Five Stealth Transformations of American Higher Education

John Zeugner

Recent studies and data collections (Spellings, AFT, AAUP, NCES, DOE) have begun to adumbrate the elephant in the living room of American higher education. Below are five partial tracings of the behemoth’s outline—ones that, though crucial and controlling, somehow do not get much attention in the formal analyses. After a brief itemization of these five mostly hidden aspects, I proffer one possible future scenario that might allow the beast to placate and at the same time demolish its keepers.

1. The Growth of Contingent Faculty

This is of primary and immediate importance because this transformation conditions how all other transformations play out. Latest counts (themselves a few years out-of-date) indicate that at least fifty percent of all instruction in all universities is conducted by contingent faculty; at least sixty percent of all instruction in the first two years of all universities is delivered by contingent faculty; and that nearly seventy percent of instruction at two-year institutions is carried out by contingent faculty. Equally indicative is the universally accepted observation that three-fifths of all new hires are on the contingent track. Contingency has many names: adjuncts, visiting professors, staff appointments, instructors, TAs, professors of practice, administrative staff teaching appointees, lecturers, and outside mentors. All of these contingent faculty are underpaid, most without any benefits, and all are on temporary, highly insecure contracts. Thus substantial university instruction has been outsourced to an exploited, anxious, overworked contingent group. That decision, most probably driven by economic exigency, but undoubtedly exacerbated by an ever-diminishing tenure system (with its star salary system), profoundly shapes inattention to the student learning process, and puts extraordinary emphasis on immediate status quo satisfaction. Such focus panders to student evaluations, and banishes controversy and academic freedom. Given such working conditions, the possibility of curriculum development and evaluation recedes dramatically (see #2 below), and the precariousness of contingent faculty employment accelerates the collapse of rigor (see #3 below).

2. The Atomization and
Dissolution of Curriculum

The end result of graduate education’s specialization and single discipline focus is a curricular vista without horizon markings, and the end result of tenure track’s usual rubrics of advancement is a candidate proffering facility in some microscopic arena and not much else. Consumer culture dictates an obsession with choice and elicits shallow responses, thus the university, in instructor and receptor, cannot comprehend, much less implement, core education. Most attempts at general or core education disintegrate into disguised specialized courses veneered with a “skills focus.” Linkage, connection, integrated intellectual scaffolding, and collaboration are wholly aleatory and unrewardable. The recent Spellings report in its call for uniformly exchangeable units of credit legitimizes pebbles of knowledge consumption. The university seems powerless to interdict its cornucopia nature and thereby accelerates its marginalization.

3. Investment Contracts and the Collapse of Rigor

The acceptance of massive debt always is predicated on some kind of contract and parents and students who incur $30,000 to $80,000 debt have expectations of some kind of reward, some measured success. Superior grades become the visible emblem the university bestows upon its regular renters, graduation its ultimate seal of contract completion. As the contract becomes ever more expensive, ever more certain become its terms. Presumably some tipping point arrives when the massive expenditure finally admits its premise—the direct purchase of degrees.

4. The Enshrinement of Facilities

Given the disciplinary differentiation inherent in the reward structures for faculty, there cannot be much consensus on what constitutes “the educational experience”; by default potential students and their parents end up evaluating facilities and consulting rating systems that, as the Spellings Report makes clear, have no capacity to judge student learning within any particular university setting. And in a market-driven splendid meshing, the compensation gap between tenure track and contingent faculty (who do the majority of the teaching) partially generates funds to keep competitive in the facilities game. The differential underwrites the lush accoutrements apparently required to fill the dorms—the cable connections, the meal options, the fitness rooms, the counseling, advising, and recreational settings.

5. The Digitization of Content

Perhaps the most difficult to grasp, this development is the most relentlessly accelerating transformation. As the software of data collection and analysis sophisticates, traditional scholarly inquiry methods get jettisoned or marginalized. The concept of intellectual property revises daily so that notions of “ownership” etiolate in the virtual universe. Collaboration and speed drives all before it. Knowledge that cannot be reduced to algorithms or emotional icons becomes worthlessly antiquarian. The cartoon graphic domain transforms thinking itself.

While new institutions of learning may emerge that can find marketable, relevant aspects of these transformations, it seems doubtful whether they will resemble current universities. One possible scenario might go as follows: heavily endowed elite institutions perpetuate themselves in the current irrelevant model, turning out “educated leaders” (à la the U.K.) who self-replicate leadership positions and articulate “liberal arts” values in governing, media, and entertainment arenas. But universities with less than one billion dollar endowments explode into satellite, credentialing operations linked directly (à la Japan) to company research institutes, or feeder employment agencies, or massive distance learning entities, or proliferating national service/military academies both at state and federal levels, achieving the “de-stealthing” of the five transformations above, and the full implementation of them.

John Zeugner (<jzeugner at wpi dot edu>) is professor of history, emeritus, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. He also taught extensively in London, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe.