San Francisco Bay on May 30, 2024

by Unspecified Employee

Q: Why does a large university, such as Northeastern, merge with various small colleges, such as Mills College or Marymount Manhattan College or New College of the Humanities? 

A: Because it can.

And because these agreements, while they are announced as mergers, are basically giveaways, and usually come with a big pile of assets that are handed over to Northeastern with few questions asked. 

For instance, when Northeastern merged with Mills College in 2022, they got what their CFO called a fully undergraduate enabled blank slate with $650 million in assets--for more or less nothing more than the agreement to respect tenure for about twenty-five remaining faculty, most of them close to retirement. And for that it got a $250 million or so endowment: a mix of scholarship funds, endowed chairs for faculty, named lecture series, etc. Also included were 135 acres of land in a major metropolitan area, much of it undeveloped. It included a number of dorms that could house around a thousand or so students, a recently updated theater, a recently restored concert hall with frescoes by artist Raymond Boynton depicting an array of mythological scenes, a number of recently built LEED certified buildings, an art museum adorned with the words “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”  from Hippocrates, a beautifully preserved Mansard building included in the National Register of Historic Places, a street that has been declared as among the nation’s hundred most beautiful, and a Julia Morgan designed campanil. And Northeastern also got a bunch of musical instruments including over twenty grand pianos and a number of historically significant synthesizers, a library with a rare book collection that included a probable leaf from a Gutenberg Bible, all the art in the art museum, a book arts studio, a woodworking studio, a ceramics studio, a number of science labs with their microscopes and their cadavers. A swimming pool was included, a nice one. And a soccer field, a bit run down but still functionable. Also many many computers, desk chairs, coffee makers. A fine presidential house. A number of lovely small houses for faculty built in the Spanish Eclectic style. A very sweet farm. All the things that make a college a college.

It is not like there were no costs when Northeastern was given this $650 million. 

Mills had significant debt, around $30 million was the rumor, that had to be paid off. And some deferred maintenance too. So shortly after the merger Northeastern invested in some brightly colored Adirondack chairs for the meadow, some signage, many gallons of paint, and they turned the fountains back on. They also provided iPads to the faculty with cell service for a year so they finally had working WiFi, then new computers the next year, and eventually a six percent raise. (Mills faculty salaries had been frozen for many years and were unusually low; this raise did not really bring them up to national norms, or compensate in any way for cost of living increases, but it was something.)  

Then the campus was easily monetized. 

Within the year, Northeastern had over a thousand students enrolled to sit in those Adirondack chairs. These students, part of the Global Scholars Program, paid full tuition. So very quickly, the campus was bringing in $81 million in tuition a year. 

The next year, another five hundred students arrived on campus. These were four-year students who were directly admitted to Northeastern, a mixture of graduate and undergraduate students. Assuming a fifty percent discount on tuition and housing, that would be another $20 million. 

Basically, the blank slate was very quickly generating $100 million a year in tuition. 

But really, the CFO’s blank slate comment should probably not be taken too seriously. It is not worth getting all righteous about. It isn’t his job to sugarcoat the merger and he isn’t working for the public relations office. 

But what is interesting about this blank slate comment is that Mills College was, of course, not blank at all. It was occupied by a number of committed faculty, staff, and students. All had different fates. 

The students either left or finished their degrees with Northeastern. Those that stayed got a Northeastern degree at Mills prices.

The staff that decided to remain were protected for a few years. Then many were retained or offered the option to move to Boston. 

But the fate of the faculty was more complicated. Even though Northeastern very quickly figured out how to bring in around a thousand and a half first year students, it has been unable to figure out what to do with the faculty. 

Northeastern, as part of the MOU that was negotiated by the former Mills president and board of trustees, was obligated “to honor and abide by the terms of tenure.” 

But full-time faculty who were not tenured, even though many of them had been an integral part of Mills for many years, had a more mixed fate. The Provost of Northeastern when the merger was announced claimed that the MOU meant that “all full-time non-tenure-track faculty will be teaching with Northeastern following the merger.” But for how long was left unclear. 

Quickly Northeastern moved the Mills full-time-non-tenure-track faculty out of the union with the promise of their “one faculty” model. They then decided that these faculty were actually not part of the “one faculty” and were not guaranteed either the protections in the faculty handbook or multiyear contracts, which allowed them to begin the process of not renewing many of them. There were around thirty of these faculty at the time of the merger; about half of them remain two years in. 

For both tenured and non-tenure track faculty there are conflicting faculty governance issues and no clear path forward to resolving them. The faculty handbook at Northeastern claims that “the University will impose no limitations upon the freedom of faculty members in the exposition of the subjects they teach, either in the classroom or elsewhere.” A fairly standard statement. But this very basic precept has not been one that Northeastern has been willing to meaningfully extend to Mills faculty. 

Right now Mills faculty are tenured under this entity called “Mills College at Northeastern University” (which according to the MOU should exist for the next hundred years). But when the merger happened, Northeastern shut down all of Mills’s classes and degree programs, so the faculty of Mills College now teach courses that the other colleges within Northeastern offer on the Oakland campus. Many to most of the remaining Mills College faculty do not teach in their area of expertise. Just one example: a professor with expertise in African American literature was recently teaching an introduction to criminology course.

Many faculty are likely to be unable to teach in their area of expertise again because that area is “owned” by a Boston college. 

For example, Mills had an internationally renowned music program. It was a well-resourced legacy department with millions in endowment support whose courses were taught by established faculty, a program so prominent that several scholarly books were written about it. Three faculty remain, so there is capacity to offer twelve music classes a year on the Oakland campus. But Northeastern has been unwilling to offer the Music major on the Oakland campus and has decided to allow at most two to three music electives to be offered each semester. (This is happening even though the endowment funds more than cover the salaries of the remaining faculty.)  

