Inside American Education (44 page)

Harvard withdrew about half a million dollars in research grant claims.
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So did Cal Tech.
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M.I.T. agreed to pay back $731,000,
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Duke University discovered “inadvertent errors” in its charges to the government, and Cornell and Dartmouth likewise scaled back their claims. Among the items charged to the taxpayers as research expenses by academic institutions were country club memberships by Cal Tech,
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jewelry and the salary of a cook for the president of M.I.T.; opera tickets, Christmas cards, and airfare to Grand Cayman Island for the president of the University of Pittsburgh and his wife; chartered airplane flights by the president of Cornell;
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and travel and entertainment expenses for the president of Dartmouth, as well as more
than $50,000 in legal expenses growing out of a lawsuit with
The Dartmouth Review
.
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Brazen loftiness has not been a tactic confined to Donald Kennedy or to Stanford, but has been a common response to disclosures of their own generosity to themselves at other academic institutions as well.

Equally sanctimonious have been the responses of colleges under federal investigation for collusion in setting their tuitions. President William R. Cotter of Colby College, for example, admitted that there were “agreements among colleges to offer a student who has been admitted to two or more of the colleges, financial-aid packages that require virtually identical family contributions.” However, he considered it to be “in the public interest” for colleges to “estimate more accurately the ability of students’ families to contribute to their education costs.” Even the students apparently benefit, in this cheery scenario, for the academic cartel “aims to increase students’ freedom to choose colleges on the basis of the most appropriate academic program, not the cost to the family.” Otherwise “many families would find the already difficult task of choosing a college distorted by the varied grant offers.”
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Similar altruism could be claimed by any monopoly or cartel engaged in price-fixing, for uniform prices relieve all customers of price-shopping, giving them more “freedom” to choose goods and services on non-price criteria. Yet no one would take such sanctimony seriously, coming from a commercial business under investigation for anti-trust law violations. It is not the uniformity of price, as such, that is the key issue. What matters is the
level
of prices at which this uniformity is achieved. That level is almost certain to be higher than it would be in the absence of collusion. President Cotter in fact backed into such an admission when he said:

If colleges were required to assess student’s need independently, we might be dragged into a “bidding war” for the best students—making conservative estimates of the amounts their families could contribute and then beefing up their aid packages. The principle of need-based aid would be eroded.
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There is only a semantic difference between “need-based aid,” as used here, and “charging what the traffic will bear.” This is especially clear when “need” applies across a wide range of family incomes, including some incomes more than double
the national average. Likewise, there is only a semantic difference between “being dragged into a bidding war” and the ordinary competition of a free market.

Others have tried to justify price discrimination in tuition by a Robin Hood theory that it is good for the rich to subsidize the poor.
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That theory might have been plausible years ago, when genuinely poor students received scholarships based on genuine scholarship. The same reasoning hardly applies today at schools where most of the students receive “financial aid”—that is, where they pay tuition on a sliding scale—and it is largely unrelated to their academic performance. Moreover, the Robin Hood theory conflicts with another favorite theme of colleges, that tuition covers only part of the cost of education. Harvard’s dean of admissions prefers this latter assertion:

… it is important to point out that every student at Harvard-Radcliffe receives a substantial subsidy, since the tuition charged does not cover the full cost of an undergraduate education. The more affluent families paying the “full” tuition charge pay for only about one-half of the true costs.
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The impossibility of determining the average cost of a joint product has already been noted in Chapter 5. The impossibility of determining the “true” or “full” cost of an undergraduate education should be especially clear at Harvard, where the faculty engaged in more than $169 million worth of scientific research and development activity alone in 1987.
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Any apportionment of the costs of a professor who engages in both teaching and research is necessarily arbitrary, as is any apportionment of the $37 million spent annually on the Harvard library system,
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or the costs of buildings and grounds, and other huge expenditures for the multiple activities of the university. An admissions director who imagines that he can predict future “leaders” among 18-year-olds may also imagine that he can determine the “true cost” of an undergraduate education. But, if he can perform these two feats, he should be able to relax afterwards by walking on water.

Sometimes the sanctimony of academics when it comes to money is more simple and direct. When Texas legislators proposed trimming the budget of the University of Texas system, the chancellor of that system wrote in
The Dallas Morning News
:

Lawmakers contemplating cuts in higher education funding should have to look Tommy Blair in the eye and tell him, “Sorry, son, we just didn’t want to spend the money it takes to help you get the education you could have gotten at Harvard or Stanford or MIT.”
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This sanctimony assumes that money spent on the University of Texas goes to teaching rather than research. But the University of Texas already spends, on the Austin campus alone, virtually the same amount of money on scientific research and development as Harvard does.
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To think that more money for the university system translates into better undergraduate education is a faith which passeth all understanding. As at other research universities, it is at least equally likely that a
reduction
in research money would benefit undergraduate teaching.

Tenure

No feature of academic life is defended more fiercely than tenure. It too generates much sanctimony—and little sense of any need for evidence or analysis behind assertions.

