By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS

The questions of quality and utility of higher education

The quality of the education available in the United States and in Illinois is in question. The debate today over what a college education should be has emerged as the same debate forcefully put centuries ago. Should we educate or should we train our citizens at colleges and universities? On the table today are four reports on U.S. higher education. This article compares and analyzes them. Next month, author Richard J. Shereikis will present the views of Illinois leaders in higher education — their responses to the national studies, their plans and hopes for the future of higher education in the state and the roles they hope to play in making Illinois' colleges and universities responsive and responsible educational leaders. Those interviewed range from the heads of systems in the state's three-tiered governance hierarchy to campus administrators, from members of governing boards to union leaders.

THERE was a time, long ago, when college campuses were ivory-towered enclaves for the wealthy sons of noblemen. There was a time when the curriculum in such places was so much a matter of tradition and precedent that to question it was heresy. There was a time when clergymen and certain gentlemen might need a college degree but when apprenticeships sufficed for most professions and the great mass of people didn't care much what went on behind those ivy-covered walls.

The Industrial and other revolutions changed all that, democratizing the Western world and changing all its institutions, beginning in the latter part of the 18th century. Old systems were overturned, old governments reformed, old prerogatives challenged. Over time, more people had more access to educational opportunities, and even higher education became a possibility for the rising middle classes, especially in places like England and Germany. And with the swelling numbers, the chorus of educational debate began.

In the 19th century, in England and elsewhere, the educational battle lines were drawn between those who felt that universities should provide practical training for specific professions, and those who felt that a college education should prepare people for the larger worlds in which they lived their lives and made political choices and cultural decisions. As always, the conflict sharpened thought and feeling, forcing people to articulate their views persuasively. John Henry Newman's The Idea of a University was one of the major volleys in the battle, and even now, over 100 years after it first appeared, it remains perhaps the greatest defense of a liberal education ever written.

Newman's primary opponents were the practical men of the mercantile middle class, men who felt that education should be geared to specific professional goals. These were men who, in Newman's words, "... insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. . . .This they call making Education and Instruction 'useful,' and 'Utility' becomes their watchword."

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Against this constricted utilitarian view, Newman (who later became a Roman Catholic cardinal) argued for the value of sheer intellectual cultivation. No other single source has been so often quoted in the service of the liberal education which colleges and universities have traditionally professed to offer. The cornerstone of Newman's argument is his belief that "Knowledge is capable of being its own end." He cites Cicero and other ancients to support his view that "Knowledge [is] the very first object to which we are attracted, after the supply of our physical wants." "Such is the constitution of the human mind," Newman argues, "that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward."

In one of his most eloquent passages, Newman argues by analogy, comparing physical health with the general cultivation of the mind which he believes is essential to any real education, and which is, finally, useful in the truest and largest sense:

"Again, as health ought to precede labor of the body, and as a man in health can do what an unhealthy man cannot do,... so in like manner general culture of mind is the best aid to professional and scientific study, and educated men can do what illiterate cannot; and the man who has learned to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyze, who has refined his taste, and formed his judgement, and sharpened his mental vision, will not indeed at once be a lawyer, or a pleader, or an orator, or a statesman, or a physician, or a good landlord, or a man of business, or a soldier, or an engineer, or a chemist, or a geologist, or an antiquarian, but he will be placed in that state of intellect in which he can take up any one of the sciences or callings I have referred to, with an ease, a grace, a versatility, and a success, to which another is a stranger. In this sense, then, and as yet I have said but a very few words on a large subject, mental culture is emphatically useful."

Newman's primary opponents were the
practical men of the mercantile middle class,
men who felt that education should be geared
to specific professional goals

Over a century has passed since New man's passionate assertions, but the disagreements are no less sharp in debates about higher education, the issues no less fundamental. The arguments are renewed in every generation, and while none have risen to Newman's eloquence, many have rallied to Newman's side in the perpetual debate over utility or liberality in education. The past two years alone have spawned atleast four major critiques of American higher education, all of them reiterating many of Newman's arguments about the importance of being liberally educated, and deploring the excessive specialization, the rampant and self-serving careerism and the short-sighted "utility" of much that passes for higher education today. How American educators respond to these critiques and recommendations will go far to determine the direction and texture of our country for generations to come. And the response in Illinois, where nearly 700,000 people are currently enrolled in institutions of higher learning, will be especially crucial as the state addresses the challenges and threats of the future. The kinds of teachers, business men and women, professionals and citizens we turn out will do much to determine whether Illinois becomes a lively, interesting and humane place where people can find stimulation and sustenance for their minds and souls as well as their bodies, or a grim and impoverished relic in the "Rust Belt." We could do worse than listen to Cardinal Newman on the matter, and the recent flurry of educational studies suggests that his spirit is alive and well.

