Posted on 07/25/2011 1:16:04 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
"Gov. Rick Perry’s ‘Seven Breakthrough Solutions’ would make for bad business, undermine meaning of a university"
Last week, lawmakers in Texas were embroiled over a series of reforms – boldly named the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” – proposed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The governor’s wildly optimistic proposals seek to implement a business-like model for the Texas state university system to optimize efficiency by measuring student satisfaction, while pinning the blame squarely on professors.
The proposals sound great, until you realize the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” are hardly breakthroughs and barely solutions. In light of rapidly dissipating state support for public higher education in our own state, Gov. Perry’s proposals do challenge a bigger question: is the business model really the best way to ensure the sustainability of public higher education?
I don’t think so. Conflating the business model with the education model is more than just misleading. It’s potentially dangerous. Under the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions,” the state treats the university like a business. It would quantify professor performances through student evaluations, and reward large budgets to departments that conduct lucrative research sponsored by external grants. The idea is to minimize what is perceived as an abundance of useless and esoteric research and focus on what could be used to directly benefit the public.
To be sure, Gov. Perry makes many points which are valid and true. Burgeoning administration costs are a sign of inefficiency within any organization. But in the end, no version of the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” can come close to encapsulating the whole issue. Examining the vastness of the debate over the future public higher education produces all the feelings of disorientation when looking through a kaleidoscope.
A university should not follow along the prime imperative for all businesses: to turn a profit, or, even to sustain itself. It’s wrong to operate a university under the business model because it begins with the wrong premise, and therefore asks all the wrong questions.
The public certainly views the university as a business. A recent poll showed that 60 percent of respondents believed “Colleges today are like most businesses and care mainly about the bottom line.”
Unlike a business, the aims of a university are much more wide and complex. The aims of a university are both to educate and to innovate, where all kinds of ideas can be explored.
The business rhetoric bemoaning the enormous monetary cost of public higher education highlights an uncomfortable, but very real, contradiction in the public mentality. In words, it is a truth universally acknowledged that having an elite public higher education system is in some sense “good” for society. In action, though, we are reluctant to fund it with our hard-earned tax dollars unless it produces tangible goods.
State support for public education has been dwindling for decades, increasingly expecting the university to run like a business. In 1990, California paid for 78 percent of the total education cost per student. Currently it pays for around 48 percent.
But a university is not a business. Treating the university as such blatantly ignores its unique rich history and tradition. Even under constraints of a tight budget, California legislators need to recognize that properly funding the university is not the same as subsidizing a failing business.
It means protecting one of our strongest civic institutions. And anything less would be to undermine it.
Embroiled in our own budget crisis, it’s best to not forget our purpose here as a university. Do you think UCLA should be treated as a business?
I’m underwhelmed by conservatives who quote Robespierre in an approving manner.
There are solid studies that show that leftist “indoctrination” in the universities fails. Folks leave with pretty much the same politics they enter with, and yet, you’d complete the desired effect of the long march of the left through the institutions, and destroy one of the institutions on which Western civilization rests to get rid of the tenured radicals.
I suggest a bit of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk to tone up your conservatism.
Preserving peculiarities is conservative. Making a monoculture where everything looks like commerce is not.
I always keep learning R_R_D.
Why is it academics and elites take such a condescending tone when imparting advice?
Do you think they even notice that trait in their character?
I’m afraid I only sound condescending when I’m peeved, and one of my pet peeves on FR is folks whose conservatism appears from their writings here to consist of a love for the free market that then makes them think everything should be run like a business.
Your quoting Robespierre just made it worse.
To me conservatism involves conserving not just the American Founding, but all of the goods of Christian civilization (and those inherited from Greek and Roman pagan civilization before that) on which the American Founding rested. And the university, as it grew organically from the middle ages onward, is one of those goods. Academic freedom was the original freedom of speech, when none existed elsewhere in Europe or indeed the world, and tenure is its guardian. Attacking it, whether with leftist speech codes or by remodeling the university as a business, seems to me to be an attack on all freedom, and the sort of unconservative behavior that amounts to moving the boundary markers of our ancestors.
I quoted Robespierre?
You know everything I feel about education and free markets from this thread?
Goodness. I guess you’ve called up the guillotine for me without any proof.
The THREE BIG anti- Rick Perry groups:Well... there's an anti-Rick-Perry group here in FR but admittedly they're not BIG... unless you judge by mouth-size.Big Education
Big Law
Big MSM
AND the ENVIRONMENALISTS
Yes, the eggs and omelette remark was Robespierre. And approving of Perry’s plan is sufficient to bring out my peeve about remaking education as business.
And, no, I’m not a Jacobin, I don’t even propose the guillotine for Obamaites, much less my fellow conservatives, even if they are less Burkian than I.
Yes, the eggs and omelette remark was Robespierre. And approving of Perry’s plan is sufficient to bring out my peeve about remaking education as business.
And, no, I’m not a Jacobin, I don’t even propose the guillotine for Obamaites, much less my fellow conservatives, even if they are less Burkian than I.
=^D
“Unfortunately, Perry is on the wrong track. The cost of higher education has risen chiefly because of the expansion of administration, both in numbers, salaries, and number of staff. And administrators, by and large, are also enamored of the university-as-business, student-as-customer model.”
That is not the cause, that is the effect. The cause is government grants and low interest loans from the government to pay students to get educated. These student grants and loan guarantees allow universities to give teachers and administrators more money. This increases the cost in a vicious cycle. It doesn’t matter if college is expensive if the government will pay people to attend anyway.
TRD I think the point you are missing is running a University as a business means efficiency and turning out a product with an education that creates both breadth and meaning. Liberal Arts is a catch all for I learned nothing of any real marketable value to the marketplace but I expect companies to hire me because I went to a school for 4 years.
Sure, if they want to take Art History or other in high demand majors let them, but then don’t whine if you cannot make a living with it.
In China approximately 10% of ALL University graduates have the requisite skills required by multi-national corporations who do business in their country. This also explains why they flood to US schools to at least have a chance at getting the skills needed to meet the market. Why spend 100K and get a degree and end up driving a txi because you cannot do anything?
BTW China is planning to spend billions of dollars to reform this and make their workforce more marketable in their workforce, education is my passion but it has become a repository for hoary old theoreticians ho have never had a job in their lives or mills to indoctrinate Liberal entitlement thinking into young minds.
JMHO of course
Do remember that “liberal arts” was named long before the left stole the word “liberal”. It meant “arts appropriate to free men”. The sentiment often attributed to Churchill (who may have quoted at second or third hand) expressed by James Alexander Smith, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, “Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education,” is still the prime point of acquiring a liberal education (remember that’s the uncorrupted use of the word “liberal”).
Unfortunately the reform needed, a return to the classical model of the university, is not the reform which will occur by adopting a business model.
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