Rejoining the Conversation

If you don’t define your organization’s goals, engineer its mission and vision, others will do so.? You, and your organization, will be repurposed, all at once or over time, and perhaps without your full awareness, to accomplish others’ aims.?

I believe this has happened, to a greater or lesser degree, to higher education in America.? We have become a tether ball, batted back and forth between opposing forces, with too little say in our fate. The last time Donald Trump was in the White House, his policy advisors discussed eliminating the Department of Education. Over the next four years, we should take seriously any Trump administration plans to merge the Department of Education and the Department of Labor, to create a new Cabinet-level department, the Department of Education and the Workforce. It is important that we know what is at stake. And it is important that we find our voice.

How did we get here, and why do I think this is the time for leadership across the higher education landscape to take a stand, to step forward and reclaim the work of defining our goals, the aims of our institutions, and the larger purpose of higher education (and public education more broadly)?

We have witnessed continuing pressure to vocationalize higher education. The effort to align schooling with the needs of the economy, to build the workforce employers want, has been with us since, at least, the dawn of the industrial age.? For years at the University of Chicago, before I stepped into more senior roles, I taught a class on Nationalism.? At the center of the course was the work of Ernest Gellner, who was among the most prominent theorists wrestling with questions about the origins and the social significance of the modern nation.? For Gellner, the nation was a historical and social adaptation, necessary to reengineer loyalties and redraw the social horizon for the great mass of people, repositioning their attachments from localities, and the small circle of people they knew in their villages and daily interactions, to a vast, anonymous community, extending out to the horizon, and back through history.? This recontextualization of loyalty was, in Gellner’s view, a necessary foundation for the industrial age.? We are, after all, social creatures.? We must be attached to a community of some type. The industrial age required a workforce of flexible, but certainly considerable size.? These workers needed to feel connected to a common destiny, they needed to be joined together by a common language, and a shared culture, they needed to be able to communicate with each other and with supervisors.? And these attachments needed to last, even if economic circumstances and labor market demands forced workers, and their entire families, to pick up and move.

To manufacture this new form of solidarity, Gellner believed, education needed to be transformed, and to be made universal.? As he put it: “At the base of the modern social order stands not the executioner but the professor.[1]”

Gellner mapped out the type of education needed in this new economy:

Universal literacy and a high level of numerical, technical and general sophistication are among its functional prerequisites.? Its members are and must be mobile, and ready to shift from one activity to another, and must possess that generic training which enables them to follow manuals and instructions of a new activity or occupation.? In the course of their work they must constantly communicate with a large number of other men, with whom they have no previous association, and with whom communication must consequently be explicit, rather than relying on context.[2]

In Gellner’s view, though, it is important to recognize, education aims at doing something more than producing “viable and usable human beings.”[3] Education is also entrusted with the work of creating a “shared culture.”[4]

I think what Gellner has in mind here is something given greater definition by another theorist of nationalism, Karl Deutsch. Deutsch is a social scientist who wrote about social change.? One of his insights was that resilient communities are characterized by “communications systems” that capably handle enormous volumes of information and process it accurately and efficiently.? This is especially important in the modern age, when societies are increasingly “uprooted by social and technological change, exposed to the risks of economic competition.”[5]

For Deutsch, education isn’t only about acquiring skills, practical capabilities relevant to work, but it is also, crucially, about exposure to symbolic systems, culture, and analytical and critical-thinking abilities, as well as cognitive and communicative tools.? What matters is one’s ability to make sense of the world and connect with others.

This is, in my view, a pretty tidy description of what liberal education has always aimed to do: give students tools to join in shared conversations, to analyze the world, and make sense of our possibilities.?

Taking a wide-angle lens view of this, what we encounter when we talk about the aims of education is a very old debate, between those who view education as a project aimed at character-building, and those who see it as a process to distribute occupational skills.? If we follow Deutsch and Gellner’s ideas, these different ideas about what education aims to do shouldn’t be thought of as ends of a continuum, but instead, we can imagine them as different ingredients in a recipe.? Some societies mix in a little more cultural focus, others a little more vocationalism.? It is also a debate between the idea of education as a social good that primarily benefits the individual – by facilitating self-realization, by allowing each of us to assemble tools to understand the world, and make our way through it, and profit from our skills – and a social good that mainly benefits society as a whole – by fashioning social cohesion, by retaining and expanding knowledge, and by creating the next generation of leaders (or workers).??

