns, by 2059, they will not be providing any support for higher education. In 2010, state and local governments spent $103.7B. This was 34.1 percent of all expenditures in the United States on higher education. This was down from its 1975 peak of 60.3 percent. Since the tax revolts of 1980, only two states, Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent), have increased their share of higher education expenditures. Declining state support for higher education leads directly to tuition increases and a greater financial burden on students for the cost of their education.

 

  • We’ve known for years that the Cost of Regulatory Compliance is significant, but there was no real attempt to calculate it until 2014. In early 2014, Vanderbilt University’s Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos commissioned a study by the Boston Consulting Group to determine how much colleges and universities were spending to comply with federal regulations. On October 19, 2015, Melanie Moran published her preliminary summary of the results, Study estimates cost of regulatory compliance at 13 colleges and universities, online in Vanderbilt News. These results were the shot heard all around American higher education. Two of the most significant conclusions indicated that regulatory compliance represented 3 to 11 percent of higher education institutions’ nonhospital operating expenses, and that faculty and staff spend 4 to 15 percent of their time complying with federal regulations. The reaction was swift and nearly unanimous:  “…compliance with federal regulations results in a significant direct and indirect financial cost.” I was not surprised by the study’s findings. In the early 1980’s I was a one-person Institutional Research Office at a small liberal arts college. I did an inventory of all the reports that we were required to complete and submit each year for various federal, state, athletic oversight groups, and accreditation agencies. There were more than 90 required annual reports. In addition to those compliance reports, I also added up the number of requests for data from outside organizations such as the Council for the Advancement of Small Colleges (CASC), American Association for University Professors (AAUP), Christian College Coalition (CCC), North American Council for Christian Admissions Professionals (NACCAP), The College Board, American College Testing (ACT), American Associations of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), Association of Institutional Research (AIR), American Association for Higher Education (AAHE), Association of Governing Boards (AGB), and the American Council on Education (ACE). There were more than 100 such annual requests for data. The third group of reports handled by my office was data requests from advertisers such as Peterson’s Guides and Campus Life Magazine which publicized comparisons of colleges. If you didn’t comply with their data requests, they used data they “gathered” from various sources such as IPEDS and College Board. However, the institution had no control over how they interpreted or misinterpreted that data. There were at least ten such requests each year. Thus for a small college enrolling less than 800 students, to stay in “good standing” with governmental and accrediting agencies, the higher education community, and the general public, we were compelled to complete and submit more than 200 annual reports. Each of these reports easily averaged more than 10 hours of my time to verify and justify the consistency of the data. If you included the time of various offices required to compile the data, you are talking about another 20 hours each. This adds up to more than 6,000 hours of faculty, staff or administrators time per year. This is the equivalent of more than 3 full-time employees per year to handle unfunded “mandates.” Fortunately, this college was in the Middle States accrediting region. The “joke” among institutional research professionals in the early 1980s was that the proscribed accrediting and reporting requirements of the Southern Association of Schools and Colleges (SACS) were the “institutional researchers full-employment act.”     

 

  • A matter of profound concern to many in American higher education for more than four decades is the Rise and Fall of Proprietary Higher Education. Prior to 1976 proprietary higher education was hardly a blip on the radar screens of higher education. That began to change in 1976 when John Sperling and John Murphy founded The University of Pheonix (UoP). The first class consisted of only eight students. By 1986 the enrollment had grown to more than 6,000. In 1994 Sperling took The Apollo Group public. By 2000 the enrollment was over 100,000 and growing by 25% per year. By 2010 proprietary institutions enrolled more than 2 million, 12 percent of all post-secondary students. Everything seemed to be coming up roses. The article The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools by James Surowiecki which appeared in the November 2, 2015 issue of THE NEW YORKER magazine paints a different picture. In those five years, UoP enrollment was cut in half. The Department of Defense removed it from its approved list for tuition payments for active duty troops. Regulatory agencies began investigating the recruitment and financial aid practices of proprietary institutions. The federal government looked closely at job-placement claims and ability of graduates to repay student loans. Proprietary institutions are now required to prove that on average, students’ loan payments will not exceed eight percent of their expected annual income. Schools that fail this test four years in a row will have their access to federal loans cut off. The implementation of this rule has effectively put a significant number of such schools out of business.

 

  • The evidence and data are clear. There are Gender and Racial Disparities, Bias, and Discrimination Within the Academy. Unfortunately, these attitudes and behaviors have been present as long as higher education has existed. More unfortunately, for many centuries, they were accepted as the norm. However, that is no longer the case. Over the past half century, there have been many small and some large steps to expose and fix these problems. In the 21st century, the pace of restructuring higher education has increased. In the case of gender disparities, a complicated paradox has emerged. One part of that paradox is illustrated in Caroline Simon’s March 8, 2017, USA Today article There’s a double gender gap in higher education–and here’s why. Simon discusses the lack of women in top leadership positions in higher education and the fact that women earn less than men in similar positions. This discrepancy at the top is in stark contrast to the fact that since 1970, the number of women students and graduates have outpaced the number of men. With more women college graduates, the question is raised about the number of women in faculty and administrative positions. There are more men at the higher faculty ranks than women, even though there are more women at the lowest faculty ranks than men. When we add in the racial component, the contrasts are much more complicated.

  

  • A July 2017 Fortune Media commentary This Economic Bubble Is Going to Wreak Havoc When It Bursts on higher education by Jim Rogers and Robert Craig Baum highlights the economic distress that the Student Debt Bubble could cause individual higher education borrowers, American higher education, and the United States economy as a whole. Rogers and Baum begin their commentary with the claim that “An imminent economic crisis the likes of which this generation has never experienced is coming…The higher education bubble (one-sixth of the U.S. economy) will likely burst with the force of all precious catastrophes combined–a shock wave so sudden, so large, that it gathers the full force of the savings and loan, insurance, energy, tech, and mortgage crashes, creating a blockbuster-level perfect storm.” They paint a grim picture of the future of AHE, suggesting that AHE leaders have no grasp of economic reality.

 

  • Natural and Man-Made Disasters Leave Indelible Effects on Colleges and Universities. Every year since 2000 there has been at least one catastrophic event that had devastating effects on American colleges, universities, and their associated personnel. However, some stand out far beyond most. In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria pounded the island of Puerto Rica and the United States mainland. The August 28, 2018 Chronicle of Higher Education article Disaster-Stricken Colleges Will Get $63 Million in Aid From the Education Dept. by Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz and Lindsay Ellis spotlights the U.S. Department of Education response to the resultant damage to 47 American colleges and universities. Most of the Puerto Rican institutions lost an entire year of operations in addition to the physical damage to their buildings. None of them have fully recovered their enrollments since their students and faculty scattered all over the United States. Also fresh in our memories are the western U.S. wildfires of 2017 and 2018 which affected many colleges in California and other western states. Other hurricanes, namely Katrina (2005) and Sandy (2012), caused significant damage to colleges and universities. I would also dare say that everyone in American higher education remembers where they were on the morning of September 11, 2001. The world watched in utter disbelief the tragic events of that day as the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City. Some colleges in New York were directly affected, while many in neighboring states were indirectly affected. In every year of the 21st century, some catastrophic event has affected one or more American college or university.   

