This lecture was delivered on February 7, 1992, as part of the Ashbrook Center's "Major Issues Lecture Series" at Ashland University. The subject for the 1991-92 Major Issues Lecture Series is "Striving Towards Excellence in Education." Because, as Governor George Voinovich has said, these lectures "cover topics that are innovative and substantive within the educational field," and because the "subject is of particular relevance considering the challenges facing our current educational system," the Ashbrook Center is publishing the lectures under the series "Excellence in Education." It is our hope that the wide circulation of these monographs, and the book to follow, will add to the much needed national dialogue on educational issues. Other speakers and authors in the series include: Denis P. Doyle, Pete du Pont, Rita Kramer, Dinesh D'Souza, Lynne Cheney, and Lama Alexander. The opinions expressed in these publications do not necessarily reflect the views of the John M. Ashbrook Center or its Board of Advisors. The Center is grateful to the John M. Olin Foundation for its generous support of the series.

      F. Clifton White
      Director
      Ashbrook Center

Your theme this year is "striving towards excellence in education." You devoted the autumn to K-12 issues. Today we turn to higher education. My purpose is to stimulate discussion of such questions as whether American higher education is losing the confidence and respect of the populace and if so why? Why are so many people complaining about it? How much substance do their criticisms have?

It's customary to begin any talk on higher education by paying ritual deference to the American post-secondary enterprise as the finest in the world. Since I'll spend most of my time today lobbing criticisms, let me first toss a few bouquets. Indisputably we have the biggest higher education industry anywhere; it absorbs by far the largest proportion of high school graduates; it is the costliest—and the most generously financed; it is the only one (save for Japan) where the private sector is large and vibrant; despite its problems, I judge that it's in better shape than our elementary/secondary system; and we do attract people from many other lands to study and teach in our institutions.

All this is good and praiseworthy. But for too many in higher education, that leads toward complacency, even smugness. And that's a mistake. While there may not be an imminent crisis, there's plenty of evidence that all is not well:

• In the recent round of national education goal-setting by the President and governors, for example, higher education has been conspicuous mainly for its absence and, to the extent that it was discussed at the Charlottesville "summit", a lot of governors were heard to have some pretty tart things to say about it, mostly along the lines of how greedy education is. Said former Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt, "I don't know of any group that more [often] says in response to the questions about quality that the issue is money."
   
• The Justice Department's recent probe of tuition-setting practices, faculty salaries and student aid policies in leading private institutions, to the astonishment of many in the academy, found a sizable fraction of the public cheering on the government and not siding with the institutions.
   
• The fracas over research overhead is having much the same effect. I didn't think anything could make Congressman John Dingell begin to resemble a populist hero rather than a bully, but Stanford's yacht and a thousand similar abuses on other campuses seem to be accomplishing that transformation. In more and more meetings over the past several months, I've heard such phrases as "the game is up" and "an era is ending".
   
• Derek Bok devoted his penultimate report to the Harvard Overseers to a defensive response to critics of higher education, something he presumably would not have done had he thought their criticisms could be ignored.
   
• The number and variety of those critics is growing, too. It's not just Allan Bloom and Bill Bennett, though they're never to be underestimated. It's not just "Profscam," either. It's also Lynne Cheney, Dinesh D'Souza, Page Smith, Roger Kimball, Shelby Steele, Tom Sowell, Stephen Carter, even Ernest Boyer. It's organizations such as the National Association of Scholars and the Madison Center, with which I'm associated. Students are organizing, too. Disgruntled undergraduates have held several conferences devoted to figuring out ways to press their colleges to raise academic standards.
   
• With extraordinary rapidity and thoroughness, the "political correctness" issue has drawn popular attention and extensive critical coverage in the mainstream media. In magazines such as Newsweek, New York and The New Republic, we have recently seen the ritual slaughter of some of academe's sacred cows—and the exposure of some objectionable practices.
   
• Equally close and critical attention has been paid to an array of troubling episodes, from the racist fulminations of Leonard Jeffries at City College to the machinations of the Middle States Association with respect to diversity standards.
   
