Public Higher Education

As scholars of human activity, we should distinguish between means and ends – instrumentalities, and governing intentionalities. Too often, particularly within higher education, we conflate means and ends. We want to see education as a purpose unto itself, learning for the sake of learning, and if not for its own sake, then for a purpose best left unspecified. This is, perhaps, not surprising. If we focus the discussion on the one being educated, the student as an individual, a strong liberal tradition would insist that the student is not a means to an end, but an end unto him or herself, and while education might be instrumental, it is instrumental to the development of the student as an individual. The social and economic milieu cannot be ignored, and education is, of course, charged with the social and economic development of the student, but the developmental path itself, the instrumentality of education to a governing intentionality, remains essentially a private matter

Hence, we have statements like that of Howard Gardner, who writes that:

Stripped to its essentials, postsecondary education – and, specifically, the traditional form of education termed liberal arts – exists to convey to students the most important intellectual knowledge and skills that have been developed to the present moment; to develop in students deep disciplinary knowledge in at least one area; to foster critical thinking, analysis, and expression across a range of topics; to contemplate the relation between accumulated knowledge and skills, on the hand, and the issues facing contemporary society, on the other; to prepare students – in a broad rather than narrow sense – for civic life and productive work. A tall order! [Declining by Degrees]

The devil is in the details, and Gardner, at once a champion of human diversity and the liberal arts, must insist upon the “broad rather than narrow sense” because any attempt to define either “civic life” or “productive work” with any degree of specificity brings us perilously close to defining the student, not as an individual, not as an end unto themselves, but as a commodity – seeing them, that is, as subject to a governing civic or economic purpose that at once transcends individuals as individuals and renders them mere instrumentalities. The developmental path of the individual and the education that helps effectuate that development become essentially a public matter open to public disputation. Setting aside questions of personal preference, is “deep disciplinary knowledge” in, let us say, English literature, in and of itself, conducive either to “civic life” or “productive work?” Even if the question is answered in the affirmative, it begs the question, “how so?” and then prompts the follow on question, “Could that same end be served more effectively, more efficiently, in another way?” To inquire after the efficacy of the liberal arts in this way, particularly for those who have committed to its study, is dispiriting. The value of a liberal education is, or should be, a truth self-evident and self-contained, and to inquire too closely after its efficacy relative to a purpose, is to diminish it and, along with it, humanity.

Yet this question, “to what end?” is being asked on several fronts, if not explicitly, then implicitly in the assumptions brought to bear. On one side of the pyramid, students themselves answer the question pragmatically – higher education is a means to get a “better job.” There is survey data galore to support this assertion, but the answer is easily replicated on the first day of any class. Ask, “Why are you here?” and the answer for most is inevitably a “better job.” A fair number know, of course, that such an answer is limited and limiting, and they will answer along the lines of a “better life,” but when pressed, that “better job” is central to the conception of a “better life.” Since many are already working, most within the lowest tiers of the service industry, just what constitutes “better” would seem eminently self-explanatory. Collegiate administrators collude in this thinking. Anthony Carnevale, Jeff Stroh, and Michele Melton answer the question, “what’s it worth?” with a simple percentage, “84%.” That is, on average, “how much more money a full-time, full-year worker with a Bachelor’s degree can expect to earn over a lifetime” compared to one “who has no better than a high school diploma.” [Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.] There are other ways of answering the question, “what’s it worth?” than a simple reference to earning potential, and I am sure the authors of the report would concur with many of those answers. Those answers are a bit less dismissive of the liberal arts, but the bottom line remains – “more money” – the answer that is, for the moment, most persuasive with students, their parents, and others who bear the increasing cost of a collegiate education.

A sideways glance at those “others” who bear the cost of public higher education, the taxpayers and the state legislators that represent their interests, it is perhaps not surprising to find a state appropriations committee suggesting that “the legislature intends that institutions [of higher education] review the return on the taxpayer’s investment,” and to propose “ways to maximize the return by providing students with the skills necessary to enter the workforce.” For private non-profit higher education, particularly those institutions dominating the top spots on the US News & World Reports’ list of the “best institutions,” there seem to be few questions about the return on investment for students. Institutional prestige answers the question, and institutional prestige is self-perpetuating, driven by and affirmed in the enormous competition for admission. Regardless of the education they provide, or how they provide it, those who invest in Princeton or Harvard are expected to experience good returns with minimal risk, and the expectations are for the most part borne out. The attendees, as they say, have won the genetic lottery, having drawn parents with wealth or native intelligence to pass forward. In this context, it seems a bit gauche to discuss employability or earning capacity, in part because both are seen as a foregone conclusion, answered at admission.

