Reorganizing Our Universities: An Inside Look at What Continually Goes Wrong in Higher Education and What Can Be Done About It

By Alan H. Levy

Many books have been written outlining problems with higher education in America. Many have been written in broad strokes. Where specific, many others have tended to focus on some of the nation's most famous schools. The average American family sends their children not to the Ivy League but to less noteworthy state schools, where quality could prevail but is often compromised. It is in such schools that many of the problems of American education continue to thrive without any meaningful reform. Levy's book endeavors to explain many of the problems which plague our schools and which shortchange students and their parents who pay the ever-higher costs. Looking in depth at a typical university, Levy reveals the ways that silly, at times corrupt, administrative and union games, marginal disciplines, and mediocre, at times fraudulent, academics have gained unjustifiably significant positions in schools and have needlessly truncated valuable resources which could otherwise be used to promote genuine quality and make universities serve the students and citizens who foot the bills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781467802697

Alan H. Levy

Alan H. Levy is a Professor of American History at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. He holds a Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has been teaching for 25 years. He is the author of several books on American music, including a biography of the composer Edward MacDowell. He has written on the history of government support of the arts in America. He also the author of several books on sports history, including Tackling Jim Crow: Racial Segregation in Professional Football and biographies of Rube Waddell and Joe McCarthy.

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© 2006 Alan H. Levy. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 4/18/2006

ISBN: 1-4259-1652-X (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-0269-7(ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Contents

PREFACE

NOT MERE MEDIOCRITY BUT FRAUD

ASSIST WHAT?

BUZZWORDS, SELF-DELUSIONS, AND NEPOTISM

REARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC

CUT THE NONSENSE

CUT ADMINISTRATION

UNION-SCAM

SERVICE-SCAM

AWARD-SCAM

EDUCATION-SCAM

B.SCHOOL/COMM-SCAM

GRAMMAR-SCAM

P.A.-SCAM

WOMEN’S STUDIES-SCAM

HOMOPHOBE-PHOBIA

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS, QUOTA GAMES, HUCKSTERISM, AND THE TRIUMPH OF SURREALISM

REALITY HAS ITS WAY

MODEST PROPS.

About the Author

PREFACE

Since 1983, the year of the publication of the famous Carnegie Report, Americans have been aware of a crisis plaguing their educational systems. Though the media attention upon this matter has varied over the years, the crisis has anything but abated. Since the Carnegie Report, study upon study has come forth, echoing concerns about the problems in American education. Studies have pointed to major troubles not only at the primary and secondary levels but in higher education as well. These studies have tended to focus upon general educational patterns in the nation. While these examinations are hardly without value, they have tended to leave the legislators in state and federal government offices, the administrators in foundation and grant offices, and the directors in corporate offices all with few details to guide them as to how to fix the situation. Beyond the making of well-intentioned threats of budgetary cuts and of meaningful calls for upgrades, suggestions for improvement have often been lacking in specifics. For reform to work, at least half (and likely more of) the effort has to be done from the bottom up. The devil is in the details, and many reformers’ failures to grasp this has rendered the history of higher education rejuvenation efforts in the United States over the past 20 years replete with examples of inadvertent, and often intentional subversion once well-intentioned initiatives are turned over to individual districts and campuses.

In the area of higher education, to the extent that there have been studies of particular campuses and state systems (though the latter is usually too broad a purview), investigators have normally focused upon schools of high repute. When Former Secretary of Education William Bennett, for example, chastised the watering down of university core curricula (Core-Lite, as he deftly put it), he intentionally aimed his remarks at Harvard University. For thoroughly understandable political reasons and for the commonsensical point of fair play, Bennett noted that it would not have been seen as kind had he aimed his rhetorical guns at Podunk U. It was good to start with such a school as Harvard, and while Bennett’s words made sense, in casting his remarks at Harvard he left out an important matter — that most reform movements regarding higher education in America have yet to address the problems of Typical U. The fact is that in the lesser schools, which do the actual educating of the overwhelming majority of America’s youth, lie sets of dynamics which are often markedly different than those of the nation’s most prestigious institutions. The words of people like former Sec. William Bennett cast at the likes of Harvard have had little or no impact down in the trenches of Typical U. Indeed many folks in such schools, even though the words of people like Bennett should be instructive to them, completely ignore the educational issues of the day and often make mere postures of concern whenever politically necessary. Within the intramural cultures of these schools rest sets of dynamics that must be addressed in order for any reform efforts to begin to bring about significant changes that affect the general quality of higher education in the nation.

