Throwback

Jambo! From Nairobi, where I’m spending the next couple of days. I’ve had some long plane flights to get here, and Lufthansa inexplicably hasn’t worked out how to put power chargers in economy seats, so I’ve been doing some re-reading of obscure texts. I want to tell you today about one piece, called Universities Under Scrutiny. Published by the OECD in 1987 it’s very, well…familiar.

Let’s start with this quote from the OECD’s Intergovernmental Conference on Policies for Higher Education in 1981:

“It was clear throughout the discussions in the Conference that the crisis of higher education is not merely one of public confidence vis a vis the performance of higher education; it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, an internal crisis of purpose, that is, one which touches of the very nature of individual institutions, their roles and functions and their place in the total higher education system.  In this a reappraisal of the special position of the university appeared as crucial.”

It turns out, reading this book, that in the mid-80s, some of the main issues facing universities and governments were:

• Funding
• Loss of clarity about Institutional Mission and Purpose
• The significance of changes in clientele (my God!  Women!)
• Curricular structures and balance (basically, how vocationally and technologically oriented should programs be?
• The place of universities in the national research effort, and in particular to technology transfer, contributing to industrial competitiveness and regional development
• The aging of the academic profession and how it can adapt to new conditions and demands
• Quality, efficiency, and effectiveness

Also, apparently, “there have been particular anxieties about the decline in some countries in the proportion of students majoring in the humanities” (p.45) and “in some systems, too large a proportion of undergraduate teaching is being undertaken by temporary staff on short-term appointments and by part-timers” (p.77). Imagine that!

1987, this was. Nineteen-eighty-freakin’-seven. Throw in a couple of references to AI, and this is the exact same discussion we are having today. 45 years gone and basically it’s exactly the same discussion we are all having today.

Which leads, I think, to three possibilities. 

1. Universities have not changed at all, so governments repeat the same criticisms over and over.
2. Universities have changed a lot, but not consistently for the better, which makes a lot of the arguments still compelling.
3. Universities have changed a lot, but governments need to kvetch about something, so…
4. Universities have changed a lot, but so too has society and the economy, and although the direction of change has been correct, the speed has not allowed institutions to catch up.

With respect to #2, I think the overwhelming and universal turn towards making universities more research intensive in the 90s and 00s was probably a mistake. Undoubtedly a lot of great stuff was learned, but it inevitably took professors away from teaching, leaving that field increasingly in the hands of sessionals and part-timers. In the public mind, this detracted from a lot of the other good things universities are doing. At most (not all) universities, I think I would argue that was not a good bargain in terms of gaining local esteem. 

With respect to #3, maybe it’s time we all recognize that governments will never be satisfied. Elected officials will always want universities to deliver more with less (who wouldn’t want that?). Perhaps the trick is not to pander to governments and promise the world, as some universities I think are wont to do, but to actually stand up to them and say: “give us some specific outcomes to work on and we’ll do our absolute best – if you stay out of our way.” 

And with respect to #4, I think this is unarguable in many respects – student services, for instance. The choice institutions really have is to speed up or dig in hard on the point above about telling governments where to get off.

#1 though…

One paragraph kind of hit me in the gut especially. It read: “…academics tend to impose their own highly specialized interests on the shape of the undergraduate curriculum…too much stress is still placed on the production of future generations of academic and research staff, teachers in the humanities and social sciences…too little on the development of entrepreneurs and risk takers.” This is not universally true, of course, anymore so now than 1987, but in the main it is still accurate, in part because “broad-based discussions of undergraduate curriculum and associated staff development are low-status and somewhat suspect activities for many academics.”

Bingo. This, I think it’s true to say, has barely changed at all. And, until this changes for good, universities will have extraordinary difficulty convincing politicians and the public about their commitment to preparing graduates for the future.