The Cost of Higher Education, 1/X

GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul recently asserted that the cost of education is so high because the value of the dollar is so low. I maintain the answer isn't nearly so neat and tidy. Numerous factors contribute to the skyrocketing cost of education in America: state budgetary cuts, soaring enrollments, protracted completion rates, and others. For some time, administrative bloat has born a fair share of the blame when this discussion of education costs arises. It's a fair argument.¹

Institutions of higher learning do seem to find themselves with a middle-aged spread of administrators at every level. Back in the day, even the generally clueless undergrad knew who and what the Provost was, and the same held true for the Dean of Students. Most departments had chairs, and most schools or colleges found themselves clustered under a mid-level dean. Today, even a modest institution will boast a deep bench of VPs, AVPs, directors, and deans to spare. Their combined salaries might just send each freshman class to school tuition-free, and I would wager that the average undergrad couldn't tell you who most are nor what they do at the school.

The possibility exists that this seeming glut of suits slowly grew out of the post-tenure, pre-retirement job placement needs of those who had earned a spot among the upper echelon of higher ed. However, today's ranks include senior administrators with newly minted doctorates in higher education administration who've seen few, if any, lecture halls of their own. That is, they were trained to administer. Not even Areas battles against necessity.²

Federal and state laws and regional accrediting policies have become so numerous and so complex and so deeply reaching that an institution can no longer operate with confidence in its day-to-day business – educating students and advancing major fields of study – without a cadre of captains. To fall afoul of the laws governing higher education can mean loss of funding, which in turns often means loss of faculty or delay of capital improvements. Under the current federal administration, new Gainful Employment standards threaten the loss of student federal financial aid to individual academic programs within a college or university unless very specific reporting requirements and students outcomes are met. And always there is the accrediting body, whose stamp of institutional effectiveness determines the worthiness of an institution's credentials bestowed upon its graduating students. With increased administrative demands comes an increased need for administrators to meet them.

The great irony is, perhaps, that the regulatory constraints on higher education mirror the national debate on primary and secondary education and accountability standards in America. Our federal and state governments and regional accrediting bodies have become so focused on ensuring that institutions of higher education are effective (largely, they aren’t), that administering has gotten in the way of our mission. That is, the bulk of administration is done to support the efficacy of our programming, while our programming is short-changed by the necessity for so much administering.

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¹Even as I write myself out of a job.

²Sophocles

Education & Poverty, 1/X

So long as policy drives education rather than the reverse, we must consider the many ways by which children living in underprivileged homes experience their worlds differently than children of moderate means or those of wealth. Experts and some policymakers often cite the pre-K years as critical to a child's school readiness, and given our current educational structure in America, no doubt these years form necessary foundations for such skills as simple word recognition, letter formation (handwriting), and basic counting. These same experts and policymakers tie this developmental time period to education and poverty by pointing out that poor parents – often single mothers – cannot afford the quality child care/preschool environment required to prepare their children for Kindergarten in America. Further, when these children begin school with literacy deficits, their ability to catch up to their peers will be heartbreakingly slim. This latter I can only address in a separate piece. The former will take several pieces, but I'd like to begin there, with just one concept I believe we often overlook.

According to the US Census 2010 American Community Survey, approximately 15% of America's population currently lives in poverty, over 46 million people of all ages. About 45% of those are male and 56% female. Of the nearly 21 million males living in poverty, 38% are 17 years of age or younger, and of those who could be, nearly 52% are in the labor force. Four and a half million males who are currently living in poverty are also employed; this is 64% of the males in the labor force. Of the more than 25 million females living in poverty, 30% are 17 or younger, and 42% of those who could be are in the labor force, 68% of whom (5.2 million) are currently employed. Perhaps most importantly, of households below the poverty level, 34% are married couples with children under the age of 18, 9% are male heads of household with no female present with children under the age of 18, and 57% are female heads of household with no male present with children under the age of 18. Despite racial, ethnic, educational, and geographic differences, these families will have much in common.

Due to shift work, carrying multiple low-wage or part-time jobs, juggling double mom and dad duties and household tasks during off-work hours when households with higher incomes are typically at home for the evening, poorer parents often do not have the time or the energy for something as elementary – and essential – as the bedtime story. Kids who are read to read earlier. Their verbal literacy skills translate to mathematics literacy. They acquire knowledge that translates to skills acquisition in a manner that no amount of rote blasting can mimic. Talk about leveling the playing field. And homes where mom and/or dad can't read? Enlist the help of an older sibling; doing so will enhance the older child's skills while laying the younger's foundation. The key is to develop the win-win outside of policy.

