Measuring Success in Inefficiency

This post started as a reply to the discussion thread on Savannah's May 29 post, but quickly got out of hand, so now it's my own post. :-)  One of the things I wanted to talk about in summing up last week's reading is education, especially given so many of your stories and comments. (I actually assigned Robinson as an example of design -- his critique of the design of our education system based on a failure to understand that an 1800s system is not designed to meet our current circumstances, and is only allowed to continue because we are so busy doing unto others what was done unto us when we were in school. My point was design, but since we're in the talk about the system being critiqued, well, I have a few opinions about that too. ;-) )  So this has turned into an opening salvo in something like Phaedrus's "Church of Reason" lecture. 


It just makes me heartsick to hear experiences like you guys are recounting here -- it's unconscionable that anyone in university employ would do their job such as to make students feel like burdens or to feel untaught. I wish I could assert with evidence that your experiences are unusual; I can't, and in my gut I don't know *what* the norm is for student experiences with faculty. 

What is doubly frustrating about it to me (a different frustration than those of you whose educations are directly affected by it) is that the university system I love is so capable of giving students who seek it superb experiences (for tons of examples just read the university's news page), and yet so often that capability seems to be untapped and wasted. We have in these places an incredible opportunity for students to work with faculty on subjects of their passion, and (frankly) for faculty to help students gain passion for subjects they're initially not engaged with. We waste so much opportunity when faculty act as you describe. I too know faculty to whom students are clearly a bother, and I want to wring their necks for their misuse of their privilege to be in this place and have you people to work with. 


With tales like yours, it's no surprise that there's so much pressure for "reform" on universities. But think with me on this -- I don't want to argue against any of you wishing for better experiences, so the following screed is not an attack on your dissatisfactions. Rather, I think if you look, you'll see that what you dislike will only get more common if we further than we already are start treating universities as businesses. I think the problems you encounter come from us acting too much like a business already, rather than not enough like one. I want to throw in an oar for, no, a university is NOT a business unless it's made to be one -- and then it's a business and not a university anymore. 


To support the last clause first, I give you University of Phoenix, the factory of higher education. Its measure of success isn't learning but efficiency. (In case you hadn't noticed yet in your life, learning isn't efficient and can't too well be made so. There's too much "no, not that way, try it again" involved.) The job taken on by Phoenix isn't what university classically handle -- the development and dissemination of thoroughly studied and tested knowledge -- but rather the pre-packaging of relatively pointless information optimized to the attainment of degrees. In a hurry. With as little human interaction as possible. Wait ... that sounds like exactly what you're complaining about here already. Difference is, at Phoenix and similar (or worse) for-profits, it's not a breach of trust -- it's the way the system is designed.


Put the profit motive in higher education and you get assembly lines for humans. Period. (The irony doesn't escape me that in lower levels of education the exact opposite is true: the assembly lines are public and the place to be treated as an individual are in privates.) And you damn sure don't get any new knowledge formed. From DeVry (perfectly good for technical education in knowledge that has long since been standardized and could be taught in a decent high school if we had any of those in this country) to Phoenix (sufficient for what it is but pretty much taking the "higher" out of "higher ed"), when education goes for profit, the teachers aren't learners and discovers anymore -- they're lecturers. Ironically enough, the adjunct model of bringing in non-teaching professionals and paying them a pittance to lecture to a class -- precisely what Kevin cites experiencing -- is *the standard business model* at for-profits, not the poor-final-option it is at MSU when the state won't fund hiring a needed full-time teacher who might have some loyalty to the institution, concern for the students, and incentive to do good work so as to be kept on in a very hard-to-get job.


(I know the obvious counterpoints that a) it's getting awfully common at MSU too, particularly in certain professional colleges, and that b) plenty of full-time, tenure/able faculty are equally guilty. I hope not as many, but I don't have stats on that.)


So, why *aren't* universities businesses? Because they cannot be made efficient or profitable given the intellectual work that they do. They depend on failure to get their work done, and failure is expensive, inefficient, and slow. It is not good for shareholders. It is not good for stock prices. They depend on vast amounts of time for innovations to be conceived, tested, modified, tested, published, repeated at other institutions across the world, modified, retested and repeated and republished, until you've got something worth knowing. Virtually every major corporate lab in the U.S. from the 20th century has been shut down or spun off because that process just cost too much for shareholders -- with their demands for instant profits -- to stomach. (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) It takes YEARS to highly educate human beings, and it can't be assembly-lined because the damn things insist on being *individuals*.  When you rightly complain about the bureaucracy you encounter at MSU, what is actually the problem?  A one-size-fits-all inhuman process that is trying to treat you like a business. 


(My claim that higher-ed can't be profitable and still do what it does is highly arguable. Please feel free to argue back. Maybe you'll hit on a way of making it so -- we just don't have one yet. By the way, "private" does not mean "business" or for-profit -- most private college and universities in the U.S. are not-for-profit.  Especially the ones you've heard of!)


So: most of what you know and experience in your modern world is a result of university basic-research that was expensive, slow, and inefficient. It is a result of professors who are paid to sit on their asses and think (think so hard it's literally physically exhausting); and it is the result of students who haven't showed up for just "the information" but instead to grapple with ideas too big for them to understand immediately, and in doing that grappling, to in fact discover things their profs hadn't known yet. I share your criticisms of faculty who get in the way of this by failing to invest in their students, or trust them, or credit them with being smart and having something to contribute, or who give their students no time and basically say "teach thyselves!"  (To the extent online courses make me uncomfortable, it's because it feels like too much "teach theyself!" is going down.)


Students who really, truly want not to have to think, but rather to be given a dumbed-down book, not talked to, and take a quick series of tests to prove you can find information a book, just like we all learned to do in 8th grade, should want to make college a business. Or, at that point, eliminate it altogether, because we could get the same thing from wikipedia, as long as we don't ever expect to be able to actually edit it.

I think when it sounds like students want that, in most cases it's because we faculty have failed to offer them anything better, so they look at what they're getting and say, "Why aren't I signed up at University of Phoenix?"


But here, I think, is my bottom line. I don't need to imagine or treat you guys like "customers" in order to do my job well -- "my job" being to do right by you and to make your brains pop loose in wonder at the new ideas -- and I don't need to make a profit and I don't need shareholders pressing for a profit . I am not offering you a product, or a service, that you are purchasing. You and I, we are sharing an experience that, if it goes as I'm meant to ensure it does, will change the way you think and plant seeds that none of us know right now what they'll grow into. You in turn are changing the way I think, because you're noticing things I don't and calling my attention to other aspects of our experience than I'm used to seeing. Together we are investing tremendous amounts of time in something intangible and untraceable: ideas and ways of thinking. We are sojourners and wonderers in a land none of us fully understand, and our job together is to understand it more. That's what I'm here for, and that's what I wish you were here for, because frankly, you don't need me or MSU for anything else. Anything else, you could be getting somewhere else cheaper and quicker. What I'm asserting, of course, is that what I'm here for and what I wish you were here for is vastly more valuable. 


Us, getting to wonder together, that's worth the price of admission (you guys) or getting paid 50% of corporate market value for a doctoral degree (me). It is all about this experience. And it does kill me inside to hear of times when your experience is not that, but rather being walked away from by your faculty. My desire for reform would be, let's only have faculty who understand the nature of university work as more than research and more than lecturing but rather some amazing combination of both in which students are fellow travelers. That'd be worth the money, and if we can't achieve it, we might as well close our doors.