FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY
HONORS CONVOCATION ADDRESS
Dr. Clay Steinman
Distinguished Teacher 1987-88
Delivered Wednesday, October 11, 1989
Esther B. Griswold University Theatre
Florida Atlantic University
ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT COMMUTER UNIVERSITIES:
MARKET METAPHORS AND THE PUBLIC INTEREST
When Ronald Reagan leaves office in January, the United States will be much more unequal than it was in 1981. The rich have gotten richer and the poor, especially blacks and Hispanics, have suffered as a result. Teaching at Florida Atlantic University, where most students seem to be middle-and-lower class, I hear more fear in the voices of students, more apprehension about their futures, than when I came here in 1977. This follows a nationwide trend.
In this climate, U.S. business and its allies in the universities have found it ever easier to persuade less affluent undergraduates to consider themselves students first of the job market, as employees-in-the-making. Still, in the classroom many of us view students in a more traditional sense, as people seeking stimulating mental lives, or preparing themselves for democratic citizenship, or for creative work. The clash of these two drives makes academic freedom contested terrain. At stake are our students’ educations, and ways they could enhance the culture.
At Florida Atlantic University most undergraduates have jobs and nearly all commute. Most major in business administration, engineering, or some other explicitly vocational subject. At public, commuter universities like FAU, administrators increasingly act as if the university teaches best when it emphasizes job training. They act as if we ought to sell credit hours as if they were tickets to financial security. They seem to think we should use public funds to pay what should be the private costs of training workers in job-specific skills.
In the process, what becomes marginalized is the teaching of ideas, of theory, of different ways of conceptualizing ourselves in the world, of asking questions about what is taken for granted, of thinking about what is fair and just. Moreover, the attack on such work threatens academic freedom in ways we might not normally suspect, precisely because the pressure against it comes dressed as common sense, the common sense of “the market” as measure of what shall and shall not be legitimate within the university.
Marketplace imagery works against academic freedom in at least three ways: as driving force of the belief among students that higher education is (and should be) a work permit for a good job; as rationale for administrators to respond to what they perceive as demand in the student credit market by supporting programs that promise high productivity; and as justification for low academic salaries, particularly for humanities professors in supposedly over saturated job markets.
I. Students and the Job Market
We know that in the United States the ultimate occupations of college graduates are related to the admissions standards of the schools they attend. People from affluent families tend to go to colleges like Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, and Smith. People who graduate from such schools tend to get the best jobs. It should be no surprise, then, that the average Ivy League alumni family in 1986 had an income of more than $120,000, more than four times that of the average household.
The expansion of U.S. higher education over the past twenty years, which made possible institutions such as FAU, was supposed to break this link between class origin and individual achievement. Before FAU opened in the early 1960s, there was no public university in South Florida. A secular, four-year education, was available only to those who could afford the cost of tuition at a private university, or the expense of residential study at one of the distant state universities.
Most of the students I teach tell me they cannot afford any of these, especially with the ever-decreasing availability of financial aid. So students come to FAU. But going to FAU is not yet going to Harvard. Why? Because politicians tend to chain commuter universities to enrollment-based funding. They deny them the resources for faculty, libraries, dormitories, and other facilities provided to older, more selective state universities resources supplied in abundance to the nation’s most selective private institutions. This is certainly the case in Florida, where public higher education is notoriously underfunded.
What commuter schools do provide, however, is the promise of upward social mobility. Claims of vocational applicability pervade such schools’ publicity. (One North Carolina college woos prospective students with billboards plastered “Learn More, Earn More.”) This fits the popular notion that a college education enhances most people’s social mobility. But statistics show it does not work. Wealth and income distribution has not changed for the better since the early 1960s; and as I said at the outset, in the Age of Reagan it has become more skewed.
Ironically, it is the students themselves who seem the last to know this, especially in terms of their real prospects. Michael Taves recently wrote that his students, “middle-class to poor … in a state college,” routinely expect to be earning $45,000-$55,000 a year once they finish school and are set in their careers. However, as Taves says, “the students lack the general academic skills necessary to reach the occupational level that would conceivably earn that kind of money.” But the students believe, and rare is the administrator (and usually the faculty member) who would dissuade them. For as consumers, students want to believe they can buy future security by paying what for them is costly tuition and expenses and putting in the required time. The last thing many of them want to hear from their professors is that few futures are secure, and an FAU diploma carries no money-back guarantee. Unfortunately, most students are unprepared to recognize the false promises of a glowing future implied in catalogs and course schedules.
Fortunately, in my experience, most students are prepared to see the value of alternatives to vocationalism over the course of a semester, to investigate what learning is all about, to look behind appearances to the meaning of things, to understand the forces that shape their culture. Indeed, I believe I owe this award to the open minds of my students.
But the minds of students are also open to those educators who reject the notion that teaching should raise fundamental questions. They say we rob students of job preparation they really could use. At the same time, in the more explicitly vocational fields such as business and engineering, accreditation pressures can work to limit students educational options and hence the range of intellectual inquiry supported by the university.
II. Administrators and the Student Credit Market
As far as I can tell, most administrators are sensitive enough to traditional definitions of academic freedom that they will not openly interfere with what tenured faculty say in or out of the classroom. More difficult to fight are the actions of administrators who try to curtail our autonomy as they seek opportunities for enrollment growth.
