Easily Distracted

Like Fontana Labs, I’ve long fretted that some day, all at once, in a tipping point reaction, both employers and families are going to decide in two different directions that expensive college degrees no longer predict success strongly and are not worth pursuing regardless of whatever usefulness they may or may not have.

There are reasons why that might not happen. For one, I think many colleges and universities are educating their students productively. The sky might not be falling so much as some people think it is. For another, the more highly selective a college or university is in its admission policies, the more useful it is for an employer as a device for identifying potentially valuable employees, even if the employer doesn’t know or care what happened to the potential employee while he or she was a student. If so, this has bad implications for expensive noncompetitive lower-tier private colleges, possibly, but since they’ve long since been the most economically tenuous part of the higher education sector, that’s not news. Also, it’s fairly hard to imagine what employers with relatively high turnover and thus a need for constantly refreshing their supply of lower-management employees would do to process their applicant pools if they didn’t have a B.A. degree as a basic screening device. Finally, the fact that public schools are becoming much more expensive in a way benefits the entire higher education sector in terms of its ability to sustain high prices for the long-term future. It used to be that you could get an education at some of the major public universities that rivalled most major private universities and at a much cheaper price. That’s increasingly no longer the case, so anybody who is fed up with the cost really has nowhere to turn besides not doing it at all.

Let’s suppose, however, that there is a tipping point out there somewhere, that higher education is moving towards a collective calamity in its pricing. What would it take for colleges and universities to start reducing their costs and lowering the price? For one, many institutions would have to do it at the same time. That’s because lowering the price is going to involve shucking off at least some of the product being made available. Doing that unilaterally is likely to be suicidal, especially among the top-end institutions. How to coordinate that movement without running afoul of antitrust collusion is a big issue in its own right.

The important thing is that parents and other observers have to understand that the high cost is in fact buying a wide range of services. Anybody who thinks you can shave the cost appreciably with little gestures of economy doesn’t understand the basic structure of academic budgets. Moreover, some of the most powerful external costs driving up academic budgets cannot be affected appreciably by colleges and universities acting on their own, but only by some larger public policy. Insurance, for example, or the costs of health care. The only thing universities could do on either of those is reduce the amount of insurance they carry or their benefits, and in many cases, those benefits already compare unfavorably to both the private sector and even to other non-profits. In other cases, costs could be controlled by universities, for example, in libraries, but only by changing the nature of academic publishing and academic credentialling, which will require faculties to participate in major reform initiatives.

What could a given university do that would not require collective action of this kind? Here I’ll cannibalize some of my observations from 21st Century College. A college or university could stop providing services of various kinds. For example, no health care for undergraduates. No counseling or help with student life issues. No athletic facilities or student life facilities. Minimalist classrooms, with minimal technological support save that which is paid for by external grants or support. Subcontract out all food services and other amenities to the highest bidders; manage nothing of this kind directly. Shed any services which do not relate to core instruction. Build only when buildings are about to literally fall apart; build nothing else unless it is completely paid for by external funding including a maintenance endowment.

You could radically intervene in the curriculum to throw overboard areas which do not pay for themselves through external grants, or which have low enrollments. You could make extensive use of adjunct or contract faculty (an already preferred solution, and thus unlikely to produce even more extensive savings.)

In fact, quite a bit of this on the curricular side is already being done at many institutions, and is the source of some complaints about the “corporatization” of universities. On the services side, however, there is largely still only growth and expansion. However, that’s in substantial measure because that’s what the paying customers want. A cheaper university sounds great until you add that it would also be a no-frills university with virtually no services, and then I suspect quite a few parents and students might feel differently. Moreover, such a university would undoubtedly be massively exposed to liability as well as discord: many of the services added in the last fifteen years are direct responses to lawsuits or agitation by students and other constituents.