 

  • Jeff Selingo in his September 2018 article How the Great Recession Changed Higher Education Forever in The Washington Post recounts the Lasting Effect of the Great Recession of 2008 on American Higher Education. The waves of troubled financial waters which swept across the world almost swamped American Higher Education. A number of institutions sank, drowning many students and faculty. Many of the institutions which survived attempted to lure the dwindling supply of students through their doors with a “fire sale” and huge tuition discounts. For many students the primary reason they went to college changed. Since 2008, students now see college as a means to secure better jobs, rather than a source of general education in order to be more human. This has meant an uptick in the “practical majors” such as business and health care, and a significant downturn in the humanities. A third and more subtle change occurred at the presidential and board level of colleges. Their focus shifted to more short-term survival interests, rather than long-term sustainability issues. History predicts that there will be more economic downturns in the future. However, this time American colleges and universities are less prepared to deal with these periods of famine.
Is American higher education a DIY money pit which will require a complete gut job to fix? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

WHEW! The deeper I dug into the current difficulties and issues facing American higher education, the more problems I found, and the more complicated they became. Having done a number of extensive home remodeling or rehabilitation jobs as we moved around the country chasing new academic administrative positions, without any qualms I can say that American higher education is like a DIY money-pit. The job will always cost more than you budgeted and take longer than you first estimated. Another parallelism between American higher education concerns and DIY projects are hidden issues. When you remove a wall you are never sure what you will find beneath the plaster or the drywall. Even when you have blueprints of the house, you don’t know whether someone made previous alterations that were not documented. Are there hidden pipes and wires that will be extremely difficult to redirect? Is there mold or asbestos just waiting to catch you? Is that a load-bearing wall you want to tear out because you think it is unnecessary or undesirable? If that wall was designed to do a specific job and you don’t compensate for its removal, you run the risk of collapsing the whole building.

Trying to fix the American higher education mess is almost overwhelming. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Although I have found more than 10 additional problems in American higher education on which I could focus, I have decided to turn my attention to the 20 that I have already highlighted. I think you have gotten the point: American Higher Education is a Mess. My next post will look at the issue of the Adjunctification of the Faculty.

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A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I

Many in American Higher Education were looking forward to the 21st Century, hoping it would bring back the good old days. Unfortunately, after the cork was popped, the new drink fizzled. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

In spite of the high hopes and great expectations of many in American Higher Education, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of a new millennium brought little relief to the beleaguered systems of AHE. In my previous post The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Education we left American higher education in a precarious situation. It was buried under numerous train wrecks brought on by many training storms or crises. Unfortunately, the incessant crises have not stopped during the first two decades of the 21st century. Not only have they continue unabated, but the frequency of their occurrences has also increased. 

The future outlook for American Higher Education is dire! Another scandal rocks AHE! The image is the author’s interpretation of current events in AHE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Instead of the period of recovery hoped for by the academy, the new millennium brought an unrelenting season of storms and turmoil to American Higher Education. A cursory examination of the reports and articles out of the general public and higher education media outlets during these first two decades of the 21st century yields an abundance of fuel for the argument that American Higher Education remains in deep trouble.

Just what I need – another project! Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The following list highlights some of the various crises that have made headlines in the 21st century. I have labeled many of them using academic code words. The task of explaining all the academic jargon associated with these code words would fill a book which I may write (Just what I need another writing project! – Is there anyone out who wants to help me?). In the meantime, to bring the project within manageable limits for this blog, I will provide a reasonably short synopsis of my take on each crisis and its immediate effects on AHE in separate posts which will follow.

The crises hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There was no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

For those too anxious to wait for my follow up, I am providing an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is in chronological order according to the appearance of the media article that I reference. I have chosen to list the topics in this manner to show the rapidity and pervasiveness of crises in higher education which were occurring during these two decades.

I will have more to say on this topic later when I have time to reflect on the matter. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The particular article I have selected may not necessarily be the first time the topic is addressed in public. However, I believe the articles selected are repesentative examples of the treatment which the topic has received. In some cases, the article referenced reflects my views on the topic. In other cases, it doesn’t. I will reserve my comments until I have the time and space to more fully explicate them.

