It’s all in the ‘question mark’. Hacker & Dreifus are
academics who have no interest in destroying higher education. They do,
however, think it has gone badly wrong, in the US at least, straying from its
real purpose. Their charge is that Universities have become insular,
inward-looking and self-serving, abandoning teaching in favour of research.
Politicians, parents, students and external commentators are waking up to the
parallel universe that is the modern university, a feather-bedded, faculty culture
that seeks to avoids teaching, with high costs, sabbaticals, endless
conferences and dubious research. Does their analysis apply to the UK? Let’s
see.
Teaching
Their cardinal charge is the high cost students pay, through
debt, for low quantity and quality teaching. Now that people pay top dollar they
are asking what they get in return. The reality, uncovered in detail, is that academics seek to abandon teaching as
their careers progress. The bulk of undergraduate teaching (70%) is now done by
low paid, part-time ‘contingent’ staff. In some cases foreign students with
English so poor they can’t be understood, especially in maths and science (a
complaint I’ve heard many times from students in the UK).
The stronger charge is that academics don’t care much for
teaching undergraduates “nor do they feel the need to”. They witness appalling
attitudes towards students, and in particular, poor teaching with low
preparation, poor skills, little eye contact, and therefore little attention by
the class, also a propensity to blame students
for lack of attention. Why? Because teaching ability is not valued. Research is
what leads to permanent employment and promotion.
“Good teaching is only possible if professors are also
active in research” is the mantra the hear time and time again. But the
pressure to shovel more and more research into more and more journals, with
fewer and fewer readers and attend more conferences, with fewer attendees, is a
road of diminishing returns. Research, through the publishing virus, is now a
reputation and resume issue, largely divorced from teaching. Indeed, newer
teaching institutions have massively expanded research, at the expense, they
say, of teaching. This research-led teaching myth also promotes the teaching of
inappropriate, esoteric topics. In short, there’s a need to de-link or further
disengage research from teaching.
Having attended both a US and UK universities and seen lots
of academics present, I would say that, if anything it is worse in the UK. We
have a more reserved culture, where highly analytic researchers find it
difficult to face up audiences. Post-92 we also had a massive uplift in teachers
who do research. I’m not convinced that this has been to the benefit of either
research or teaching in the UK.
Dropout rates
Shocking figures are presented on dropout rates. Estimates
for those who drop out in the first semester lie between one quarter to one
third of all freshmen. Engineering courses have huge dropout rates, with
faculty holding the view that their job is to ‘weed out’ poor performance, an
approach they refuse to apply to themselves. This lack of interest from faculty
astounds the likes of Eric Mazur, a physicist and teaching expert at Harvard,
who claims that a meeting on falling teaching standards had the, “lowest
turnout he could recall”.
Bureaucratic behemoths
Universities have also loaded up with odd (they give job
titles), and in their view superfluous, administrative jobs and show that the
ratio of administrators to students has doubled in 30 years. With these jobs
comes office space and buildings, adding significant costs to students’ fees. This
war of words between faculty and administrators is familiar in the UK.
Extravagant
facilities
The costs of huge sports facilities and teams, and the
distortions this places on finances and learning are explored in detail. This
is not such a problem in the UK, but our propensity to throw up buildings, that
are empty most of the time, is just as bad. At least in the US they have more
commitment to summer schools and keeping campuses open for students year round.
Poor performance
Failing academics are almost impossible to fire, so poor
teaching and lazy research abounds, with ‘academic freedom’ used as the shield
to defend poor performance. On top of this academia clones itself, leading to
groupthink and a lack of academic diversity. Indeed, the evidence they cite
shows that an academic, like Ward Churchill, is far more likely to be dismissed
for exercising academic freedom, something well documented by Lionel Lewis’s Cold War on Campus, where Universities
caved into McCarthyite demands for sackings.
We’ve had no McCarthyism in the UK, but the sclerotic and
over-protectionist policies towards faculty staff are possible more entrenched.