• As for the general public, in a 1989 Gallup survey, 44 percent of the sample gave the colleges honors grades for "overall performance"—but 45 percent marked them "C" or lower! Just 37 percent conferred "A" or "B" on higher education for "making young people good citizens." And while few (22 percent) felt that a college education is worth less than the cost of attendance, only 39 percent indicated that it is worth more. (Most of the rest—35 percent in all—thought it about even.)
   

It's possible, of course, that these are but straws in the wind. I suggest, however, that they should be taken seriously. Even Bok noted that "These harsh indictments have not been culled from fly-by-night journals or obscure newsletters."

What is the gist of the indictment? Before setting forth my own bill of particulars, here is how Bok summarized it:

"[F]ar from praising our universities, critics in this country have attacked them more severely during the past ten years than at any time in my memory. The tome of these complaints is often surprisingly bitter. Higher education has been termed 'underaccountable and underproductive,' in a 'sickening tailspin' and 'a national disgrace.' Undergraduate education has been accused of 'winding down toward mediocrity' with a curriculum alternately describes as 'chaotic,' a 'disaster area,' or 'rotten to the core.' Faculties too have had their fair share of criticism. According to one recent book, 'The professors—working steadily and systematically—have destroyed the university as a center of learning and have desolated higher education, which no longer is higher or much of an education.'"

I think that's pretty accurate. But there's more. Let me now turn to the ten main elements of my own critique. I won't try to describe the solutions to these problems but you'll likely find most of them implicit (which is not to say they're going to be easy).

1. Shaky cognitive outcomes among those who pass through the system. The data leave much to be desired—a related failing of higher education is its inability, some would say reluctance, to furnish reliable and intelligible measures of learning—but consider the following: in 1985, the National Assessment program gauged literacy levels among young (20-25 year old) adults and, within that population, one can isolate those with substantial postsecondary education. When Audrey Pendleton of the U.S. Department of Education performed such an analysis, here is what she found:

"More than half of college upperclassmen and college graduates were unable to perform at the 350 level of the scales….Tasks characteristic of this level include stating in writing an argument made in a lengthy newspaper column, using a bus schedule to select the appropriate bus for given departures and arrivals, and calculating the amount of a tip in a restaurant given the percentage of the bill."

Remember, the people she's describing are young adults with at least two years of college under their belts, and many have graduated. Yet not even half of them function intellectually at the level Pendleton described.

Another body of evidence comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which in 1989 surveyed the history and literature knowledge of college seniors. Here, in Lynne Cheney's words, is what they found:

"25 percent of the nation's college seniors [were] unable to locate Columbus's voyage within the correct half-century. About the same percentage could not distinguish Churchill's words from Stalin's, or Karl Marx's thoughts from the ideas of the U.S. Constitution. More than 40 percent could not identify when a Civil War occurred. Most could not identify Magna Carta, the Missouri Compromise, or Reconstruction. Most could not link major works by Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton with their authors. To the majority of college seniors, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail' were clearly unfamiliar."

This is not the place to settle the argument about what higher education should teach. Surely college ought to transport one's intellect well beyond factual knowledge and cultural literacy. But it's hard to add a floor to a house that lacks a solid foundation.

2. Attrition during college. Only about half of those in the high school graduating class of 1980 who entered four year colleges on a full-time basis that same year wound up with bachelor's degrees within six years. Among black and Hispanic matriculants, barely a quarter received their degrees within a six year period.

The situation is worse if we look for degrees earned within the traditional four years. According to the National Institute of Independent Colleges and Universities, fewer than 15 percent of those entering four year colleges received their degrees in that period of time; on private campuses, that figure rose to an unimpressive one student in four. By semester 12, more had dropped out of college than had won degrees.

This is far higher than the much-lamented high school dropout rate. It suggests that something is gravely wrong, either with the recruitment and admissions process or with what students find after they matriculate; I suspect both. Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that every single person who puts his toe in the college pond should be expected to swim all the way to the other side. But I do say that too many are drowning along the way.

3. Low to non-existent entrance standards. This is obviously related to the previous two points. Just as many high schools now provide a belated primary education, so do many colleges find themselves offering what could fairly be termed an ex post facto secondary education. This is hugely expensive, wasteful and inefficient. It devalues the college degree (and makes more employers look for post-graduate degrees as evidence of a bona fide higher education). And it severely undermines our efforts to reform the K-12 system.