  • Adjunctification of the faculty threatens academic quality across all of AHE is a theme that began appearing in higher education circles in the 1980s. It has exploded with much force in the new millennium. Gabriela Montell begins her December 15, 2000 article A Forecast of the Job Market in English in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the conflicting statement: “It would be an overstatement to say the job market for faculty members in English is booming, but scholars have reason to be mildly optimistic…” Later in the article, defining the term adjunctification, she notes that “Many professors also say they are concerned about universities’ reliance on part-time and temporary faculty members…the great worry…is adjunctification, which could keep students from getting the proper tenure-track jobs they clearly deserve.”
  • Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities are subjects of internal and external heated debates. Three researchers, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, collaborated in the study Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. This paper “captures the sense of dreams deferred as well as the tension between ideals and reality that young scholars face as they move through graduate school and into faculty posts … if they move into faculty posts.” It appears in the May 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
  • The Academic Lattice is the seemingly constant expansion of administrative support structure to handle tasks and duties seen by many as not directly related to teaching and learning. It is very frequently blamed for unneeded increased costs. This phenomenon is often derogatorily called “administrative bloat”. The study The Cost of Prestige: Do New Research I Universities Incur Higher Administrative Costs? by Christopher C. Morphew and Bruce D. Baker seems to say it does apply to some institutions. However, it leaves the question open for others. The paper appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Review of Higher Education, Volume 27, Number 3.
  • Basic questions concerning College Admissions which have been around for hundreds of years remain tauntingly unanswered: “Who should go to college?” “How should a college decide to whom they offer admission?” Ross Douthat addresses one particularly sticky question in his article Does Meritocracy Work? His article concerns the fierce competition among prospective students to gain entrance into elite institutions, and the extensive pressure on elite institutions to enroll a more diverse student population. The article appears in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic.
  • Since the Reagan tax revolution, many public higher education officials and commentators have debated the issue of whether the privatization of the academy threatens public higher education. In 2005 Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published the white paper The Perfect Storm and the Privatization of Public Higher Education, a version of which appeared in the November 2005 issue of Change Magazine. Ehrenberg argued that the privatization of public higher education and the shrinkage of public support threatened to do irreparable damage to public higher education. In a November 2009 blog post Reality Check: The Privatization of Public Higher Education, Travis Reindl partially rebuffs the Ehrenberg arguments. In the decade since Reindl’s post, public support of public higher education in terms of government funds have continued to decline. So where are we?
  • Sweeping demographic changes are altering the face of AHE. These changes began in the last half of the 20th century with the entrance of women and some minority students into our colleges and universities. However, they have picked up steam heading into the new millennium. Rob Jenkins sketched the new “traditional student” in his October 2012 article The New ‘Traditional Student’  in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This new student is married, living at home, and working. Within a few years, the majority of students will be over 25 years of age and a person of color. 
  • Scandal after scandal rocks AHE and drags its reputation through the mud. Prior to the dawn of the new millennium, AHE was not immune from scandalous activities. However, as social media access has accelerated the news cycle, information about scandals has become more available, more quickly. A Google search for “college scandals” took less than 1 second to produce over 75 million results. One of those results was a Harvard Business School Working Paper The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications, which was published in 2016. The abstract of this study by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith begins with the provocative statement: “In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape.” In their paper, the authors attempted to answer the question “With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications?” The authors looked at the top 100 American universities ranked in the 2015 U.S. News and World Report, “Best Colleges.” They then constructed a database of reported scandals on these campuses between 2001 and 2013. They found that during these dozen years, 75% of the top American universities reported at least one major incident. Since their databased cut off in 2013, they didn’t include recent major scandals including the Michigan State gymnastics incident (2014), the Baylor football scandal (2016), University of North Caroline cheating scandal (2017), the fraternity hazing death of Timothy Piazza at Penn State (2017), the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal (2019), and the Varsity Blues Admissions fiasco (2019). It also doesn’t include the Louisville basketball scandal (2017), Temple falsification of USNWR data (2018), or the implosion and collapse of ITT (2016) since these schools were not in the top 100 universities on the USNWR rankings.
  • Are athletics taking over the academy? Many including Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, think so. He presents some ammunition for his opinion in the op-ed piece Athletic arms race hurts academics, which appeared in the December 31, 2013, edition of the Omaha World-Herald.
  • The Academic Ratchet tightens its grip on AHE. The automatic response of many within the academy to solve every budget or enrollment deficit is to seek new students via the addition of new programs and faculty, or an increased effort by the admission, recruitment, and fundraising offices. “To solve our problems all we need to do is rachet up our efforts, programming or personnel.” The obvious problem with this solution is that for most institutions it just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough funds, faculty, and students to satisfy all of AHE. In addition, institutional personnel doesn’t have the time nor expertise to do all of the necessary work. To help alleviate the academic rachet problem, in the late 1990s Robert C. Dickeson developed a process he called Program Prioritization. He outlined it in a 1994 book which was later updated in 2010. It is titled Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, 2nd edition. Over the next 25 years since Dickeson’s process was first released, more than 500 institutions attempted program prioritization. Some were successful in achieving a strategic balance. Many were not. In January 2014, Alex Usher, a consultant with Higher Education Strategy Associates, wrote a blog post Better Thinking About Program Prioritization critiquing the Dickeson plan.
  • As Academic Arms Races heat up in all segments of AHE, the burning question is “What is the price of prestige?” Kevin Iglesia attempted to answer that question in his 2014 Seton Hall University dissertation The Price of Presitge: A Study of the Impact of Striving Behavior on the Expenditure Patterns of American Colleges and Universities.
  • The question: “Is virtual teaching a replacement for the traditional classroom?“ has perplexed higher education since the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students in 1960. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. It evolved in the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system which at its height was operating on thousands of computers all over the world. By the time we entered the new millennium, millions of students were not only using computer-aided instruction for supplemental course work, but they were also taking entire courses and even degree programs online. Faculty members and universities were asking the question of whether these students were getting a quality education. Along the way, faculty began to worry about whether they were becoming viewed as superfluous. Universities became concerned about whether their brick-and-mortar palaces would be ghost towns replaced by a new costly virtual infrastructure. In a June 23, 2018, blog posted on the eLearning Industry website, Allistair Gross asked the direct question Is Virtual Teaching A Major Threat To Teachers?
For the past two decades, have educators been running from crisis to crisis trying to save American higher education? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

Having reached 10 crises and running out of room in this post, I have decided to save another 10 crises for a Part II of A New Millennium – Same Old Story. Tune in next week for more troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters in 21st century American higher education.

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The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Education

Image of the radar echos of “training thunderstorms” battering the east coast of the United States in February 2009. The image is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), taken or made as part of an employee’s official duties. Image courtesy of NOAA and Wikimedia Commons.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, American higher education was battered unrelentingly by storm after storm. In weather terminology, meteorologists call this phenomenon “training”. This name is derived from how a train and its cars travel along a single path, the railroad track, without the track moving. With repeated precipitation hitting the same geographic area, this weather pattern often produces heavy damage caused by flooding. American higher education has been heavily damaged by a constant barrage of storms.

There is little debate concerning the results of the numerous storm trains which assailed American higher education. It left AHE in shambles. To many observers, health-wise AHE was in critical condition. The blue light was lit and the warning alarm sounded. The critical response team was called into action. The condition of American higher education had definitely reached the crisis stage.  Danger lurked around every curve on every track. Educators and politicians held their breath because another potential train wreck could happen at any moment.

Photograph of the results of the December 18, 2017 Amtrak train derailment near DuPont, Washington. This image is a work of a National Transportation Safety Board employee, taken or made as part of an employee’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, all NTSB images are in the public domain in the United States. Image courtesy of the NTSB and Wikimedia Commons.

When one car derails in a train wreck, it usually takes many, if not all of the cars behind it off the rails. Since the cars are all connected, sometimes the sudden stop of a car in the middle of the train will even cause the cars in front of it to crash also. Trailing cars will pile up on the initial crashed car, scattering debris in every direction and causing much collateral damage.

With “training storms” the accumulation of the falling precipitation can eventually cause flooding. This flooding will be greatly exacerbated by the following storms, multiplying the damage. With multiple storms dumping rain on one spot, the flooding deepens at that location. It will eventually spread, affecting adjacent locations. The crisis has become a full-blown disaster.

As flood waters began to engulf American higher education, many commentators and most politicians started calling for disaster aid. They wanted some entity to act as the educational equivalent of FEMA, They were clamoring for someone to step in and rescue what they saw as a failing system. This vocal group will have to wait a long time because there is no educational equivalent of FEMA. In addition, many within higher education believe and strongly avow that the system is not failing. It is the public, along with the federal and state governments that are failing higher education.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. American Higher Education was considered the gold standard to be emulated by everyone else. When gazing over a fence, you don’t always see the crabgrass in your neighbor’s lawn. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

What ended the Golden Age of American Higher Education and seriously damaged a system that was the envy of the whole world? In many accident investigations, it is difficult to identify a single event or factor that caused the mishap. Much of the time, there is a series of events or determinants that contribute to the incident. What was the series of events that caused the train wreck which derailed American higher education?

My self-identified list of the causes of rail accidents included the following items:

  • Human error
  • Environmental conditions
  • Mechanical failure
  • Infrastructure deterioration and collapse
  • Speed
  • Design flaws
  • Unintended obstructions
  • Sabotage
  • Combination of problems

As I have analyzed the difficulties that American higher education has faced in the last quarter of the 20th century, I believe that most, if not all of them, can be attributed to one or more items in the above list. I will use the remainder of this post to list specific events that contributed to some of the more serious disruptions during this tumultuous period in the history of American higher education. Speculation concerning the assignment of blame for those disruptions, and possibly others, will have to wait for future posts.