Thus far most efforts at reform have either made no impact or sometimes perversely extended the very problems reformers have been trying to address. A key then is to study in depth the ways that a typical university operates; unearth the problematic patterns in these ways; explain why such problems have grown and remain so virulently resistant to change; and propose how genuine changes can be brought about.

Aside from its funny little name, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania is an altogether typical American institution of higher education. By national standards, its students are neither terribly good nor terribly bad, and, as at every university, the overwhelming majority of the bad student performances stem from a lack of genuine effort and not from a lack of aptitude. The socio-economic classes from which most of the Slippery Rock students come is typical of middle America, though an America slightly less buoyed by the elements of late 20th/early 21st-century prosperity than most regions. The students’ career aspirations and anxieties are driven by the same mixes of practicality, nervousness, upward mobility and cynicism which mark many young Americans of the time. The population of the university, slightly over 7000, renders its size at the median level, neither a mega-sized university nor a small college. Perhaps the only major a-typicality is the fact that the school lies in a small town with a low crime rate. Although, with the campus lying but 45 miles from downtown Pittsburgh, there is a slight suburban tinge to the atmosphere that adds to the typicality. For all these reasons the school provides an excellent microcosm through which the vagaries of American higher education can be studied. Most importantly, Slippery Rock is the type of school to which the average American family sends their daughters and sons. The Harvards and Stanfords of the nation may get more press attention, but they are irrelevant in regard to the expectations, the experiences, and, most of all, the financial possibilities of John and Mary Q. Public. The nature of the developments at schools like Slippery Rock that should concern the average American, and concern is indeed the appropriate word.

Doubtlessly, many may consider such an analysis as this to broach indelicacy or even to offend because it does talk about specifics. A hailing of personal offense has indeed been a major way timid, status-quo minded educationists resist change. Ad hominem is the instinctive method of reparté among many modern educational leaders. For many reasons, sadly, such flippant pseudo-discourse usually serves the purpose of deflecting challenges and maintaining petty power. But the problems do not abate. Meaningful reform can only come with attention to detail, yet with a detailed critique people take offense, an umbrage many others in administrative posts then choose to indulge, usually out of fear, laziness, or sniggering self-preservation. The indulgence relieves administrators of the short run personal problems within their little institutions and allows the personal to compromise all discourse about professional matters. A few administrators even realize that there is ultimately a bigger price to pay when quality is compromised in the name of personal connections. Moreover, they are a minority, and they rarely wish to raise such a point, as the watchword at virtually all small colleges and universities involves going along to get along.

While some may comprehend the ways that petty politics have marginalized genuinely important issues, others are completely obtuse and actually contend that such elevation of the personal over the professionals is a mark of sound management. Few thoughtful managers in the business community agree, but their wisdom does not penetrate into the administrative labyrinths of America’s Typical Universities. The taxpaying public seems generally content to leave the details of educational problems beneath the scope of the radar. Unless a given problem has a personal, journalistically splashy dimension, the attention span of the public has not appeared to have had the requisite patience to provide the sufficient and steady demand for truly meaningful reform to take place. As long as that remains the norm, it is difficult for problems ever to receive systematic treatment. Those who profit from America’s educational malaise will then continue to enrich themselves, and their atrocities will never receive a full redress.

With the personal utterly eclipsing the professional at schools like Slippery Rock, attempts to discuss important educational matters have then always met with extreme resistance. When privately circulated drafts of this discussion circulated about Slippery Rock University, the quantities of vitriolic, ad hominem, attacks were enormous. Some even tried to get the author fired. Were Slippery Rock in the old Soviet Union, dismissals would have been the result. This comparison is not idle. Indeed the bureaucratic incrustations of the old Soviet Union, that so weighed down the dynamics of that society and contributed mightily to its abject failure are not without parallel in American higher education. Individuals in positions of petty power and authority spend most of their energy cultivating cozy relations with one another so as collectively to ensure their petty perquisites, wealth, and security. This habit so ensconces itself that the original functions of such tasks at hand as educating the youth become dim priorities at best and are often utterly negated, though covered up with a dizzying array of Orwellian nomenclature. Among American educationists, the greatest animation comes in response to criticisms that threaten their security by a questioning of bureaucratic premises. Attacks then focus little on the content of the criticism itself but exclusively upon the critic. Within the tightly controlled worlds of the petty bureaucrats this tactic has usually worked. What is necessary in such calcified, petty environments is to force the bright light of publicity onto the otherwise hidden state of corrupt institutional affairs. Then resistance can no longer succeed at the personal level as it does when only the small town confreres are involved.

