Sustainable. Resilient. Free.. John Warner C.
newspaper or magazine. I chose Esquire,3 and in an end-of-semester vote by my classmates, my column was voted “most entertaining.” Objectively, it was probably pretty terrible, but it is impossible to quantify how much even this small encouragement meant in my overall trajectory as a writer.
I cannot imagine a life without these experiences. So why should subsequent generations be denied these opportunities simply because those who came before them lack the will to reorient the system around the values we claim are so important?
In many ways, I graduated at the last gasps of broadly affordable higher education. Just under 50 percent of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1993 borrowed money for their education. By 2000, that number had increased to 65 percent. In 1993, only one-quarter of those in the highest-income quartile borrowed money for college. By 2000, that number had nearly doubled.4 That’s how you end up with $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
The system as it exists now is clearly exhausted. It seems the only place to go would look something like Galloway’s vision, where tech company behemoths wield more power than the government itself,5 and where workers will be indentured to corporations from cradle to grave. We may even be paid in digital scrip. That’ll be fun.6 Perhaps students could settle for a significantly diluted experience like a three-year degree, where the first year consists of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) assessed by algorithms, a literally disembodied experience. I suppose another option would be to just give up on the notion of public higher education entirely.
But why would we go down that path if there is an alternative?
A New Narrative
I write this book as someone who deeply believes in the mission of education. I can get a little misty-eyed walking around university campuses contemplating the awesome potential embodied in such places. But I’m also someone who has been betrayed and exploited by institutions that have failed to live up to that potential.
As a career contingent (or adjunct) instructor, I have received a fraction of the pay that tenured faculty receive for the identical work of teaching credit-bearing courses. My labor has produced a surplus of tuition dollars so that others could pursue their research or teach courses that run at a deficit of tuition revenue. No doubt, I consented to these conditions with my agreement to be employed under them. But they are an injustice that is inconsistent with the academic mission. That they are entirely common to the world of higher education does not change this fact.
I know it is difficult, if not completely impossible, to divorce my view of the problems plaguing higher education from my own lived experience and frame of reference. But that’s true for anyone. Galloway, the marketing professor, cannot help but see what ails institutions as a problem of branding and their need to reposition in the marketplace. My career, on the other hand, has been spent working literally below those concerns, trying to figure out how to help students learn to write. And what I’ve seen in this role is a system that is fundamentally hostile to that mission.
In truth, the challenges facing public higher education are not unique but are instead a by-product of the belief, which took root during the Reagan era, that markets and competition are beneficial to us all. This ethos is obviously exhausted. As we’ve seen, the once most-powerful country in the world has struggled to provide basic protective equipment to its frontline health care workers during a pandemic, many months after that need became readily apparent. The coronavirus is remaking society in ways we could not possibly conceive of before, revealing fault lines that many have been trying to alert us to for years and that now finally seem impossible to ignore.
I have been told by those who work in the upper levels of higher education administration that I do not understand reality, that I do not appreciate how difficult it is to meet the competing demands of student “consumers” or to manage legislatures that can be unhelpful, or even hostile, toward the aims of higher education, that everyone is doing the best they can. I do not doubt their intentions, but I question the results. If this is everyone doing the best they can, we must change course. We must make our public higher education institutions sustainable, resilient, and free.
The first step toward doing that is to understand the origins of how things went so wrong.
CHAPTER 3
The Wrong Turn
In 1983, US News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities. And then, over the course of thirty years or so, higher education slowly and inexorably went to shit.
We have reached the end point of what it means for colleges and universities to be run with what I call an “operations on down” approach, rather than a strategy focused from the “mission (pedagogy) on up.” This is because schools are not currently in the teaching and learning business. They are machines meant to capture education-related revenue.
Carol Christ, the current chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, made it plain in a 2016 interview, “Colleges and universities are fundamentally in the business of enrolling students for tuition dollars.”1 In other words, as explicitly stated by the leader of one of the top public universities in the country, in our system as it is currently structured, colleges and universities are not oriented around the mission of teaching and learning, but instead exist to recruit students, enroll students, collect tuition, and hold class—operations. Oh, also football.2
These conditions are not unique to public higher education. We are experiencing the final reckoning of the failed promise of Reagan’s America in almost every sector of society, where deregulation and the resulting competition was supposedly going to unleash the unstoppable force of the free market to deliver superior and cheaper goods and services for everybody.
In 2020, however, there’s been no shortage of stark evidence of the sheer exhaustion of governance rooted in Reagan-era faiths like minimal government, minimal regulation, maximum competition, and a privileging of profits over sustainability and broad-based prosperity. The lurching governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic, wherein states have been largely left to their own devices as they attempt to “reopen” in order to spur economic activity, despite the obvious consequences of increased infections, is an object example. People are literally being asked to sacrifice their lives for the good of the stock market.
There is little thirst or imagination for structures which privilege safety or prudence over the profits that are accruing to a narrow group of corporations and individuals. The turmoil surrounding campuses’ attempts to reopen for face-to-face instruction in the midst of an unchecked pandemic speaks to the dysfunction and sickness of the present system. Colleges have to open because they must collect fees for room and board. They’re bringing students into coronavirus hot zones and making those zones even hotter, or they’re creating new hot spots in places where conditions were previously promising—all in order to protect the bottom line.
As we compare life in America to other wealthy countries similarly affected by the virus, we can see how misguided the vision of Reagan’s America truly has been.
The Great Unravelling
Other public goods besides higher education have been terribly degraded over the last four decades as well. Competition in the newspaper industry has left us with three national behemoths (the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post) while hundreds of regional papers are barely hanging on. Formerly great newspapers like the Denver Post and Chicago Tribune have been drained by the private equity firm Alden Global Capital, using various (and legal) financial shenanigans to drive up debt and extract profits before leaving the discarded husk behind.3
The decline in local journalism is an object lesson in how the loss of a public good can come at significant cost to the public. In the long run, it is the municipalities who are deprived of a robust fourth estate watchdog that suffer when local newspapers shutter. A comprehensive 2018 overview by the Columbia Journalism Review4 found that in the absence of local reporters to hold them accountable, local governments are less responsive, less