My view, as a starting point, is that making choices about all of this, how these different aims and priorities and benefits get reassembled into a long-term strategic roadmap for higher education, should be our job.? We don’t take on this job in a hermetically sealed ivory tower, set apart from other voices and viewpoints.? I believe we have special expertise, professional knowledge and a deep commitment to learning, that means we should be trusted to make socially responsible choices about how education is designed and distributed. I believe, however, we have largely walked away from that role. Increasingly, we have deferred to public officials, to organized corporate interests, to regional and local chambers of commerce, to employers and industry, to boards of trustees (often made up of members appointed by or representing some combination of these interests), and to parents.? Don’t mistake my claim: all of these parties should have a place at the table and a voice in the conversation.? Institutions of higher learning are too important, too central to our collective efforts to engineer the future, to be managed by a small community of learned high priests.? What I am saying is this: the expertise of educators should not be ignored as we make plans for our colleges and universities, and higher education as a whole.? And as educators, we should not allow ourselves to be elbowed aside.

The proposal to abolish the Department of Education, and replace it with a new department dedicated to the narrowly focused work of rethinking education to meet workforce needs, should not be a surprise.? We have been steering toward this eventuality for a generation.? Candidates in the past several presidential campaigns have advocated for the elimination of the Department. The implications are broad.? The Department of Education oversees a vast portfolio that begins, of course, with K-12 education, and assistive funding for public education, it collects and analyzes educational data and performance outcomes, and through its Civil Rights Division, it enforces laws and policies against discrimination.? All of that work is important, and all of it would be imperiled if the Department is eliminated.?

Yet my focus will be on higher education, because that is where I work. And, in fact, don't forget that I work in workforce and continuing education. I value the connection between work and education. I just believe it is complicated. And we should be vocal about the complexities.

The tug of war between two positions – education as a type of finishing school, teaching culture and manners, and education as a mechanism for distributing vocational skills – has been with us for as long as we have historical accounts of organized education.? In America, we have consistently tried to steer a middle path between these two extremes, while, at the same time, recognizing the role of schools in manufacturing and distributing the tools for democratic citizenship.? Our system of higher education has, to a greater or lesser degree, reflected this general consensus.? And presidents and provosts, deans and the professorate, have assembled a variety of ways to navigate this landscape.?

Of course, like all things, there is a history to all of this.? And, as seems to be increasingly clear, we aren’t paying attention to this history.? If we were, we could find some clear lessons about the costs of these pendulum swings, the resilience of the liberal arts or “generalist” models of education, and the key role of leadership and expertise in fashioning viable compromises, which have allowed us to build simultaneously the world’s most meaningful experiment in democracy and an economy of unrivalled creativity and innovation.? My fear is that the direction advocated by the nation’s current leaders will put at risk both of these accomplishments.

The democratization of American higher education unfolded over our long history.? It paralleled the democratization of our other foundational institutions, in the political, social, and economic spheres – the enlarging circle of voting rights, the overturning of slavery and eventually of Jim Crow, the opening of the workplace to women and marginalized minorities.? Like these other advances, the democratization of higher education was a product of both intentional effort and demographic change.? And, like our lawmakers and employers, colleges and universities sometimes resisted change and democratization, diversification and inclusion. Higher education was, at the beginning of the Republic, a privilege reserved for the wealthy and high-born.? Yet, as the nation made its way across the continent, through the Appalachian Mountains, into Ohio and West to the Mississippi and beyond, we opened colleges, often to provide young men (almost exclusively) with an education in Christian thought and the great works of European theorists.? So, in time, we had not only elite institutions of higher learning along the Atlantic seaboard, but also more modest institutions scattered across the map.?