For many years American businesses suffered from such patterns of localized resistance. The efficiency of many corporations suffered mightily as a result. The most innovative of business leaders have been able to see through the silly nomenclature and grasp the meaninglessness and waste of ensconced ways. Reform has been hard, but it has often worked. The sadness here is that education, while it cannot always use business models directly, has been immune from the awakening to the nonsensicality and dangers of bureaucratic thickening and subversion of standards. Humorous, but sadly significant here is the point that many educational bureaucrats have eagerly sought to graft the bureaucratic practices and jargon-laden discourse of business inefficiency, usually with a currency that is about 10 to 15 years out of date. However, when calls come forth for the kind of wake up that businesses have commenced in regard to the absurdities of such practices, then educationists begin chanting solemn intonations to the effect that the business models have no applicability to the higher issues of education. The hypocrisy is palpable, and it would simply be a big joke were the moral and financial stakes not so significant.

In addition to the hypocritical rejection of the lessons of modern business, educationists confronted with the details of their absurd ways do little more than merely attack the messengers. They seem utterly resistant to any consideration of the facts being presented to them. This is a most telltale point as to most of the discourses about higher education in America over the past generation. The illiberals in positions of petty power never wish to discuss the actual content (such as it is) of what they do. They avoid this at all costs, because such discourse is too threatening. Indeed, at intramural levels, none of the points raised in this discussion have ever been attacked as to their factuality. Attacks have amounted only to variations on the themes of How dare you! and Shutup.! When the ensconced politico’s, who were offended by the content of the discussion, tried to get the critics fired, that nagging thing called the First Amendment got in their way. Rather than read any lesson from this point, such as how the Constitution’s dictates usual reveal many campus liberals actually to be reactionaries, and rather than learn from any of the facts presented in the discussion, people have preferred blithely to ignore the facts presented.

A simple point at the outset, then, is that all facts here are completely verifiable, and one point of verification comes from the utter inability of the administratively ensconced to counter any point, despite having had every opportunity to do so. What follows is a study of a typical American university — what is actually taking place there that sabotages the quality of education, despite huge appropriations from the state; why so many absurdities go unchecked; and what can genuinely be done about it.

As noted, there is a tendency at small colleges and universities to reduce all matters ad hominem. People do this, as folks always will, when they are threatened and cannot readily respond to the actual content of ideas presented to them. Such McCarthy’ist tendencies seem to be so habitual at schools like Slippery Rock, however, that among some faculty and administrators that there is an outright, widespread inability to contend with inquiries and discourse in any other manner. This small-town reductiveness has been so overweening a component of many schools’ cultures that one cannot but anticipate it and address it straight away. Further comment on the many destructive effects of such a petty culture ensues in later sections.

Casting the broader but similarly dysfunctional nature of the ante-bellum South, the brilliant historian David Potter once described a world in which membership is evaluative rather than merely descriptive, and criticism is immediately reduced to a description of the critic and is permitted no evaluative impact. Thus when one cannot deal with points people raise, the course is always clear — attack the person raising any points that are valid and discomforting. Many have reacted to this writing in exactly this intellectually vacuous manner. Many did not even take time to read it but nonetheless spewed false vitriol about people who say things that are said to create a stir. One professor in the arts, for example, declared that the critique was a bad idea. Asked if she had read it, she replied No. Asked then what she would think if someone declared her artistry was lousy, while admitting he had never witnessed it, she sniffed: That’s different! Such fussy, hyper-dismissive and laughably hypocritical behavior has constituted the essence of the corporate culture at Slippery Rock and at many small schools like it. Hypocrisies make no difference. The key is to be an accepted member of the club. The cogency of analyses makes no dent as the focus of the community will be solely on the analyst and not on what he or she may say.

Like many communities with a middle-rank school in its midst, Slippery Rock has always been far more a small town which happens to have a university in it than a university which happens to lie in a small town. A persnickety, angst-laden culture thrives which resists any sort of change from the outside and which continually revels in its own surreal ways. The fact that the state has always provided the support money to sustain odd habits and prevent correctives from the real world is the key here. Not all in Slippery Rock and other such communities directly participate in the corrupt ways. Many readily perceive their absurdity, but most are simply willing to turn a blind eye to it, deeming it futile to try to make corrections. They prefer to take their paychecks, do minimal work within the school and let a culture of academic fraudulence dominate and control the future. As occurred with the blue-collar factories of the nation’s industrial heartland, the utter unwillingness to face problems and make simple corrections will only bring greater problems if not outright doom to the institution in the long run. Poignantly, Slippery Rock is surrounded by such old factory towns that are now fully rusted.