The first of the recent batch of studies to draw national attention was "Involvement in Learning: Realizing the Potential of American Higher Education." Sponsored by the National Institute for Education (NIE), the report first appeared in the October 24, 1984, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the major weekly news source for the nation's higher education community. The report's affinities with Cardinal Newman's beliefs were reflected in its concerns about "the erosion of liberal learning" in American colleges and universities, about the "narrow specialities" being chosen by increasing numbers of undergraduates, and about the degree to which "students have abandoned some of the traditional arts and sciences fields." The report deplored the effects of professional accrediting bodies which "distort students' expectations and close off their future options": "The result is that the college curriculum has become excessively vocational in its orientations, and the bachelor's degree has lost its potential to foster the shared values and knowledge that bind us together as a society."

Among the "warning signals" of impending problems in American higher education, the report cited the facts that "One out of eight highly able high school seniors does not choose to attend college," that "Only half the students who start college with the intention of getting a bachelor's degree actually attain this goal" and that "Student performance on 11 of 15 Subject Area Tests of the Graduate Record Examination declined between 1964 and 1982," with the sharpest declines in the areas requiring high verbal skills.

To counteract these threats and challenges, the NIE report suggested "three critical conditions of excellence — (1) student involvement, (2) high expectations, and (3) assessment and feedback." It outlined ways in which universities could make students more active participants in their educational experiences, urged that "All bachelor's degree recipients should have at least two full years of liberal education," even if it meant "extending their undergraduate programs beyond the usual four years," recommended that more attention be paid to what students had actually learned, and suggested that teaching be more closely scrutinized and highly rewarded in faculty personnel decisions.

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Close on the heels of the NIE report came a 42-page study from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Entitled "To Reclaim a Legacy," the report was developed by the NEH's Study Group on the State of Learning in the Humanities headed by William Bennett, then-head of the endowment and currently secretary of education in the Reagan administration. The NEH report echoed the concerns of the NIE about the decline in students' exposure to the traditional liberal arts disciplines, deploring the fact that "few of them can be said to receive ... an adequate education in the culture and civilization of which they are members," which leaves them "shortchanged in the humanities — history, literature, philosophy, and the ideals and practices of the past that have shaped the society they enter." The Bennett report, as it came to be called, took a traditional stance, recommending required readings in classic works, along with requirements in foreign language and course work that would insure "an understanding of the most significant ideas and debates in the history of philosophy."

Like the NIE report, the NEH's challenged the traditional reward systems in American higher education, which encourage highly paid senior faculty to teach specialized courses for majors and graduate students while leaving underpaid part-time and/or junior instructors to teach many of the required general education courses. "The great public fears or despises us," the Bennett report asserted, "because we hire an army of underpaid flunkies to teach the so-called service courses, so that we can gladly teach, in our advanced courses, the precious souls who survive the gauntlet."

Bennett's strong language and traditional recommendations made his a more controversial report than the NIE's, but both touched common concerns and issues: the need to insure some common knowledge, skills and understandings in all college students; the need to make students aware of other cultures, times and value systems; the need to encourage and reward good teaching in universities' personnel processes; and the need to set high standards to help students and faculty realize their potential. And both, in their ways, pointed to a lack of conviction in administrators as a major cause of the problem. Bennett's language was typically sharp on this matter: "Many academic leaders lack the confidence to assert that the curriculum should stand for something more than salesmanship, compromise, or special interest politics. Too many colleges and universities have no clear sense of their educational mission."

In February of 1985, another report appeared in The Chronicle, echoing and reiterating many of the concerns expressed in the NIE and NEH reports. "Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community" was, in its way, more scathing than the earlier reports, and probably more significant, if only because of the distinguished 19-member committee which stood behind the recommendations. "Integrity in the Curriculum" was part of the Association of American Colleges' (AAC) Project on Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, and its basic theme was that the bachelor's degree had become a meaningless credential, undermined by excessive specialization and faculty members' unwillingness to assert the importance of coherent and challenging general education requirements. "Today's student populations are less well-prepared, more vocationally oriented, and apparently more materialistic than their immediate predecessors," the report states. Yet faculty members, it points out, seem concerned primarily about advancing their own careers by pursuing narrow scholarship of the sort that wins them tenure and promotion in most American colleges and universities.

... its basic theme was that the bachelor's
degree had become a meaningless credential,
undermined by excessive specialization and
faculty members' unwillingness to assert
the importance of coherent and
challenging general education requirements

In ringing language, the AAC report asserts that "the quality of American life is at stake" in the debates about the future of higher education and that administrators must be bold and courageous in finding ways to make "higher education the vital instrument for enabling generations of young men and women to grasp a vision of the good life, a life of responsible citizenship and human decency":

"Higher education shares with other institutions — the schools, churches, media, and professions - a responsibility for how we as a people will meet and shape the future. This generation of academic presidents and deans is required to lead us away from the declining and devalued bachelor's degree that now prevails to a new era of curricular coherence, intellectual rigor, and humanistic strength. Their visions must be bolder, their initiatives more energetic and imaginative, and the great potential for academic leadership that is latent in the authority of their positions must be asserted forcefully and skillfully."