Only a handful of colleges and universities are highly selective these days. Admission to most campuses requires merely that you be able to walk through the door and write a check.

There is something to be said on behalf of open or semi-open admission for purposes of widening opportunity. And I do not doubt that it's become important to colleges worried about maintaining their enrollments at a time when the capacity of the industry surpasses 14 million though the number of graduating high school seniors each year is barely 2.7 million. But what message does it send to a sixteen year old deciding, of a Tuesday evening, whether to spend the next few hours revising his lab report or to go out and party with his friends?

Putting the matter plainly, the admissions requirements of higher education (and employers) constitute the de facto exit requirements of our primary/secondary schools. If these are stiff, they will be met. If lax, those, too, will be met. But seldom surpassed.

There is compelling evidence that educational mediocrity remains most acute among the college-bound portion of the high school population, and that the reform efforts of recent years have had the least impact on those relatively able young people (while raising the achievement levels of their less-academic classmates). Daniel Singal's examination of SAT scores in The Atlantic, and a more rigorous analysis by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in The Public Interest, suggest strongly that the greatest immunity to improvement is to be found among the abler students, those most apt to be influenced by college entry standards.

Today's college admissions game also saps some of what I'm rashly going to term the dignity of higher education, as marketing strategies for a number of institutions come to resemble those of resort hotels. A dorm at Southwest Missouri State was described in the Chronicle as boasting microwaves and computers in each suite, tanning beds, a convenience store and room service. And, says the housing administrator of a Florida university, "They want cable. If there's no MTV, the room is hardly rentable."

Doubtless that's an honest statement of his experience. But what does it say about institutional priorities? And if the sellers act like this, what sorts of behavior should we expect from the purchasers?

4. Shabby, incoherent curricula. You've heard this from many critics. What most of them are saying is that on the typical college campus today, the undergraduate liberal arts curriculum remains a smorgasbord in which you don't have to learn anything in particular, in which few things you may want to study have prerequisites and there is little sense of accumulation of knowledge or progression of intellect, and in which the faculty has largely abdicated its single most fundamental responsibility, which is to decide what students ought to learn.

Why this is so is open to multiple explanations. I tend to ascribe it to the triumph of relativism and loss of institutional authority—not just in higher education—that we associate with the late sixties and early seventies, plus the marketing dynamics that come from providing whatever students want to take, plus the fragmentation of many academic disciplines, plus a bit of academic feather-bedding.

Some data on the matter come from a respected mainstream researcher, Penn's Robert Zemsky, whose study of 25,000 student transcripts found the liberal arts curriculum to be "fragmented". "We find the undergraduate curriculum in the liberal arts lacking in sufficient breadth of study," Zemsky writes, "particularly in the natural sciences and mathematics, and lacking in substantial depth." He suggests, moreover, that the situation may be worse in colleges outside his sample. Then he endorses much of Allan Bloom's critique!

Lynne Cheney makes the straightforward point that one reason college seniors don't know many things is because they're not obligated to study them. According to NEH survey data, one can graduate from 78 percent of the nation's colleges without taking any course in the history of western civilization, from 38 percent without taking history at all, and from 45 percent without taking a course in American or English literature.

Another reason the curriculum is so flabby is that shaping it up would endanger institutional marketing strategies. Two thirds of all bachelor's degrees awarded these days are in professional fields, not in the liberal arts. (Among this year's freshmen, fewer than a quarter plan to major in the arts and sciences.) Since students, most of whom don't know any better, often want to study only that which they think is germane to their intended post-college plans, course requirements that get in the way of those preferences may result in shrunken enrollments.

But I have a hunch that the flight from liberal arts has to do not only with career-obsessed vocationalism. It could also have something to do with not finding in today's liberal arts enough that's rewarding amid what Page Smith labels the "social nonsciences" and "inhuman humanities." One may enjoy literature, for example, but how many students get any real satisfaction from deconstructionist analysis? One may relish history, but find that it loses a lot when its grand epics are overtaken by quantitative analyses and worm's eye views of tiny little questions from the perspectives of various victim populations.