These are difficult issues that challenge faculty governance and autonomy in all sorts of ways. To say that Mills music faculty cannot develop courses or programs in music denies the autonomy of Mills faculty.

But even if the Boston Music Department was willing to let Mills faculty develop courses, something they have not been willing to do, the Mills faculty would still be excluded from the decision making processes of those departments. To fix that and foist Mills faculty on pre-existing Boston departments as tenured members risks violating the autonomy of Boston departments to do their own hires. Yet to have say two Music departments in one university with different classes and different requirements is absurd. 

There is no easy way out of these conundrums. And the result has been a sort of stalemate where Mills faculty are in a holding pattern. Because the campus only houses freshmen, everyone is limited to teaching service classes such as first-year writing. Most are barely teaching in their fields. And some have been forced into doing low-level administrative work to fill out their workloads.

Mills College is not Northeastern's only acquisition. It fixed this mess in its in-process merger with Marymount Manhattan College by not respecting tenure and giving all faculty, tenured or not, a one-year contract. This deal, and really here the president and the board of trustees of Marymount Manhattan College should feel deep shame, basically preserves nothing of the mission of Marymount Manhattan College. 

The Marymount Manhattan merger has come with some vague promises that Northeastern will grow Marymount Manhattan’s creative and performing arts programs. But what are Marymount Manhattan’s programs without their faculty? 

Faculty have been promised consideration for any open positions, but without any commitment to there being any open positions. And, as anyone knows, all “consideration” means is the ability to apply for jobs, something that anyone can do at any time. 

This means that there is a good chance that the current Marymount Manhattan faculty are working extra hours for no extra pay, to oversee the teach-out, the very thing that will allow Northeastern will discard them once they’ve done this work. 

Abby Fiorella, chair of the Board of Trustees of Marymount Manhattan College, claims this merger will ensure "the long-term preservation of our mission, our values, and our college." But how can this be true when the merger essentially abandons the college's name, mission, and faculty? 

There is another way to think about this issue. Who “owns” a college? The answer is sort of no one. They aren’t corporations really. And while their assets can be bought and sold, the college itself can not. For many reasons, a college isn't a collection of buildings. If it is anything, it is an organic entity composed of a distinct educational mission, long-standing traditions, and a community of alumni. A board of trustees working with a dedicated faculty and staff are tasked to maintain these traditions and fulfill the mission. 

While a college's mission and traditions naturally evolve over time, these changes typically happen gradually and intentionally, guided by the trustees, faculty, and staff who understand and care about the institution's core values. Simply maintaining the physical campus as classroom space for another university does not preserve Marymount Manhattan College. 

Right now, around a hundred colleges are closing each year and this number is expected to rise. Mergers are way better than closures. They should be encouraged. It does not help anyone, especially students, to just let colleges fail. It also does not help anyone anywhere to just abandon faculty and with them their years of expertise. 

It might be that more oversight and regulatory control is needed as it does not look like big universities are going to do the right thing voluntarily, even things--like protecting tenure, cultivating the exchange of ideas, and utilizing the expertise of a skilled workforce--that would be in their best interest. 

Sadly, the accrediting agencies seem not adequate to this task. The Mills College case illustrates this problem. When accreditors visited post-merger, their response to faculty concerns about governance was that they were lucky even to be employed. 

It was a true statement. They are lucky. But in a fair world, mergers should not be allowed to arbitrarily eliminate faculty and staff positions. At minimum, the assets that the acquiring universities obtain for free in these mergers should be used to offer generous buyout packages to faculty and to meaningfully integrate those that remain before these assets drop to the bottom line of the acquiring university. 

Really though, to be done right, mergers (and not closures called mergers, which is sort of what the Marymount Manhattan College deal seems to be) should involve substantial faculty involvement. Meaningful faculty involvement that is; not the usual meetings that administrators like to hold so they can claim faculty were consulted. 

Northeastern’s tendency so far has been to go in the opposite direction. Trustees are not allowed to discuss the merger with faculty until it is settled. And then right before a merger is announced, they impose gag orders between employees of both institutions (even though it seems likely that this practice contradicts Northeastern Faculty Senate Bylaws regarding faculty authority over issues related to faculty). The gag orders are indicative of the administration’s fear: genuine faculty solidarity across institutions could challenge their ability to structure mergers primarily as asset transfers. And sadly the gag orders seem to be working, with long term consequences. Over two years later, Mills faculty remain embattled, isolated, and paid less than their Boston equivalents. 

The future of higher education mergers does not have to follow this pattern of treating colleges as mere collections of assets to be acquired and faculty as inconvenient obligations to be managed away. A better model would recognize that the true value of any academic institution is not its physical assets, but instead is the expertise, dedication, and institutional knowledge of its faculty and staff. 

When universities like Northeastern acquire smaller colleges without meaningfully integrating their faculty and staff or preserving their academic missions, they gain short-term financial benefits. But ultimately, they diminish the very thing that makes universities meaningful: their role as centers of teaching, learning, and scholarly discourse. 

As more colleges face financial pressures in the coming years, we need a framework for mergers that prioritizes academic integrity and faculty governance. Without such reforms, the losers are not just displaced faculty members, but the entire academic enterprise itself.

The season's higher ed masterplot is easy to state: liberal arts education is a financial failure; financial success requires mega-universities.

Whatever the partial truths contained in these claims, nothing this winter provided actual evidence for them.  They also conceal the real factor that's undermining private as much as public higher ed-: the unnecessary obsession with its private funding.

