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Would you jump off a bridge just because your peer schools did?
The Chronicle of Higher Education has a story today whose headline almost says it all: "In Hunt for Prestige, Colleges May Undermine Their Public Mission." Here's how it begins:
The Internal Revenue Service's 79-page report on colleges' tax compliance was a thorough reminder of just how big and complex higher education has become.That complexity affirms the concerns of some higher-education experts that many large research universities are placing too much priority on activities that raise the profile and prestige of their institutions but do little to improve undergraduate education. Such activities include contracts for private research and public-private partnerships to market new patents.
"In some of these places, undergraduate education has never been a top priority," says Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. The issue is whether the increasing amount of support coming from sources outside state tax dollars "is causing these institutions ... to move away from their public mission. The answer in too many cases is, unfortunately, yes."
Ms. Wellman is exactly right that undergraduate education too often gets short shrift. But there's one important factor that has nothing to do with money. It's the term my parents used on me with regard to cigarettes and acting out in school: peer pressure. (Can't you hear your mother asking the timeless question, "Would you jump off a bridge just because your friends did?")
To see why this is, take a look at the letter ACTA just received from John Ed Anthony, the chairman of the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees. It comes after we sent two letters to him and his fellow trustees, in which we object to reported plans to dumb down the excellent core curriculum at the University of Arkansas' Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences.
In the letter, the board essentially punts on its obligation to ensure Arkansas students receive a quality education, deferring entirely to "faculty, in consultation with their department heads and deans" and the university's chancellor. Attached to the letter is a response by the chancellor, which claims the criteria used on ACTA's college-guide website, WhatWillTheyLearn.com, "lie outside generally accepted academic norms" and notes with alarm that the Fulbright College core is much larger than those of peer institutions.
We're not sure what's so earth shattering about seeing whether universities require broad courses in composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and science, which is what we do on WhatWillTheyLearn.com -- with the endorsement of a former dean of Harvard College and to the delight of several other institutions. But it's certainly understandable that the chancellor is interested in what his peers are doing. Here's the rub, though. The University of Arkansas is a land-grant institution, and there is consequently something infinitely more important than what its peers are doing: what these institutions were created to do in the first place. And according to the Morrill Act, land-grant universities are supposed "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life."
The University of Arkansas should be pursuing this public purpose whether its peers are doing so or not. This is one of many reasons why it is such a shame that the university's senior administrators seem to be dead set on gutting a core curriculum that aims to ensure that all graduates have a solid grounding, most notably, in mathematics, sciences, fine arts, Western civilization, and a foreign language -- and that the trustees have, for now at least, refused to do anything about it. So much for "liberal and practical education."
Posted by Charles Mitchell on May 21, 2010 at May 21, 2010 05:45 PM
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