The first two events that led to the End of the Golden Age of American Higher Education were the end of the Vietnam and Cold Wars. These are the primary counterexamples of the axiom which states that the end of an American war produced a boom in education in the United States. What were the differences between the Vietnam war and the Cold War and other American wars?

This is a photograph of Sterling Hall taken after the 1970 explosion targeting the Army Mathematics Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The bombing by four student radicals was in protest of the Vietnam War. The image is part of the UW Digital Collections and released to the public domain under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Image courtesy of UW Digital Collections and Wikimedia Commons.

The Vietnam War might arguably be the most unpopular war in the history of the United States. People didn’t know or didn’t believe the reasons given by politicians and military leadership as to why young American soldiers were being sent to Southeast Asia to fight and die at the hands of an unknown enemy. With a military draft in effect between 1964 and 1973, many young men used academic deferments as a means to avoid military service. The term “draft dodger” became a common insult that was hurled at these individuals.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, young men avoiding military service swelled the enrollment ranks at many colleges and universities. They became a vocal part of the social activism that was growing up on American campuses during these turbulent years. College campuses became the hotbed of dissent not only for an antiwar movement but also for all forms of militant protests for social justice, civil rights, and alternative lifestyles.

One of the most violent protests occurred on the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus in the early morning hours of August 24, 1970. Four students detonated a bomb in a stolen truck that was parked next to Sterling Hall which housed portions of the UW-Madison Mathematics and Physics Departments, including the Army Mathematics Research Center, which was the primary target of the bomb. There were only four people in the building at the time of the explosion. A physics post-doc doing an experiment on the ground floor was killed and three others on higher floors were injured.

During Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, he promised to eliminate the draft. However, after assuming office, this proposal was met with great opposition to the idea of an all-volunteer army from both Congress and the Department of Defense. Instead of acting immediately on his promise, Nixon appointed a commission, chaired by Thomas Gates, former Eisenhower Secretary of Defense.

President Ford announcing amnesty for draft evaders from the White House. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division
under the digital ID ppmsca.08536. This work is from the U.S. News & World Report collection at the Library of Congress. It is part of a collection donated to the Library of Congress. Per the deed of gift, U.S. News & World Report dedicated to the public all rights it held for the photographs in this collection upon its donation to the Library. Image courtesy of U.S. News and World Report, the Library of Congress, and Wikimedia Commons.

The Gates Commission studied the idea for a year, issuing a report in February 1970, suggesting that an adequate military force could be maintained without conscription. When the existing draft law expired in June 1971, the Department of Defense successfully argued that it needed more time to institute all of the Gates Commission’s recommendations. Congress agreed and extended the draft until June 1973. Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal and his subsequent resignation on August 9, 1974, prevented him from seeing the Gates Commission recommendation put into place.

In anticipation of the end of active ground participation in Vietnam, the last draft was held in December 1972, of men born in 1952. The end of the draft contributed to a noticeable decrease in men applying to college in the mid-1970s. The last impediment for the anti-war objectors having to choose between fleeing to Canada for sanctuary or attending college for an education, in order to stay out the army, was removed on September 16, 1974. On that date, President Gerald Ford announced from the White House a complete and total amnesty for draft evaders.

A photograph of the troops on the Normandy beachhead being resupplied. Most likely taken in 1944, between June 9 and June 11. The image is in the domain since it is a work of a sailor or employee of the U.S. Navy, taken or made as part of that person’s official duties. Image courtesy of U.S. Navy and Wikimedia Commons.

In conventional wars, soldiers participated in armed conflicts and thus were unable to engage in collegiate studies. One million soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy between June 6 and July 30, 1944. Each day, these soldiers were fully engaged in a life and death struggle, and could not have devoted any time to academic pursuits. When the armed conflicts ended, soldiers were freed to advance themselves through college studies. After WWII and subsequent wars, the various GI bills allowed veterans to enter college or career preparation programs. After WWII, almost half of the 16 million eligible veterans enrolled in some type of educational program. After the Koren War, 43% of eligible veterans used educational benefits. After the Vietnam War, an enormous 73% of eligible veterans used educational benefits. However, there were only 2.7 million eligible veterans after the Vietnam War. Thus the 73% benefit usage percentage produced just under 2 million students, compared to the almost 7.8 million after WWII and 2.1 million after the Korean War. This smaller number of actual students didn’t produce the enrollment bumps that occurred after the earlier wars.

The Cold War was a completely different kind of war. It was a  battle for scientific superiority. The battlefields were the college classrooms and laboratories. The Cold War itself was a huge incentive for students to enroll in colleges and further their education. By doing so they were not only furthering the cause of their country, they were increasing their opportunities for social and financial upward mobility. The actual effect of the Cold War enrollment bump is hard to determine because it came at the same time as the last of the Baby Boomers and the first of the Gen Xers came of college age. The Gen Xers had the greatest college enrollment in American history. College enrollment of this generation of students compared to previous generations exploded.

This is a photograph of U.S. President Ronald Reagan giving a speech at the Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, the Federal Republic of Germany on June 12, 1987. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States. This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 198505. Image courtesy of Reagan White House Photographs, National Archives and Records Administration, and Wikimedia Commons.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire were emblematic of the end of the perceived Soviet threat to the American way of life. Without that driving force, the massive universities and college systems that grew up in the 50s and 60s found themselves as superfluous. The generous public support that had been so ubiquitous during the Cold War suddenly disappeared. In 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as President, the amount of public funding in cost-of-living adjusted dollars allocated to education started to decline for the first time in American history.

Without the immediate threat of an external enemy, the American public turned its attention to internal needs and desires. Suddenly, there were other public services competing with education for the limited available public resources. These other services included transportation and infrastructural needs, emergency services, judicial and penal services, public utilities, social and welfare services, services for an aging population, and affordable medical care. In the 1980s, with the U.S. population becoming much more concentrated in urban and suburban centers, the other services began to win more of those funds.

A comparison of the cumulative percentage increases in college costs versus the general consumer price index, 1975 to 2000. College costs extracted by the author from the Digest of Education Statistics. General CPI data extracted by the author from HIstorical Consumer Price Index Data on InflationData.com.

To appease their ravenous appetite for more of everything, without government funding, the colleges and universities turned to the next most available source of funding — their students. The total cost of college, including tuition, fees, room, and board, rose almost 400% from 1975 to 2000, while the General Cost of Living Index only rose a little over 200%. During this period college costs were rising almost twice as fast as the general cost of living.

As a bone tossed to the vulnerable students and their families, colleges increased access to financial aid. However, the overwhelming majority of these increases in financial aids were in the form of loans instead of grants and scholarships. This meant that those increased costs would have to be paid by the students sometime in the future.

With the increased availability of student loans, another problem surfaced. After students left college, whether or not they graduated, those loans came due for repayment. Another storm was brewing and another train car in danger of derailing. By the mid-1980s, students and parents had incurred nearly $10 billion in federal student loans. In 1986, more than one-quarter of all student borrowers had outstanding student loans of more than $10,000.

In 1990, the typical college student graduated with a median debt of just over $12,000. That graduate going out into the workplace could look forward to a median starting income of slightly over $43,000. This is a debt to salary ration of 28.6%. By the year 2000, the median college graduate left school with a median debt that had almost doubled to $22,500. However, the median starting salaries of college graduates had decreased by 1% to just over $40,000. This means that the debt to salary ratio had almost doubled to just over 56%. If these numbers were not shocking enough, tougher times were just around the bend.

In my next post, I will look at the continuing turmoil and disruption of American higher education that carried over into the first two decades of the 21st century. We will consider how the student debt bubble, exploding tuition costs, several recessions, proprietary institutions, and technology challenged the status quo and balance of the higher education arena.

 

 

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The Golden Age of American Higher Education

From 1945 to 1975, American higher education had the Midas Touch. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

After each major war in the history of the United States, significant growth occurred in the American higher education enterprise. All of these increases combined did not equal the growth in the three decades following WWII. The period between 1945 and 1975 could easily be labeled the Golden Age of American Higher Education.

During this time span, American higher education had the Midas touch. Everything was going well. American colleges and universities had overflowing enrollments. They couldn’t build facilities fast enough to satisfy the undergraduate student demand. Graduate schools couldn’t produce a sufficient number of PhDs to fill the faculty positions needed to teach the surfeit of undergraduate students. Public and private supporters tripped over each other as they rushed to provide the enormous increase in financial support needed to finance the vast expansion occurring. Nationally and internationally the reputation and prestige of American higher education were soaring to new heights.

During these three decades, the face of American higher education (AHE) was completely altered. AHE changed its focus. No longer was it predominantly an exclusive club for the sons of the wealthy elite, providing them with a liberal arts veneer to establish and ground them so that they could assume their “rightful place” of leadership in business, governmental, ecclesiastical, and social circles.

President Roosevelt in the Oval Office signing the GI Bill into law. The original photograph was taken by an unknown government employee as part of that person’s official duties. Thus, the photograph is in the public domain in the United States. Image courtesy of the FDR Library and Wikimedia Commons.

As WWII wound down and the nation transitioned into a post-war phase, two presidential actions had an enormous effect on American higher education. The first occurred two weeks after the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy, France on D-Day, which began the most important battle of the war. On June 22, 1944, President Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the G.I. Bill, into law.  This bill provided a very wide range of benefits for returning World War II veterans, including educational assistance for veterans and their families.

This law expired in 1956 and was subsequently replaced by adjustments for veterans of the Korean Conflict and Vietnam War. Of the nearly 16 million World War II veterans, more than 2.2 million used benefits to enroll in a college or university and another 5.6 million participated in various career-oriented training programs. In the peak year of 1947, veterans accounted for 49 percent of all U.S. college admissions. Between 1956 and 1975, another 6 million individuals were aided by educational assistance programs for veterans and their families through extensions to the original GI Bill.

President Truman in 1945. This is an official presidential photograph taken by Edmonston Studio, which did not renew its copyright when the initial copyright expired. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.

In light of the economic, demographic and educational changes occurring in the United States, by proclamation on July 13, 1946, President Harry S. Truman instituted a Commission on Higher Education, and named George F. Zook, then president of the American Council on Education, as its Chair. Truman charged the Commission

“…to concern itself with the ways and means of expanding educational opportunities for all able young people; the adequacy of curricula, particularly in the fields of international affairs and social understanding; the desirability of establishing a series of intermediate technical institutes; and the financial structure of higher education with particular reference to the requirements for the expansion of physical facilities.”

In the Commission’s 1947 Report, Higher Education for Democracy, it was noted that

“Education is by far the biggest and the most hopeful of the Nation’s enterprises. Long ago our people recognized that education for all is not only democracy’s obligation but its necessity. Education is the foundation of democratic liberties. Without an education citizenry alert to preserve and extend freedom, it would not long endure.”

The last phrase echoes the words of President Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the Gettysburg Civil War Battlefield Cemetery.

In reflecting on President Truman’s charge to the Commission, the report stated that

“…the President’s Commission on Higher Education has attempted to select, from among the principal goals for higher education, those which should come first in our time. They are to bring all the people of the Nation:

  • Education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living.

  • Education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation.

  • Education for the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems and to the administration of public affairs.”

In spite of the new frontiers in to which American Higher Education was being pushed by the perceived new national needs and the plethora of government commissions, reports, and programs, along with the burgeoning population growth engendered by the Baby Boom and subsequent diversification of the potential higher education clientele, AHE still proclaimed itself as the legitimate heir and guardian of the liberal arts tradition. The only concession that AHE seemed willing to make was the introduction of the new model of a liberal education to replace the declining model of the ancient liberal arts.

An illustration of the seven liberal arts from the 12th-century book Hortus Delicarum of Herrad of Landsberg. This image is in the public domain because it is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art. Image courtesy of Dnalor 01 and Wikimedia Commons.

The seven traditional liberal arts of Medieval times were divided into two parts. The first part was called the trivium, which consisted of three literary disciplines. The second part was called the quadrivium, which consisted of four quantitative disciplines.

The three literary disciplines were:

  • Grammar. This deals with the correct usage of language, both in speaking and writing.
  • Dialectic (or logic). This is correct thinking, helping an individual arrive at the truth.
  • Rhetoric. This concerns the expression of ideas, particularly through persuasion. It deals with ways of organizing thoughts in a speech or document so that people can understand your ideas and believe them.

The four quantitative or mathematical disciplines were:

  • Arithmetic. This deals with numbers and the simple operations involving numbers.
  • Geometry. This concerns spaces, spatial calculations, and spatial relationships.
  • Astronomy. This is the study of the stars. It is used for timekeeping, navigation, and developing a sense of place.
  • Music. This is the study of ratio, proportion, and sound as it is related to melody and song.

Prior to the 20th-century, with a few exceptions for professional and practical arts programs, American higher education followed the medieval liberal arts paradigm. In the 20th-century, American society transitioned from a rural and agricultural society to an urban and manufacturing culture. In response to these changes, AHE evolved along with them.

This chart is the blog author’s graphic interpretation of the 2002 definition of Liberal Education offered by the AAC&U. The chart was created using ClickChart software.

The 20th-century American higher education version of the liberal arts added several other components. These were usually framed in the sense of the answer to the question: “What foundation of general knowledge did a well-educated individual need?” These additions began with a solid grounding in the humanities and sciences, including history, philosophy, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. AHE invented the term liberal education in an attempt to describe this “slightly altered” form. To describe this new form of education, the term liberal designated the knowledge and values which freed up or liberated an individual to be more human or humane. The American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) took it upon itself to define more fully what the new liberal education should look like and involve.

American higher education became bifurcated and unapologetically splintered. While one side of campuses persisted as the solid, unyielding fortresses of the liberal arts and liberal education, the other side of campuses rapidly developed into the training ground of choice for a quickly and constantly changing workforce which needed professional, technical, and career knowledge and skills. Students flocked to American colleges and universities to study the practical arts and sciences (such as the agricultural sciences of horticulture and animal husbandry), engineering, technology, educational studies (such as pedagogy and curriculum), and career and professional studies (such as accounting, business administration, and management).