As the evaluation in the performance in teaching is low, it is never a serious
cause for the necessary weeding and feeding that Universities need to stay
vibrant. Even when low research output is delivered, attempts to remove faculty
are greeted with hysterical responses e.g. Sussex and Middlesex.
Skewed admission
Lazy admission policies lead to middle-class parents paying
for personal essays (in the UK personal statements). On SATS, the rich pay
thousands of dollars for courses from Kaplan and Princeton Review to ‘cheat’
the exam. Is there any other area of human endeavour where respectable
educational institutions offer courses on ‘cheating’? It’s like a Business
School offering a course on ‘Robbing banks’. (Mmmmm…)
Vocational/academic
The authors unashamedly support a return to a Liberal Arts
model with undergraduate courses leading to vocational specialisms. They are
rather snooty about engineering, MIT and CalTech. Although they have a pop at
the Ivy League and rankings that reflect a “premium on prestige” and brands not
teaching and learning. The Golden Dozen in the US come in for some heavyweight
criticism for below par teaching.
This is mirrored in the UK, where vocational degrees (apart
from medicine) are regarded as below par. On the other hand we have some worthy
Universities, such as Heriot-Watt and Manchester and UCL that still carry the
banner for solid, professional vocational courses. In may ways we’ve never
adopted the Liberal Arts BA then Medschool/Lawyer model from across the pond.
That’s to our credit.
Recommendations
They’re a bit lightweight on technology in learning (they
call it techno-learning) but smart enough to see that it’s a solution, with a
detailed case study on Humanities 2510 at a Florida College, where the costs have been halved
with increased attainment. Great to see the wonderful Carol Twigg research
(LINK) being used as the inspiration for this course. There’s nothing quite
like the OU in the US, then again, the great failing in the UK was the failure
to apply the OU model, even for high-volume theoretical courses, where it
clearly works.
“The future is here…it’s just not evenly distributed”, said
William Gibson, so price and product are not aligned, so shop around. They name
a whole raft of small colleges offering excellent degrees at a fraction of the
price of bigger institutions. Some colleges have simply dropped excessive
spending on sports teams and stadia, others are wholly committed to students
and teaching, not research, even free tuition. Braver still is Evergreen
College, where grades and fixed curricula have been abandoned; students get a
long written evaluation.
Good advice in the UK. We have similar snobbishness around
prestige and brands. The ranking tables are a disgrace, ignoring teaching.
This, I feel, is set to change.
Toxic debt &
bubble
The core problem is the indirect subsidy of 2nd
and 3rd rate research. Reduce research and you improve teaching and
reduce costs. It’s that simple. So they call for more student-centred
institutions, less sabbaticals, less research, less administrators, more
scrutiny of bad teaching and more leadership. How many people can actually name
the Vice Chancellor of their local University? They have become anonymous
apparatchiks, obsessed with research not teaching, building not technology,
chasing gongs not glory. Couldn’t agree more.
It’s the debt that’s attracting attention. As costs have
risen by 250% in real terms in the US and much higher levels in the UK, we
should be worried. This has all the signs of a bubble. We have deferred payment
through loans (debt) to a generation who may not be able to pay and bankruptcy
is no escape. What if these debts turn toxic?
The bottom line is that students and parents are being
short-changed by entrenched values that have sacrificed learning for research.
Academia has adopted the same stance as the finance sector, refusing to hold
itself to account, adopting a prickly, defensive posture. The worry, for the
authors, is that we’re creating an “indentured educated class”.
This may be less of an issue in the UK, as loans are
recovered from tax with a one third expected loss guaranteed by government
(still a loss). But the debt bubble is still a possibility, through a
combination of evasion and inability to pay.
In many ways the arguments in this book can be applied to UK
Universities, the notable differences being the US commitment to campus sport
and a much larger number of private institutions. I’d suspect, therefore, that
the debate has already reached these shores with fees looming, as we are now
third in the world on the cost of Higher Education to students, with only S
Korea and the US ahead of us. We would do well to listen to what these researchers
have to say.