Hey, let’s go out for pizza. How many times have students heard such words and yielded to the temptation despite knowing they had studying to do? For many, obviously, the answer is a high number. The issue of pizza is meaningless in itself, but the connected question is important. Why do students habitually do something other than what they know they should be doing? This has always been a problem for educators. It is one that is getting worse, not because students are getting at all dumber (they’re not), but because they have created and are surrounded by expectations which increasingly cater to their short-term needs as consumers rather than to their long-term needs as students (the word literally from Classical Greek, meaning one who is eager). Never at Slippery Rock, nor at any other such school, did there come a single point of demarcation when a fateful line was crossed and standards for students fell into the proverbial dumpster. People of different ideologies have tried to make this historical determination. Conservatives love to blame the excesses of the 1960s. Perhaps more perceptively, the brilliant analyst Christopher Lasch (in The Culture of Narcissism), pinpointed the key lying in the growing sense of diminishing expectations that emerged in America in the wake of the oil crisis and economic strains of the mid-1970s that spawned a narcissistic outlook over a range of cultural activities. The latter certainly reveals its prescience at schools like Slippery Rock.

Whatever the historical root, students have come to schools like Slippery Rock with much of their home and school preparation geared to the mentality which is all too willing to go out for pizza, literally as well as metaphorically. Rare is the student (or professor OR administrator) who devotes him/herself to the long term professional goals. The accouterments of such goals, especially the financial rewards, are certainly sought, but rarely do people pursue the substance of the goals of professional achievement themselves. For students the point is to be able to bear down on a plan of study which avails a professionally fulfilling reward. Some students do this nicely. The success, for example, of Accounting majors with the CPA exam attests to that. Not coincidentally, that field can do no other than orient itself to an outside yardstick. No amount of self-deceptive intramural finessing can alter that point. Students have to prepare for the CPA exam; a critical mass of professors and students grasp that obvious points and prepare accordingly. Any efforts to water down the rigor in the field would not pass muster with those involved because of the irresistible fact of the professional standard on the horizon.

Of problematic quantity, however, are the students in the majority of disciplines who have permitted themselves to fake it a bit and go out for pizza rather than study and learn up to their capabilities. Professors and administrators have done much the same for one another, and while the students usually have to encounter a day of reckoning when it comes to securing a satisfactory career, the faculty and administrators have been able to stack the deck for one another without, thus far, the appropriation axes falling from state and other outside funding agencies.

It is so seductive to young students to gravitate toward professors, courses, and programs of study they know to be not terribly rigorous. Surrounded as they are by peers and by teachers and administrators of sadly similar cast, they can latch onto rationale that they are really engaged in higher education. The result if a not-so-subtle disconnect that goes unchallenged, but for the words of a few outcasts who invariably face great censure, much like those in any dysfunctional situation who dare to point out the salient truth. Reality has a way of forcing itself into view, however. With dysfunctional people this usually occurs when it is too late to meet challenges fruitfully. For the students, this happens come job time. For a state university it comes when the State System’s Chancellor talks to the legislature, where tougher questions as to why quality education seems not to be occurring in the State System are beginning to be asked with greater frequency. Generally, no one in little schools like Slippery Rock has animated terribly much in regard to such problems and questions, other than to sanction people who try to call attention to the problems or to invent often surreal procedures which usually thicken administration and generate mere images of addressing the problems of quality and accountability.

With slip-shod programs about them, students often come away from schools like Slippery Rock with a rather cynical outlook on their education. Low levels of alumni giving (compared with that of more rigorous schools) illustrate the point. The argument that nearby prestigious schools like Bucknell or Haverford have more generous alumni because they are richer, only reinforces the point in certain key respects. Alarmingly larger numbers of Slippery Rock graduates are securing jobs which pay less than $40,000 a year. Few seem to be willing to ask what the school is doing that makes its graduates have such little apparent economic value.

Until now anyway, state universities like Slippery Rock University have never really had to worry too deeply about the problem of dissatisfied alumni because they have been blessed with the support of taxpayers. Facing the criticisms of falling standards and high costs, state school leaders have taken action. Seeking to answer not the alumni but the legislature, administrators have devised, and are continuing to devise outwardly complex, though intellectually ethereal, means that seek to make a posture that such systems of higher education as Pennsylvania’s are indeed confronting the challenges which face higher education in the Commonwealth and in the nation as a whole. These postures are largely Potemkin Villages. Indeed they further belie what has been making education at Slippery Rock and other such schools so vastly more mediocre than it needs to be.

