“And there are unique costs, most notably with libraries and instructional technology. (Though in my humble view, that’s one area where higher education could hit back very hard against external service providers and get a lot of budgetary relief.)”

What do you mean by this?

Another thought: I would be fascinated how you would go about designing a liberal arts college from scratch today. What would it look like in terms of curriculum and support services? What would you want in terms of infrastructure, library collections, technology support, athletics, and classroom design? If you had the liberty to wash away the past and start anew in 2012, what would an ideal liberal arts college look like from the bottom up? I think this thought experiment would produce a thoughtful and interesting post. Consider it a request, just like the ones I used to call in to my local radio station in the 1980s. I don’t expect you to play my song request, but it would be awesome if you did.

As for cutting non-teaching expenses, your solutions don’t really help. They simply shift who students pay those costs to. (Although it will be interesting to see how the ACA effects things like college health care costs for students). Now, if you were talking about destigmitizing community colleges and having them expand their offerings so that more top students saw it as a legitimate choice, that would actually cut costs for students and families. But expanding CC alternatives and increasing quality would not necessarily result in tuition savings (although it does result in room savings, although not necessarily saved food costs).

First, perhaps this is obvious, but universities are not democracies, and they can be extremely hierarchical. Individual departments can bear the same qualities too. So, to get to a point where faculty members actually feel like stewards and departments and divisions feel like communities with shared interests may take a VERY long time. If we take the approach that universities and colleges are a microcosm of society, it is useful to think about the basic class structure that exists, with admin folks taking in 6 figures, a diminishing tenured faculty echoing the diminishing US middle class, and adjuncts occupying the bottom rungs. This hierarchy needs to be overcome or resolved if there is to be any kind of stewardship ethos.

Second, some of the suggestions like increasing teaching are already happening, if not by annual course load, then by class size. My class numbers have gone up across the board. Did I ask for this? No. So some of the recommendations above with teaching, funding, etc. I think are already happening by virtue of market pressures, at least at public institutions. I’m unsure if faculty need to be proactive about these things. Scarce resources have forced these matters upon us.

Solutions? If the problem is defined as increasing tuition and increasing costs, I think universities and colleges need to reconsider “non-educational” expenses: social activities, sports, and so forth. Aspects of university life that you don’t get formal credit for. A huge expense, but mostly window dressing. While important to college life, I think these elements can be out-sourced: encourage stronger town and gown ties, have students live off campus, have medical care be off campus, and so on. It’s not entirely clear why colleges and universities should be fully responsible for such matters.

A slightly different solution that relates to educational expenses and teaching: most students take out loans for a BA and then more loans for a graduate degree (an escalating burden), so why not compress programs such that a BA/JD can be achieve in 5 years rather than 7? Or a BA/MA in 5? Or a BA/PhD in 7? These sorts of programs already exist, but are not part of mainstream education. It would require students to make professional choices sooner, but it could also provide more focus and more qualifications faster and at a lower cost. Who needs a triple major in 4 years when you can complete a BA/JD in 5? A triple major, even a double major, is a sign of spinning wheels and wasting time, I think, that could be used pushing ahead toward a graduate degree. Finally, compressing education in this way could also seize upon the teaching potential of professional school faculty who, frankly, have it easier, given that they don’t have undergrads. They’re the ones with 1/1 loads.

Just some thoughts.

But you’re right that this is not a blank slate. I’m sure Swarthmore is not special in that there are folks at any institution carrying around a long list of remembered slights and perceived victories to avenge or defend. I don’t know how you get people to drop that sort of thing. And I should make it clear: defending real, actual, employed people who have invested themselves in an institution and its work is a different matter–as is defending their autonomy to make their own decisions about how to be a professional.

But I do think it would be worthwhile for you to address some of the inevitable practical difficulties here. No institution is starting from a blank slate. There have been winners and losers in the past. There are definitely perceived inequities and so resentments (some unjustified, but some, unfortunately, quite reasonable). The first thing that a no-growth era does is lock the results of that history in place.

This is, obviously, not conducive to the kind of high-mindedness that your arguments seem to presuppose. I realize that you’re trying to persuade people to *be* high-minded, of course (especially at the end). But I do think that there should be some plank to all this that’s about building the necessary trust and consensus in an environment that may prove a bit corrosive to those things.

* I should probably however note that I’m impressed by your personal willingness to pursue a line of argument which pretty obviously leads to some nasty places for your discipline and for your particular specialism within it.