The for-profit sector has, of course, marketed directly to the career interests of students. For profits are competitive, within a competitive marketplace, but it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that the for-profit sector is private enterprise. They are competing for public subsidies in the form of federally subsidized grants and loans, and not unlike the defense industry, for profit education would wither and die without the influx of federal tax dollars. Nevertheless, despite tuition costs approaching the private non-profits, and the loan debt associated with those tuitions, they have been successful in part because they promise students precisely what they want to hear. Granted they have not always done so with probity, and the Gainful Employment Act is intended to address the often-egregious disparities between the advertised promises of “high paying jobs” and the subsequent realities faced by students, but the act itself is a double-edged sword, acknowledging the vocational focus of higher education on the hand and on the other, as a condition of federal financial aide, putting in place measures directly tied to a student’s earnings after schooling. Although limited for the moment to for-profits and the community college sector, it is not in the least inconceivable that the provisions of the act might be extended to those other sectors of higher education who proffer, as one legislator in my state put it, “degrees to nowhere” meaning those degrees in the humanities and social sciences that hang at the bottom of the Georgetown scale – those degrees in the liberal arts for which the question, “What’s it worth?” returns the answer “Not much” if the concern is centered principally on earnings.

Higher education has become vocational education, and I am not so sure the revaluation is wholly a bad thing. Education has become, not an end unto itself, but an instrumental path to a career, and our relationships with our careers are as complex as any we might imagine. There is, of course, our relationship with money. We work for money, and even our hypocrisy would blush if we suggested that money was not an interest, at the very least to a level of necessity – the “middle-class wage” that frees us from the scrabble of relative poverty. Aristotle was perhaps repeating common wisdom when he pointed out that “the life of money making is one of constraint, and wealth manifestly is not the good we are seeking, because it is for use, that is, for the sake of something further,” and that something further Aristotle suggested was eudaimonia, if not happiness, per se, then perhaps, the full flourishing of well-being. Much contributes to our well-being beyond the transient pleasures of consumption, the getting and spending that dominates the popular media, but nodding to those students who recognize that one’s well-being might include a sense of investment in relationships with others that does not reduce them to objects of predation, career nevertheless remains near the center of concern. For the vast majority of us, we are what we do, and while we may round out the picture with our interests and our relationships beyond career, an increasing portion of our lives are defined within and by our professions. The choice of career becomes, not simply a pecuniary question, but an ethical question in the proper sense of the word. It answers, for the most part, the question, “How shall I live?”

I am more than willing to concede the legitimacy of my students’ interests in career, but I would also point out that it is principally a “private,” not a “public” interest. Let me take my cue from a conservative thinker on this point. Milton Friedman writes that

public expenditures on higher schooling can be justified as a means of training youngsters for citizenship and for community leadership – though I hasten to add that the large fraction of current expenditure that goes for strictly vocational training cannot be justified in this way, or indeed, as we shall see, in any other.”

I would not want to be quite so categorical, but it does set up the paradoxical circumstance of a conservative thinker admitting public subsidies for the liberal arts that prepare a student for “citizenship and community leadership,” but not for the vocational training that prepares students for their immediate entry into the workforce. How well (or perhaps more precisely how appropriately) the liberal arts prepare a student for “citizenship and community leadership” might well be a subject for some debate, particularly in the ideologically charged atmosphere of the present, but with “vocational training” it seems clear enough to Friedman that the benefit accrues principally to the private individual. As he goes on to point out, vocational training

is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of non-human capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being. If it does so, the individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher return for his services than he would otherwise be able to command.

The humanist in me bristles a bit at the analogy, but Friedman’s distinction between public and private is not identical to the distinction between the social and the personal, the economic and the human. Subsidizing vocational education, of course, provides some social and economic benefit to employers, but this is mostly about higher education’s emergent role as a mediator between the private interests of the students and the private interests of the employers. If anything, as private actors, students and employers should bear the cost of the vocational training that serves their mutual interests. The marketplace would determine the appropriate share to be invested by each.

