Right or Left?
By Joseph Asch | Sunday, June 8, 2008
Little effort has been made to tie Dartmouth’s alumni revolution to larger trends in higher education, but an attentive reader does not have to look far to find shared ideas.
Numerous recent books by university presidents and deans have echoed the Dartmouth petition trustees’ central criticisms of the College: that institutions of higher learning are drifting away from their commitment to undergraduate education in favor of research and administration. Undergraduate students are the losers.
Frank Newman, director of Brown University’s Futures Project and a former president of the University of Rhode Island, sounds a note familiar to Dartmouth readers when he writes that “colleges have been focusing their energies on a form of competition based not on improving graduates’ skills and knowledge but on institutional prestige and revenues.” He states: “It is time to elevate the status of teaching to that of research.”
Harry Lewis, Harvard’s former Dean of the College, gave his book on colleges the self-explanatory sub-title: “How a Great University Forgot Education.” And books by Harvard’s former President Derek Bok (“Our Underachieving Colleges”) and Yale’s former Law School Dean Tony Kronman (“Education’s End”) both explicitly opine that universities have moved away from their core responsibilities to undergraduates in favor of research.
Finally, Richard Hersh, formerly president of Trinity College, has compiled a collection of articles entitled “Declining by Degrees: Higher Education at Risk” in which his essayists argue that the overall effectiveness of higher education has diminished due to a loss of focus on undergrads.
As a first point, one might observe that none of the above commentators could possibly be described as “ultra-conservative” or members of a “radical minority cabal,” to repeat the words used to describe Dartmouth’s petition movement in columns in the Dartmouth by Shaun Stewart ‘10 and Peter Fahey ‘68. Yet these mainstream academics have come to the same conclusions about what ails higher education as Dartmouth’s petition trustees (not to mention the thousands of alumni who voted them onto the Board).
Obviously these scholars do not have a “clear ideological agenda”—to quote from a recent, accusatory mass-mailing to alumni by Dartmouth’s non-petition trustees. Opponents of Dartmouth’s petition trustees repeat this tired charge ad nauseam, but where is their evidence? Might the petition trustees actually be correct?
The independent Lumina Foundation‘s recent report on “The Growing Imbalance: Recent Trends in U.S. Postsecondary Education Finance” describes in detail the continuing disproportionate growth of colleges’ “non-instruction related costs” (translation: bloated bureaucracies), though in fairness, it says that private institutions have done better in this area than state schools. Once again, the conclusions in this detailed report could not be described as “right wing”—even though the arguments in this study, too, are consistent with Dartmouth’s petitioners’ positions.
Regrettably, the concerns expressed in these books and reports have not led to a movement for change at other institutions. Unmerited self-congratulation seems to be the order of the day in academia, even in the face of decades-old complaints from business recruiters and other observers that students are graduating without a complete set of intellectual and practical skills.
So who will instigate reform in the future?
On a visit to Dartmouth in October, Harvard’s Harry Lewis pointed to alumni as the only possible driver of innovation. Alumni, he said, were a college’s sole, disinterested link to society. Like other commentators, he remarked that leaders throughout higher education were watching Dartmouth’s trustee and governance controversies to see if the College would be the first school to change its strategy and tack away from our rudderless sister institutions.
Of course, the reasons that Dartmouth could take the lead lie with our passionately loyal alumni and our unique, open system of governance. No other institution has historically allowed alumni to vote directly for such a high percentage of the Board. And no other prestigious college has tried to keep a focus on undergrads for so long.
On June 10, the results of the Association of Alumni elections will be announced. On that day, we’ll find out if the Administration’s supporters will succeed in pushing Dartmouth down toward the mass of average institutions, or whether the College will lead the fight to restore higher education’s focus on undergrads.
The whole of academia is watching. Personally, I’m betting on the wisdom of our alums to see beyond the name-calling. I expect that they’ll vote to maintain parity by continuing to cast their ballots for the candidates in the vanguard of thinking about higher education.
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