The New College Try

Nick Gillespie from the December 1999 issue

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More disturbing, Kolodny often personifies the worst trait of political correctness: intolerance of criticism or open debate. She puts forth a definition of what she calls "antifeminist intellectual harassment" which is so broad and vague that it precludes the possibility of any legitimate critical engagement with feminism or feminist scholarship. By her lights, such "harassment" includes "any policy, action, statement, and/or behavior [that] has the intent or the effect of discouraging or preventing woman's freedom of lawful action, freedom of thought, and freedom of expression." Such harassment occurs "when any policy, action, statement, and/or behavior creates an environment in which research, scholarship, and teaching pertaining to women, gender, or gender inequities is devalued, discouraged, or altogether thwarted." Such an outrageous, pre-emptive position is not only the polar opposite of legitimate academic debate and inquiry; it is also far removed from the best feminist scholarship, which seeks critical engagement, not special standing.

Still, Failing the Future is instructive on how colleges are adapting to changes in both student body and faculty. Kolodny's chapter on recognizing and responding to "cognitive diversity"--different styles of learning--contains some practical insights. She tells of working with the director of the basic language program in German and the head of Arizona's Language Research Center to develop a "learning mode profile" that would indicate whether a particular student responds more quickly to large conceptual frameworks or to an "aggregate of details." In other words, writes Kolodny, "will the student learn German more easily if she is first introduced to the theory and structure of an inflected language, or will she do better with some basic grammar rules and vocabulary-building?" Given rising enrollments--and competition among colleges for students--Kolodny is certainly correct that "the next generation of Ph.D.s...must be prepared to teach a more inclusive everyone, and they must be prepared to teach everyone well."

Curiously, for someone who seems to detest markets ("they are," she claims, "notoriously unreliable as protectors of the common good"), Kolodny understands incentives extremely well. That's rare among college administrators, who typically rule by decrees that often fail to actually change faculty and student behavior. As dean, Kolodny instituted competitive grant programs that motivated faculty and staff to develop or rethink curricula to interest students while maintaining academic rigor. These incentives ranged from a $5,000 grant for developing new curricula to free lunches to support a "buddy" system for new faculty, in which two tenured faculty met informally with new hires.

As her views on "antifeminist intellectual harassment" suggest, though, Kolodny's calls for "bottom-up" and "decentralized" decision making have definite limits, as does her appreciation for institutional experimentation. Generating new course offerings, say, is all to the good, while any tampering with the far more fundamental (and static) academic institution of tenure is merely a sign that you've been influenced by nefarious "conservative forces," whose attack on tenure she implausibly claims is really aimed at discouraging minorities from aspiring to academic careers.

That would be news to Zachary Karabell, author of What's College For? Like Kolodny, Karabell is a conventional academic leftist. Yet his nonideological attitude toward tenure exemplifies the main strength of his book. Karabell, a Ph.D. who has taught at the college level, spent time talking to students, professors, and administrators at schools ranging from community colleges such as Los Angeles' Pierce College to massive state universities such as Texas A&M.

Pace Kolodny, Karabell views tenure not as an "absolute good" but as something that "has so distorted the academic labor market that any benefits to free speech are more than outweighed by the distortions in the economy of higher education and the stultifying intellectual and professional orthodoxies that tenure promotes." Most critics of tenure, he points out, are chiefly concerned with the corrosive effects that guaranteed employment has on job performance. Where Kolodny hugely underestimates the "deadwood" in most academic departments at between 3 percent and 5 percent, Karabell's figures suggest that even if that low-ball estimate is accurate, underperforming faculty are very well protected by tenure.

"Out of nearly nine thousand tenured professors in public colleges in Texas, only eight were fired between 1990 and 1995, three for poor performance," he writes. "In the past twenty-five years, UT-Austin [the state's flagship school] has fired only one tenured professor for incompetence. In the entire United States, only fifty [tenured] professors are fired annually." The main effect of tenure, particularly at relatively uncompetitive institutions in which there is no collegial pressure to keep up in one's field, is to protect faculty from working too hard.

That's not to say Karabell is against tenure per se. Rather, his larger point is that if higher education is to remain vital and strong, schools must be free to experiment. "It may be that at places like Bennington and New College [which have gotten rid of tenure], academic freedom will disappear, consumerism will dictate course offerings, and academics will be underpaid and overworked. But only if these experiments are encouraged and carefully studied will we know. We could envision hundreds of variations on tenure, from its abolition in some places to a far easier granting of it at others. And it may be that variety would best meet the needs of a higher-education system that encompasses thousands of different schools."

Academia is, of course, crawling toward precisely that sort of variety: Some schools are doing away with tenure, while others are instituting new "post-tenure reviews" or expanding the use of full- and part-time, non-tenure-track instructors. Critics typically paint such developments in apocalyptic terms, but Karabell properly contextualizes them as useful responses to changed economic and educational realities.

Karabell's understanding of competition as a necessary discovery process infuses What's College For? with energy and insight. Echoing a theme that runs through Kernan's and Kolodny's books, Karabell argues that students are the ultimate engine of change in higher education; their changed makeup and the demands they make inexorably change the schools they attend.

At all but a few very well-endowed private schools, he notes, tuition dollars are necessary to keep the operation running; at state-assisted institutions, healthy numbers help keep public-sector funding levels up. Karabell worries about that need to placate students. He argues that in an age where employers and workers alike increasingly view a B.A. as a prerequisite for a "decent" job, students and professors are more likely to find themselves at loggerheads. That's because, he says, "professors believe that a college diploma represents the culmination of an education. Students, however, increasingly see the diploma as a credential that will lead to a better job. In an ideal world, education and credentializing would be compatible, but in the world of higher education today, they are often at odds." He further frets that such "commodification" of education erodes standards and skills.

Karabell grossly overstates the mismatch. Certainly, students want a diploma and, at least since the Middle Ages, most have tried to get it by doing as little work as possible. But they also recognize that few employers (or graduate programs) uncritically accept any given degree, even from a prestigious school. Students know they will be hired less on the basis of a piece of paper and more on the skills and the potential it represents. Your grades, your institution's reputation, your related experience, your references, your self-presentation, and a host of related concerns all have a huge impact on your prospects. All also work ultimately to push standards up precisely because employers are ultimately more interested in specific skills rather than a general degree.

Karabell is on much firmer ground when he explores a different mismatch, one also touched on by Kolodny. Doctoral candidates, Karabell points out, are trained at institutions usually very different from the ones at which they end up. Although they are trained primarily as research scholars--and typically receive no formal pedagogical instruction--they are likely to find themselves in teaching-intensive schools where research is either de-emphasized or discouraged. The very professors at Ph.D.-granting schools who are responsible for training future faculty members, writes Karabell, are attempting to "maintain a definition of the university that excludes more than it includes." The "guild mentality" among faculty at research universities doesn't just exacerbate tensions by leaving new professors unprepared for the actual classroom experience that will largely define their professional lives, says Karabell. It "often impede[s] the efforts of individual professors, students, and schools to innovate."

Yet, as Karabell himself acknowledges at various points, that innovation has proven to be irresistible, and his own book underscores that anxiety over the fate of higher education is simply a sign of a lively debate. In the end, he strikes just the right note. If Kernan looks back to the past too elegiacally and Kolodny to the future too fearfully, Karabell recognizes that "the strength of American higher education is its variety, and any attempts to homogenize the experience are not only bound to fail but also undermine the system's strengths....The result [of decentralized experimentation] may not be neat; it may be unwieldy. But it will serve an American society that has since the beginning been messy, contradictory, and at its best, incredibly vibrant and astonishingly creative."