The cost of higher education worries me enormously. It appears unsustainable as well as unjust. It is aggravating a problem that is somewhat separate in its causal underpinnings, the increasing degree to which universities are exacerbating the reduction of economic and social mobility in the United States. But I’m not sure what to do about it. I think at the least that some of the people most aggravated about it are going to need to get real about what it is that they’re asking for: curricula that are pared down radically to what external funders judge valuable and thus heavily biased to technical subjects with immediate professional payoffs, and institutions with few if any meaningful services beyond education. It would be interesting, at any rate, to see an institution of higher learning built on those principles start up in this marketplace, at least one that wasn’t built around online education, and see how it fares (and just how low it could get tuition).

I’m with Brad DeLong: John Tierney’s column on cronyism and academia is an especially annoying case of the lack-of-pluralism-in-academia argument. It is a lazy conflation of two completely different issues. I’m perfectly willing to agree that there is a problem with a lack of intellectual pluralism in many parts of the academy, but for reasons which have nothing to do with the concept of cronyism that’s being applied to the Miers nomination.

In fact, the situation in academia is often almost the opposite. A distant relation of mine had worked in the past in the Swarthmore administration before I got hired here: we’ve joked occasionally since that it’s a damn good thing he didn’t know I was up for the job until I got it and that no one knew of the relationship. Trading on connections in most academic institutions, at least since the mid-1970s, is done with extreme delicacy if at all. Your advisor or pedigree or influential patrons may help you find a job in some contexts, but only if their influence is exerted with extreme passivity and indirection. They may equally hurt you: I can think of some important patrons in some disciplines whose students have sometimes suffered the brunt of professional jealousy directed at their teachers while on the job market. If administrations at universities or colleges try to intervene in hiring processes directly, they often end up causing faculty to move in the opposite direction just to spite the administration.

Groupthink and insularity in academia mostly don’t come from cronyism or nepotism, from anti-meritocratic promotions designed to reward personal loyalty to a powerful figure. When that sort of thing does happen within a single institution, it tends to spawn enormous ill-will and backlash, and it tends to be connected to the kinds of total failures of leadership of the sort exhibited by John Silber at Boston University.

Academic insularity comes from collective institutions and passive-aggressive models of distributed enforcement of the sort exemplified in tenure decisions. There’s been a lot of talk about tenure in the last week among bloggers due to Daniel Drezner’s denial of tenure. I thought Sean McCann’s comments on the case were among the best I’d seen. In particular, Sean captured my own dual reaction: dismay at the decision, a creeping sense that it connected to what I see as some of the underlying problems with academia’s overspecialization and insularity, but also irritation with some of the rather Tierney-like pronouncements about the decision, which often demonstrated little knowledge of academic institutions and their internal governance.

As long as tenure exists, for example, it’s never going to be easy to exercise it with any selectivity. The number of people who make it through the numbing process of graduate school who are blatantly unqualified to be scholars or ignorant are perishingly small. If that’s all that you eliminated in granting lifetime employment, you’d have to abandon any sense that tenure ought to be about a serious appraisal of scholarly potential and teaching ability. Many smart academics could potentially write a blog rather like Dan Drezner’s: it is not what he writes per se in his blog that is an indication of his distinctive quality as an intellectual, but that he wrote it in a situation where it was potentially career-threatening to do so, and certainly not career-enhancing. That indicates a clarity of commitment to the public character of scholarly work and to the communicative ability that is one of the foundations of good teaching.

But institutions have their own cultures, too, which is what perhaps the non-academic readers can’t or don’t perceive. What gets you tenure at Harvard is not what gets you tenure at Swarthmore which is not what gets you tenure at the University of Alabama. Perhaps that is not as it should be: I’ve said many times that I think Harvard’s approach is devastatingly self-destructive, and that goes for Chicago as well. What one is complaining about, however, in attacking the way tenure works within these specific institutional cultures and across academia as a whole is not something like cronyism. It’s about administrative structures like departments, about the premium that the organization of academic places on inward-turning specialization, about modes of achievement that often rest on bygone publishing regimes and practices of readership which have no more than a decade’s worth of life left to them. It’s also about peculiarly local cultures of institutional life that really need to be appreciated in their own terms before understanding how and why they’re misfiring in the way that they sometimes do.