Academic tenure has been said to promote the pursuit of truth by “a professoriate that is free to seek, discover, teach, and publish without interference.”
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However, the claim that tenure is necessary to promote free expression flies in the face of the experience of many “think tanks,” which have no tenure but which have produced some of the most controversial writings of our times, including fundamental challenges to the orthodoxy pervading academic social science departments. By contrast, leading academic scholars like Stephan Thernstrom at Harvard and Reynolds Farley at the University of Michigan, who have devoted a career to the study of racial and ethnic groups, have simply abandoned the teaching of the subject in college, rather than continue to be targets of ideological intolerance and harassment on campus. No other major contemporary American institution has the kind of intolerance for free expression which has spawned the phrase “politically correct” in academia. Yet it is academia which has tenure.

Like much else in the academic world, tenure has been depicted as a product of public demands:

Outsiders will have confidence in the research and output of a faculty only if they believe in the independence of its authors; students will study with faculty only if they believe in the independence of their teachers; and private donors and government agencies will support the ongoing activities of the faculty only if they believe in the independence and openness of their inquiry.
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Tenure is thus a “response to this wide range of pressures brought to bear on the university.”
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All this was said in a publication of a think tank—a kind of organization which lacks tenure and which has been spreading rapidly, as its output has been widely accepted by the public and has attracted financial support from “private donors and government agencies.”

The radical divergence of academic opinion from public opinion in general in no way negates the conformity
within
academia. Nor are academics noted for courage in voicing what differences of opinion do exist. When Professor Bernard Davis of the Harvard Medical School publicly questioned double standards for some black students, he received “hundreds of private expressions of support from colleagues, at the school and elsewhere,” though he charitably noted, “it would have taken a great deal of courage to offer any public support.”
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Any academic who has challenged any fundamental aspect of the prevailing orthodoxy will be familiar with the phenomenon of “private support” from colleagues. At the very least, academic tenure has yet to demonstrate that it produces any more courage or diversity of views than exists in professions without tenure.

Much discussion of the merits of tenure focuses on the benefits it provides to those who get it. By this kind of reasoning, one could justify monarchy on grounds that it benefits kings. The real test of tenure, as of monarchy, is how it performs
as a system
serving public purposes. The tenure system, as it exists in American four-year colleges and universities, entails a Draconian “up or out” decision and confers general academic governing power on tenured professors. The ramifications of this whole set of practices are many.

One claim for tenure is that it promotes collegiality.
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However,
a study based on hundreds of interviews at dozens of colleges across the United States
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found that, on many campuses, junior untenured faculty had “isolated” themselves in order to meet “the overwhelming pressure to produce and publish,” to get tenure before the dreaded “up or out” decision was at hand.
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This same study also found “a general pall of uncertainty and injustice” among untenured faculty who were “living in a state of nagging anxiety about their future status.”
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What was unjust was that the younger, untenured faculty were often better qualified than the tenured professors who would be judging them. Dean Henry Rosovsky of Harvard referred to “the conviction of some non-tenured younger faculty members that they are smarter and more qualified than the old bastards who deny them promotion.”
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In many places, this conviction is shared by others
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but tenure prevents anybody from doing much about it. Whatever the merits of older and younger faculty, isolation and resentment are not collegiality.

Where collegialilty does exist, as among the tenured elites, it readily lends itself to log-rolling, making the maintenance of institutional standards and the protection of other interests—those of students, taxpayers, or the larger society—much more difficult.

The sheer inefficiency of governance by large numbers of unaccountable faculty members is yet another hidden cost of tenure. Tenured faculty members are not entirely employees, but at least quasi-managers, except that they are not a management who can be either fired from within or taken over by outsiders, as in business. Moreover, tenure does not make them live with the consequences of their decisions, as the commitment is entirely one way. The departure of a tenured professor for greener pastures is without either legal constraint or social stigma.

It would be hard to conceive an institutional arrangement with more potential for irresponsibility. More of that potential has been realized in recent decades, as vast sums of research money have turned many senior professors into grant entrepreneurs, to whom a given academic institution is simply a place to have an office, pending a better offer elsewhere, and as ideological passions have led other faculty members to see education as simply a continuation of politics by other means.
Tenure reduces the ability of a college or university to assert its own institutional mission or responsibilities to students, parents, or the public, as against such self-indulgent professors.

Ideological Double Standards

One of the best books written in defense of the academic establishment—
The University: An Owner’s Manual
by Henry Rosovsky—handles the whole issue of ideological double standards on campus in the best way possible strategically, by not mentioning the issue at all. Like the silence of the dog which did not bark while a crime was being committed, in a famous Sherlock Holmes story, the silence of Dean Rosovsky is itself an important clue. Derek Bok’s attempt to dismiss the issue in his book,
Beyond the Ivory Tower
, is much less effective. While President Bok wrote that universities “have a critical interest in preserving free expression,”
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his reference to “the brief period in the late 1960s” when the militant left “threatened to push all opposition aside” depicts the dangers from that quarter as long past. He observes complacently “how grossly the radicals overestimated their power.”
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