Alleged proof of the liberal arts's fiscal demise is coming in the form of closed or closing liberal arts colleges.  These arrived on the heels of the closure of liberal arts programs last year (like Wisconsin's Stevens Point that we covered in two parts).  Stephens Point now appears to be the tip of the iceberg: In January, CHE announced a forthcoming Modern Languages Association finding that 651 language programs have closed in the last 3 years, without academia really noticing.  Meanwhile, with only local fanfare, 17 liberal arts colleges have closed in the last five years in Massachusetts alone. Moody's claims that 1 in 5 small liberal arts colleges are under stress.

The best known case is Hampshire College.  Forever young and poor, it epitomized the creativity ideals of the whole liberal arts college genre, tied to customized majors and the small, intense classes that underwrite the "active learning" we are all supposed to have.  But Hampshire's enrollments fell 17 percent between 2010 and 2017.  Most universities survive on enrollments, and Hampshire's small endowment meant it had to find new revenues. (How much money they had and what they borrowed is in dispute.)

But Hampshire didn't become a poster child for liberal arts failure until the president's bizarre January 15th announcement that Hampshire was "carefully considering whether to enroll an incoming class this fall." This was followed by a February 1 Board of Trustees decision not to admit a full freshman class--which, as sociology professor Margaret Cerullo noted in her excellent Nation piece, was an attack on their own revenue base.

And yet Hampshire's trouble doesn't prove anything about the innate unsustainability of the liberal arts if it is self-inflicted.  That is clearly the situation.  President Miriam Nelson's initial statement didn't really make sense, as she combined her declaration of emergency with the comment that, "at Hampshire our budget is balanced, our $52 million endowment has performed well, and the success of our educational model is confirmed by an array of stellar data. We continue to be among the top three percent of institutions whose students go on to earn a research doctorate." 

Instead, Nelson and the Board seem to have artificially induced Hampshire's crisis to court potential suitors, most likely to UMass-Amherst, which had just taken over failing Mt Ida College in Newton.

Instead of praise for making the tough call, Nelson and the Hampshire Board of Trustees got the harshest appraisals I've seen dished out to college management.  In her overview in the New Yorker, Masha Gessen wrote, "Secrecy and confusion remain the defining characteristics of the Hampshire crisis."  Since its founding, Hampshire College has raised the question of whether students and faculty could manage themselves without top-down administration.  The question is being raised again, this time by its managers' incompetence.

The college leadership has wrought disaster.  Gessen writes,

Nelson is expected to announce a second wave of layoffs, in April. She told me that the scale of the layoffs would match the loss of revenue resulting from admitting a much smaller freshman class—that is, around a quarter of the college’s operating budget. Hampshire faculty members, in keeping with the school’s education philosophy, are not protected by tenure—back in the sixties, the idea was that tenure encouraged passivity in academics, and its absence would motivate them to continue to grow and develop. Word among Hampshire faculty members is that half of them are likely to lose their jobs. According to Barskova, because Hampshire has traditionally fostered co-teaching, the looming layoffs will kill the academic program.

Nelson and her board may turn out to have destroyed the college rather than sold it, and for no good reason.

Other criticism came from Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a specialist in higher education leadership.  He was writing in Fortune, which you'd expect to support this apparent example of disruptive innovation, except that just about everybody is sick of it and its regular failure to make things better.  Sonnenfeld noted a total failure of the Board to make use of the college's assets:

the college board’s executive committee framed this [matriculation] challenge as an existential crisis . . . and their actions have since created chaos. And rather than locate better ways to mobilize their own many assets—Hampshire’s distinctive mission, the Five College Consortium community, a strong alumni network, and a largely successful existence as an innovative education model—to a recovery, Hampshire’s leadership appears to have panicked.

Interestingly, Sonnenfeld tied this gross underestimation of the college's value to a failure of management to work with its wider community.

Over the course of the fall, Nelson never consulted her five living predecessors, faculty leaders, or other campus constituencies. Nor did she appeal to alumni about her dire assessment of Hampshire’s financial situation, a list which includes Stonyfield Farms chairman Gary Hirshberg, former CEO of Seventh Generation Jeffrey Hollender, renowned documentarian Ken Burns, and Pulitzer Prize winner Edward Humes. Gregory Prince, who was president of Hampshire College 16 years, envisioned tapping such alumni for a recovery plan involving various interconnected institutes. But in the panic, consultation—a cultural necessity in a liberal arts college founded on participation and engagement—simply did not occur and this important resource was overlooked.

Collaboration is in fact the foundation of intelligence in pretty much everything, but education managers only sometimes sees this.  Cerullo chronicles Nelson's failures on this front. Sonnenfeld cited former Hampshire president Prince calling for restored campus partnerships in Hampshire policy-making.  In spite of the insight of various individuals, higher ed admin culture has shifted in recent decades toward autocracy.  That has justified many a mediocre decision, including this one.

The inevitable New York Times mediation on the demise of communitarian ideals misses the point that Hampshire may close not because of liberal arts economics but because of the autocratic replacement of shared governance.

The liberal arts are often scapegoated for economic problems that come from the spread of the market model in higher ed.  Many, many people who can and should benefit from higher education cannot pay market price for it.  Markets fails to allocate higher ed efficiently--they give too much to the rich and too little to the poor.  Markets hand education out according to ability to pay, as they are supposed to do. But that isn't how societies allocate true public goods like quality healthcare, high school diplomas, and now bachelor's degrees.  Societies need relatively equal distribution of public goods that meet the same quality standard in all cases.  Such a distribution is always subsidized--where "subsidy" means society pays collectively for a just distribution through the tax system.  In other terms, capitalist societies are always partly socialist or they function very badly.  The key feature of neoliberalism--privatization of all interests and allocations--actually degrades the capitalism it seeks to expand.