In each of the two camps of the liberal arts and the practical and professional studies, more fissures appeared. Both camps separated themselves into undergraduate and graduate schools. The undergraduate schools concentrated on providing students with basic post-secondary education, helping them acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for further study or to obtain the first position in their field. The graduate schools concentrated on assisting qualified students to do more in-depth study within their field and prepare themselves to add to the world’s knowledge base.

President John F. Kennedy speaking at Rice University on September 12, 1962. This image was originally posted to Flickr by NASA on The Commons at https://flickr.com/photos/44494372@N05/29533458786. It was reviewed on 15 September 2016 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the No known copyright restrictions. Image courtesy of Flickr, NASA, and Wikimedia Commons.

American higher education had expanded its reach after the Civil War into the service arena with the Land Grant Act. University faculty were also drawn into national service through research projects directed toward the national defense in the lead up to WWII. After WWII these areas exploded. Rising revenues from government and industry sources transformed faculty research from an afterthought into a booming business.

President Kennedy was the superb politician and master of the one-liner. He spurred the nation into a service frenzy, with his “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” The peace corp, an outgrowth of Kennedy’s inaugural speech, became the embodiment of the ideals toward which the Morrill Act of a century earlier had pointed a growing nation.

Kennedy then jump-started the space race in his famous Rice University speech with the line:  “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” This challenge set the tone for a decade of exploits not only in space travel but many other areas of scientific and medical research in which American research universities led the way.

Picture of the University of Chicago as it may have appeared in 1900. The image by an unknown photographer. It is the public domain because it was published prior to 1916. Image courtesy of the University of Chicago and Wikimedia Commons.

The American research university came into being in the late 19th century as a few American institutions took the German Humboldt University model and put a new world twist on it. In February 1900, the presidents of five American universities (Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of California) invited the presidents of nine other universities (Catholic University of American, Clark, Cornell, Princeton, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin – Madison, Yale) to meet at the University of Chicago to discuss plans to solidify the place and reputation of American universities in the research and higher education world. As a result of these discussions, the fourteen schools formed the Association of American Universities (AAU).

The initial agenda of the AAU included three items:

  1. to bring about “a greater uniformity of the conditions under which students may become candidates for higher degrees in different American universities, thereby solving the problem of migration,”
  2. to “raise the opinion entertained abroad of our own Doctor’s degree,” and
  3. to “raise the standard of our own weaker institutions.”

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, as the American research university matured, the unofficial agenda of the AAU became the following four points:

  • inspire research institutions to emphasize a distinction between preparatory studies and higher learning;
  • encourage research institutions to make the idea of advancing knowledge through specialized, original research a central tenant of their mission statements;
  • embolden research institutions to assure the independence of faculty and students in the area of intellectual inquiry (i.e., guarantee “academic freedom” in their studies)
  • exhort research institutions to provide the necessary institutional structure to fully support the “research ideal.”
Radar image of Tropical Storm Humberto approaching the United States along the Texas coastline in September 2007.  This image is in the public domain because it contains materials that originally came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, taken or made as part of an employee’s official duties. Image courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Wikimedia Commons

After WWII, the AAU redoubled its efforts to push a “specialized research” and an “America first agenda.” Although world rankings of universities didn’t exist until several years into the 21st century, the 60 United States members of the AAU were recognized around the world as top-flight educational institutions. By 1975 these schools and many other American colleges were attracting students and faculty from every corner of the world.

To many inside and outside the American higher education community, the horizon for American higher education could not have looked brighter. However, to the critics and some commentators of AHE, warning signs abounded. There was a storm brewing that was just showing up on radar screens across American campuses. Just like the radar screenshot of Tropical Storm Humberto shown at the left, only small showers had landed prior to the approach of the massive body of the storm, which was getting ready to unload its full fury a short time later. Was the golden age of American higher education about to end? Spoiler alert: my next post in this series will focus on the disruptive forces which played havoc with American higher education from 1975 to the present.

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KPI – Part XI: Era of Expansion and Disruption in American Higher Education

Some historians of American Higher Education call the era between the American Civil War and WWII the Gilded Age of American Higher Education. When I look at it, I see a period of unparalleled expansion, confusing disruptions, and bewildering rearrangements. It is also a period rife with widespread uncertainties and inescapable paradoxes. It is a period of unprecedented diversification.

A schematic view of the American Higher Education Family Tree, with the four main branches (University, College, Institute, and Faith-Based Schools), and their many intertwined connections. This schematic was created by the blog’s author using ClickChart Software.

During the Civil War, much of American higher education shut down. Many colleges were forced to cease operations due to a lack of students. In both the North and the South, many young men of military age either enlisted or were drafted. Since this group formed the overwhelming majority of college students, the potential student population was almost completely depleted.

Photograph of Rev. John M.P. Atkinson, 10th President of Hampden-Sydney College, and Captain of the Hampden-Sydney boys, part of the Virginia Militia. Image is in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image courtesy of Alfred Morrison, Hampden-Sydney College, and Wikimedia Commons

The stories of what four institutions. Hampden-Sydney (with its sister school Union Theological Seminary), the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, went through during the Civil War Period are so interesting I will address them in a separate, future post.

Since much of the actual fighting in the Civil War occurred in the territory of the Confederacy, a large number of colleges in the South found themselves in battle zones. A few colleges in the North, like Pennsylvania College (since 1921, known as Gettysburg College) and its sister institution Lutheran Theological Seminary, were also put in dangerous situations. This placed students and faculty at severe risk. Travel was treacherous at best. Students from the Confederate States who were studying in the Union States, and vice versa, were prohibited from crossing territorial or battlelines and were forced to withdraw from their colleges.

During the eight decades between the Civil War and WWII, the current structure of American higher education began to take shape. Prior to the Revolutionary War, all colonial colleges were begun with a religious emphasis by individual clergy or denominations. These schools were founded to provide an educated clergy for the church.  Studying the early days of these institutions, we also see that they were not in the business of changing the social stratification of the colonies.

Most of the colleges established between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were built to maintain the status quo. They only enrolled white, males. They were expensive, residential institutions, which meant that the “lower class” families could not afford the luxury of doing without the income supplied by the family sons. Entrance requirements of many were rigorous and only within the reach of the wealthy few who had the advantage of a demanding secondary education.

The few female colleges were also expensive, residential colleges that trained girls to be “ladies”. These schools were beyond the reach of most families and didn’t fit the long-term goals of most girls in America.

Prior to the Civil War, there were very few coed colleges. There were also very few female applicants who could meet the admissions requirements. There were only a handful of colleges open to African-Americans. Colleges prior to the Civil War were the great sustainers of an elite hierarchy with white males at the top of the ladder. Many obstacles were placed in the paths of others trying to ascend the ladder of social mobility.

