Among the many things that drive me completely crazy about discourse in higher education is the mythologizing about “the olden days”. You know, before “neoliberalism” came along, and research was non-instrumental, people “valued knowledge for its own sake”, classes were tiny, and managers were things that happened to other people.
Whenever I hear this kind of thinking, part of me wants to say “and when was this again?” But that’s a bit flip: there is some truth to each of these claims of former idyll. However, each needs to come with a caveat because it either wasn’t quite as good as it seems in retrospect, or it was abandoned for some pretty good reasons.
Start with research. Yes, there was a time when research came with a lot fewer forms (major paperwork really began in the 1990s, so far as I can tell) and demands to demonstrate short-term relevance were not quite so prominent. But back then there was also a *lot* less money for research, and tenure standards didn’t demand quite so much of it. Less money, but less research needed for career requirements. And, I might add, significantly higher expectations with respect to teaching loads.
As for the days when people “valued knowledge for its own sake”? This is a favourite of people who disdain – not entirely without reason – the continuing drift towards professional fields of study, and prefer classic (usually liberal) education. And yes, there were olden days – say, up until the early 1970s – where this was true.
But the professionalization of curriculum was, for the most part, a reaction to massification. It became pretty clear in the early 1970s that there weren’t unlimited jobs for arts graduates. And since the whole point of massification was to provide more routes into the upper middle class, a lot of people – including students themselves – began demanding programs that were more applied. In a very real way the “valuing knowledge for its own sake” thing was only possible because rates of access were about a quarter of what they are now. If we had the chance to make that decision again, does anyone really think we should make it differently?
Same thing – to a degree – about managerialism. If you read books like Peter Kent’s Inventing Academic Freedom, which provides an interesting picture of a Canadian campus in the late 1960s (and which I reviewed back here), you’ll see that in the late ’60s there was virtually none of the managerial infrastructure that now exists. Of particular note is the degree to which academics themselves took on pastoral roles on campus. But precisely because of: a) massification, and b) increased research load, profs simply opted out of these types of roles in the 1970s and 1980s, and loaded the work onto a new, largely professional student services system.
A final point to make about the halcyon days: professors really didn’t get paid anywhere near as well as they do today. If you go back to the 1950s or 1960s, academics’ pay was much closer to the national median. Compare that to now, where making associate prof pretty much automatically puts someone in the top 5% of individual income distribution. Ironically, part of the reason for this is that the arrival of all those widely- derided “administrators” relieved professors of their “non-academic” duties, which made the professoriate itself more of a “profession”, which was a key in achieving higher pay.
So yes, there were some halcyon days – for some, at least. But they existed partially because access was restricted, pay was low, and teaching loads were high. Now, hands up: who would trade yesterday for today?
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I agree with your general description of the transformation in our universities over the past forty years, but I wonder if this change happened uniformly in all parts of the academy. Disciplines such as physics, philosophy, mathematics, the experimental sciences, and those subjects where there is a high premium on analytical rigor seem to have changed less during this period than other disciplines, some of which, of course, were created as a response to the “massification” of universities that you describe. (The disciplines I mentioned are also the ones that, notoriously, are having enrolment problems these days.) General trends are very important, but I am struck by how little some parts of our universities these days resemble other parts, especially with all of the internal barriers to entry. Some departments are trying to preserve the old standards at the level of graduate studies, but, it seems, with mixed results.
I think the comment that this has happened at different speeds in different parts of the university is almost certainly correct.
Well, I might make the trade. Pay would be less, but so would the pressures and, more importantly, the perverse effects of the pressures. In any case, nobody is really offering it to me.
Your post implies, but does not directly state, two things:
1. Nostalgia (like utopianism) is a statement of ideals and principles. There may not have been a time when monks were all religious, holy men, but every reform movement in the monasteries harked back to such a time. Similarly, there may not have been a time when we all just pursued ideas for their own sakes, but it’s our ideal, our sense of what a university is in principle and ought to be in fact. And this is a beautiful ideal, one for which it is worthwhile to fight.
2. Many of these changes derive from an increasing bureaucratization. People like to blame neo-liberalism, but the movement is more towards the heavily government-controlled educational systems of France or (more darkly) Soviet Russia, where education had the instrumental function of producing cadres for the economy, the army, and the party.
Partly this bureaucratization and instrumentalism is a product of massification, but there’s an irony to massification that everyone seems to miss. It’s inspired by the notion that a university education is worthwhile, but it then functions to undermine university education, to turn it into something else, a sort of job training or perhaps citizen preparation. Hence, our repeated return to a lost golden age, as a statement of our desire for precisely what the champions of massification wished to share more broadly.
BTW, today’s Chronicle has an article you might enjoy, on how we speak at cross-purposes on change in higher ed. It also deals, as I think your post does, with problems in the language we use to try to discuss these things: http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Can-t-We-Have-More/234969?cid=trend_right_h
Yours,
SKL
Interesting points. I guess my response would be partly “what a university is/should be” has always been a) variable across the university, mainly by field of study and b) contested so I’m less certain about something *specific* having been lost. But I take your general point about it being an expression of ideals.
I think another area worth exploring would have to do with the extent to which universities themselves led this process. I mean, presumably there was a point where universities could have said – no good, we’re getting off this train. They didn’t. Why?
I hadn’t seen the chronicle piece – thanks for that!
Why didn’t universities get off the enlargement/professionalization bandwagon?
One is tempted to point to the many reasons why figures in history or literature enter in Faustian pacts. More seriously, I think it’s because while, as you point out, the question of what a university should be is contested, nobody actually debates it. We don’t have the philosophical and historical debate about what we ought to be, and so we simply defer to market demand. There’s no dramatic ceremony involving signing in blood, just a spreading apathy.
Secondly, without asking what universities are and ought to be, everyone assumes them to be good. And of course they’re right: everyone deserves the opportunities offered by a university education. If those opportunities don’t include the opportunity to study literature or science as ends in themselves, however, then they’re quite attenuated. This is the irony of massification which I pointed to earlier.