In higher ed wea have this jerry-rigged system called student financial aid that offers selective subsidies without having to own market failure.  A college like Hampshire, which is private, typically uses endowment returns, gifts, and the full tuition of affluent students to subsidize poorer students.  Public colleges do the same thing with state appropriations (including direct aid to students).  Whether the college is private or public, its finances are now constituted by market failure. It needs the subsidy work-around from somewhere.

Private colleges are facing an artificial crisis borne of the national--wholly political--demand that they cover their very high quality educational operations entirely with private revenues.  Their students can't actually come up with this money: colleges are now discounting tuition in many cases by 50 percent in order to fill their classes.  This has nothing to do with the quality of the students but reflects the normal smart person's very limited personal wealth.  (The actual economics of public goods suggests that colleges should be discounting tuition anyway, since at least half the total value of a college degree is non-private, students should never pay actual cost in the first place (Stage 1)).

To function, Hampshire has to get a tuition subsidy for many or most of its students; enrollments decline because of insufficient subsidies that declining enrollments make even more insuffiicent.  The doom loop I describe in The Great Mistake applies to private as well as public colleges.  If President Nelson did in fact want Hampshire to be taken over by UMass, she was acknowledging (in a destructive way) that her private subsidy stream wasn't big enough, and could be fixed only with a bigger public one.

Let's pause to note that the thirty years propaganda war on the liberal arts, first for PCness and now for non-vocationality, has successfully scared customers away. But the liberal arts aren't only the most powerful rival of literalist, dispensationalist Christianity on the one hand and business autocracy on the other, but are the exception to college's problem with "limited learning," all of which happens in vocational majors (Figure 6).  The irony is that liberal arts colleges aren't just the most vulnerable sector of higher ed, but also its best.  The constant attacks on them are lowering overall college quality.  The attacks are enabled by the failure to understand public-good economics.

I drafted a Twitter thread on this a couple of days ago.  Liberal arts college quality comes from a combination of intense workload for students and small classes for active engagement with the material.   To make a crude contrast: a typical public college student takes 48 quarter courses for a 4-year BA. Of those 48 courses, how many will have 15 students or fewer?  Probably no more than 1 or 2, and quite possibly zero.  In contrast, at my alma mater, Reed College, I had only two courses with more than 15 students. The engagement difference adds up.

It costs much more money to do high-quality active learning.  Instead of facing this fact, the US is letting cost end the policy discussion rather than start it. The policy questions are: does the United States want to limit Hampshire-style quality to a small elite that can pay? Does it want to limit it to a group that is economically more diverse but still small (the high-tuition/high-financial aid model)? Or does it seek mass quality and see the liberal arts as something to scale up?

Politicians have been stuck in an anti-ambition mode for thirty years, catering to the tax revolt which is in large part a symptom of structural racism, which leads them not to want to pool public resources across racial lines. Operationally, this is moronic and self-destructive. it has lowered the quality of the entire national infrastructure, from roads to schools to housing.  The same is true of liberal arts colleges, public and private. Since they are more or less the best we have, refusing to fund them is tantamount to lowering overall attainment.

Liberal arts college leadership has been on the defensive for years, and is completely intimidated by criticisms of price. But the solution is not to let these colleges die so an even smaller elite gets to have their quality.  One alternative, mega-universities, with their dependence on charging significant tuition for online enrollment, are a way of kidding ourselves about quality as we give it up.

The key issue is that the whole ecosystem of higher education has been destabilized by shifting to a private cost structure that doesn't work.  Seeing colleges as private goods insures that society under-invests in them. A confident society sets goals for things like education and then figures out how to pay for it.  It does not downsize the goal to fit benighted leaders' ideas about the budget. The US has to decide if it wants real learning for all college students or just for the traditional, limited group.

If we do decide we want mass learning or democratic education, we're going to have to fix the business model. That will mean reversing privatization at private colleges too. Society and business will have to increase subsidizes to colleges and universities, not demand that universities subsidize society and business--which happens when we make students pay the cost of educational benefits that are actually half public. 

This social support for private college students will take the form of public funding for places like Hampshire.  This is a good year to start thinking about how to do it.

Photo credit: Katherine Taylor, New York Times

UPDATE. Both Hampshire's president and Board chair have resigned.   President Miriam Nelson's resignation letter can be read here.  It acknowledges that the secrecy of admin's deliberations was a problem while also trying to justify it as part of Hampshire's original charter.

Students, staff, and faculty are proceeding with the Renvisioning Hamphsire project. It's Facebook site is here.

There may be one benefit of Republican downgrades of the University of Wisconsin system in recent years: insight into the kind of public colleges that austerity and #faketenure will create.  At the system's Stevens Point campus, the administration has used an induced budget deficit to propose the closure of thirteen arts, humanities and social science departments, whose savings are to fund the expansion or creation of majors that seem more directly connected to existing jobs. UW's modified tenure rules allow the firing of tenured faculty when their lines are needed for other higher priority programs, so faculty layoffs are likely as the main source of any budgetary savings.  The result is to be the conversion of the humanities into service units for vocational majors.

This idea of the humanities as service providers of basic skills may sound strange to people acquainted with the riches of literary history, philosophy and multiple languages--or who assume that policymakers still want graduates steeped in common national culture.  But the service humanities are  baked into a vocational model that enjoys bipartisan policy support.  I've tried to focus our collective attention on this before, after service status was indicated by the bulk closures of humanities departments at SUNY Albany in 2010.  The current case is worse. Not only has the administration at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point (UWSP) proposed the closure of many more departments than Albany did--"American studies, art (but not graphic design), English (other than English for teacher certification), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (social science for teacher certification would continue), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology (social work major would continue) and Spanish"--but it openly champions the humanities service model.  

Here I'm going to argue that the main objections to this model have rested on a valuable public-good intuition about higher education that we should develop. In Part 2, I'll analyze the administration's strategic planning, which is defective in illuminating ways.