Academic Freedom: Mantle of Expertise or Cloak of Infinite Protection?

At the post-secondary level (my level), there are so many issues with which we grapple. Student preparedness, entitlement, bureaucracy, social promotion, apathy, tenure pressures... it all sounds so negative despite the fact that there is much good being worked in America's colleges and universities. I do plan to discuss all of it or at least as much of it as I can. However, I've got a pet peeve when it comes to some of my peers. I've heard it from day one of graduate school from my mentors (grumbling around the coffee pots and water coolers) and I hear it now from faculty at many colleges who struggle with things like the adoption of common syllabi. I refer to the war cry of Academic Freedom, and following is an essay I wrote on the issue after Mike Adams' partial victory against UNC-Wilmington this past spring. I suppose this is as good as any place to launch this blog.

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In the year 1590 or thereabouts, as Galileo made his infamous treks up and down the campanile at the University at Pisa carrying two small cannonballs to test Aristotle’s theory of the speed with which objects of differing weights fall, he likely did so in robes and sandals. He likely lectured in such a habit also, his academic regalia, as European universities had almost uniformly adopted a code of dress for faculty, requiring their distinction from students by degree-dress. These would be the very same robes we tend to dust off for Founder’s Day celebrations and December and May graduation days. The history lesson remains a valuable tool for remembering our roots as academics.

When we become professors, we don a mantle of expertise and embark upon a career of professing. We teach and do research. A presumption is made that professors, as a body, contain within themselves a corpus of knowledge either needed or desired (or both) by the student body we serve and, further, that we have the tools and desire to disseminate that knowledge in a pedagogical manner conducive to learning. This mantle can be likened to any number of metaphorical symbols, but in the current litigious climate of the United States, one of the most common and fallacious seems to be a cloak of infinite protection.

Let us begin at the beginning and hopefully come full circle by the end.

College and university professors in America are not guaranteed, nor are they protected by, anything called “academic freedom.” This phrase has become so pervasive in the popular media that we hardly go a week without reading a news article or hearing a public radio broadcast relating to this court case or that tenure promotion somehow turning on academic freedom. There exist more detailed reviews of the litigation surrounding academic freedom in the United States than I shall provide here (see Standler, 2000), but until April 2011, no court – high or low – had ruled in any way favoring faculty on the issue. The Supreme Court, however, in Sweeny v. New Hampshire (1957) ruled clearly that academic freedom is reserved for institutions. Further, the Court specified that this academic freedom granted institutions the right to determine the following four elements:

•         Who would be taught at their schools

•         What would be taught

•         Who would teach that content

•         And how that content would be taught.

In no legal case is academic freedom, as such, awarded to a faculty member. From time to time, Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court loosely quotes Justice Brennan and refers to the term as a special consideration of the First Amendment. However, in the handful of cases where academic freedom is specifically defined (see Keyshian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 (1967), Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968), and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 312 (1978)) cases uniformly reference Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957), the case that gave us the institutional definition cited above. There is no special “academic freedom” for faculty outside the normal purview of the First Amendment protections granted to all citizens of the United States. As Judge Agee of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in the majority opinion for Adams v. University of North Carolina-Wilmington in April 2011, the Supreme Court has not established ‘a First Amendment right of academic freedom that belongs to the professor as an individual,’ but rather ‘to the extent [the Supreme Court] has constitutionalized a right of academic freedom at all, [it] appears to have recognized only an institutional right of self-governance in academic affairs’” (Regents of the University of Michigan v. Ewing, 474 U.S. 214, 226 (1985)).

We should pause to consider what this means. As professors, are we not then accorded the privilege, the duty, of expressing ourselves – fully including our perspectives on social, ideological, and moral topics – both inside and outside the classroom? I’ll start with the equivocal psychologist’s response to every yes/no question: it depends. For certain, as citizens of the United States, we are duly protected in the content of our speech under the First Amendment. Pickering (1968) offers the clearest, and most legally sound, explanation. Faculty can speak their minds on any issue at any time in any open forum, including criticism of their own administrations without fear of reprisal from their employers so long as they are doing so as private citizens speaking on matters of public concern. This is the concept of free speech as we have always known it. We can also advance causes, address student inequities, and pursue agenda related to faculty concerns so long as they fall within the scope of one’s college or university service. What we should note clearly at this junction is that having been granted the right of free speech, “academic freedom” as an expression thereof for institutional faculty becomes redundant.