Preparing people for work, even socially or economically meaningful work, does not provide a fully meaningful answer to the question, “What is the public purpose of public education?” Friedman touches on the answer with the longest standing – “a stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread acceptance of some common set of values.” Insofar as democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people, it needs at least a contingent of well-educated citizens who possess the skills and knowledge necessary to engage the on-going public debate over public policy. There is a certain level of idealism implicit in such assertions, most often advanced as a self-evident truth. Who after all wants a poorly informed electorate? The difficulty, however, is the obvious one. If the public purpose of public higher education is the “widespread acceptance of some common set of values,” just what are those values exactly? If one believes, as I imagine many do, that the business of America is business, and that what is good for Microsoft and Citicorp is good for America, then we are back where we started, the public purpose of public higher education is to shape, if not citizens per se, then good corporate citizens, and at its most ambitious, corporate leadership. Not a trivial task, and one that might well require some infusion of the mental habits associated with the liberal arts, but I am not sure that even Friedman had in mind “corporate values” when he suggested the need for “widespread acceptance of some common set of values.” It is contingent not only on a conflation of “democracy” with “free-market capitalism” of the sort explicit in Friedman’s and Hyack’s and others accounts, but the subsequent conflation of “free-market capitalism” with the ascendancy of the modern corporation, a governance (if not government) of the shareholder, by the shareholder, and for the shareholder. After all, as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “the people who own the country ought to govern it” [Chomsky 46].

I am simply suggesting that the public purpose of public higher education might go beyond staffing the cubicles of corporate America with the next generation of Dilberts. Any suggestion to the contrary – those emergent from the so-called liberal bias of the liberal arts with its emphasis on “critical thinking” – critical in both the academic and popular sense – thinking deeply analytical with an eye toward alternatives to the existing order – does not seem possible in today’s ideologically polarized political discourse. As an educational end, a general education outcome, critical thinking, as such, has lost much of its allure. Problem solving still has some sway, if they are the right problems within he right context, uncritical of presumptive, ideologically charged values. The critical thinker, however, has always been the bane of the ideologue, whether on the left or the right, and equally the bane of simplistic pieties. The growing distrust of higher education – the growing insistence that it be on the one hand increasingly vocational in its orientation and on the other increasingly private in its funding – the growing antipathy to the traditional accoutrements of the professoriate like “tenure” (why, after all, shouldn’t the professors as professionals suffer the same conditions of employment as their corporate counterparts?) – all might be traced back to the ideologue’s distrust of critical thinking. While employers might want graduates who can solve problems, they want graduates who solve their problems, in their context, those related to productivity and profit within a corporate setting. They want a professoriate that contributes to economic and workforce development. They most certainly do not want either graduates or a professoriate who might see the corporate employer themselves as the problem to be solved, who might agree with Jefferson, when he wrote to Tom Logan that he hoped to “crush in its birth aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

There is another problem in placing the public purpose of public higher education in the need of democratic societies for a well-educated citizenry. It is the problem of democracy itself, or at least the prevailing two party system as it has evolved within the United States. The entrenched fractiousness between the parties runs roughly between ‘freedom’ on the one side and ‘justice’ on the other. To value ‘freedom’ is to compromise ‘justice,’ and to value ‘justice’ is to compromise ‘freedom.’ Despite occasional assertions to the contrary, thee has no wholly satisfactory philosophical bridge between the two parties of the sort that could provide a set of common core values that is often adduced, rarely specified. Rawl’s account and Sen’s critique of his account have more to do with the nature of the compromise than with any synthetic reconciliation of one to the other. The so-called conservative wing has positioned itself as the champion of ‘freedom’ and has entered into an ex-ante compromise with ‘justice’ – that is to say, an emphasis on ‘equal opportunity’ rather than ‘ex-post’ equality of result, a position that might be palatable if indeed all were created equal and it was merely a matter of predilection and talent that produced the disproportionate result – if indeed all were situated equally at the outset and it was merely a matter of pluck and luck that differentiated winners and losers. The so-called liberal wing has positioned itself as the champion of ‘justice’ and entered into a negative compromise with ‘freedom’ – that is to say, an emphasis on what one has been freed from rather than one’s positive freedom to act more or less as one chooses, a position that might be palatable if each ‘freedom from’ did not entail another’s deprivation – a deprivation that might be palatable, in the name of charity, if so many of the beneficiaries did not seem, on the face of it, so unworthy, so unreasonably entitled.