It is necessary, then, to consider what university leadership groups have been posturing as ways of allegedly meeting the future; what, if anything, is being covered by their modalities; what, more importantly, is being ignored and why; and what alternatively can be done honestly to meet the needs of the state and the nation.

NOT MERE MEDIOCRITY BUT FRAUD

If only the chief problem of schools like Slippery Rock was but one of how mediocrity could be turned into excellence. The problem, alas, runs much deeper. It concerns not excellence versus mediocrity, but mediocrity versus fraud, and here the word fraud is not being employed flippantly. Schools like Slippery Rock can never realistically expect their science departments to compare with those of MIT or Cal. Tech. or their music schools to compare with Juilliard or Curtis, though there is certainly nothing wrong with striving for such levels. But no school, from Johns Hopkins Medical School to a County Community College should put up with fraud. Yet Slippery Rock is choking over this very malady, over a pathological need both to indulge such dysfunction and sanction any who dare to take exception, and over a deep cynicism which shrugs at the absurdities and says why fight it? Any changes one seeks will encounter these obstacles.

In such contexts as this, it is a pathetically pseudo-aware banality which claims that politics are everywhere. Such canards (and habits of discourse at Slippery Rock are full of such non-thought) are meaningless. Yes, there are politics in most any business or school. But at the best of such institutions, one has to have the goods to get in the game. Orthopedists and Anesthesiologists may fight over resources at Johns Hopkins Medical School, as will trombonists and pianists at the Juilliard Conservatory. All such conflicts have political dimensions, but in such cases, the contenders have to be legitimate practitioners in their respective fields. At Slippery Rock, no such goods appear to be necessary. Indeed, they can actually be a liability. Contending with the conflicts between departments at a medical school, a dean would not listen to pleas calling for equal resources given to Alchemy. A music conservatory head would not give equal time to a gazoo player, yet at Slippery Rock such academic alchemy and gazoo playing has often eclipsed the legitimate, and it actually appears to be doing so at an ever-quickening pace.

Many such examples of this fraudulence eclipsing the legitimate abound at Slippery Rock. Many illustrations are to follow. For now, it is instructive to examine a notable one that so perfectly encapsulates the school’s ensconced culture: a professor applied for promotion to the rank of full professor. On her application, subsequently placed on open reserve for all to read in the faculty union office, she claimed to have published two books. One was her doctoral dissertation, which she legitimately listed elsewhere in her application as an achievement in itself. Casting the dissertation elsewhere as a publication thus constituted double-dipping, a no-no in itself, but a minor faux pas compared to the rest of her posture. The publisher of one of her books was the University of Michigan Microfilm Service! As virtually all who have attended graduate school and countless others know, the University of Michigan Microfilm Service records virtually all dissertations in the U.S. There is no editorial board through whom one secures approval; the Service is simply a verbatim recording of a dissertation to facilitate dissemination. In other words, presented as a published book, this was quite a comical pose, one that would have been laughed out of a promotions committee at any major university in the country. The applicant’s comedy did not even stop there, however. The professor’s other published book had a different publisher. It was (trumpets, please): Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania: Desk Top Publishing. No such publishing house exists in the town of Slippery Rock, of course. The book was something merely done on a word processor, duplicated, and passed around to colleagues. Published books are a centerpiece of academic accomplishments in many academic fields, including the one in which the professor contended to have gained distinction, and if there had been any legitimate monograph, she would, no doubt, have trumpeted it loudly. Elsewhere in her application, the professor claimed to have published articles, but many were of equal dubiousness; some, for example, published in E-Mail networks. At a majority of higher education institutions in the nation, such absurd postures would have not only led to no promotion, they could have easily led to a dismissal. Yet, and here the final absurdity, the Slippery Rock University administration chose to promote the professor with the blatantly fraudulent record. They not only passed over other worthy candidates in doing so, they later tried to come down hard on people who dared to criticize the whole absurdity.

It is this pattern of academic fraud, combining often with false postures of political liberalism, and savage reactions to any who expose the nonsense, that has dominated the sensibilities of leadership at Slippery Rock University and at many schools like it. Were the issue merely that of an occasional phony somehow bamboozling some dull-witted political hack of an administrator into a now $95,000-a-year position (which was the case with the "Desk Top Publisher), there would be some snickers. But the problem is that such acts of fraudulence occur all the time, with the major animation from faculty and administrators tending to come only in reaction to those who wish to point out the cronyism and corruption. Therein lies the pattern of dysfunction that plagues the institution in so many ways. To many down in