The Ivory Tower Under Siege

...The enemy is at the gates, in fact on both sides of the gates...

...Both the price tag as a whole and the Federal share have been rising substantially for decades...

...Although the rate of growth has declined in the past few years, it is sobering to note that in 1970, at the end of the expansive '60s, the total cost of higher education in constant dollars was about half what it is today...

...Accreditation reports, which are supposed to measure institutional quality, are typically an unstable mixture of quantitative statistics and uplifting rhetoric...

...Is the University of Lake Wobegone really capable of making everybody above average...

...its research is harmlessly bizarre at best and sometimes destructive...

...Few universities, however, are willing tomeasure the quality of teaching seriously by testing what students learn in some form that permits comparison with other institutions...

...The total bill for American higher education in 1991 was $165.8 billion, of which the Federal government paid $20.3 billion, about the same number of Federal dollars that year as for Aid to Families with Dependent Children...

...So much for funded research...

...Jane Smiley's much-reviewed novel MOO, published earlier this year, cruelly but brilliantly symbolizes the university as a hog—the subject of an eccentric professor's research project—whose sole purpose is to get as fat as it is genetically possible for a hog to be...

...After 35 years of trying to be too many things to too many people, the university systems of many states have now gotten so big, chaotic and expensive that fundamental questions may be near at hand...

...WHAT KIND of an institution is the troubled American university today, and how can it be understood most effectively...

...So far, governors and legislators in many states are picking around the edges, examining such faculty perquisites as tenure, sabbaticals and summers without teaching, or wondering out loud why a professor should make more than a plumber...

...In addition, the same university has 11 branch campuses that account for nearly another 100,000, full-time and part-time...

...Ask a president, provost, dean, or department head (I used to be one) what the purposes are of his bailiwick, and before you can finish the question you will hear "Teaching research-and service" chanted as though it were a single word...

...There are now more administrators and quasi-administrative employees than faculty members...

...Tighter fiscal management, downsizing of administration, more discipline in the purchase of new computer systems might help temporarily, but fundamentally the whole structure, public and private alike, may rapidly be reaching the point where taxpayers who feel overburdened are unwilling to sustain it...

...instead they typically have the students fill out forms evaluating classes and professors, an exercise that is little more than a public-relations device to make the customer feel powerful...

...Greed is the deadly sin that long ago corrupted the whole enterprise, an insatiable appetite that the giant hog innocently represents...

...Congressman Obey's sincerity was beyond question, but his shot may have been off the mark...

...The National Center for Education Statistics has projected the total enrollment in all American institutions of higher education in the fall of 1995 at nearly 15 million, of whom about 8 million are full-time students and over 9 million are enrolled in four-year schools...

...No other country spends more than a fraction as much, or enrolls nearly so large a proportion (i.e...

...As for research, its true value, whether to the local economy or to the world of learning, is usually hard to gauge and may take decades to become manifest...

...By comparison, elementary and secondary education, with over 46 million pupils, cost a total of $248 billion in 1991...

...Measuring the success or failure of an institution whose aims are so various and nebulous is not easy...

...When Moo U. undergoes a fiscal crisis of a magnitude few of us have experienced (yet), salvation comes from a paranoid local farmer who, before dying in a snowstorm, invented a new kind of planting machine and bequeathed the patent to the university...

...Political correctness is the part of the problem that has received the most attention?speech codes, extreme forms of affirmative action, the Leftist orthodoxy prevalent in many humanities and social sciences departments—but the bad publicity these things generate may be the least of the university's difficulties...

...The instruction her fictional Moo U. offers is a drop in the bucket of adolescent ignorance...

...Most contemporary books in this genre deal with particular aspects of academic life, often with the political thrust of the curriculum or faculty behavior...

...The topic fascinates a large enough audience to keep the presses rolling...

...Community colleges account for the rest...

...Put in this blunt form, these questions have the taint of elitism and are seldom asked...

...There the answer was reassuring: College graduates make far more money in their working lifetimes than those who go no further than high school...

...An increasing number of people wonder what the public is getting for its money...

