The Big U is good for you (maybe)
By Richard D. Erlich
There is currently a debate going on in The Miami Student (Oxford, Ohio) over Miami's becoming more fully a research university, and various professors have argued well both pro and con. I'd like to extend the argument with a discussion of the advantages of what I'll call "the Big U Model for higher education."
I draw here on the work of Murray Sperber in Beer and Circus (2000), Michael Moffatt in Coming of Age in New Jersey (1989), and my own informal research at Miami at Oxford, Ohio, in the mid-1980s.
Briefly, the Big U -- the large, public research university -- works.
You should now ask, "Works for whom, and to what ends?" The system works for employers, the university as an institution, established faculty, and for most students.
It does not work particularly well to educate on an advanced level large numbers of Americans; but, as an old joke has it, "Most jobs require only a decent high-school education, which is why employers require college degrees." For employers, any system works that certifies potential employees who are able to work their ways through complex bureaucracies. A college degree does that, certifying graduates have "satisfied in full the requirements for the degree of" whatever, and are therefore people who can show up fairly regularly, follow orders, and get a job finished more or less on time.
For the university as an institution, in part a business operation, there is this from a former Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs: "The purpose of Miami University is to process the maximum number of students in the most cost-efficient manner." For cost-effectiveness, that VP and economist insisted on "maintaining the value of the Miami degree as a piece of social currency": i.e., our degrees had to certify enough competence to make them exchangeable for a chance at a good job.
Since the 1980s, add to necessities for the university as business "The Three Rs" of Recruitment, Retention, and Renewal: Bring them to your school, keep them there, send them out happy and ready to contribute money ("renewal"). Which brings us to students and faculty.
Students are and should be attracted by the status of universities, and that status rests to a large extent on an impressive faculty in terms of impressive published research. If that research takes time and emphasis away from undergraduate education, well, research still serves the interests of many faculty members, whose personal status is increased by well-received research more than by teaching. And less faculty attention to teaching and to undergraduate students may not be altogether negative for students in terms of the desires of students.
Murray Sperber suggests revising somewhat and recycling an old "taxonomy," yielding for students the subcultures Collegiate, Academic, Vocational, and Rebel (3-11). We can discount "Rebel" for most schools, and note that high percentages of undergrads desire most what has been politely called "The full collegiate experience" and less politely called--in titles from two of my students--"College: Half-Way House to Adulthood" and "College: The Four-Year Vacation."
Some Miami students are very serious about school; I found about one-third of our students work hard. Far more students want College! ("The Four-Year Vacation") plus the "paper": a degree with a decent transcript as "social currency."
Michael Moffatt handles such issues in his comments on the 1968 sociological work, Making the Grade: The Academic Side of College Life: "Three sociologists have written an excellent ethnography of the grading process at the University of Kansas based on research in the late 1950s that proves that the pragmatics of 'making the grade' came first for almost all the students and that substantial intellectual understandings of the material they were learning came a distant, optional second." Moffatt's more recent study of Rutgers undergrads showed the same result, and he wonders, given the institutional system, "why three otherwise intelligent sociologists should have expected" anything else (287).
Most students are Collegiate and/or Vocational and in college for College! and for the "paper"; for those whose primary goal is academic, there are Honors and other small programs, such as Miami's Western College Program.
High-quality, published research improves the reputation of a university, hence improves the value of its "paper"; and the Big U Model serves "Collegiate" goals.
Emphasis upon research requires freeing faculty time for that research, which in turn means--money always being short--many classes taught in a cost-efficient manner: large lectures with machine-graded exams.
"When thinking about formal learning," Moffatt notes at Rutgers, "the students clearly disliked the herd approach to higher education. In other ways, however, this aspect of academia contributed to the students' freedom and autonomy in college." Moffatt sums up, "You could, in other words, take it very easy indeed in the Rutgers classroom in the 1980s if you so desired. Or you could pace yourself exactly as you liked. And so the students did" (292-93), in many cases freeing up time for Collegiate social life.
Unlike training, about all education is good for is helping people become well-informed critical thinkers, capable of citizenship in a Republic. So one can attack the Big U for not earning its keep as a support of the Republic and the life of the mind. But to do so is to speak a language foreign to important constituencies for which the Big U works just fine.
Richard D. Erlich has taught at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) since 1971.
Sources
Erlich, Richard D. "It's Time to Rethink How Colleges Are Financed." The Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Dec. 1985. Rpt. in Points of View on American Higher Education. Ed. Stephen H. Barnes. Vol. 2. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1990. 56-60.
---. "Rethink College Financing." The Plain Dealer 10 Apr. 1985: 2B.
Moffatt, Michael. Coming of Age in New Jersey: College and American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989.
Sperber, Murray. Beer and Circus (How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education). New York: Holt, 2000.
