University Reform: Threat or Opportunity

When you feel yourself beginning to slide down a cliff, you are not likely to think too hard about what it is you grab to stop the fall. But the choice of handholds makes a difference—the difference between continuing to plunge and holding on long enough to plant your feet. As you descend, what seems a vine turns out to be a viper, and what seems a solid trunk proves rootless and tears away. So it is as faculty have contended with the growing shelf of studies criticizing, occasionally analyzing, and mostly prescribing for, higher education. We feel the structure, the norms of our profession, shifting and sliding beneath our feet. We reach for a handhold, a point of stability, and discover, alas, that there’s little that is reliable, much that is frail and fragile. Three of the mid-1980s higher education studies1 were among the opening shots in what has become an extended battle over the character and quality of the institutions in which professors work, as well as over what exactly it is that faculty and staff do. One could, of course, dismiss these and more recent studies, perhaps citing their manifold banalities as sufficient reason for indifference. Or, as faculty, we could acquiesce, agreeing to such changes as the reformists are able to compel, but doing little more than what is necessary to protect our turf. Either course is rationally defensible. Neither is advisable for the academic community. It seems to me that either indifference or generalized resistance would be mistaken—for at least two reasons. First, this has proven to be an unusually strong tide of reform, and even now, half a decade later, it seems still to be waxing. Even from the perspective of strict self-interest, not an unfamiliar ground for academics to stand upon, it would be dangerous to ignore what is a continuing effort to reshape the character of our work and lives. Second, the drive to reform college education presents faculty and staff with an opportunity to shape the direction of change, and in particular to raise what none of these reports really contends with: What political values, what economic forms, what social objectives do we really wish to pursue?