The very proliferation of course offerings, and the inability of most faculties to decide what is more important than what, may well also contribute to the exodus of students from the arts and sciences.

Clearly, I believe it's the responsibility of the college to determine what skills and knowledge students should possess and then see that they acquire these. I don't mean every single item should be prescribed. But an undergraduate education has to be more than a cafeteria where people wander in and nibble at what they like. Eighteen and nineteen year olds—and even a fair number of 28 and 39 year olds—probably aren't the best judges of what they ought to learn or how well they've learned it. That's what faculties are for.

5. On more and more campuses, we now find amid the curricular smorgasbord one new rule: a single required course in some aspect of multi-culturalism: non-western civilizations, women and minorities, tolerance and diversity, etc. This represents a major beachhead of political correctness within the curriculum. Imagine a college where political correctness is the only thing that everyone must study. And even on campuses where such courses are not mandatory, they are proliferating like kudzu. This impulse is not just to be found on the instructional side of the institution, either, but also in its patterns of academic and social organization. I think of is as the Beirut-ization of higher education.

Important events, Marx wrote, occur twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. The wave of multi-culturalism sweeping our campuses already displays elements of both. The first time it hit the academic beach, it deposited departments of—and, usually, majors in—Women's Studies, Chicano Studies, Native-American Studies, Black (now "Afro-American") Studies, and sometimes Gay Studies, not to mention clubs and associations for almost every imaginable racial, ethnic, cultural, demographic and political subgroup and sexual orientation, as well as college-sponsored centers, dorms and dining arrangements organized along similar lines. Financial aid is disbursed on racially exclusive lines, and affirmative action in hiring and admissions has mutated into quotas on many campuses.

Those processes are still underway, of course, but the wave has already returned for a second sweep. This time, it is leaving behind "white student unions," programs of "men's studies," "re-education" classes, and a hodgepodge of causes and movements from animal and vegetable rights to frontal assaults on heterosexuality—or, as it was termed in a recent MLA presentation—"heteronormativity."

What we see here is a preference for the lines that divide rather than the ties that bind, for the "pluribus" in American society rather than the "unum." That such lines criss-cross the land is not disputed. The question is whether educational institutions should help etch them deeper.

We observe plenty of examples around the modern world of societies in which such lines run very deep indeed, places where people identify primarily with their own racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic or religious group, and where they view others in terms of group identity rather than as individuals. Look at Yugoslavia, Lebanon, Kashmir, the Punjab, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Czechoslovakia, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and South Africa, just for starters.

The sentiment most conspicuous in these places is intergroup hatred. The politics most evident are those of subjugation, secession and disintegration. Quite a lot of killing goes on too; slaughters whose most visible characteristic is that killer and victim belong to different groups.

Ideas of individual merit, accomplishment and worth take a backseat in such societies. So do neutral institutions and broad principles such as equality of opportunity, color-blindness and due process. These are modern, essentially artificial, contrivances—fragile and weak alongside the forces of tribalism, fundamentalism, prejudice, and guns.

I do not believe that many Americans want such a future for the United States. One has to wonder then, why so many of our educational institutions are pandering to the tendencies toward social disintegration. It seems doubly ironic when we're told that the most vexing problem on many a campus is intolerance, nastiness, and inter-group hostility.

6. Despite the celebration of pluralism and sensitivity on campus, we also encounter evidence that free inquiry, untrammeled discussion, and openmindedness are in trouble; that many disciplines and departments are politicized; that holders of contrary views are unwelcome, either as colleagues or as guest speakers; and that students who do not hew to the dominant political ethos may encounter something very different from empathy and sensitivity. One veteran of the College of Wooster's required freshman seminar on "Difference, power, discrimination: perspectives on race, gender, class, and culture" says of it that "The style and the tone . . . is so heavy handed in one direction that it ceases to be interesting." The editor of the student paper concludes that "It's split people up."

Repression in the name of tolerance has also begun to collide with the First Amendment, as a number of campuses attempt to respond to statements they deplore and modes of expression they find objectionable with bans and prohibitions, at least two of which have already run afoul of the federal courts.

