Names, names, names – So and-So and So-and-So of This-and-That University and Such-and-Such Academic or Political Connection. After a while, you can’t tell the players in the Texas higher education debate without a program in hand.
“Debate,” I said? That’s a good one. There’s hardly any debate at all concerning means and ends when it comes to fitting Texas colleges and universities for life in the 21st century.
Most of the news we hear, to the extent we’re paying attention, sidesteps ideas to get on to the power question: Who’s jabbing whom, or wants to? Who’s pulling whose strings? What are the actual “agendas”?
A lot of valuable time is going to waste. Power – admittedly an old-fashioned, human-type concern – isn’t the main question deserving of display.
More consequential questions have to do with accessibility and cost – are our state’s public universities available to the great bulk of those who want to attend? You have to wonder as the tuition at the University of Texas-Austin is 80 percent higher than in the 2000-2001 school year with total cost per full-time enrolled student increasing from $21,251 in 1980 to $36,769 in 2008.
Yet there’s still more to talk about such as the balance between teaching and research. Is it still the job, indeed the duty, of top professors to engage the minds and mold the character of their students? If not, who’s going to do so?
And do we need new research universities? For what kinds of research? Should as many young people as possible obtain university degrees, or at least have the chance?
Many are the challenges inherent in training and maintaining the kind of skilled work force that sustain Texas prosperity. Aren’t such challenges a very big deal? If not, how would we define a big deal? Would the definition need to center on political mayhem and backstage relationships?
Such questions matter intensely, but they no more than scratch, in proverbial fashion, the surface of the immense question that encases all subsidiary questions.
To wit, what does a state deserve from its system of public higher education? What should such a system do? How will the general, taxpaying public know when the universities operating in its name are doing what they ought to do? Are they even entitled to know?
A little adult supervision would help provide some focus, by the messengers and bearers of news and views, on the essentials of a higher education debate worth having, in which ideas, rather than names, rise to the surface of public attention. Might that not be enough to get a constructive discussion going?
The media’s once-warm fascination with the relationship between particular universities and their supposed critics has now partly evaporated. Rather, politics and power became the focus. It was too essential, apparently, from a general entertainment standpoint to focus on alleged struggles over who was in charge of this particular show.
Sad. Very sad. We can’t lose many more opportunities of this character. The challenges facing academia won’t wait.
Last month, Sandra Day O’Connor, who has dedicated her post-U.S. Supreme Court career to the advancement of civics education, lamented that fewer than half of American eighth graders know the meaning of the Bill of Rights. Imagine the effects on colleges and universities when this crowd hits campus. Remedial education, here we come!
One “Professor X,” in a brand-new book In the Basement of the Ivory Tower, suggests that the whole academic enterprise is clouded by the reality that underqualifed college students are accumulating debt loads out of all proportion to anticipated returns on their diplomas – assuming they receive diplomas instead of just walking away.
The structure, the mission, and the tools of academia cry out for adjustment, refocus, and enhancement. We get instead the politics of the thing. It’s a start, perhaps, on a long, long journey to something – one can hope – better and more constructive.
William Murchison is a Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin.