The University’s Crisis of Purpose

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
September 6, 2009
Crossroads
The University’s Crisis of Purpose
By DREW GILPIN FAUST


The world economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama will change
the future of higher education. Even as universities, both public and
private, face unanticipated financial constraints, the president has
called on them to assist in solving problems from health care delivery
to climate change to economic recovery.

American universities have long struggled to meet almost
irreconcilable demands: to be practical as well as transcendent; to
assist immediate national needs and to pursue knowledge for its own
sake; to both add value and question values. And in the past decade
and a half, such conflicting and unbounded expectations have yielded a
wave of criticism on issues ranging from the cost of college to
universities’ intellectual quality to their supposed decline into
unthinking political correctness. A steady stream of books — among
them “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk” (also a PBS
special), edited by Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow; Anthony T.
Kronman’s “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have
Given Up on the Meaning of Life”; and Dinesh D’Souza’s “Illiberal
Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus” — have delineated
what various authors have seen as the failings of higher education.

At the same time, American colleges and universities have remained the
envy of the world. A 2005 international ranking included 17 American
educational institutions in the top 20, and a recent survey of
American citizens revealed that 93 percent of respondents considered
our universities one of the country’s “most valuable resources.”

Such a widespread perception of the value of universities derives in
no small part from very pragmatic realities: a college education
yields significant rewards. The median earnings for individuals with a
B.A. are 74 percent higher than for workers who possess only a high
school diploma.

In some respects, this is not new. Education has been central to the
American Dream since the time of the nation’s founding. But in the
years since World War II, it was higher education, not just
instruction at the elementary or high school levels, that emerged as
necessary for a technologically skilled work force as well as
fundamental to cherished values of opportunity. As late as the 1920s,
enrollments in the United States stood below 5 percent of the
college-age population. They rose to about 15 percent by 1949, in part
as a result of the G.I. Bill. They have now reached nearly 60 percent.
The United States has pioneered a new postwar era of mass college
attendance that has become global in reach.

But today, for all its importance to individual and social prosperity,
higher education threatens to become less broadly available. By the
end of the 20th century, as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz
document in “The Race Between Education and Technology,” the rate of
increase in educational attainment had significantly slowed, and the
United States had fallen behind a number of other nations in the
percentage of its youth attending college. Goldin and Katz demonstrate
how this slowdown is creating a work force with inadequate
technological abilities, as well as contributing to rising levels of
American inequality.

Escalating college costs have played a significant role in this
slowdown, even as universities have substantially expanded their
programs of financial aid. So, too, have declining levels of
government support.

After World War II, the country witnessed the establishment of a new
partnership between Washington and the nation’s institutions of higher
learning, with the federal government investing in universities as the
primary locus for the nation’s scientific research. This model now
faces significant challenges. Steep federal deficits will combine with
diminished university resources to intensify what a 2007 report by the
National Academies declared to be a “gathering storm,” one that
threatened the future of scientific education and research in America.
The Obama administration has set a goal of devoting more than 3
percent of gross domestic product to research. One hopes this highly
ambitious aspiration can become a reality.

The economic downturn has had what is perhaps an even more worrisome
impact. It has reinforced America’s deep-seated notion that a college
degree serves largely instrumental purposes. The federal government’s
first effort to support higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862,
which established land grant colleges, was intended to advance the
“practical education of the industrial classes.” A Department of
Education report from 2006, “A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future
of Higher Education,” concentrated on creating a competitive American
work force and advancing “our collective prosperity.” But even as we
as a nation have embraced education as critical to economic growth and
opportunity, we should remember that colleges and universities are
about a great deal more than measurable utility. Unlike perhaps any
other institutions in the world, they embrace the long view and
nurture the kind of critical perspectives that look far beyond the
present.

Higher education is not about results in the next quarter but about
discoveries that may take — and last — decades or even centuries.
Neither the abiding questions of humanistic inquiry nor the winding
path of scientific research that leads ultimately to innovation and
discovery can be neatly fitted within a predictable budget and
timetable.

In an assessment of the condition of higher education in the
Anglo-American world, “Multiversities, Ideas, and Democracy,” George
Fallis, a former dean at York University in Toronto, deplores the
growing dominance of economic justifications for universities. They
conflict, he argues, “with other parts of the multiversity’s mission,
with . . . narratives of liberal learning, disinterested scholarship
and social citizenship.” University leaders, he observes, have
embraced a market model of university purpose to justify themselves to
the society that supports them with philanthropy and tax dollars.
Higher education, Fallis insists, has the responsibility to serve not
just as a source of economic growth, but as society’s critic and
conscience.

Universities are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but also
of (often inconvenient) doubt. They are creative and unruly places,
homes to a polyphony of voices. But at this moment in our history,
universities might well ask if they have in fact done enough to raise
the deep and unsettling questions necessary to any society.

As the world indulged in a bubble of false prosperity and excessive
materialism, should universities — in their research, teaching and
writing — have made greater efforts to expose the patterns of risk and
denial? Should universities have presented a firmer counterweight to
economic irresponsibility? Have universities become too captive to the
immediate and worldly purposes they serve? Has the market model become
the fundamental and defining identity of higher education?

Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of
students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an
accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees.
Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with
twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any
other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the
pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities.
Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and
breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human
beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs.
The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such
purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

Drew Gilpin Faust is president of Harvard. She is the author, most
recently, of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil
War.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Faust-t.html