Why higher education is neither - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1989 by Jason DeParle, Liza Mundy, John Heilemann

Even a president as boisterous as B.U.'s John Silber--an insistent backer of a core--has had little effect on his school's curriculum. "The faculty insisted on being the one to build any changes from the ground up," explained Alan Marscher, chairman of B.U.'s academic policy committee. Years of hotblooded hassling ensued. The result? This year, the school is offering a voluntary core for about 150 of its 3,547 entering freshmen. The rest will face the same old system of distribution requirements, in which, Marscher explains, despite an attempted tightening, "courses of marginal educational value continue to arise and attract many, many students."

The second thing to realize is that universities are run with the interests of the staff foremost in mind, not the interests of the students. In their focus in their own needs above and beyond those they purportedly serve, universities are like a great many other modern institutions, including, for instance, the medical establishment and most agencies of government. Or, as core champion Robert Maynard Hutchins once put it, "Every great change in American education has been secured over the dead bodies of countless professors."

The faculty's interest in preserving the perverse status quo stems from two maladies: the system of campus budget allocation, and the primacy of the Ph.d., with its emphasis on specialized research. Universities are fragmented into departments and each faces a dual dilemma: one, its professors need to conduct the highly specialized research that allows them to publish and gain and preserve stature in their field; but, two, the department also needs to attract students to its courses, for without students its funding will wither. That is, while most "teachers" feel acute pressure to polish their latest monograph, they also need to entertain the people who cough up the tuition.

Distribution requirements offer the perfect solution. By demanding that students take some courses in history (or English, or art, and so on), the requirements ensure the departments a steady flow of bodies. But by refusing to delineate what, precisely, the students must study, the requirements don't interfere with the professors' research needs--the professors get the bodies, but the bodies don't get in the way. Departments are free to indulge in courses that either stem from, or lead to, the professor's next publication. Thus are born such fundamentals as U.T.'s study of gypsies, courses in which the professor, in effect, offers the student a trade: I'll give you one distribution requirement in exchange for your indulgence while I prepare my next conference paper. The outsider who questions this cozy arrangement will no doubt be denounced as a Philistine; and if the outsider is a parent, such lofty phrases as "academic freedom" may even accompany the indignation.

Of course, such standards as Intro to Western Civ can still be found in the course catalogs of most major universities. That's not to say that such survey courses will stand between that professor and his conference paper, however. The professor gets a way with one or two lectures a week, while responsibility for such professionally unrewarding experiences as leading seminars and grading papers is usually left to graduate students.