Perhaps the most consequential historical development, most meaningful in transforming American colleges into something broader and more inclusive, was the creation of the American land-grant university at the end of the nineteenth century.? As universities dedicated to the study of agriculture and engineering, and later a broader cross-section of subjects, were created, liberal arts colleges responded, by secularizing their curricula, and introducing areas of study and specialized majors.? In the end, what resulted, viewed from a 10,000 foot level, was a consensus that higher education should aim at creating broad, general academic knowledge and analytical skill as well as developing some type of subject or career-focused specialization. Education should aim at both self-realization – feeding the soul and the intellect – and help to engineer the nation’s division of labor.? Along the way variations emerged, including, significantly, the development of research universities, built on the German model, which aimed at doing these things and offering graduate degrees and supporting the research of faculty with expertise in a variety of academic fields, both theoretical and applied.?

As history unfolded, events shaped the focus and curricula of colleges and universities – a focus on western knowledge in the face of a perceived clash of civilizations, a pursuit of scientific advancements to combat the Soviet threat, a rethinking of tired reading lists that excluded works by women and people of color and great thinkers from distant cultures – but, importantly, and this is my point, colleges and universities, and the presidents and provosts who led them, and the faculty who taught at them, participated in framing and shaping these choices.?

When the federal government got involved in assessing the aims and purposes of education, and shaping priorities and aspirations, it typically involved university presidents in the conversation, even if resulting recommendations were bent toward advancing particular objectives in line with the ideology or concerns of the relevant administration.? This was true from the time of Harry Truman’s 1947 President’s Commission on Higher Education, which focused on the Cold War threat, through Johnson’s 1965 Higher Education Act, which aimed to guarantee access and affordability for the broad mass of Americans, and the Reagan-era Nation at Risk report, which fretted about the declining performance of our schools, colleges, and universities.? Even the Bush-era Spelling Commission, which focused more narrowly on the “educational needs of a knowledge economy,” included at least token representation by experts from the landscape of higher education.?

Along the way, I might believe, we didn’t always rise to the challenge.? We surrendered to those who said our mix of programs needed to be shaped more narrowly to fit employer’s needs, or the challenge of global competitors, or the national defense of the homeland.? Those things matter.? But so did the work of preserving what we inherited, and the priority of shaping intellectual capacity and the love of learning, and providing the tools and critical thinking skills and discerning insight necessary to effectively participate in self-government. As a whole, our institutions do those things more poorly than they once did.? Worrying about those aims isn’t a sign of our “elitism,” as some might argue.? These aren’t quaint, out-of-date concerns.? Analytical agility, insightful and intuitive thinking, an eagerness to learn, and a deep, probing curiosity are all needed, perhaps, more now than ever before.? And this is true at every imaginable level of education, whether it is K-12, post-secondary, graduate, or adult and continuing education.? In fact, contemporary views, which imagine each level of education joined to the next, as interlocking links in a single chain, require us to develop the capabilities of confident, self-directed, curious learners at every stage.

What I see, as I perceive it, is a direct assault on the great democratic experiment of American higher education. Public universities, in particular, aimed to do many things, but two objectives were most central. First, they took on the work of “incorporation,” creating vast horizontal solidarity across the broad landscape of the nation, engineering citizens by creating a common body of knowledge, and a shared culture. Second, they helped create a division of labor, or as Durkheim might refer to it, organic solidarity, by manufacturing the talent needed to support the many types of work and effort required by America's (and ultimately, the world's) complex modern economy.

Essential to my view, they did this in a radically inclusive fashion, offering everyone the chance, if they assembled the right set of tools, to do almost anything they wanted. State universities shattered the caste system, opening up access to occupations and vocations once reserved for elites.

We are betraying that promise. Here and there across the country, we have been snatching away the hope that kids from modest families can climb out of the boxes we have placed them in, and escape the confining limits fate has assigned them. And now, if we move forward and replace the Department of Education with a new Department of Education and the Workforce, this betrayal is becoming institutionalized as national policy. And further, without the broad conversation, as we have seen in the past when these consequential shifts were made.? We are being denied the opportunity to lend our expertise and our voice.?

This move may be popular.? Much of the country has been persuaded by a growing certainty that education should aim for instrumental value or vocational preparation, rather than intellectual development, and the complicating capacity to formulate difficult questions. Yet, those of us who work in higher education know better.? We are being guided by, at best, short-term thinking. ?Applied or work-related schooling, sometimes referred to as “technical” education, is, by most measures, ill-suited, or at least insufficient for an age defined by technological change.? Mastering a technology that will be replaced by a new technology next year doesn’t help individuals (or societies) navigate change.?