Let’s return to Judge Agee, who pinpoints the real issue at hand. Agee refers again to Pickering but also to Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983) in discussion of whether a faculty member is a public employee who, at the time of his speech, is a private citizen speaking on a matter of public concern or a paid employee speaking on a matter of private concern. Exercising our free speech rights under First Amendment protections illustrates the former. What about the latter? Classroom teaching, for example, or committee membership and other forms of college or university service that exist within the bounds of the ivory tower? These may, and often do, fall within the scope of a public employee speaking on matters of private concern. As such, they are not necessarily protected speech. Judge Agee wrote, “The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the government may impose certain restraints on its employees' speech and take action against them that would be unconstitutional if applied to the general public” (Adams v. UNC-Wilmington) and further quoted Urofsky v. Gilmore, 216 F.3d at 406 (2000), “[T]he state, as an employer, undoubtedly possesses greater authority to restrict the speech of its employees than it has as sovereign to restrict the speech of the citizenry as a whole.”

In short, we are not guaranteed carte blanche to say or do what we like in the classroom or elsewhere on our campuses. The more important question, from my perspective, is why do we need this cloak of infinite protection? Of what are we afraid? In point of fact, I would assert that the time has come to cast off our illusions regarding the notion of academic freedom and critically examine the reasons we might wish to toss it into the Goodwill pile altogether. Aside from the obvious conclusion that the United States Supreme Court has multiple times granted all academic freedom to institutions rather than individuals, let’s consider the following:

Entitlement by Virtue of Purpose. Academics, broadly, serve three functions. We teach. We conduct research. We do both. The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) comments on academic freedom begin with these two remarks on teaching and scholarship.

1.       Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties; but research for pecuniary return should be based upon an understanding with the authorities of the institution.

2.       Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment.

The final statement on academic freedom by the AAUP focuses both institutional and individual attention on free speech. The AAUP reminds institutions that faculty are citizens with First Amendment protections. Concurrently, faculty are reminded that “their special position in the community imposes special obligations” and “they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances” (AAUP Policy, 2006, p.3). Constitutionally then we are protected in our speech as are all citizens, yet we remain responsible by virtue of our positions for our speech. To some degree, that should be true of all citizens, and I suppose it is.

Responsibility by Virtue of Purpose. Before any of us cry, “Academic freedom!” in response to some perceived institutional constriction, I believe it’s helpful to pause and reflect on our professional purpose. As scholars, our charge is to advance our respective fields in our academic pursuits. We may wear the mantle of expertise, but we don’t yet wear the laurel wreath. At best, we’ve garnered a well formed twig. Referring back to the AAUP’s remarks, the organization supports the notion of faculty freedom in the pursuit and publication of knowledge in their fields. Although no great illumination issues forth from this statement, we can reasonably surmise the AAUP doesn’t wish faculty to stray too far abreast of their training; nor do they wish administrations to stymie the efforts of their faculty scholars.

Teaching professors remain a different breed of academic, as they have always been, the teacher-scholar model more popular in the United States. I’ll address the latter first. If a scholar teaches in order to engage in scholarship (i.e., the job requires undergraduate teaching but affords research or requires research in addition to teaching for tenure), then faculty likely haven’t been trained or at least not trained well as classroom instructors. Further, faculty perception seems to permeate institutions of higher learning that the same autonomy exists in the classroom as exists in the laboratory, and this is as much a fallacy as the transmogrified mantle of academia into the cloak of infinite protection. Students pay institutions tuition for the purpose of earning some form of credential, generally a diploma. Institutions, generally, pay into a regional or national system of accreditation allowing those credentials to be considered worthy of the time and financial resources invested on the part of the student. Institutions, both public and private, that are accredited have not only the right but the obligation to ensure standards are met in such areas as their general education core curricula and also in individual courses. What are students supposed to be learning? Are they learning those things? And how do institutions know whether or not students are? When an institution enacts a policy change such as adopting a common syllabus and/or textbook for a general education core curriculum course, this in no way infringes upon the academic freedom of the teaching professor or teacher-scholar.  The institution is constitutionally granted the right to determine what is taught and how it is to be taught, and by virtue of his or her appointment at the institution, the faculty member is obligated to teach that content in the manner the institution’s policy deems most beneficial to students. Can this rankle faculty who teach in order to engage in their scholarship? Sure, but it isn’t an issue of academic freedom.