In addition to its analysis of what the problem is and who is responsible, the AAC report also recommends a "Minimum Required Curriculum" to counteract the chaos and confusion caused by the "marketplace philosophy" which prevails in many colleges and universities. As opposed to what it calls the "anything goes" curriculum, in which students are told to "pick eight of the following" from a list that might include over a hundred courses, the AAC recommends nine "experiences" which should be required of all undergraduates. It would be difficult to argue with the list of nine — some of them "skills" some of them "ways of growing and understanding" — as the basic tools for survival and success as a responsible and responsive citizen. The list calls for competencies in "inquiry," "literacy" and "understanding numerical data"; it calls for the development of a "historical consciousness" and for substantive awareness of the values and processes related to science and art; it proposes education in "values" (involving "the capacity to make informed and responsible moral choices") and in "international and multicultural experiences"; and it insists on "Study in depth . . . [which] requires sequential learning, building on blocks of knowledge that lead to more sophisticated understanding and encourage(s) leaps of the imagination and efforts at synthesis."

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These nine "experiences," according to the AAC, comprise "an education that will enable American people to live responsibly and joyfully, fulfilling their promise as individual humans and their obligations as democratic citizens." The AAC's emphasis on these "skills" and understandings" rather than on specific courses or works separates it somewhat from Bennett's more conventional call for specific curricular requirements. But both reports, as well as the NIE's, are emphatic about the need for educators to assert themselves in determining the direction and substance of undergraduate education. All of them rightly insist on the need for incisive, adaptable and competent citizens in a democratic society, where distinctions and choices must be made intelligently, and where economic and technological developments occur so rapidly that specialization can mean imminent obsolescence.

The most recent major report on higher education sounds the civic note even more emphatically in calling for greater attention to developing a "national education policy." Given John Henry Newman's historic role as a commentator on higher education, there's even a kind of symmetry in the report issued last November by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report was prepared by the Education Commission of the States, headed by Frank Newman, a long-time observer of American higher education and former president of the University of Rhode Island.

The Frank Newman report points to the "growing complexity" of citizenship "at the very time that capacity for citizenship seems to be declining." Citing a need for education which is characterized by "civic involvement," Newman says that today's complex problems create "a demand for graduates who have a profound understanding of what it means to be a citizen; graduates capable of an interest larger than self-interest; graduates capable of helping this country to be not simply a strong competitor but a responsible and effective leader in a complicated world." Newman reports that "by every measure we have been able to find, today's graduates are less interested in and less prepared to exercise their civic responsibilities." He worries about what happens when universities become reactive primarily to economic pressures: "In a period when interest in economic development is high, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on the role that higher education plays in supporting the economy. Such an approach only adds to the excessive specialization and career focus already prevalent today."

All of them deplore the degree to which
American colleges and universities have lost
conviction and commitment about their
roles and responsibilities in their short-sighted
efforts to respond to changing economic
and demographic conditions

To break through the self-serving insularity of students and universities, Newman proposes a number of practical initiatives to enable students to finance their educations through paid public service activities. Such a program of internships, Newman believes, might counter the increasing self-interest of college students while helping them avoid the debilitating debts which many students must now incur when they finance their college educations through financial aid programs that include student loans. In addition, Newman argues for "education for creativity, risk-taking, and civic involvement," and, like the earlier reports, this one suggests ways to make students' roles in their educations less passive and for making higher education more accessible to minorities.

Despite a few differences in style, tone and emphasis, these four recent critiques of American higher education are in remarkable agreement on a number of major points. They all agree that too many students follow narrow and excessively specialized routes to their undergraduate degrees. They all agree that not enough is done to make college students aware of other cultures, other value systems, other ways of seeing the world. They all agree that not enough is done to insure that college graduates can think and write critically and coherently. All of them deplore the degree to which American colleges and universities have lost conviction and commitment about their roles and responsibilities in their short-sighted efforts to respond to changing economic and demographic conditions. All of them — except perhaps Bennett's — argue that greater efforts must be made to recruit and retain more minority students. And they all agree that both students and institutions have become too passive in their roles. Newman's remarks on this matter are representative: Students, he says, "too frequently sit passively in class, take safe courses, and are discouraged from challenging ideas presented to them." Administrators, he argues, may worry about students' increasing narcissism and declining civic awareness, but they "feel that not much can be done, that one can only wait for another swing of the pendulum."

As Illinois' citizens and political leaders know, that kind of passivity can be destructive. As the state struggles to understand how it became part of the Rust Belt — and how to get out of it; as unemployed workers learn the pain of displacement and the difficulty of learning new skills; as the state develops economic relationships with other countries and their languages and value systems; as new technologies replace old ones; and as politics degenerates into marketing, the state can ill afford to turn out tunnel-visioned specialists who can't tell the special from the specious, reality from rhetoric, decency from demagoguery. A population that is trained instead of educated could well find itself blindsided again by social and economic changes it could not foresee nor understand. The state's colleges and universities must accept a role to prevent such shocks in the future.

The common theme of all the education studies, from Cardinal Newman's to Frank Newman's, is that today's "utility" is tomorrow's obsolescence, and that to educate only for today's realities may cheat us of tomorrow's promises and deprive us of a rich, full life. Leaders in Illinois' higher education community must have the wisdom to understand that, the ability to articulate it and the courage to translate their wisdom into actions that will prepare the state's citizens for the changes and challenges ahead.

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