One important criticism is that the plan relegates the students of central Wisconsin to second class citizenship.  MLA Executive Director Paula Krebs rightly described the plan as an insult to working-class students who, because they can't go to the Madison flagship, are to be given a limited-option, second-tier degree.  Students from well-resourced high schools and affluent families can study anything they want in any depth at UW-Madison.  Meanwhile, rural or poorer or older or more rooted students get the limited job-training menu at UWSP.  The original vision of statewide university systems was democratic: a citizen would not get a lesser education because of location or lower income.  The new Wisconsin plan is stratification and inequality within the system.  This will intensify growing income inequality outside, and inject lower qualifications into a rural economy that needs exactly the opposite.

A second objection has targeted the plan's overt subordination of qualitative to quantitative and technical fields.  On the UWSP campus, the Save Our Majors coalition mounted the campus's biggest protest since the Vietnam War.  In demanding a new and inclusive planning process, the coalition wrote a letter that "acknowledges the university must change but says students and central Wisconsin residents oppose the current plan to address its $4.5 million projected deficit by targeting humanities majors."

The Stevens Point Journal reported, "at one point, one student’s speech turned directly to the chancellor.  'We feel expendable. This is how many students feel,' Ethan Cates, a senior philosophy and Spanish major, said.  'I want you to see how much anger and frustration there is.'"

Many people pointed out the irreplaceable content of arts, social sciences, and humanities courses (I call these SASH for short, to avoid saying ASSH).  This was summarized by a student sign:

The SASH fields are as empirical and instrumental as STEM and professional fields, but in their own domain: they discover and spread knowledge about culture, society, relationships, and every kind of individual distinctness.  And it's true that no problem on earth can be solved without better SASH knowledge that we have now, including problems that seem mainly technical.  Students get this, which is why so many double or triple major to combine expertise in domains like wildlife ecology and Spanish.

The public good intuition combines two insights.  One is that study should not be rationed according to ability to pay.  Another is that the full range of human interests and capabilities need to be brought to bear on public problems.  The U.S. should double down on qualitative and interpretative thinking, not cut it in half.  It should also build its capacity to link qualitative and quantitative methods, not subordinate the former.  The country's political crisis is arguably the result of a population that is not smart enough about hard qualitative situations. The same goes for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica opinion manipulation, which will only be addressed with better syntheses of interpretative and data skills.

One hard qualitative problem comes from the state of Wisconsin itself.  It is losing its younger population to other states--in the typical community, the youth population fell 22 percent between 1990 and 2010.  A recent study of the problem began with the insight that the state can't stop brain drain with policies that target young people as individuals.  That is because their decisions to stay or leave involve the overall community culture, including a range of amenities from housing, outdoor recreation, coffee shops, arts facilities, and many other things that create the look and feel of a place that will attract not only you but your friends and peers.  Understanding the problem means understanding both individual and group subjectivity. How do you make young people feel like they can have they life they want in Wisconsin?

Help on this kind of public problem could come from graduates of UWSP's proposed new major in Geographic Information Science.  But GIS majors can't understand multi-causal cultural and psychological interactions in GIS terms.  Quant approaches need to work with--really be embedded in--qualitative socio-cultural studies. These need to include education in languages and the intersecting identities that affect everyone's real world decisions.

Now, the UWSP's restructuring statement claims that they have this covered.  They are making the liberal arts more relevant by rehousing them.

We must resist the false choice between providing a broad, well-rounded education or narrow professional and vocational pathways. As one strategy, we will reimagine traditional liberal arts majors for students seeking applied learning to improve their career potential. Second, we will strengthen our core liberal arts curriculum. Preparing students for engaged citizenship, ensuring that they graduate as broadly educated and well-rounded lifelong learners, and equipping them with the kinds of professional skills that we know are essential for career success in any field—these are things we owe to all students regardless of major. 

UWSP's leaders say they aren't downgrading the liberal arts but reimagining them. They aren't marginalizing the liberal arts but strengthening their core.  They aren't going to crank out job-ready technicians but create well-rounded citizens.  They aren't narrowing Stevens Point education but broadening it.  Eliminating majors and departments doesn't demote their content but generalizes it.  But what is the evidence for this claim?

In regard to the public document, the answer is none.  In fact, the administration makes it clear that they will sacrifice the "well demonstrated" value of "traditional liberal arts" degrees to training for  "the careers available to [graduates] in central and northern Wisconsin"-- even as young Wisconsin graduates, for decades, soon leave those jobs. (See the Jobs comments for Plover, adjacent to Stevens Point.)   The UWSP administration wants

programs that allow students to study the liberal arts in order to build specific skills and achieve career-oriented outcomes. For example:  

• Rather than a general major in English, can we create a more focused program for professional writing and publishing in a digital age? 

• Instead of comprehensive majors in French, German, and Spanish, how can we equip graduates in health and business careers with the language and intercultural skills they might need to do their jobs in a diverse global society? 

• Instead of a Philosophy major, can we develop offerings in applied ethics for the next generation of professional leaders? 

• In place of broad majors in Political Science and Sociology, can we explore the creation of more career-minded programs in Public Affairs, Criminology, or Legal Studies?

The answer to each question is yes you can, but only by narrowing and dumbing the curriculum down.   Having real "language and intercultural skills" is a process that takes many years. "Engaged citizenship" doesn't happen in one or two general education courses, but through full course sequences in history, political science, economics, literature, and sociology, where the results need to be actively integrated by each student who moves through the curriculum.

For every possible combination, 21st century learning requires depth through immersion and integration across fields, not surface familiarity through a handful of electives. It requires more coherent course sequencing, much better advising, and independent student projects. It means "research-learning" for every student. That can only be supervised by regular faculty who are themselves research-active, and have the working conditions that allow teaching and research to coexist.  