Teaching professors, as stated previously, are a special category of academic. They wear the same mantle of expertise as scholar professors, but their professional purpose is to educate the young mind. These faculty operate under the same restrictions, if any exist, in their employing institutions as teacher-scholars;  yet, those restrictions may rub in distinct ways. Is it not the duty of the sociology professor to engage students in discussions of current, often controversial subject matter, matter often protected by free speech provisions? Absolutely. What is not “duty” but, rather, skirts the ethical bounds of the teaching professor’s relationship with his or her students is the introduction of material “which has no relation to their subject” (AAUP Policy, 2006, p.3). Here we have a dilemma. It is not relevant to a discussion on poverty or abortion or homosexuality in a class on one of these topics what my views on poverty or abortion or homosexuality are? By its very nature, the role of “professor” conveys authority and power, and students are subject to the effects of that role. The responsibilities of faculty are to inform, to open students to new avenues of thought, to make of them critical thinkers and problem solvers capable of entertaining multiple perspectives and not simply adopting the professor’s as many will do as soon as they know what that is. The classroom is not the place for such self-disclosure nor does it contain the appropriate audience. Any claim to academic freedom protections for free speech in that venue is laughable at best.

If we believe in our professional purpose – to advance our fields through scholarship, to advance the knowledge of students in our fields, or to do some combination of these two things – then it is clear our professional obligations are to conduct sound research, to produce good literature or art, to challenge young thinkers, to disseminate knowledge… and not to pursue a personal agenda in the private forum that is the lecture hall. Further, the cloak of infinite protection, “academic freedom,” with regard to teaching method or style or in the choice of content delivered dazzles us with its illusory truths. We should wish to fulfill our obligation to impart actual knowledge in the classroom as opposed to advocating our alleged right to teach whatever however we wish. Ample room exists in the lecture hall for the pedagogical differences comprising our own unique styles without resorting to the cloak of infinite protection.

Equality in the Workplace. Free speech protections on the job (and often off the clock as well) with regard to academia have been addressed only so far as governmental employees are concerned. That is, there are no constitutional protections in place for faculty at privately run institutions. If faculty are presumed to have this “academic freedom” as a special consideration of the First Amendment, it should logically follow that all faculty at all American institutions of higher learning deserve the same considerations. They do not. Martyrdom may not be de rigueur, but I find it interesting that academic freedom lawsuits flow almost exclusively from the streams of public institutions.

While we ponder that ignoble truth, let’s try a little exercise. Stand up. Go on; I’ll wait. Walk to your closet and open the door. No, not that one. The one where your robes hang shoved at the back awaiting May graduation. Pull them out. Put on your tam or your hood. Better yet, put on the whole thing. Remember your hooding ceremony. Feel the weight of the mantle on your shoulders. There. Isn’t that better than a non-existent cloak? Perhaps Galileo’s fellows had it right after all. 

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Please refer to the post on the House Rules if you are unsure of how to comment. Thank you.

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Welcome

An initial blog post deserves some form of introduction. For this one, I'll begin with what will hopefully turn out to be a brief summary of caveats and house rules. I've spent several months contemplating the best method for embarking on this journey, compelled to discuss issues clamoring for attention in the forespaces of my mind, but uncertain at the same time of how to organize my thoughts. In my workaday world, I noticed a propensity to say to some individuals who work with tireless diligence on issues I'll raise here, "We're still not having the conversation that needs to be had," but even were we having that conversation, I know there would be another and another and another needing voice. At the end of the day, I realized there could be no thorough organization of my thoughts, no one best path on which to embark unless I wished to wait an interminable amount of time to begin. Waiting cannot be an option.

So, we begin here, and doing so, we begin with the above mentioned list of caveats. I fear I shall be obliged to recall them at the end of each post I make, but I do so in good faith and with the intention of cooling hot tempers that may flare in the course of a journey we really must make. The path, whatever shape it takes, cannot be traveled in any way but together with all our competing loyalties, desires, and ambitions if we are to emerge strengthened and empowered as a nation.