Let me, for argument’s sake, play this game on the opposition’s turf.? What does American industry need to be competitive in the twenty-first century?? Not workers who thoughtlessly apply techniques and processes they learned in narrowly-focused applied programs.? Work isn’t merely mechanical or reproductive, characterized by repeating the same processes over and over.? It never was.? And now, inescapably, with the accelerated pace of change that characterizes our lives, processes need to be continuously updated, reinvented, or fixed. Too many organizations—guided by leaders and employees who can’t think more expansively—create processes to update the status quo or fix problems, rather than plans to move beyond these routines and problems and into a future that can only be imperfectly viewed from our present vantage point.

We often find we are paralyzed because we worry that we don’t know all the variables at play. What are the costs, what will the benefits be if we choose a particular choice, or navigate a change in direction, or make any decision of consequence? We can’t know for certain, of course, but analytically capable employees will be able to model consequences across a broad landscape of possibilities, beyond simple bottom-line criteria. They will be able to think about acceptable risk, and design strategies to mitigate or manage risks. They will be able to think about the ethical or reputational fallout from some choices, and propose other options.

So even framing the argument narrowly around the “practical” values of a liberal education, we can make a case for why education should aim at doing more than narrowly teaching workplace-relevant skills. When we expand the field of argument, and look at the political and social challenges we face, as a nation and globally, the insufficiency of a skills-based education becomes impossible to deny.?

We are struggling with a destabilizing decline in civic literacy.? Americans don’t know basic facts about their own government.? They lack a clear understanding about the aims and the importance of the first amendment.? An Annenberg Public Policy Center survey found that only one in four Americans know there are three branches of government.? Americans lack the basic analytical skills to sniff out fake news, incapable of employing the discerning tools of rational assessment to ask smart questions about stories’ claims, or the biases of the author, or whether the story seems to be collaborated by any other credible source.? Americans have shrinking knowledge about nations beyond our borders, and fewer study foreign languages.? Too few study and appreciate the arts, resulting in plummeting cultural literacy.? These complaints might seem like old news.? Haven’t elites been complaining about the backwardness of average Americans for generations?? That’s not what I am doing, though.? My point is this: institutions of higher learning aren’t standing up to defend these subjects and areas of study with the sort of urgency and stubborn persistence we should.

Further, for so much of our history as a nation we have viewed education as a way for individuals to overcome poverty and inequality, to reinvent themselves, to throw up ladders to climb into the middle class, to join in broad, important conversations about who we are as a nation, and where we should go.? Colleges and universities, among all the things they do, have helped to develop and assemble each generation’s leaders, change agents, and pioneers.? Who gets to sit at the table when we make consequential decisions, and define our social, political and economic priorities?? Overwhelmingly, the college educated.? If we turn from this responsibility, if we accept that post-secondary education is merely a mechanism for handing out workplace skills, we will be responsible for dismantling this machinery for producing, and transforming, our nation’s leadership.? And, I worry, we will consign the nation to the fate of being led by privileged elites, a narrow social and economic upper-class, whose views and priorities are untroubled by the perspectives of those from more modest means and diverse backgrounds.

As a senior leader in the world of higher education, I don’t pretend to argue that I should get to make decisions about where we should go as a nation, or what is coming next in the world of business and finance and manufacturing.? But I do have a professionally-informed opinion about (and a role to play in deciding) how colleges and universities should do the work of providing the education that helps us make these decisions.

To implement the change he wants to make, President Trump will need to get congressional approval to combine the Departments of Education and Labor.? With the President’s party holding power in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, that might be easy. If Congress holds hearings on the matter, we still have a chance to weigh in.? The other day I saw a bumper sticker that read: Make America Smart Again. Let’s begin the conversation about how to do that.?

[1] Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 34

[2] Gellner, p. 35.

[3] Gellner, p. 38.

[4] Gellner, p. 57.

[5] Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (Boston: MIT Press, 1966).