None of this is achieved by swapping out liberal arts and sciences majors for vocational ones.  In fact, it looks as though the growth of vocational majors is partly responsible for the "limited learning" that scholars have been detecting of late.  The most likely outcome of UWSP's plan is to transmit reduced budgets directly into reduced learning for its graduates. The plan lowers the possibility of the alternative, full-scale creativity learning of the kind I discuss here and at length in The Great Mistake. 

It's a deep mystery why ostensibly democratic societies don't make a bigger effort to offer the same quality of learning to regular people that they invariably offer their elites. For example, the most influential single major in the U.K. is arguably Oxford's program in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. This is partly because of the highly selected students who enroll at this super-elite university, but it is also because of the program itself, which integrates many SASH disciplines over an intensive three-year course.  USWP's "core liberal arts curriculum" will be painfully half-assed by comparison, and not just compared to Oxford but to any undamaged state college.  

The challenge of 21st century higher ed is to bring the whole university population up to a higher standard.  We have to undo the stratification that afflicts the current system, and that has lowered overall U.S. university outcomes to its current level of international mediocrity.  UWSP's administration proposes to perpetuate and intensify stratification by ignoring the results of educational research, to the obvious disservice of its students and its region.

The current response to the plan reflects a contrary, public-good understanding of higher ed, in which university systems allocate learning without regard to the wealth of a region or its students.  It reflects an awareness that UWSP's administration is offering a quality rationing plan.

Cynics will say that this is what you'd expect when career managers and political appointees design a university curriculum.  You'll obviously get a structure that doesn't pass professional muster.   You'd consider it only because its authors have the power to impose it.  But we might more generally see the UWSP proposal as a reflection of an administrative-political subculture, one appealing, in spite of nods to citizenship, to a private-good sense of the value of college as residing in salary increments.  This is a subculture, however.  It has fallen woefully behind current popular demands for universities with broad public benefits and advanced academic standards.

Photo credits: Stevens Point Journal

By Jennifer Ruth (Portland State University)

The conversation prompted by Excellent Sheep has turned into a referendum on “meritocracy.” Deresiewicz mercilessly takes meritocracy to task – “The meritocracy purports, like every ruling class, to act for the good of all,” he writes; “Its ethos is in fact, by definition, one of self-advancement: not duty or responsibility, not character or even leadership, but individual aggrandizement, a single-minded focus on the self and its success” (226). For Deresiewicz, meritocracy is the culprit behind the Reagan-era culture of “winner take all” that continues on today among our elites who are “brilliant, gifted, energetic, yes, but also anxious, greedy, bland, and risk-averse, with no courage and no vision ” (228-9). These political and business elites can’t wrap their heads around why they keep falling on their faces when they are so manifestly intelligent. Here’s Deresiewicz on Obama: “With his racial identity and relatively humble background, his election has been called the triumph of the meritocracy. The sad thing is that that's exactly what it was” (230). Obama is a failure because “he plays it safe, like every other product of the [meritocratic] system” (229).

Meritocracy’s defenders also do it no favors. Steven Pinker’s rebuttal to Deresiewicz’s New Republic piece “Don’t Send Your Kid to the Ivy League” starts off with a reasonable-sounding defense of the ethos of meritocracy as the prioritizing of ability and effort over various forms of inheritable privilege. By its end, however, Pinker’s piece has become a party in honor of standardized tests. Pinker believes that merit—defined as intelligence—can be measured objectively. The problem for him then is not that colleges follow a meritocratic admissions process but that, with their legacies and athletes and trombone players, their process is not nearly meritocratic enough.

Pinker doesn’t worry about wealth buying merit because he thinks it can’t. All those advantages the well-off give their children—from piano lessons to the best private schools to test-prep courses? They only budge their kids’ scores by a negligibly few percentage points, Pinker tells us. Ensconced at Harvard and annoyed that students prefer competing in lacrosse games to attending class, Pinker doesn’t seem to grasp the main issue. Isn’t the issue that entrenched inequality has destroyed any illusion that rewards are distributed meritocratically in American society? And, further, that if meritocracy did once act as a vehicle of redistribution, it acts to exacerbate inequality now?

Chris Hayes hammers this point home in The Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy (2012). Hayes discusses the structural tension between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. He argues that the generation that profited when we moved from an old boy patronage system to a meritocracy (or equality of opportunity) has pulled the ladder up behind them. Though the meritocratic culture once lead to greater equality of outcomes, in its second and third generations it has led to greater inequality of outcomes.

Each ruling class, it seems to me, is always in danger of devolving into a patronage system regardless of the nature of its original legitimation. The middle class Barbara Ehrenreich discussed in her 1989 classic Fear of Falling has been hollowed out but her analysis of a certain psychology applies to today’s elite. They do not want their children to have to experience a lower standard of living than they enjoy. The impulse to rationalize advantages and even game the system when people you care about are involved is irresistible for many. The fight against this—what Deresiewicz refers to as “self-overcoming”—is never-ending.

It’s not just parents with kids. I see it at the departmental level. People from relatively modest backgrounds who got into Stanford and Harvard and are now Professors of English or Cultural studies will push hard to hire friends or family. They not only don’t see a problem with this but they see themselves as doing something compassionate by championing the people they know over the people who are as yet words on a page. The ever-flawed striving for some modicum of objectivity—the holding at bay of connections and kinship—doesn’t come easily to any of us, no matter our personal trajectories. If we desire a fair society, though, we are doomed to repeatedly breaking up patronage systems—even patronage systems generated by meritocracies.

