What Are We Doing, Here?

One of those days in higher education

As I’ve said a number of times, I’m a person who’s very deeply embedded in the odd world of elite higher education. Depending on how you count my grad school and post-doc years, it’s either “almost 25” or “more than 30” years of being associated with elite institutions. I’m generally very happy with being here, because in a lot of ways, this is the kind of space I’m most comfortable being in. And, of course, I’m enormously lucky to have the opportunity to be here.

Still, there are moments when I question the whole enterprise.

These are mostly triggered by people pointing out what Freddie de Boer helpfully puts right in the title of his recent post: “Our National Conversation on Higher Ed Has Next to Nothing to Do With Higher Ed's Real Problems.” The point being that the sort of elite, mostly private, institutions I’ve devoted so much of my life to are a tiny, tiny slice of the actual system of higher education in the US. Matt “Dean Dad” Reed is another great one for reminding me of the same imbalances: the vast majority of college students in the country are actually enrolled in community colleges and lower-tier public colleges and universities. Those places are facing an entirely different set of challenges than those of us at places that actually have a spot in the national US News rankings.

From that perspective, arguments about the limited effect of legacy preferences in higher education, or various “Can we not?” curricular kerfuffles seem pretty pointless. Likewise the much-dunked-upon “I’m taking my ball and going home” stunt of founding a new university. If you really want to make a difference in higher education, in whatever ideological direction, you shouldn’t be messing about with the elite end of the institutional spectrum, but way at the other end, where all the students are. You should be giving unrestricted funds to community colleges and lobbying state governments to properly fund those institutions, where the money needed to create a single faculty line at Harvard or Williams or Union could have a transformative impact for more students than enroll at any of those institutions let alone take a class with the new endowed professor. Or, better yet, invest time and money into working to create alternatives to college for those who, for whatever reason, aren’t in a good position to benefit from additional schooling at their current stage of life. That last in particular I think would be an important step toward fixing a whole host of problems; I wish I had a good idea (or any idea at all) where to start on that.

At the same time, there’s a bit of a “too much fucking perspective” element to this way of thinking. Or, to put it another way, while there’s a kind of argument that I should stop spending time teaching rich kids from Connecticut about arcane points of quantum physics in favor of helping poor kids from basically anywhere else, there are lots of other equally good arguments in other directions. I should drop everything and shift to working on climate change, or global poverty, or systemic racism, or any of a host of other giant issues with a plausible claim to be “The Real Problem” facing modern society.

It’s all kind of paralyzing.

In the end, I usually come back to something I said at the top of this, namely that this weird elite place I’ve landed is where I belong. I’m well suited, in terms of skills and temperament, to doing what I do in the space where I do it, and would be less well suited to lots of the “more important” spaces. And I do think there’s an important role for elite institutions training future political and cultural elites, however uncomfortable that may sometimes be (as I fumblingly wrote about a few weeks back). There’s more than a little “Well, you would say that…” in that view, I guess, but I do feel a strong emotional connection to what we do in our weird little elite space, and that’s not nothing.

But I do go round and round on this, some days more than others.

Anyway, in lieu of a strong conclusion, here’s some barbershop raga:

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If you get the sense this is prompted by some day-job stuff I don’t think it would be appropriate to talk about, you’re not wrong. Anyway, here are the traditional buttons:

And should you feel so moved, the comments will be open.