Caveats & House Rules

• Limits of Expertise: My training, while well grounded in experimental psychology, methodology, and statistics, is not boundless. I am not an expert in every field nor in any given field on which I may state an opinion in this blog. I will rest the weight of my opinions on the following two things: 1) my ability as an academic to research the available pedagogical literature and, from that, formulate a well educated opinion, and 2) a careful examination of the relative arguments of opposing experts speaking on relevant matters at this time. Where neither literature nor expert argument exists, I will make my best, most humble attempt to generalize from what is available (with the acknowledgement here that I don't do humble very well).
• Opinion v. Data: At all times, I will draw careful distinctions in my posts between what is data-driven (i.e., evidence based) and what is merely opinion. What I write that is opinion based is subject to free and open discussion (as is data-driven writing of course, although I find it much less defensible to argue with numbers).
• Education Systems: While my own professional experience is primarily limited to post-secondary education, I do not believe we can hold a comprehensive conversation regarding education in America (or abroad) today without that conversation including education at all levels. This includes the primary, secondary, and post-secondary systems. Because this is my professional opinion, posts will appear that address education issues at each of these levels.
• Redundancy v. Comprehensiveness: Along the same vein, I also believe that many of the issues about which I shall write have multiple facets to them. It simply will not be possible to do some topics justice if I attempt to encapsulate all facets within a single post. Thus, it's entirely possible any given topic will appear across several posts in order that I might feel I have covered it comprehensively.
• Enmeshed Topics: Continuing the bullet point just above, many of these topics are enmeshed with one another. The effort to tease them apart may ultimately mean that there are not clear delineations between certain areas. For instance, I foresee posts that deal with both secondary and post-secondary issues, posts that cover both accountability and literacy. This is not to say I have no clear vision but, rather, that the vision appreciates the complexity of the web we have created from our education system(s).
• No Assumptions: I do not believe there are any given saints in our educational system save perhaps the public school teachers we have right now. What I mean to say is that there are students, faculty, and administrators at every level who are both pawns of a broken system and who are somehow continuing to survive in spite of it. I make no assumptions about ability (high or low), effort (high or low), or intent (good or bad) of any key stakeholders in our current system. What this may mean for the posts I make, for instance, is that you may feel I vilify college faculty in one post while canonizing them in a later one. I intend no contradiction and, further, see none. I think you will see none, too, if you read what I really mean to say closely. The only exception I do make nearly across the board are the public school teachers, in general, who continue to enter a system they know is broken and continue to teach a body en masse they know is ever shrinking in terms of the numbers they touch.
• Purpose: The general purpose of this blog is two-fold. As stated above, I want a forum in which I might loosely begin to organize my own thoughts on these complex, interwoven issues. I also want a forum in which to begin a dialog with others who are involved in some way with the American education system. Given what I hope to achieve here, it is, I believe, inevitable that solutions to this problem or that problem will be bandied about. I have no moral opposition to this. Solutions are good; generating possible solutions to social problems is part of what binds us as a species. I do, however, think it's important to remember a few important things as we begin.
• Solutions should follow a couple of principles. Whenever possible, they should be evidence based. We should look to the literature to see if potential solutions have been tested and how they have fared and with which populations. If a proposed solution is truly brand new (i.e., there is no evidence in favor or in opposition to it), then we should think carefully how that solution might play out; we should consider its costs, its potential for good and for harm, etc.
• Solutions, like opinions, are often kindling for argument rather than healthy discourse. Polite commentary is very welcome here. Comments on my own posts and between those commenting are very welcome so long as general social rules of etiquette are observed. Rude, hostile, provocative language will not be tolerated, and those who abuse the open nature of this forum will not be tolerated.
• Because I am an academic researcher, I value the contributions to complex problems of those who are experts in allied fields. If you conduct research in an area on which I post, or if you know of literature in one of those areas, please feel free to email me, and I'd be thrilled to include data that illuminate one or more of these areas. I'm also more than happy to entertain guest bloggers on these issues.

Will all of this out of the way, I suppose I should attempt to make some sense out of the sticky notes I've got stuck in my notebook with balloon ideas and interconnecting lines leading from one thought to another. I don't know what I'll tackle first, but please make no assumption that I assume it's the most important topic. Most likely, I'll write about whatever I can get my mind around first.