Hayes argues, however, that at this point simply breaking up patronage systems is not enough. We can only restore the equality of opportunity from which today’s elite benefitted by moving decisively in the direction of equality of outcome. This begins with redistributing wealth back to public education because, whatever it might be, a meritocratic society is certainly not one with such extreme and stubborn inequality that the vast majority of its 18 to 24 year olds are deprived opportunities for quality education, gratifying work, and socio-economic mobility.

Deresiewicz ultimately arrives at a similar conclusion:

If service workers can demand a $15 minimum wage, more than double the federal level, then those who care about higher education can insist on the elimination of tuition and fees at state institutions and their replacement by public funding furnished by taxes on the upper 10 percent. As with the minimum wage, the campaign can be conducted state by state, and it can and should involve a large coalition of interested groups: students, parents, and instructors, to start with. Total enrollment at American colleges and universities now stands at 20 million, on top of another million-plus on the faculty. That’s a formidable voting bloc, should it learn to exercise its power. Since the Occupy movement in 2011, it’s clear that the fight to reverse the tide of growing inequality has been joined. It’s time we joined it.

These words are from Deresiewicz’s essay “The Miseducation of America” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The last pages of Excellent Sheep strike the same power-to-the-people note and, while I’m grateful that he concludes on such a note, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that he tacked on these pages after someone read the manuscript and asked: Okay, but what do you have to say about the nation’s students who really need help?

Deresiewicz justifies the attention he lavishes on the Ivy League cohort by pointing out that they become the elites who have outsized power over the fates of the rest of us. Fair enough. But until we restore funding to our public universities, it will be hard to resist the siren song of select schools. “The economist Caroline Hoxby has shown,” Pinker writes, “that selective universities spend twenty times more on student instruction, support, and facilities than less selective ones, while their students pay for a much smaller fraction of it, thanks to gifts to the college.” Betsy Hammond, The Oregonian’s higher education reporter, recently published a piece entitled “Are Oregon Universities Efficient at Producing Graduates?” Relaying the information provided in the

the study "Trends in College Spending: 2001-2011" by the American Institutes of Research, Hammond reports that my institution, Portland State, “remains one of the most efficient public research universities in the nation, spending just $40,700 on education and related expenses for every graduate it produces.” Hammond’s use of the word “efficiency” has the bizarre effect of implying that the less a public university spends on its students, the more praise it deserves. The fact that state funding for Portland State University decreased by 80% over the last two decades surely is a tragedy, not a case study in virtuous efficiency.

Is the problem the concept of meritocracy—a concept, after all, that demands that every effort be made to even the playing field before the games begin? Isn’t the problem that we’re no longer bothering to level the field by even so much as an inch?

Deresiewicz tells us that Ivy League students don’t hang out on the beautifully manicured campus lawns or brood over Rilke, because they have been trained to avoid activities that don’t further their careers. As the numbers above demonstrate, Portland State students do not have the same fertile environment to squander. Even if they did, most of them wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it since the vast majority of them work outside school. Many of them hold 30 to 40 hour a week jobs. They take these jobs to pay for their classes and yet the punishing work schedules turn their classes into just more obstacles on their weekly obstacle course.

Deresiewicz’s weakness for grand flourishes simplifies what’s at stake: “We’ve had meritocracy; it’s time for democracy,” he says as if we all know and agree upon what both “meritocracy” and “democracy” mean. But Deresiewicz is right about what he calls “the essential thing.” “The new dispensation must ensure--this is the essential thing—that privilege cannot be handed down;” he tells us; “The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, as it did in the middle decades of the twentieth century, not reproduce it.” If we want a society that plays more people than it benches, we have to win that campaign Deresiewicz talks about—the one to eliminate tuition and fees at state institutions and replace them by public funding derived from taxes on the upper 10 percent. Where and when is the campaign kick-off party?

Business Week thinks so: its headline is "Krugman Move Boosts CUNY Effort to Escape Columbia, NYU Shadow."   In this piece, cool is a public city college doing the following things:

• stealing star faculty from rich private universities, recalling the glory days when CCNY "graduated 12 Nobel laureates between 1930 and 1950."

In recent years, CUNY has hired a number of professors away from elite universities, including Jeremy Kahn, a mathematician from Brown University; Vijay Balasubramanian, a theoretical physicist from the University of Pennsylvania; David Joselit, an art historian from Yale University; and Cathy Davidson, a technology scholar from Duke University.

• reclaiming the core mission of mass quality:

CUNY has about 274,000 students seeking degrees and almost 250,000 in continuing education and certificate programs, said William Kelly, interim chancellor and past president of the graduate school. It has 24 campuses spread across five boroughs.
“A university can be both public and provide access to a half-million students and pursue the highest goals imaginable,” said Kelly. “What has happened here is that the university has reclaimed its commitment to both access and excellence. Public universities need to do both.”

• hiring large numbers of full-time faculty: "CUNY has stepped up faculty recruiting, boosting the number of full-time professors to 7,500 from about 5,000 over the past 10 years."

• not saddling its students with debt: at CUNY "about 80 percent of baccalaureate and associate degree students graduate without debt."  Prof. Davidson made a particular point of saying "part of the draw was the university’s high quality and the low cost to students."

•  having high levels of innovation: Prof. Joselit remarked, “Public universities are much more willing to experiment with the format, at least in the humanities and social sciences,”

Is public anything more experimental than its private version?  That's how it reads.   Although the job moves of these major scholars are largely symbolic, their visibility, along with statements like these, might help make public colleges seem exciting again.

* * *

How has CUNY been able to do all this full-time faculty hiring at its tuition level of under $6000 per year?  Not by suppressing wages: faculty salary tables at the Chronicle of Higher Education show CUNY sometimes above and sometimes below average salaries in all professorial categories (2012 Almanac).  The recipe seems to be to staff most of the campuses like colleges rather than like research campuses--with the obvious exception of the Graduate Center.