The cover of the catalog of Pennsylvania Female College (now known as Chatham University) in 1886. Since it was published before 1924, it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Chatham University and Wikimedia Commons.

Immediately after the Civil War, the dams of restrictive access were leaking a little, before they finally burst. In those early post-war days, a number of changes occurred. It became more acceptable for women to attend college. More women colleges were opened, and more colleges permitted men and women to sit in the same classrooms.

A second new stream of students consisted of the returning soldiers. Their war experience awakened new dreams. They saw that the only difference between them and many of their “educated” officers was formal education. The rank and file soldiers found that they were just as smart as their officers. They began to question why had they been deprived of an opportunity to advance themselves. They demanded the right to go to college, and some colleges opened their doors to these new students. However, more than college for themselves, they demanded college for their children so that they could better themselves and not be limited to the status of a lackey or foot soldier in the future.

Jubilee Hall, oldest permanent building on the campus of Fisk University (an HBCU in Nashville, TN). It was opened in 1876. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image courtesy of Fisk University, National Park Services and Wikimedia Commons.

A third stream formed with the opening of colleges for African-Americans. At first, this was a small stream because these students had many deficits to fill in from their lack of education prior to the Civil War.

In 1860, there were less than 10 institutions of higher education which were open to African-American students. By 1900, there more than 100 institutions that were dedicated primarily to the education of African-American individuals. These schools became known as Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).

First-year students in cadaver lab of Univ. of Penn Medical School in 1890. The image is in the Public Domain since it was first published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Amy Hutchens, University of Pennsylvania and Wikimedia Commons.

A fourth stream formed with the demand for specialized training and education. Career colleges, business schools, technical and engineering institutions, art schools, research universities, Bible colleges and seminaries, agricultural schools, medical specialty colleges, nursing schools, and law schools began popping up in every corner of the growing country.

Another new strand of higher education emerged in the first decade of the 20th century, the community or junior college. These colleges were designed to offer the first two years of a general college education and permit their graduates to then transfer to the four-year colleges and universities. Joliet Junior College in Illinois was the first public junior college. It opened in 1901.

A publicity card depicting the two founders, Sam Knight and William Baine, of Central City Commercial College in Waco, Texas. Image courtesy of the William Baines Papers of the Texas Collection at Baylor University.

Previously, colleges were primarily residential and located in rural or semi-rural settings. But now urban students demanded and got schools in the middle of cities. These students didn’t want the residential experience, so a new type of commuter college was invented.

Schools like Central City Commercial College (4C), which opened in Waco, Texas, in 1924, met the need of urban residents for training in employable skills or retraining in new skills. In 1935, 4C expanded its evening programs in order to accommodate shift workers who wanted to learn new skills.

Prior to the Civil War, most colleges were founded under the flag of religion. By the time the Civil War began, many of these institutions had drifted from their religious moorings. Some had become secular institutions, while others had their ownership assumed by governmental agencies and had become public institutions.

The Honorable Justin Smith Morrill, Senate sponsor of the Morrill Act of 1862. The photograph was taken between 1865 and 1880. The image is courtesy of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). It is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cwpbh.04981.

After the Civil War, three separate strands of institutional control were formally recognized. The first strand was public institutions, which were primarily funded by governmental agencies such as states, counties, or cities. These institutions were kick-started by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, also known as the Land-Grant Acts. These pieces of legislation provided grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in Agriculture, Home Economics, the Mechanical Arts, and other useful professions. Public institutions began to dominate higher education with their seemingly untouchable advantage of an apparently unending supply of tax revenue.

The second strand consisted of private, non-profit institutions. These were chartered by states, but controlled by independent boards. Some of these were sectarian in nature. They were founded by, controlled by denominations or churches, and funded through the religious founders. Others were non-sectarian, without any particular religious bent.

The third strand was the proprietary schools. These consisted of schools typically founded by an entrepreneur who viewed the institution as a profit-making venture. They were chartered by states, but controlled by the founder or a board of trustees, similar to a corporation. These three strands still dominate the higher education scene of the 21st century.

Diversity in these colleges was not just limited to the type of control, students, programs offered, or geographic location. Students began choosing colleges for more reasons than particular academic programs. They began including in their selection processes non-academic programs like athletics, debate teams, musical opportunities, both vocal and instrumental, and social organizations.

In the opening game at Michigan Stadium, Michigan beat Ohio State in October 1927 before a crowd of 84,000. This image is courtesy of Kaufmann & Fabry Co. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pan.6a28995. See Commons: Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2348814

Rutgers University defeated Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game on November 6, 1869. The University of Michigan’s football stadium, Michigan Stadium (known as the Big House), was built in 1927 with a capacity of 72,000. It soon outgrew it and added 10,000 more seats within five years. The stadium was formally dedicated on October 22, 1927,  when Michigan beat Ohio State before a standing-room-only crowd that exceeded 84,400 people. College sports had become a big-time business. Colleges began recruiting athletes to attend their school in order to play for them.

Intracollegiate debating on college campuses seems to have originated in literary societies as early as 1830. The first recorded intercollegiate debate may have been between Wake Forest University and Trinity College (later known as Duke University) in 1897. Soon debate teams were touring the country, holding matches and tournaments. The movie “The Great Debaters” memorializes a 1935 debate team of African-American students from Wiley College (Marshall, TX) which supposedly traveled to Harvard University, and defeated the reigning national championship debating team. In reality, the debaters from Wiley did not debate Harvard. They debated and defeated the reigning national debate team from the University of Southern California. However, the Wiley team could not declare themselves victors because African-Americans were not permitted to join the Debate Society until after WWII.

James Farmer, Jr., was recruited as a 14-year old freshman by Melvin Tolson, the founder, and coach of the Wiley College Debate Team to become a valuable member of this formidable debating powerhouse. He went on to a have distinguished career in civil rights work in the United States in the middle of the 20th century.

Civil Right Activists including Martin Luther King Jr, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer Jr in the White House on January 18, 1964. The picture is in the public domain because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image is courtesy of the LBJ Presidential Library and Wikimedia.Commons

James Farmer Jr. was considered one of the “Big 4” in the civil rights world. The first of the other three was Martin Luther King Jr. (1948 graduate of Morehouse College an HBCU institution in Atlanta, GA), and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The second was Whitney M. Young Jr. (1941 graduate of Kentucky State University and HBCU institution in Frankfort KY) who served as the Executive Director of the National Urban League, transforming it from a passive organization into an aggressive force working to give socioeconomic access to all individuals who had been historically disenfranchised. The third member of the group was Roy Wilkins (1923 graduate of the University of Minnesota which had a long history of accepting African-American scholars and students), who was Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1955 to 1977. Roy Wilkins was one of the primary organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1967, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian decoration.

Postcard publicizing the Carlton College Glee Club itinerary for the 1913 season. The image is in the public domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Carlton College and Wikimedia Commons.

Glee Clubs were small choral groups dedicated to singing glees, short secular choral songs, which were written or arranged for several vocal parts.   These clubs originated in London in the late 18th century and made their way to the American college campuses in the mid-19th century. The first documented American collegiate glee club was founded at Harvard University in 1858.

