The Chronicle:
POINT OF VIEW
The Power of Academic Citizenship
By MILTON GREENBERG
American colleges and universities prepare a large proportion of the leaders and major participants in the worlds of business, industry, government, and the learned professions but do little to prepare their own faculty members (and eventual administrators) for the world of higher education. This reflects the academy’s well-honed sense of dread at the idea that higher education is part of the world at all. One of the academy’s core values is institutional autonomy, treasured as an enclave free of political and economic concerns. In many cases, faculty members can barely see beyond their own discipline or narrow specialization, viewing even that as independent of their own campus issues. The time and place to change this pattern are in the preparation of the professoriate and through the provision of professional outlets for faculty members’ continued development as academic citizens.
Unfortunately a major professional outlet, the American Association for Higher Education, announced last year that it was closing after more than 40 years of service. While most associations are based on institutional membership representing specific sectors or limited professional interests, the AAHE was unique as a major individual membership organization whose programs, projects, and publications attracted faculty members, administrators, government bureaucrats, think-tank scholars, and association leaders from every sector of higher education. Their meetings directed attention to the professoriate as a core national enterprise with shared professional interests and obligations irrespective of academic disciplines or institutional rankings. Together members studied and talked about teaching, student life, general education, and the academy’s responsibility to a changing nation and world.
The AAHE played a leading role in virtually all major recent reforms of the academy, giving rise to the idea that we need to take teaching seriously, to be concerned not only with what was taught but with what is being learned, to explore faculty roles and rewards with emphasis upon student achievement, and to establish public trust in higher education’s effectiveness. The announcement of the AAHE’s closing noted that for several years it had experienced a decline of revenues from membership and conferences. That the AAHE could not recruit adequate numbers of members or attract sufficient numbers of participants to its unusual conferences while the size and influence of higher education have exploded says a lot about our profession, and the message is disturbing.
That message is that an insufficient number of faculty members (as well as many midlevel administrators) know or care about issues facing higher education. It often takes the simple form of frequently expressed negative feelings by faculty members to the effect that “our university is unappreciated by political leaders or by potential financial supporters; our working conditions are poorer than at good universities; our leaders are incompetent and think like corporate hacks.” These kinds of complaints emerge largely out of ignorance of the condition of higher education and partly out of fantasies about life in the Ivy League and flagship graduate schools. It is easier to view professional problems as reflections of single campus defects and poor leadership independent of national issues affecting higher education.
American higher education is declining in the international competitiveness race while expending almost all of its energy on a domestic internecine prestige war among institutions, which only exacerbates a range of problems from financial aid to social mobility. The academy’s response to every issue appears to be “we need more money” rather than “let us see how we can harness the enormous resources we have in human capital to address identified national educational issues.”
The American Council on Education and other associations have started a campaign to win public understanding of and support for higher education, but some of that energy might better be directed to winning faculty understanding. The faculty controls the academic agenda through which positive reform rather than defensive postures can be achieved. To put it another way, if the faculty believes, as it does, that it must have a say in most universitywide policies, then it behooves professors to have more than a passing acquaintance with the issues that affect the well-being and the responsibilities of higher education broadly conceived.
This issue is made all the more urgent as American higher education is caught in an unparalleled environment in which traditional political partisanship has affected issues such as academic freedom, student access, and international competition. The prolonged and contentious debates over renewal of the Higher Education Act by Congress as well as the Senate inquiry into the governance and financial operations of the nonprofit sector reflect the intensity with which higher-education issues affect the broad spectrum of American life. In many states, legislatures hover over financial and governance issues at colleges and universities, and public universities are already being held to account for graduation rates, job placement, and other measures. These events are inevitable for a sector of society that has such a vast impact upon the lives and fortunes of the voting public — and they will not abate.
The faculty constitutes a huge national resource, a virtual army of about a million people whose voices can be enormously effective in explaining the fluctuating missions of higher education and the diversity of institutional types. They can also convey the impact of national educational issues pertaining to population changes, financial aid, decreasing state support, skyrocketing tuition, athletic excesses, research policies, competition from for-profit education, accreditation, and technology.
How can we MEET this need to educate and enlist the support of faculty members? The process is deceptively simple. Doctoral training for faculty positions has long concentrated on research skills with sparse attention to the other facets of university life and obligations. Only in the last decade or so has any serious nationwide effort been undertaken to prepare doctoral students for the other responsibilities that most will undertake as faculty members. Through such projects as “Preparing Future Faculty,” a joint undertaking of the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council of Graduate Schools, and the University of Washington’s program on “Re-envisioning the Ph.D,” most major graduate programs have added a teacher-training dimension for their students. Increasingly those programs have been extended to include discussion of professional issues such as tenure, service, consulting, and publishing. Most universities now offer centers for teaching assistance to all faculty members, young and old. Sessions on teaching and professional life are now part of national disciplinary conventions. It took a long time to reach this point.
Still missing from most faculty preparation and professional development is the place of higher education in the nation and the world, the underlying and pervasive social issues that affect it, and the great potential of the power of academic citizenship.
We can begin by adding the subject of higher education per se to the various doctoral training programs that are under way. I recently gave a talk on contemporary issues in higher education to a group of doctoral students in a teacher-training seminar whose questions revealed an understanding that their own careers are likely to be affected by change and a concern with how they might contribute to some needed reforms. I believe that a substantial amount of interest in such issues exists on most campuses, but that interest is easily diminished by neglect and other pressures of academic life. At the very least, future faculty members must be aware that, because of the enormous diversity of American campus life and the politicization of the academy, the kind of professional life they will lead will differ from that of the faculty generation now dominant in the academy.
Arrangements can easily be made for campuswide discussion of higher-education issues through the regular forums for campus discourse. Presidents and provosts who frequently address the faculty should use the opportunity to put campus issues in broader context. College retreats or mini-conferences for deans and department heads dedicated to discussion of national educational issues featuring guest speakers can be salutary in discussion of universitywide matters. Faculty senates and departmental or college meetings of faculty members can and should from time to time discuss “how do these national issues affect us and what are we doing about it, alone or in concert with other institutions?”
The abundant literature on higher education can be made conveniently available on the campus. Many campus units, for example, subscribe to The Chronicle and circulate it among department members, but now the entire campus can be given online access to The Chronicle through a site license. The major higher-education associations have magazines for their members, which could be acquired for departmental reading rooms, while libraries could exhibit periodic special displays of these publications.
National and regional meetings of professional disciplines now often feature sessions on teaching. Why not hold sessions on how national educational issues affect specific disciplines and how faculty members can clarify issues requiring cooperative endeavors among several institutions?
Most important, the spirit of the AAHE’s work can and should continue. Other major higher-education associations should take on the responsibility of engaging more faculty members in their programs. That would not only strengthen the academy broadly but also give additional support to the missions and political lobbying activities of the associations. (A quick guide to the 50 Washington, D.C.-based higher-education power centers may be found at http://www.whes.org.)
None of these suggestions is extraordinary, but recall that not too long ago we believed that teaching could not or need not be taught. We have shown that to be a false premise and relatively easily remedied. I suggest that future faculty members will react favorably to efforts to bring them into the big-stakes game of serving the higher-education needs of the American people.
Milton Greenberg is a professor emeritus of government at American University, where he served as provost and interim president.
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 52, Issue 22, Page B20