It's been noted by others that the campus is last bastion of sixties-style radicalism is American society. Roger Kimball and Dinesh D'Souza both develop that point at considerable length. Recall that one of the great failings of sixties-style radicalism was its intolerance, particularly of traditional values, of patriotism, democracy, and capitalism. While I don't suggest that the American public wants cheerleading, chauvinism, or indoctrination from our institutions of higher learning, I believe most people expect these places to display open-mindedness, balance, diversity of views, tolerance, and free inquiry.

Dismay at their absence is often voiced by political conservatives, but it would be a mistake to think this concern is the property of the right. Let me return to Page Smith, historian, long-time college professor, founding provost of the University of California at Santa Cruz and, by his own description, a man of the left. "Academic fundamentalism is the issue," Smith writes, "the stubborn refusal of the academy to acknowledge any truth that does not conform to professorial dogmas. In the famous 'marketplace of ideas', where all ideas are equal and where there must be no 'value judgments' and therefore no values, certain ideas are simply excluded, and woe to those who espouse them. Such individuals are terminated, lest their corruption spread to others."

This is what leads to people trying to prevent Christina Hoff Sommers from publishing her articles skeptical of radical feminism. This is what has led to the preparation of what can only be termed an "enemies list" by the new group called "Teachers for a Democratic Culture," itself formed in reaction to the National Association of Scholars, which was a response to the chilly, homogeneous, and sometimes repressive climate of the academy. This is what's led Stephen Thernstrom, the distinguished social historian, to describe his experiences at Harvard as "somewhat worse" than McCarthyism inasmuch as the witch hunt that targeted him was carried out by the university's own students, faculty and administrators, not by Philistine outsiders.

7. It's too doggone expensive. $11,700 is the average expenditure per student in U.S. higher education this year according to Department of Education estimates. That's twice what we spend per pupil in the public schools. If you multiply by 4, to approximate in a crude way the costs associated with a four year undergraduate education, you find it's $46,800. That's just the institutional expenditure, of course. It says nothing about where the money comes from, nor does it include the direct and opportunity costs facing students who enroll. Though the rate of increase has abated somewhat in the past two years, we know that the cost of higher education has been rising faster than inflation. On a per student basis, expenditures rose 27 per cent in constant dollars during the 1980's. Yes, there are reasons for this—at least there are explanations. But I don't think they ring true outside the academy.

The annual U.C.L.A. survey reports that 27 per cent of this year's freshmen chose their college because of low tuition; 28 per cent said their decisions were based on financial aid. Many cited the ability to live at home and commute as a decisive factor, and 37 per cent expect to have to work to pay their college expenses.

One could conclude from such data that society is being stingy and should subsidize students more generously. A number of people in higher education, not surprisingly, think exactly that, and one of the dramas that will play itself out in Washington over the next half year will be the attempt to turn "Pell grants" into an "entitlement." An equally plausible explanation of what's going on, however, is that higher education is becoming expensive at a faster rate than people can afford to pay from their private resources; and given the condition of the federal budget and most state budgets, it's hard for me to believe that public resources are going to swell in response. As a matter of fact, total state appropriations for higher education actually declined a bit this year in real terms, the first time in decades that has happened.

8. Related to runaway costs is the lack of efficiency or productivity on campus. I will not soon forget my impressions from visits to about two dozen well-regarded colleges with my (then-high school senior) children in the summers of 1987 and 1988: nobody, save for admissions office people, was visible in July. Those elaborate physical plants were mostly idle. Those well-stocked libraries contained virtually no readers. The faculty was nowhere in sight.

It may seem churlish to dwell on such things at a time when many of the nation's most prestigious universities are considering draconian budget cuts and the New York Times is solemnly predicting that "the academic scene of the early 21st century will be slimmed, transformed not in evolutionary ways but under the lid of a financial pressure cooker." My purpose here is simply to suggest that despite all the deferred maintenance, over-subscribed courses and non-renewal of lab equipment, there is on many campuses today an attitude of ease and habit of self-indulgence that can afflict students, faculty and administration alike.