By 1910, there were more than 100 colleges hosting Glee Clubs. Many of these co-curricular clubs were replaced on campuses by larger choral groups and formal choirs which performed under the auspices of the music department or school. Many of the colleges would sponsor the Glee Club tours for fundraising and student recruiting purposes.

The Purdue Marching Band “Block P” formation from 1922 football game. Image in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Purdue University and Wikimedia Commons

Historically marching bands were associated with military ventures. They consisted primarily of wind, brass, and percussion instruments. By the middle of the 19th century, they found their way onto college campuses. The first official collegiate marching band was the University of Notre Dame Band of the Fighting Irish, founded in 1845. It first performed at a football game in 1887. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds of American colleges and universities hosted marching bands and orchestras. In 1907, the Purdue All-American Marching Band unveiled the first pictorial formation on a football field with their rendition of the Purdue “Block P.” Not to be outdone, later that year, the University of Illinois Marching Illini band performed the first full halftime show at the football game between the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.

Colleges and universities began recruiting students to perform in their vocal and instrumental musical groups. Other performing arts, like drama and dance, soon followed. Colleges and universities became cultural centers, not only for students but for the communities in which they were located.

Fraternities, sororities, and other social clubs dated their beginning on American campuses from December 5, 1776, with the founding of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the College of William and Mary. Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, fraternities and sororities developed slowly. They were primarily centered in the Northeast quadrant of the United States.

A photograph of the monument in Lexington, VA commemorating the founding of three Panhellenic fraternities in that town. SuperNova at the English Wikipedia, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Super Nova and Wikimedia Commons.

After the Civil War, with the great expansion of colleges and universities, fraternities and sororities also flourished. The American higher education system began encountering racial, religious, and gender diversity and new colleges were founded or reformed throughout the south and west. Growth in the fraternity system overall during this period would lead some to label the last third of the 19th century as “The Golden Age of Fraternities.”

However, the diversity of institutions which engendered a diversity of students also had a darker, hidden side. Students looked to the fraternities and sororities not as vehicles to encourage diversity, but as avenues of escape and as a way to avoid associating with large numbers of particular types of students. They became vehicles of discrimination.

Thus the period between the Civil War and WWII was an era of growth in terms of the number of students and the diversity of types of institutions, types of campus activities, and diversity of students within the system as a whole. Paradoxically, it was also an era of rampant discrimination and exclusion. WWII produced another pause in the development of the American higher education system. We pick up that story in the next post.

 

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KPI – Part VI: Difference Between Governance and Management

Many within higher ed think management theory is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to sneak into the sheepfold and devour the sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime, ID 28175702 © Debspoons | Dreamstime.com

In this post, I return to looking at Key Performance Indicators in a higher ed setting. While this gentle approach may seem innocuous to most individuals outside of the insular world of higher education, it is sure to raise the hackles of many of my higher ed colleagues. They will accuse me of trying to sneak the wolf (management theory) dressed in sheep clothing into the sheepfold (the university) through a back door.

Welsh Corgi working as sheepdog with a flock of sheep. Image courtesy of Dreamstime and Natalia Yaumenenka. ID 104389610 © Natallia Yaumenenka | Dreamstime.com

I am going to be bold enough to take that next step and publicly declare that I do not see management theory as a wolf trying to devour the sheep. I believe it can be viewed more like a sheepdog, herding the sheep to safety through the one and only door of the sheepfold. The sheepdog then lies down at that entrance and guards the fold and the sheep against all predators.

 

Education is a process that can’t be measured in financial returns. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

Many of the most familiar performance indicators are business-oriented outcome measurements. How many widgets were produced? How much did it cost to produce each widget? How much income did the firm make from the sale of those widgets? Higher education for years has claimed that since education is a process, we shouldn’t focus on or speak of educational outcomes, especially financial ones.

As I noted in my post K PI Part III, A University Should Be Managed as If It Were a Business  Milton Greenberg in his seminal essay “The University Is Not a Business (and Other Fantasies)” published in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 2 (March/April 2004), argues forcefully and persuasively that a university should be managed as if it were a business.

Very early in his essay, Greenberg proclaims, “ Presumably, a ‘business’ involves the hierarchical and orderly management of people, property, productivity, and finance for profit.” The primary counterarguments of academicians to Greenberg’s position hinge on three concepts in this sentence.

We need to dig further into the idea of “Hierarchical Management” and the difference between governance and management. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.

 

In this post, I will begin to address the first of these counterarguments, the concept of “hierarchical management.” To understand the problems created by the use of the term hierarchical management we need to have some familiarity with the difference between the general concepts of governance and management.  We also need to look at the typical governance structures of colleges and universities, and the usual management formats of colleges and universities. These two topics are too involved to address in depth in this one blog post. I will take each of them up in subsequent posts. This idea will require more in-depth excavation.

Governance refers to the relationships among people in an organization. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

The origins of the two terms automatically set the stage for a huge battle in the academy over their applicability to higher education. The term governance historically came from the disciplines of social and political sciences. Without digging into the finer points of the definition, this ancestry would usually imply that it must primarily deal with relationships.

Governance has many definitions, but most center on two related ideas. The first idea concerns how decisions are made. What are the processes of decision making within the organization? Who has a voice in making decisions? The second changes the focus to how those decisions are implemented. How is power or control exercised within the organization? What is the locus of authority within the organization?

The typical view of the concept of management is to get employees to work harder to make more money for the company. Image courtesy of Presenter Media

On the other hand, the term management originated within the realm of the business world and was then fine-tuned within the disciplines of economics and business. This ancestry automatically makes it suspect to the academy, which believes that given its origin, it must naturally deal with productivity and finances. These concepts are antithetical to many citizens of the academy.

The four tasks of management. Image courtesy of the author, created by using ClickCharts.

Most modern definitions of management view it as a process of four interwoven tasks. The first of these tasks is Planning, the selection of appropriate organizational goals and the best array of actions to achieve those goals. The second task is Organizing, the establishment of assignments and an aura of authority that encourage and allow people to work together to achieve the organization’s goals.

The third task is Leading which involves motivating, coordinating, inspiring and energizing individuals and groups to work together to achieve the organization’s goals. The fourth task is Controlling which has two primary aspects. The first is assessing situations by establishing accurate systems of measuring and monitoring how well the organization has achieved its goals. The second is redirecting the course of operations when it is apparent that the organization is not achieving its goals.

Modern universities consist of four major groups of individuals. These groups are students, faculty, administration, and governing boards. In subsequent posts, we will examine the historical development of these groups, their relationships with each other, and their roles in governance and management.

From the definitions of governance and management, we see much common ground with one major difference. The major difference is their primary focus. Governance focuses on relationships, while management focuses on tasks. In subsequent posts, I will deal with the idea of shared governance and hierarchical management. I hope to convince you that the two concepts are not mutually exclusive.

To get to the point of being able to discuss these topics, my next post will be this Friday, March 29. It will be a short history of the development of the modern university and the four major groups of individuals that comprise the university.