There is a lot wrong with this whole way of running the railroad, but tenure is really only a symptom of that deeper disorder. In fact, abolishing tenure would not, as Sean McCann notes, really improve things. Any departmentalized, specialized, decentralized academic institution would shoot itself in the foot just as effectively with multiyear contracts as lifetime tenure, only more often and with greater chaos. Any highly centralized, bureaucratized, top-down controlled campus would have opposite but equally bad problems, becoming more like the immobile and unproductive institutions that dot the landscape in Western Europe.

The problem in a way is that American universities and colleges don’t, can’t, think in any centralized way about what allows them to function well, what maximizes their internal productivity and generativity.

Some of it is the result of very deep-seated internal contradictions about what kinds of productivity is meant: productivity of knowledge, of engagement with the world, of numbers of “student units” churned out, of reputation?

More of the problem is that the consumers of higher education and its products (whether students, employers or the public sphere) don’t really know how to evaluate the relationship between external reputation and internal process (something that some of the discussion of Drezner’s case illustrates). They don’t know what goes on inside a university, or what it is that faculty do.

Take my day today. It’s fall break here. I worked on a book chapter on my book about Zimbabwe and chiefship this morning. I did a quick-edit of an article for an online journal in games studies after that. I replied to a lot of email. I talked to a reporter. I worked on this blog entry. I answered a survey on using digital images in the classroom. I prepared some material for use in courses next week. I read some of the texts I’m teaching from next week. I tried to arrange a lunch for a visiting colleague who is coming to give a talk on Monday. I began to prepare my book orders for next semester. I looked over a report on a recent conference that’s going to quote some of what I said in emails and thought about how to edit down what I’d said informally so the insulting stuff stayed off the record. I did some planning for a visit from a speaker on Monday Oct. 24th that turns out to have a hidden logistical problem. I worked a bit on a proposed “decision rule” for a planning committee on I’m on. I talked with a friend about a workshop on fieldwork that we’ve organized in New York City tomorrow, and how we want to substantively organize the discussion. I read some of the material he circulated for the workshop. I did a bit of thinking about a presentation I did earlier in the week for an alumni reading group and some substantive questions to circulate in early November when the reading groups begin meeting actively.

That’s a pretty busy day, partially because I’m using my break to catch up on some of that stuff, but it’s reasonably typical of the balls I’m juggling in the air most semesters. It is a typical example of how contemporary academics are producing knowledge, teaching and acting as administrators all at once. Some colleagues do as much or more than I do; some do less. It is so at most universities and colleges. But I don’t think outsiders have any sense of that work process, and they certainly don’t evaluate academic institutions on whether or how any of that is getting done, or getting done well. Because they don’t, because the reputation of academic institutions is mostly not especially dependent on what faculty actually do or don’t do, academics themselves don’t have to think carefully about any of this when they think about tenure or hiring or promotion or training of graduate students. A business thinks (or should) about who is a “value-added” employee; academia instead mystfies and obscures its own work processes, works its reputation capital in ways that often don’t come back to the actual engines of productivity, and reproduces itself in ways that often maximize insularity and dysfunction rather than make an effective connection between institutional generativity and social capital in the world at large. There are no reputational consequences in many cases for institutions which suffer badly from internal disorder or poor institutional productivity, and few reputational benefits from the opposite. That also goes for individual faculty. Dan Drezner’s blog is a “value-added” asset for the University of Chicago (or was until he was denied tenure) but most of us know, including Dan, that it was never likely to be accredited as such.

Complain about that if you like: I will endorse your complaint. Suggest it may be an issue in Drezner’s case, or many other cases, and you may be correct. But whatever it is, it’s not cronyism. That’s somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s failure, and it is the height of anti-intellectual laziness to trot out and try to blame the eggheads for that, too, on top of all the things that they already have a problem with.

