The President at College

No, we are not at present discussing the fact that President Obama, who promised unparalleled transparency, has not released his college transcripts. Why he has not, no one can be quite sure: perhaps his transcripts would run counter to the myth of Obama's native brilliance, a myth, it's worth pointing out, that involves far more than the current President himself, since every Republican Presidential nominee in our memory has always been portrayed as a dunce (sometimes amiable, sometimes not) and every Democratic nominee as an intellectual giant. It is an article of faith in the mainstream media, so much so that one can hardly blame John Kerry for famously lamenting on election day 2004 in regard to George W. Bush, "I can't believe I'm losing to this idiot." The reflexively contradictory nature of the statement itself might have been a clue that something is inherently wrong with the myth; for those innocent of elementary logic, the historical fact might have been instructive, since the putative Republican dunces more often than not defeat the Democratic geniuses. In an enterprise of such complexity--rhetorical, historical, sociological, statistical, economic, and so on--as a national election, the intellectual David really should not be able to slay the mental Goliath with such predictable regularity.

But let all that pass: it is with President Obama's comments yesterday at the University of Michigan that we have to do. In decrying the rapid rise of college tuition, the President put public universities on notice that if they do not find a way to curb cost, he will find ways to withhold Federal money from their budgets. As usual (and as more usual in an election year), some Republicans reacted negatively to this proposal, arguing that the President is again interfering with Freedom of Enterprise by telling colleges how they should charge tuition. Now we have no doubt that the President, also well aware that this is an election year, is saying what he is saying for the worst possible reasons, but it does give one pause that in the matter of college tuition, the President at the very least has a genuine issue on which to give a speech. For the past fifty years, the best path to a comfortably affluent life led through a college education to a profession that allowed one the potential for growth as the economy continued its predictable expansion. Now, however, college, and with it the reasonable certainty of a good life is being pushed beyond the reach of the middle class. In the case of TMH, college some thirty or so years ago cost (without room and board) about $1000 per year, and the last two years were easily paid for by unsought scholarships that came as the reward of the merest modicum of effort. This was of course at a public university, but certainly not a third-rate one: the fact was that a solid education in the Honors College of a major public university could be had in those days for so modest a cost. In such a case, paying for tuition and books was well within the reach of most middle-class parents, even if it meant some sacrifice. One of the major reasons for these low costs is that the universities in those days were modest affairs that functioned by providing the basic elements of a university education: students, faculty, facilities (including dormitories and a library or two), and the minimal administration necessary to keep faculty and students together.

Now, however, things are different. College costs vastly more--so much more that providing children to college now requires on the order of $15,000-$20,000 a year, even at very small regional public universities. To be sure, some of the increase is due to the cost of better facilities, such as dorms that look like reports, with suites for sleeping, basement wellness center for exercise of the body, and lounges and computer labs putatively for improvement of the mind. Still, such costs are relatively fixed in the sense that the residence resort gets built only once and probably does not cost vastly more to maintain than does the old concrete dorm built a quarter-century ago in the brutalist style apparently so essential to the aesthetic experience of a higher education across the land. A much larger potential expense is new employees at the universities. First, such employees, whoever they be, are not a one-time expense like the new building: they require an annual salary, which may be frequently increased over the course of their twenty-five or thirty years of employment, and they require the medical plans that come with these salaries. Second, colleges over the past quarter century have tended to hire not so much new faculty members but administrators. Colleges do so for the simple reason that colleges--at least public colleges--are, like virtually all other governmental or quasi-governmental organizations, bureaucracies, and the main principle about bureaucracies, first and last, is that they exist primarily for the benefit of those they employ. In the case of public colleges, they have since the 1980s almost without exception evolved into institutions which exist primarily to provide (relatively well-paid) employment for those working there. And so, like all bureaucracies, they must perpetuate themselves, primarily by continuing to hire more administrators to oversee the paradoxically growing number of administrators. Spatula has pointed out that as a national average colleges now employ more administrators than faculty members, a baroque condition entirely unnecessary if universities existed to educate students.

TMH has only a sentimental opposition to bureaucracy: in the cold light of logical analysis, we have no firm opposition to any private corporation that wishes for its own ends to hire as many administrators as there are offices in its buildings, computers to monitor, or keyboards at which to type. But public institutions, which are funded to a large degree by taxpayer money--that is to say by the salaries of average men and women working in order to provide better lives for their families--have a responsibility to treat their budgets and their missions with the greatest respect. Those administrators who are paid by public money have an obligation to use those funds precisely to educate students. When faced with a choice, they should always decide to hire the extra faculty member, who may very well be essential and thus by educating his students make a very real contribution to the public good, rather then the third assistant vice president for intramural affairs. The unfortunate matter of fact is that over time college administrations have grown more autocratic and have taken on more and more power to make the essential decisions, while faculty lose ever more voice in collegiate governance; it is no surprise that in the end the administrators in charge of slicing the pie slice it so that they receive ever larger portions. As an actual fact, then, public universities have to a large degree become marked by a soft and genteel corruption, in which administrators partly direct funds meant for education to increasing their own salaries and hiring lieutenants onto whose shoulders they shift more of the actual workload required to run the institutions they control. This has long been the state of public education from kindergarten through high school; it should be no surprise that the contagion has now spread to public universities.

I suspect that in the case of President Obama's proposal, the devil may be in the details, as it has been in so many of his policies (such as the Affordable Halth Care Act); but in its general outline, we agree with his central idea. If public universities continue unthinkingly to increase the size, wealth, and power of administrations, then they should do so without public money. For the simple matter is that these institutions could never survive if they genuinely had to compete in the educational marketplace. If they had to do so, then they would have to focus upon education and put most of their money to that task: university administrations are free not to do so precisely because they are sheltered from the rough weather of competition by the steady supply of government money. Take that away, and administrators, faced with the choice of extinction or education will either retire or turn their attention to educating students, which will result in leaner administrations and a redressing of the current imbalance of power in favor of faculties. It may be heresy to some whose knees jerk in too reactionary a fashion that President Obama is on the right side of an increasingly important issue, but so he seems to be. We hope that it accrues to our favor to point out that saying so at least causes us considerable pain.

Tenure?

Another friend sends me a link late today to yet another story--this time in First Things, R.R. Reno's review of Naomi Schaeffer Riley's book The Faculty Lounges. The delightful pun in the title, which reminds me of a former colleague who to all appearances did nothing all day but wander from office to office with a mug of coffee in hand, seems to be the best thing about the book. Apparently Riley has produced another volume in what has by now become an almost venerable genre--the conservative attack on tenure. The instinct is understandable, for who does not lament the fact that virtually the entire system of American education, from elementary through graduate school, is in the hands of left-wing teachers? This system produces liberal students in schools of journalism, education, and liberal arts all across the country, who upon graduation spend years proselytizing for the left-wing cause until, in due course, they learn through experience that life is not at all the utopian concern they were taught it is and they begin on the way of wisdom to unlearn the teaching of the colleges.

That, as I say, is a huge problem. Would Barack Obama ever have made it to the White House with an electorate that had been educated in high school and college about the differences between Carter and Reagan? And yet, despite the damage that a bad system of education can multiply throughout society, tenure is not the root of the evil, nor is its abolition the solution.

One notes, for example, that while telling us that Riley explains well how tenure ensures conformity, the paragraph in which Reno summarizes Riley's explanation doesn't really explain anything at all: "Far from securing a free and open academic culture, tenure can have the opposite effect. Riley does an especially good job showing how tenure constricts rather than expands the intellectual diversity of most college campuses. Colleges and universities want to give jobs and tenure only to qualified applicants—and qualified applicants are those who think the same way as the already tenured professors on the tenure review committees." To some extent, this is true, as the case at the University of Kentucky showed last year, when a qualified professor was not hired to teach astronomy precisely because, as emails from the search committee revealed, they feared his Christianity. But it is unclear how precisely tenure causes this problem. The difficulty lies in the fact of the bias of those who hire. A left-wing system of education will produce a left-wing faculty, who will tend to hire clones of themselves. Whether or not those who hire have tenure will make little difference.

One suspects that the conservative opposition to tenure is two-fold. First, the university faculties really are singularly left-leaning institutions in the context of a generally conservative society. Since these faculty also enjoy the singular privilege of tenure, it seems logical that the tenure must be the root of the liberalism. But tenure is not necessarily the cause of the liberalism: if it is, the critics of tenure ought to provide a more convincing explanation for how the one causes the other. Second, conservatives, who tend to value the free market as a model for most human endeavor, are understandably suspicious of a system which, after a period of probation, provides a sinecure for whoever is lucky enough to receive one. That universities ought to be run as free-market enterprises, however, is far from certain. In their old traditional form, when they laid the groundwork for the magnificent tradition in the humanities, universities were grossly inefficient in economic terms. College faculties were assembled to teach a handful of matriculating students, an an entire Oxford College--All Souls--existed (and still does) purely for research, not educating any students at all. However, if one contrasts that inefficient system with the for-profit institutions of today or the general tendency of third-tier and regional universities to be run like businesses, one will find that the former system, which lavishes great expense on the relationship between teacher and student actually produced something worth having--a system that gave us a canon of great works of literature that nourish the human soul and the means for any curious mind to study those works through a body of helpful scholarship that guided the student through such works as docents through a museum. The current system is in danger of cranking the greatest number of warm bodies through the smallest number of classes to ensure that they produce the largest possible body of tuition-paying students, who are ensured of graduation so that they can one day contribute alumni dollars to administrations that are fat, happy, and completely in charge of the budget bag.

If we want universities that actually educate students, we will indeed need serious reform. But that reform should begin with administrations, which ought to be even more bothersome to conservatives than tenured faculty. University administrations continue to drive up the costs of education by providing ever greater salaries for themselves and their rapidly-growing armies of support staff, who make their jobs ever easier as they gain an ever-larger slice of the university finances. And since they are largely the ones who allocate those finances, they embody corruption. It is they, whose numbers since the late 1970s have been increasing rapidly, who drive up the cost of education, not professors, whose numbers and salaries have remained relatively flat over the same period of time. At the university where I teach, the only thing that stands in the way of the administration's turning the institution into another business on the order of Best Buy or the local Toyota dealership is a tenured faculty which can sometimes act as a conscience for the school and through opposition shame the administration into abandoning some of its most cynically self-interested initiatives.

Although conservatives often describe tenure as existing primarily to protect the controversial speech of some professors, such I think is not its primary purpose. Going back to the beginning of Western society is the idea that human beings can live two types of life--the active and the contemplative. This is in part what lies at the heart of Achilles' great choice in the Iliad, and it is the point of the Gospel pericope about Mary and Martha. Some do while others teach, and both action and contemplation are necessary for society to flourish. In part this realization is an example of the old medieval argument about whether knowledge or action is supreme: the answer is that the world needs both. Action without knowledge is dangerous, says Confucius, while knowledge without action is useless. Society needs librarians and researchers. We need the contemplative Einstein, Gödel, and Turing, as we also need the active Ford, Edison, and the brothers Wright. Those without tenure have the compensation of being free, if they work hard enough, to grow very wealthy indeed; those with tenure will never grow wealthy, but they will have the security they need to study, think, educate themselves in the sometimes impractical knowledge that in the end makes them better teachers. To use one's tenure, for example, to acquire a range of languages, which permits reading a rich variety of untranslated texts, makes one a better teacher than he would be if he had been forced by lack of tenure into the greater productivity of writing articles and books that would do neither him, nor other teachers, nor his students any good. Such studies deepen a mind to which any students who wish can have access: such access enriches their life and helps them approach the richness of culture that is one of the chief ends of a liberal education. A professoriate without tenure constantly worried about productivity on someone else's timetable will not be able to serve as such a guide.

One can respond, of course, that such a professoriate is rare these days, when more and more faculty members work themselves into ever narrower niches of bizarre specialization that end up as parodies of scholarship. But denying tenure to the few traditional scholars who occupy the universities will not solve this problem. We do indeed need a way to achieve greater diversity of opinion on college faculties, but leaving all professors without protection at the mercy of self-serving administrations will only make matters worse. Whatever the ultimate solutions to this problem, ending tenure will not in the end help anyone--except administrators.