There is evidence that students and professors are doing less work than they used to and taking longer to accomplish the same amount. Many undergraduates now spend five or six (or more) years getting their degrees. The Carnegie Foundation reports that tenured faculty members now teach just eight hours a week, on average. Semesters are getting shorter and so are weeks. Saturday classes have long since vanished; Friday classes are going fast. Thursday night has become a party night, with keg parties on campus and crowds of students in the town pubs. There is anecdotal evidence that students and faculty members are tacitly conspiring to cram courses into a Tuesday-Thursday pattern so as to permit everyone to enjoy four day weekends. This is all a bit out of synch with the rest of society, where we see evidence that work-weeks are lengthening again and leisure time diminishing.

There are really two points here. One has to do with dwindling work-loads and productivity. The other has to do with what might be called the absence of institutional self-discipline. Dongell's hearings have revealed one abuse after another on the overhead front. Recently in the headlines was partial government reimbursement to Syracuse University for a $11,295 St. Patrick's Day party. But there's more here than the occasional tale of antiques and fancy bed-linens. Assistant comptroller general J. Dexter Peach testified that "The problem of unallowable costs being charged to the government is systemic."

The overhead issue may be the most visible, certainly the most discussed in Washington, but it's not the whole story. Nor am I thinking only of the lavish athletic and recreational facilities or the buffets in lieu of set meals in the dining hall. Look at campus personnel patterns. Even as more instruction is being handled by part-timers and so-called "gypsy" faculty, often over-worked and underpaid, we also see vast growth in non-teaching administrators and staff. The Chronicle reports that between 1980 and 1990, a decade in which faculty ranks grew by 14 per cent, the number of administrative and managerial employees rose 25 per cent and the number of so-called "other professionals" increased by an amazing 62 per cent.

I don't say these new hires aren't earning their pay. But what does this say about institutional priorities? About how the academy views change? Here we encounter what Rodman Drake, head of Cresap, the management consulting firm, calls the confusion of quality with quantity. "Too often", he has written, "colleges treat quality like an abstract ideal, unconnected to real world concerns. Pursuing that ideal, ironically, becomes a matter of sheer quantity. Quality is taken simply to mean more—more faculty, more publishing output from that faculty, more books in the library, more sophisticated machines in the labs, no matter how expensive or how little used. Our so-called quality-driven institutions are characterized by the escalating costs of new buildings, new departments, new course offerings and greater specialization, all layered onto existing programs. This add-on spiral is exacerbated by cost-plus pricing in which budgets are set by an institution's wish list and financed through higher tuition charges and increasingly ambitious fund-raising drives—tactics that only intensify the cost-quality dilemma."

When confronted with such criticism, the academy typically offers a three-part response: Quality costs money. Money is scarcer than ever and, far from indulging in luxuries, we're really tightening our belts. Besides—the third response—nonprofits shouldn't be expected to show productivity gains. To which almost everyone else says balderdash.

9. Amorality. Drinking, drugs, sex, plagiarism and cheating, too much of all these among students, too little supervision by faculty and staff, abandonment of the "in loco parentis" role of the college, failure sometimes even to enforce state and federal laws, let alone to instill moral and ethical behavior in students.

A 1990 survey of undergraduates at Miami University in Ohio found 91 percent of them admitting to having engaged in academic plagiarism. Rutgers professor Donald McCabe recently surveyed 6000 students on 31 elite campuses, and reports that two-thirds of them admitted to cheating at least once in college; 41 percent acknowledged cheating on exams; and 19 percent said they had cheated on four or more tests. A Rutgers student named Michael Moore has published a "how to do it" book called Cheating 101: The Benefits and Fundamentals of Earning the Easy A.

Here we're well beyond questions of whether condom dispensers should be installed in the dorms and beer served at fraternity parties. It goes to the question of what kinds of adults we're producing. Do people who cheat in college become virtuous, law-abiding citizens, good parents and trustworthy employees after they graduate? Is it desirable for them to have their views on these matters determined by what they can get away with rather than what is right? Is it proper for colleges and universities, while generally deploring unethical behavior, to permit it to grow unchecked? Even to rationalize it, as did the chairman of the Rutgers geography department, who said of Moore's book "It's no accident that at the end of the 80's, beginning of the 90's, and era that brought us Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky and Charles Keating, we have this kind of book for students." The university professor, in short, blames society. Michael Moore blames the university for stimulating, even fostering, this kind of behavior among students. Nobody shoulders responsibility for doing anything about it.

