Do Regional Publics Know Their Product? (opinion)

While institutions of higher education have in recent months been incessantly targeted from without, it is also important for universities’ long-term health that we consider what has been going on within them. Often, the national conversation disproportionately focuses on Ivy League institutions—what one famous professor recently referred to as “Harvard Derangement Syndrome”—but if we want to understand what the vast majority of American college students experience, we must look at the regional public universities (RPUs) that are “the workhorses of public higher education.”

According to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, roughly 70 percent of all U.S. undergraduates enrolled at public four-year institutions attend RPUs. Yet declining enrollments and years of austerity measures have left these workhorse universities particularly vulnerable. Writing about the difficult financial decisions many of these campuses have already made, Lee Gardner warns that “if many regional colleges cut at this point, they risk becoming very different institutions.”

But those who work at regional public universities will tell you that they are already very different institutions. Rarely, however, have these transformations been the subject or result of open campus discussion and debate. Often, they are not even publicly declared by the administrations spearheading these shifts, though it’s not always clear if that is by design or because administrators are unclear about their own priorities. An unsettling likelihood is that we no longer know what these workhorse universities should be working toward.

My own regional college is part of the State University of New York system, which, as political scientist and SUNY Cortland professor Henry Steck argues, has always struggled to define its mission and purpose. “From its earliest days,” writes Steck, “SUNY’s history has been characterized not simply by the recurrent challenges of growth and financing, but by a more profound disagreement over what higher education means to New Yorkers.”

As a result, the SUNY system “has yet to discover or resolve its full identity,” which, today, is torn between three “disparate visions” that emerged in the latter half of the 20th century: the civic-minded vision of 1950s university leader Thomas Hamilton, who emphasized the cultivation of intellectual, scientific and artistic excellence through broadly accessible liberal learning; a utilitarian vision that, beginning in the 1980s, stressed the economic importance of graduate research and professional education; and the neoliberal ethos of a 1995 trustees’ report entitled “Rethinking SUNY” that encouraged both greater efficiency and more campus autonomy to boost competition between institutions in the system.

One can perceive all three visions overlapping in complex ways in my own campus’s mission statement, which emphasizes “outstanding liberal arts and pre-professional programs” designed to prepare students “for their professional and civic futures.” But day-to-day realities reveal a notable imbalance among those aims. Recent years have seen a substantial scaling back of liberal arts programs, particularly in the humanities. In 2022, our philosophy major was deactivated despite overwhelming opposition from the Faculty Senate.

In 2020, my own department (English) had 14 full-time faculty; this coming fall, it will have just six. Meanwhile, there has been an ever-increasing emphasis on pre-professional majors and a borderline obsession with microcredentials, allegedly designed to excite future employers. Lip service is still paid, on occasion, to the importance of the liberal arts, particularly in recent months as federal overreach has prompted colleges to reaffirm the responsibility they have, as my own president put it in a campuswide email, “to prepare students for meaningful lives as engaged citizens.” But without robustly supported humanistic disciplines—and especially without a philosophy department—how are we to teach students what a “meaningful life” is or what engaged citizenship in a democratic culture truly entails?

To state the problem more openly in the language of business so familiar to college administrators: It’s not just that we do not have a coherent and compelling vision; it’s that we have no idea what our product is anymore. On my own campus, administrators tend to think the issue is simply a marketing problem. It is our task as a department, we are told, to spread the word about the English major and recruit new students. In many ways, this is right: Universities and the disciplines that constitute them have not been great at telling their story or communicating their value to the public or even to the students on their campuses.

But the issue goes much deeper. “Remarkable marketing,” writes marketing expert Seth Godin, “is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn’t remarkable, it’s invisible.” Godin calls these remarkable products “purple cows” (which are clearly unlike other cows).

Yet to the extent that conversations on my campus have been oriented toward a product at all, it rarely concerns the nuts-and-bolts dynamic of liberal learning that happens in the humanities classroom—that is, the rigorous intellectual journey faculty should be leading students on, taking them outside themselves (and their comfort zones) and into the broader world of ideas, histories and frameworks for making sense of human experience. Instead, the focus has shifted, not simply to inculcating skills, but more significantly to the immense institutional apparatus comprised of therapists, advisers, technology specialists and other paraprofessional support systems.

Put another way, because there seems to be massive uncertainty about the nature of the higher education classroom, what we end up marketing to prospective students and their parents, wittingly or unwittingly, is an array of services for “managing” the classroom and helping students transact the business of completing a degree or assembling one’s microcredentials on the way to employment.

The result is a highly technocratic conception of the university and a fiercely transactional notion of higher education that flattens virtually everyone’s sense of what should transpire in the college classroom and which redistributes professional authority away from faculty and toward various administrators and academic support personnel—a shift that Benjamin Ginsberg has astutely documented.