...Those who work in universities have heard it all before and hope that, once again, it will eventually go away...

...Then there are state colleges, community colleges and private institutions...

...Until recently, a different question was usually posed: What does an individual get from attending college...

...The only remaining form of power is money, and that flood is probably receding beyond recall...

...How large can the white-collar class get...

...And above all, at what cost, relative to other things the public wants or needs...

...So far, few state systems have dared buck a legislator by closing a campus in his district...

...more than half) of the relevant age group...

...Quite apart from the problems of balancing the national defense with other needs, the priority accorded to higher education in budgetary planning at all levels of government has recently come under more serious question than at any time since World War II...

...An article of faith among politicians at every level holds that the public wants a campus in its backyard so that its children may undergo some process dimly related to what it imagines goes on at the great universities...

...Not surprisingly, it costs a lot of money to keep more than 3,000 post-secondary institutions running at such capacity...

...Yet all those bills refuse to go away: for heat, light, long-deferred maintenance, research equipment, remedial classes, stadiums, parking garages, conference centers, faculty salaries, public relations, and above all skyrocketing administrative expenses...

...Maybe its vastness and diversity defeat coherent treatment...

...Does the economy profit measurably from all those expensive labs...

...One gets the impression that Smiley, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who teaches at Iowa State, has little respect for higher education in its present condition...

...Surprisingly few writers try to represent the university as a total structure, a society within a society...

...announced irately on the floor of the House that the cost of one B-2 bomber would pay the tuitionof every undergraduate atthe University of Wisconsin's main campus for 12 years...

...Maybe the subversive thought that in 1995 the United States has an overcapacity in higher education occurs only to people who work in it (outside the development offices, naturally...

...Contrary to Clark Kerr's famous hopes for it, the multiversity now serves such contradictory interests so obliquely that no human being exerts effective control over it, even the control of properly informed judgment...

...He did so to an extent that was mostly symbolic because, while populists may dislike professors, they also want the children of the people to enjoy the advantages of college...

...What the subsidizing public, as opposed to the subsidized individual, gets from all this activity is another matter...

...This sort of grumbling has a long history, much of it rooted in populist anti-in-tellectualism...

...A crooked billionaire based loosely on Ross Perot has the power to twist the university around whichever finger he chooses on any given day...

...But this time it probably won't...

...In practice, universities tend to measure their research success by the volume of grants and contracts received from industry or government...

...In 1995, it is estimated, 2.2 million degrees of all kinds were conferred by American colleges and universities...

...Whether they make more, on average, than people of equal ability who go on to study auto repair or air-conditioning installation is a question less often raised, since the assumption is that higher education should get you into, or keep you in, the white-collar classes...

...The University of Wisconsin at Madison currently enrolls over 40,000 students...

...In fact, the reverse is often true, but many people don't know it...

...The colossal growth of colleges and universities since World War II has been predicated on the widely accepted assumption that a degree means money and social advancement...

...But then, the university is an inherently elite institution that can go only so far toward accommodating itself to a populist era without losing the qualities that give value to its degrees...

...Finally, service, in an academic context, is such a vague category that it rarely gets scrutinized...

...the academic fields that have boomed, such as engineering, business, law, and computer science, are the ones most obviously related to these goals...

...Presidents faced with budget cuts or freezes talk cheerfully about doing more with less, one of the two great cliches of academic life today, and go on competing with other campuses for the same students, basketball players, donors, research grants, and tax dollars...

...Or perhaps a global view of today's university can be presented coherently only in a work of fiction, the kind of academic novel whose main focus is not on individual characters within a university setting but on the setting itself...

...How many 18-year-olds are well qualified to become engineers, computer scientists, lawyers, and masters of business administration, and how many of these professionals does a society need...

...Those administrators have recently been scrambling to meet state demands for "accountability," the other prevailing cliche, but how does one measure the success of an enterprise whose scale is so enormous and whose true goals are so hard to pin down...

...Where," he demanded of his Republican adversaries, "are your priorities...

...one source of Ronald Reagan 's national attraction was his early vow as governor to cut the University of California's presumably radical faculty down to size...