Our Underachieving Colleges

By Michael J. Ellis | Friday, March 3, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

Our Underachieving Colleges
Derek Bok
Princeton University Press, 2006

Poor Larry Summers. He never understood the one basic fact underlying contemporary American higher education—professors run the show, and they can and will topple any administrator who dares to undermine their shibboleths. Summers, of course, was himself overthrown as president of that grandest of academic institutions, Harvard, in a palace coup last week. Summers’s mortal sin was to upset Harvard’s Praetorian Guard of faculty with a series of faux pas : first by proposing that men and women might have different neural hard-wiring, then by suggesting that African-American studies professor Cornel West might better serve his academic career by publishing books instead of hip-hop albums, and finally, the gravest sins of them all, asking tenured faculty to teach large undergraduate survey courses and firing Dean of the Faculty William Kirby. Derek Bok, president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, understands what Summers did not, that a unified faculty can, by being resistant to change in the worst way, stultify needed reforms and make or break any administrator. But while Bok clearly gets the current state of the academy right in his new book, Our Underachieving Colleges , he gets the fix wrong. He realizes that reticent and lazy professors are the chief obstacles to necessary changes, but his reform package, which fails to consider the possibility that someone other than the professoriate might be able to take responsibility for an institution’s governance, comes up short.

Curiously, Bok puts himself in the same camp as both polemical progressives and traditionalist conservatives, with his beliefs that there is something seriously wrong with American universities. His complaint is neither that students are insufficiently politicized and radicalized by their education, nor that they graduate ignorant of the great works of Western Civilizaion. Rather, it is a more basic and pragmatic complaint—that our “colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should.” Sure, American educational institutions remain at the fore-front of scientific research and academic publishing, but they also produce

seniors [who] graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a class in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably unformed citizen democracy.

And so the list could go on, practically ad infinitum . Distracted by research and political causes, our universities are failing at their most basic of tasks: teaching undergraduates. Bok may be right when he notes that there has never been a “golden age” of university education in America—after all, history is hardly permanently pointed in one direction, either for the better or for the worse—but standards have certainly been on the decline. More students enter college today than have at any point in history, but the result is more uncertain than ever. In the top tier of higher education, the students are smarter—Dartmouth, for example, has seen the mean SAT score of its incoming freshmen increase from 1362 for the class of 1999 to 1438 for the class of 2009—but the outside observer would be hard-pressed to find any substantive difference between the two classes (save for perhaps more SAT-prep classes for the current frosh). After all, the good of sending a high-achieving high school senior to Dartmouth becomes quite questionable if the only result of that degree is a fast track to high-paying jobs after graduation.

So why are our colleges failing? Bok identifies six main problems: the increasing divergence of aims of professors (pure knowledge and the research that accompanies it) and students (a higher-paying job), barriers to collaboration between faculty members of different departments, a general neglect for overall purpose within the curriculum, a fixation on general education requirements at the expense of any logical structure to individual concentrations, a neglect for teaching (especially pronounced among senior faculty at research institutions), and a failure to build a positive extracurricular atmosphere. Some of his assessments are spot-on—Dartmouth, for one, has lacked a general purpose for its hodge-podge curriculum for years and freshman composition courses are increasingly taught by part-time and adjunct professors instead of tenured faculty. Some, however, miss the mark. An increased focus on collaboration between members of different departments to create more interdisciplinary course offerings makes little sense when students have trouble enough mastering the basics, and if there’s one thing Dartmouth and similar schools have too much of, it’s administrative meddling in campus social life. Give the curriculum purpose and bring senior faculty down from their ivory towers to teach freshman, but for the love of God, don’t hire another person to work on the second floor Collis (which hosts, among their apparatchiks, the Office of Pluralism and Leadership).