Faculty, meanwhile, are constantly implored, often by academic support staff who have never taught a class, to “innovate” in their methods and materials, “as though,” retorts Gayle Green, “we weren’t ‘innovating’ all the time, trying new angles, testing what works, seeing if we can make it better, always starting over, every day, a whole new show.” It’s a world of learning management systems (aptly titled to emphasize “management”), learning centers (as if the classroom were a peripheral element of college life), “student success” dashboards, degree-tracking software and what Jerry Z. Muller calls a “tyrannical” preoccupation with data and metrics, which serve as the simplified benchmarks through which educational progress and value are measured.

And while, as Greene’s book highlights, this approach to higher education has permeated every university to some extent, what is unique to my campus—and, I suspect, to other cash-strapped RPUs fighting to stay relevant and competitive—is the fervent extent to which we have embraced this technocratic approach and allowed it to dominate our sense of purpose.

To be clear, I am in no way opposed to robustly supporting student success in the multitudinous ways a university must these days. I routinely invite learning center specialists into my classrooms, I refer students to the advising or counseling centers, and I have worked with our accessibility office to ensure my supplementary course materials meet all students’ needs. What concerns me is the lack of substantive, broad-ranging discussion about what terms like “student success” or “student-centered education” even mean, and the dearth of guidance from administrators about how the various campus constituencies should work together to achieve them. That guidance would require a much clearer and more well-communicated vision of what our ultimate purpose—and product—is.

As much as I admire Godin’s mindful emphasis on “building things worth noticing right into your product or service,” I wonder if some core element of the liberal learning that resides at the heart of higher education is a product that can’t be endlessly innovated. What if higher education is a product similar to, say, the process of drawing heat or energy from a natural resource such as firewood or sunlight? Yes, we can refine these processes to a great extent by building energy-efficient woodstoves to capture more heat from each log or solar panels and storage devices to wrest more energy from every beam of light. But eventually there will be diminishing returns for our efforts, and some so-called improvements may simply be cosmetic changes that really have nothing to do with—or may even detract from—the process of heat or energy extraction, which, at its foundation, simply entails intimate contact with these distinctly unchanging natural elements.

Etymologically, this is precisely what “education” means—to educe or draw forth something hidden or latent. And as silly as the above analogy may sound, it is precisely the metaphor that philosophers and writers have used since the classical era to conceptualize the very nature of education. In The Republic, Plato likens “the natural power to learn” to the process of “turning the soul” away from reflections projected on a cave wall (mere representations of reality) and leading oneself out from the cave and into the sunlight of truth.

Closer to our own time and place, Ralph Waldo Emerson professed in “The American Scholar” that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”

“Forget this,” he warned, “and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.”

But it was W. E. B. Du Bois who, arguing for racial equality roughly six decades later, brought these ideas together in one of their most radical forms, forever giving all American universities something to aspire to. In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois, drawing on the education-as-heat-extraction metaphor to evoke the immense powers of learning, posited that “to stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires.” And his paean to the college classroom is remarkable for its emphasis on the university’s spartan but enduring methods:

This is a vision of education almost perfectly designed to baffle today’s educational reformers or RPU administrators, not simply for its attitude toward innovative “time-saving devices,” but for the fact that Du Bois was advocating this approach—one more akin to those found at wealthy liberal arts schools these days—for Black individuals in the Jim Crow South in contrast to the more trade-focused vision of his contemporary, Booker T. Washington.

Washington’s vision has clearly triumphed in RPUs, where the humanistic learning that Du Bois writes so passionately about has been dying out and, in the years ahead, will likely be relegated to the spiritless distributional requirements of the general education curriculum. As Eric Adler has admirably written, such an approach further shifts responsibility for meaningful curricula away from faculty judgment and toward student fancy and choice.

So, too, does it marginalize—that is, reduce to a check-box icon in a degree-tracking tool—the emphasis on “soul-crafting” that takes place, as Du Bois well knew, when students persistently grapple with life’s biggest questions. “By denying to all but privileged undergraduates the opportunity to shape their souls,” Adler argues, “vocationalists implicitly broadcast their elitism.”

That very elitism was broadcast at my own university when an administrator suggested in a conversation with me that our students often work full-time and thus are not as focused on exploring big questions or reading difficult texts. When I pushed back, asserting that my classroom experience had demonstrated that our students were indeed hungry to read the serious literary and philosophical texts that can help them explore questions of meaning and value, the administrator immediately apologized for being presumptuous. Nevertheless, the elitism was broadcast.

If RPUs are serious about the civic ideals they have once again begun to champion in response to potential government overreach, then they need to re-evaluate the overall educational product they are offering and redirect autonomy and respect back toward the faculty—particularly the humanistic faculty—who are best poised to educate students in the kinds of “soul-crafting” that are essential to a well-lived life in a thriving democratic society.

There have been many calls to revive civics education in the United States, but no civics education will be complete without cultivating the broader humanistic knowledge and imaginative capabilities that are essential to daily life in a liberal democracy. Literature, philosophy, history, art—all are vital for helping us understand not only ourselves but also the ideas, beliefs and experiences of other individuals with whom we must share a political world and with whom we often disagree. Such an endeavor may seem rather basic and perhaps old-fashioned. But anyone who has taught at the college level knows it is an immensely complex undertaking. It is already a purple cow.