It is not quite that neat, of course, as it plays out in the legislative arena, and both parties have the hypocrisies inherent to compromise within compromise. Social conservatism, particularly the alliance with Christian evangelicalism, would do away with a very broad swath of personal freedom and the positive ability to define one’s self and one’s happiness in ways that are not purely economically driven. It is perhaps not surprising that higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have not been able to embrace the social conservative legislative agenda. It is fundamentally prescriptive, as the recent controversy over the “Marriage Vow: a Declaration of Dependence upon Marriage and Family” demonstrates. It references the “debased currency of marriage” and goes on to say “the debasement continues as a function of adultery; quickie divorce; physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation, pervasive infidelity and ‘unwed cheating’ among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color …” It goes on, and it does so in the nature of a polemic. It would make little difference to the authors of the piece to suggest that not all of the listed items are equally obvious. I doubt that one would find many supporters for those who perpetrate “physical and verbal spousal abuse” and advocate for their right to do so either as a matter of personal choice or irresistible “inclination.” Homosexuality is another matter. The authors of the Vow would insist that homosexuality is a personal choice, an ethical and moral choice, but a choice that people should no more be free to practice homosexuality than one should be free to practice spousal abuse. The flaws in the argument are apparent enough, and despite my own academic inclinations to debunk it, the “Marriage Vow” is not intended to open, but to shut down critical discourse and dialectic, to demand assent through diatribe to what would appear to some, to me, as a series of covert and overt bigotries. I doubt that “empirical evidence” showing homosexuality to be genetically determined, if it were provided, would suffice in this context than the empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s grand theory has sufficed in the context of the biological sciences. If preparing students to “live with diversity” is a goal of higher education, and diversity includes “sexual preference,” then the disconnection is apparent enough.

An ability to communicate, as one of the professed goals of higher education, implies something worthy of communication, but most of our public discourse has been reduced to infotainment of the most venal sort, or to a sophistry worse than Plato could possibly have imagined. There is too little in the way of rational discourse, at least not of the sort one might imagine for an educated leadership addressing an educated public. It is clear enough why the authors of the Vow would not favor the sorts of Socratic inquiry as a goal of high education, at least not in the way that Martha Nussbaum and others have imagined, in part because it opens the possibility that one might think otherwise. The danger, of course, is a converse sanctimony. If there is something ante-apocalyptic in conservative discourse, dire predictions of impending doom, there is something post-apocalyptic in the post-modern – the devaluing of ‘logo-centric discourse’ – the various and sundry victimizations that tend to stymie almost any action, any exercise of positive freedom, even those undertaken on behalf those victimized – an easy relativism masquerading as tolerant profundity – the reduction of all thing, even the physical sciences, to an epistemological subjectivity, within which the assertion “I believe” is both sufficient unto itself and utterly meaningless. I will not rehearse the arguments here, and much has been made of political correctness, but I would tend to agree with those more conservative critics of higher education, like Bloom, who bemoan the absence of any real “correctness” or standards of “truth” beyond the sorts of Google-algorithms that have elevated group think to a truly global scope. It closes down the American mind as effectively, if not more effectively, than any outright bigotry because there seems, sadly, little beyond it. It is perhaps not surprising that various fundamentalism have rushed in to fill the resulting void, to include an economic fundamentalism, an overweening faith in the so-called market.

In the end, it is difficult to imagine much agreement on what an education prepared students for citizenship and community leadership might look like, and so we are left with the sorts of “strictly vocational training” that are important enough, but do not quite rise to provide a public purpose for public higher education. Those who need employees and those who want to be employees need to sort it out the arrangement in the market place. If higher education is an “investment in human capital,” as is endlessly pointed out, it nevertheless remains something of a good investment, providing higher incomes and a greater likelihood of employment. It provides a more satisfactory answer to the question “what to make of a diminished thing?” One should not conflate a free market with a free society. Positive freedom, the freedom to act, is contingent upon the means to act, and with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the freedom to act in meaningful ways is likewise concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Although programmatically, the immediate interests of a plurality of Americans would be served by one or another form of redistributive justice – as Paul Krugman put it in a recent New York Times editorial, “direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers” – one is not likely to see it in the immediate future. The lack of meaningful reform following the recent financial crises points to the entrenched interest of the emerging oligarchy. Too big to fail is also too big to effectively regulate or tax, and so government, perhaps despite itself, finds itself subordinate to those self-same corporate individuals who precipitated the crises and profited from it. As Krugman goes on to point out, what our economy “very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.” The word will not get out soon. The self-same interests have the means available to act within the realm of public discourse, and with Citizens United, the Supreme Court has opened the door to a huge influx of private money into public discourse, the effects of which on electoral politics are just beginning to be felt, but it is clear enough that the effects will not be neutral. The corporation as individual has been uniquely positioned to usurp the individual per se, not by any overt act that might limit free speech rights, but by placing those rights within the prevailing economic context. I am as free to speak as ever, but it is enormously unlikely that my voice will be heard, and even if heard, will be as persuasive as the amplified voices heard on Rupert Murdock’s Fox News. In the meantime, one can expect public support for public higher education to continue its slow decline. One can expect the increased privatization of higher education, with a greater and greater share of the cost transferred to students through tuition and a greater and greater demand for one or another form of vocational training that rounds out the investment in human capital.