To deal with these problems, Bok has proposed a well-researched and well-thought out package of reforms for higher education: reinstitute rhetoric classes so graduates can be counted upon to competently make presentations in their future careers (paging Jim Kuypers, see TDR 4/22/2005); insist that tenured faculty cease abdicating their responsibility to teach undergraduate writing; bring back moral reasoning classes so students leave college with firmer characters; and mandate civics classes that could potentially combat the downward trends in youth voting, newspaper-reading, and general knowledge of government. To create the time for these necessary components of the undergraduate education, Bok would do away with skimpy distributive requirements that more often than not end up placing students with little interest in a subject in the easiest possible classes that are taught mainly by graduate assistants. His arguments are supported by mountains of statistical evidence, some of it common-sense and some of it startling. For instance, that federal law requires all universities receiving government aid to distribute voter registration forms to all of their students 120 days prior to an election, but only 17 percent of colleges actually comply.

Perhaps the most stunning revelation, though, is how little care faculty members actually devote to their teaching. Teaching, of course, is not like research or consulting—it cannot be quantified like research funding, ranked like prestigious awards, or publicized with front-page New York Times articles. Facts, however, belie admissions offices’ claims that undergraduate education is the primary focus of professors’ talents. Only 40 percent use student evaluations when considering how to revise their courses, the average student retains just 42 percent of the material from a lecture by the time it ends, and just a tiny minority of Ph.D. programs even bother to instruct their budding academics on how to teach. Yet, like children at Lake Wobegon, more than 90 percent of professors rate their own teaching to be “above average.” And after all, since teaching skills can’t be rated by the all-important US News and World Report rankings, why bother improving them? Dartmouth has certainly taken some of Bok’s advice to heart. The shiny-new Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), headed by Milton scholar Tom Luxon, has improving faculty teaching as its explicit mission. But, as DCAL was only created in 2004, it is difficult to say what, if anything, the Center has done for Dartmouth’s teaching. On other counts, though, the College is moving in the exact wrong direction. The new “Writing Program” headed by computer science professor Tom Cormen has ghettoized writing courses outside the walls of the English department—a move, which, according to Bok, has at other schools caused “constant staff turnover, low morale, sudden, unpredictable fluctuations in student numbers, insufficient resources, and abiding sense of being marginalized by the faculty and administration despite performing functions that are both demanding and essential.” When, as Prof. Mara Sabinson rudely found out, (see TDR 1/20/2006), writing classes at Dartmouth are used as punishment for wayward professors, it is little surprise that they fail so spectacularly in their goals.

But while Bok’s diagnosis of the university’s ills is so insightful and his cures are so pragmatic and common-sense, his method of delivery betrays the fundamental problem of Our Underachieving Colleges. Until the faculty’s iron grip on academia is relaxed, presidents and deans who attempt to implement Bok’s reform package are, in his own words, “venturing into treacherous waters.” While he realizes that academic leaders will “meet initial resistance and even firm rebuffs” from tendentious professors, he also firmly believes that professors will eventually agree to the reforms themselves, since, of course, they are “thoughtful, conscientious people” who “will not defend an untenable position indefinitely once the issue has been raised.” Perhaps he should check in with Larry Summers on how well that strategy worked for him. Over recent years, the professoriate has increasingly shown its willingness to close ranks and block even the most basic challenges to their positions. As one professor recently told the Chronicle of Higher Education , “once someone’s a tenured professor, if he wants to write articles for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times instead of doing his scholarship, he has every right to do that. Once someone is a tenured professor, they answer to God. It’s as simple as that.” N.B.—the irony here, of course, is that the vast majority of tenured professors do not believe in any sort of God.

In this respect, perhaps the College can provide an example to the rest of higher education. Faculty need not be the answer, as Bok presumes they must be. Alumni can reassert their control of their alma mater. Admittedly, such a process is easier at Dartmouth than at most other schools because of our unique system of alumni elections to the school’s Board of Trustees. But alumni and parents, in conjunction with many state legislatures, control the most valuable asset of all in the struggle to reform American universities—money. Without it, even the most entrenched faculty will wither on the vine. Organizing vast groups of alumni to demand better returns on their donations is certainly no easy task, but it is still better than relying upon the faculty to reform itself. Reforms in the corrupted core of American higher educational are long over-due, but they must come from without, rather than from within.

Our Underachieving Colleges

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