10. Finally, weak to nonexistent quality control of and by the higher education community concerning everything I've been talking about: academic standards, moral standards, cost-benefit ratios, student defaulters, degree mills and all the rest. Accreditation hasn't done the job, nor has anything else. Indeed, accreditation has recently taken a worrisome new turn in the direction of policing "diversity" and enforcing political correctness.

Consider what happened in the Leonard Jeffries episode. He is, of course, a fiery racist. Among those savaged by his scurrilous words is my friend and colleague, Diane Ravitch. But what has the City University of New York done? Well, its first response was to reappoint him chairman of the Afro-American studies department for just a singal year rather than the customary three.

As the institutional mechanisms of the academy reveal their inability to set matters right, and show some inclination to exacerbate them, it's not surprising when state and federal officials intervene, whether on loan defaults, accrediting standards, tuition-setting policies, the tax treatment of university-owned businesses, expenses legitimately charged to federal overhead, and faculty hiring and retention. Thus—to note just two recent instances—Secretary of Education Alexander's intervention in the Middle States episode, and Governor Cuomo's stong reaction to the Jeffries episode. I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg of the external regulation and control that may lie in the future, if the moral authority and self-discipline of higher education continue to crumble.

That's my litany. It does not exhaust the possibilities, though. Unlike Page Smith, for example, I haven't said a word about the various corruptions that come with big-time varsity sports, or about what he calls the "meretriciousness of most academic research", or about the alliance of the academy with big government and big business. I haven't deplored lackluster undergraduate teaching or the screwy campus value system that pays so little attention to teaching in meting out status and rewards.

What to do? As I warned you, I don't propose to be explicit about remedies that I hope are implicit in what I've already said. I do want to leave you with the thought, however, that what you first must do is decide whether some significant portion of the problems I've been laying out are for real, or whether there's not much more here than inadequate public relations built on a bum rap.

Some people in higher education think the steak is fine, the cooks are swell and the recipe is sound; the only problem is that the platter doesn't sizzle quite enough when served. Others say the sizzle is the least of the problems, that higher education needs to attend to the quality of the meat and the deftness of the kitchen, if only out of keen concern for its own self interest. Many seem to understand that higher education requires a degree of public approval, not just tolerance, in order to thrive. In Derek Bok's last annual report, he observed that "Unless society appreciates the contributions of its universities, it will continue to reduce them to the status of another interest group by gradually stripping away the protections and support they need to stay preeminent in the world."

Just so. But such appreciation must be earned, and constantly renewed. It can be diminished, perhaps even lost. I believe it is jeopardized by the kinds of problems I've been discussing today. Obviously I think those problems are real and I don't expect them to prove easy to solve. But we find a sizable reservoir of good will and confidence in American people with respect to higher education. It is something that people still value and want for themselves, their children and grandchildren. It is not, like the solid waste disposal industry or the advertising industry, a necessary evil, something that we're stuck with but don't much like. Higher education is something that people want to respect.

Thanks to this basic goodwill, the academy doesn't have to pull rabbits out of hats, doesn't have to solve its problems overnight. The American public will be patient. But it needs some evidence of movement in the right direction, some indication that the problems are honestly acknowledged and that efforts to solve them are finally commencing.

About the Author

Chester E. Finn, Jr., is Professor of Education and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Education Excellence Network. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies and serves as a consultant to Secretary of Education, Lamar Alexander. He has assisted the Bush Administration with the planning of the America 2000 education strategy. Dr. Finn serves on the President's Education Policy Advisory Committee, the National Council on Standards and Testing, and the National Assessment Governing Board. He is also President of the Madison Center for Educational Affairs and an Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute. The Author of more than 150 articles in magazines and journals, Dr. Finn has also written the books We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future, Scholars Dollars and Bureaucrats, What Do Our 17 Year-Olds Know? with Diane Ravitch, and Challenges to the Humanities with Ravitch and P. Holley Roberts.