Graduate Center staff consists of about half full-time and half part-time professors (75% of full-time professors are tenure-track);  about two-thirds of its overall teaching staff are graduate students. On the other hand, a check of a few of the CUNY colleges shows lower percentages of full-time faculty.  Hunter has 705 full-time and 1175 part-time faculty (or 37.5% full time): the comparable figures are 38.3% full-time at CCNY and 41% at Queens.

Teaching loads are also pegged to standards for teaching rather than research universities, judging from the experience of the faculty I know at Queens, Brooklyn, Hunter, and Baruch Colleges, meaning that everyone I know in the humanities and social sciences is teaching three or more courses per semester rather than 2 and 2. 

As for research itself, CUNY does much less bench science than universities of comparable size.  The NSF's Higher Education Research and Development Report for FY 2011 ranks the top CUNY unit, CCNY, in 182nd position, with expenditures of less than half those at lowest-spending University of California campus, UC Riverside. Hunter is at 219th, Queens at 265th, and so on.  The Graduate Center doesn't appear, and may be lumped together with CCNY, but it's worth noting that none of the recent hires mentioned in the Business Week piece require laboratory facilities.

One conclusion is that it's easier for public universities to be experimental when they don't have to pay fo rexperimental science.  CUNY also isn't paying for full-scale, full-time research faculty spread throughout the system.  CUNY hires great full-time research faculty at all of its colleges, and then doesn't give them research faculty conditions. Obviously this limits  CUNY faculty's overall research output.

Can public universities maintain or upgrade instruction while staying major players in basic research? The first answer is yes, in the sense that they have been maintaining their 2/3rds share of overall R&D (Appendix Table 5-3).

A second answer is no, they won't sustain this going forward, since they are already having a hard time affording STEM research. For example, they spend nearly twice the share of their own resources supporting research as do private universities: "Public academic institutions supported a larger portion of their S&E R&D from their own sources—22%, compared to 13% at private institutions."

A third answer is that public universities will always be able to sustain or even increase research output--if they increase the share of non-STEM research in their mix.  CUNY can lag in overall R&D expenditures while still having a huge arts, humanities, and social sciences research output since these fields (borrowing the AHS acronym from Gerald Barnett) spent only $3.5 billion of the $65.8 billion spent on R&D in US universities was spent on STEM.)  You can be 265th in expenditures while being an AHS powerhouse, given these fields' much greater bang for the buck.

* * *

A contrasting example appeared in the news last week--Duke University--whose costs were the subject of a piece at NPR's Planet Money.  Duke, the article noted, claims that the University loses money on the $60,000 a year it charges to go there, since it allegedly spends $90,000 per student per year.  This is about 6 times UC's combined per-student in-state tuition --minus financial aid--plus state general fund).

The gap in per student expenditures between top privates and mass publics is shocking and socially inefficient: it's something this blog has been denouncing for years, that the Delta Project's studies made visible to policymakers (Figure 18), that education economists like Archibald and Feldman have analyzed, that I've argued causally reduces attainment and increases racial disparity.

The innovation in the Planet Money piece is that an MSM outlet stages a debate between standard and alternative higher ed accounting, juxtaposing Duke's provost Peter Lange and UC Berkeley's independent budget analyst, professor emeritus of physics Charles Schwartz.

Using the standard approach (I am describing, not endorsing it), Duke reports that a quarter of the $90,000 of per-student expenditure is affluent students subsidizing other less-affluent students, and that another quarter goes to paying faculty salaries. (In the context of familiar claims that academic salaries are the core of higher ed's "cost disease," this is not a large slice.)   Another quarter goes to "sponsored activities," which is close to the normal 20% or so that research universities spend to subsidize extramurally-funded research. The final quarter of the pie chart goes to overhead, which includes facilities and non-teaching staff.

Prof. Schwartz's point has long been that faculty research time gets lumped together with teaching time, so that the faculty cost of instruction is exaggerated.  Provost Lange counters that research and teaching are intertwined at a research university.  (For the record, Prof. Schwartz has never denied this, but has shown how they can be disaggregated so we at least know how much universities are spending on what.)  The Planet Money piece produces an accurate description of the debate:

In the end, Schwartz and Lange don't disagree on the value of what goes on at places like Berkeley and Duke. The disagreement is over the story that Duke tells its undergraduates.

So if you're a student at Duke, are you getting a massive discount on the cost of your education? Or are you subsidizing a giant educational edifice that you as an undergraduate student will barely come into contact with?

The answer sort of depends on what kind of student you are.

If you're engaged in research and capitalizing on your professors' expertise, maybe you're getting something that's worth more than what you paid. If you've got a good financial aid package, you're definitely getting a good deal. But if you're a full-paying student, who's not learning much from professors outside the classroom, it's the university that's getting the deal.

This formulation puts huge pressure on elite universities like Duke to subsidize student costs and to make sure every single student is experiencing artisnal research-learning.   This would be a big change for students who are buying a brand affiliation that will get them to the head of the line for the careers of the 1%, which, judging from Laura Newland's alarming memoir of her Duke undergrad years, is most of them. (You can listen to Doug Henwood's interesting interview with her January 30, 2013).

After many lousy years, I think momentum is starting to shift back towards public colleges. The challenge for them now for has several parts:

• Get affordable for students again--by being honest about the limits of financial aid and restoring correct levels of public funding.
• Define hands-on and research learning that brings Duke-style intensity to public university students.
• Build budgets that allow research and teaching to interact at all types of public colleges. This means transparency about research costs so that research activity can be increased.  

Fewer people than ever will pay $60,000 or even $16,000 for a degree. But they will pay for real learning--if they understand its costs.