Ok, so I’ve suggested to the American Historical Association (AHA) that they should eliminate formal paper sessions with extreme prejudice. That goes for all big professional meetings (MLA, AAA, what have you): no more formal paper sessions in which participants take 15-20 minutes to read a paper, ever. The intellectual content of big professional meetings should be more like blogging, frankly: roundtable responses to current issues in the discipline. Roundtables on controversial books, on the discipline’s encounters with the public sphere, on major internal disputes within the discipline, and so on. The kind of thing that doesn’t get talked about except between the lines in the ordinary business of scholarly publication. Papers or formal writings are for small, concentrated, topically focused meetings.

Next on the chopping block: any pretense by professional associations to exert leadership over a discipline. On the issues where that leadership might actually matter in internal terms, such as sanctioning practicioners for misconduct like plagiarism, the big associations routinely duck, avoid or explicitly abjure an active stance. That’s probably a sound legal strategy, and may even be a sage admission of the necessary limits of the association’s capacity. Often when disciplinary associations try to address the deeper flaws inherent in contemporary academic practice (say the overproduction of doctorates in the field, or the misuse of adjunct instructors), they either come off like a butcher trying to perform brain surgery with a hatchet, or they offer hopelessly meek, mealy-mouthed, everybody’s-got-a-point responses that do nothing to address the situation but also convince onlookers of the inability of academics to police themselves.

What annoys me more is when any of the disciplinary associations attempt to take a position on behalf of the discipline on significant public or political issues. Not because I’m apolitical, or even because I disagree with the positions taken, but because the associations usually have no basis for exerting meaningful clout, because they’re inevitably amateurs playing a game dominated by hardcore professionals, because they frequently end up making the professoriate look worse in the public eye in the process, and because this often leads to wasting money on payments to lobbyists or consultants who are content to spin some wheels and look busy.

I’m not always sure I want my professional associations taking positions on issues that are legitimately and narrowly within their domain (say, the AHA on K-12 history curricula in U.S. schools, or the African Studies Association on Title VI funding for African studies) but at least that makes good sense, and often has productive results.

What else? Drop any association journals that aren’t established, prestigious outlets for publication in the discipline. The American Historical Review is an established, prestigious journal: the AHA ought to keep that. However, plenty of professional associations, especially the smaller specialized ones, churn out weak journal-type publications that probably end up in the garbage of many members. Kill vanity publication lines, or well-meaning but pointlessly tree-killing pamphlets that are meant to communicate some worthy but self-evident sentiment to members or to audiences that well-meaning members think ought to be the targets of some sort of outreach.

On the other hand, constantly data-mine the membership for the kind of information that we’re constantly thinking about in the administrative side of faculty jobs: what the distribution of specializations in the discipline is, what the current demographics of the discipline are, what the average size of departments in the discipline are (on a kind of “per capita” level, in comparison to other departments at institutions), what the ratio of people trained to people finding tenure-track jobs in the discipline is. Track what Brian Leiter tracks for philosophy (what Lingua Franca used to track for everybody): major movements of personnel in the discipline at the senior level, and hires at the junior level. There are a lot of times where it would be useful for me to be able to make definitive statements about whether history as a discipline is growing or shrinking, what the current balance of specializations actually is and how it has changed over ten years, and so on. None of this matters, however, unless you make this information available quickly and regularly to the membership.

Every professional association should have an active web presence, maybe even a blog or two. That’s where the data being collected constantly could be published, just as regularly. You should be able to renew your membership and deal with all other membership details quickly and painlessly online. The way some professional associations come at it, you’d think maintaining an online presence of this kind is a daunting technical challenge that has to be custom-designed from the ground up. Or alternatively, that it’s some amateur thing to hack out over the weekend.

The problem with trying to make any of these suggestions beyond a quickly-dashed-off blog entry, of course, is that you’ll inevitably end up asked to sit on an associational committee or worse yet, told to run for an associational office if you care that much. I don’t care that much, so I have no interest in going beyond blog-kibitzing.