Unlike their counterparts at elite universities, administrators at schools like FAU seem to feel all too little obligation to attend to the quality of the general education their schools provide. They seem to accept the notion that their universities are not the ones charged with educating young people destined for leadership. Too often at schools like FAU, students are treated as if they were destined for subordination, as if what they needed most was to learn to follow directions rather than to think for themselves. But that’s wrong. What students need most for professional—and personal—competence is to learn how to learn, to think, to solve abstract problems, to know what it means to be creative.
Recently, my own department, communication, has been under attack partly because we tend to be interested above all in helping students to be generally literate, a prerequisite for success by any standard. At the same time, we want students to be able to think for themselves about the media of communication, as the consumers they definitely will be as well as the industry workers they might possibly become. But our approach has not been commercial enough for some administrators, who want the department to siphon off more students from the university’s explicitly vocational programs. This, they say, could be done by changing what we teach and how we package it. But this would also make poor use of our training, would provide poor service to our students, and would make the university even less diverse than it already is.
For standing against this approach, our resources and our time for research have been cut back. Courses in film studies, nonvocationalist courses that have some expenses attached to them, for at least this year have been banned. So while I am honored to be recognized for my approach to teaching by the university’s students, I am prohibited from teaching my field of greatest expertise, in which I have my Ph.D.
This is harassment, in my view. This is an effort to make most of us in communication so unhappy with our situation at FAU that we will leave, even though according to the established measure we tend to perform very well in teaching, research, and service.
The attack on academic freedom does not come in forms that make it easily recognizable. At least to our faces, not once has the quality of our work been questioned. Never has the specific content of our classes been criticized. No one has attacked our writings. As far as I can tell, our major offense continues to be our stand against what others think of as market forces.
In Florida, state politicians seem most concerned with building an image of higher education accessibility; state bureaucrats seem to care most about pleasing politicians, including keeping costs down and enrollments up; state and local corporate elites may speak out against declining general education, but they tend to lean on the schools only when the quality of work in their businesses is unsatisfactory.
For some administrators, visions of building student enrollments combine with perception of student vocationalism into a pseudo-democratic argument: We should offer students the curriculum administrators believe students want and need. Never mind difficult questions of student preparedness for the increasingly complex demands of high-paying jobs. Never mind the specifics of the job market, which offer high-paying jobs only to a tiny minority of college graduates. Never mind what the students could learn in order to be more interesting to themselves as well as to others, to participate in public life, to be prepared generally for different kinds of difficult work.
III. Faculty Salaries and the Market
Finally, some administrators use the national marketplace to justify much lower salaries for humanities faculty, the lowest for the least vocational among us (philosophy, literature, the fine arts). This devaluation of nonvocational discourses dispirits many of us, but, with the help of our union, the United Faculty of Florida, an affiliate of the National Education Association, we have mobilized to file nearly forty grievances on the issue and to keep the matter before the public.
One result of this mobilization has been the extensive discussion among faculty of the politics of salary differences between departments at the university. This is a major issue at FAU, because differences here are greater than they are nationally. At the same time, salaries in all fields at the university are too low to recruit and regain the faculty we need to do the job we should for the people of this area. In filing the grievances, our main consideration has been the sexual politics of salaries, but in this context more relevant perhaps is the relation between subject matter and compensation. We argued that the university’s salary and reward structure, which tends to penalize nonvocational professors, constitutes an attack on academic freedom.
This attack will remain covert as long as the politicians and bureaucrats maintain a semblance of distance form corporate elites, and articulate an ideology of general public service. But to the extent that the public interest becomes a function of corporate interests, the attack will become normalized as a sound administrative practice, and those who do not teach in the corporate interest will find their relative salaries dropping accordingly. The gap between private and public is closing fast. Not only are corporate contributions increasingly tied to specific programs donor want, already universities in Florida and elsewhere plan branch classrooms specifically to serve individual businesses.
In this way, perceived short-run economic demands come to dictate the mission of universities. Those whose work is not immediately practical become increasingly vulnerable. Terrifyingly, this attack on critical reason can appear as Reason itself. The teaching of tools, bits of instrumental knowledge, with no thought of their value, context, or purpose, becomes an act of social loyalty: It’s what the students and the society need, given the competition.
Twenty-five years ago, Herbert Marcuse called this society “one-dimensional” because it squashes efforts to articulate alternative visions of how we might live on this earth. If we want our world to get better, higher education must be free to provide an environment in which students, faculty, and staff alike can assess the value of all that we do and explore ways we might act differently in a more humane and just social order.
People need to be free to argue that we need more of a market society, not less, that we need more inequality, not less, if this is to be a better world. But others must be as free to attack the idolatry of the market, to criticize efforts by students, faculty, and administrators to appease capital as if it were a god, sacrificing our academic freedom to meet its apparent demands. We must be free to offer the very critique the market does not want to make: that the more human beings offer up to corporate power, the less they leave for themselves. And we must be free to do this not just on special occasions such as this, but as a matter of routine.
It is easy to believe in academic freedom must largely rest with those at the university who are not administrators—students and staff, surely, but foremost the faculty. If they are vigilant, they serve not only themselves but the public interest as well. For outside the university, private interests tend to determine how we spend our time. Nowadays, most adults—male and female—work, all too often performing tasks for others, tasks which they neither design nor control, learning on the job tends to be learning from others. At night, the average adult—including the average college graduate—watches more than four hours of television, and you can be that most of what is seen is designed neither to stimulate nor to provoke.
The market cannot be the measure of academic value if time at the university is to be of a different sort. Shaping curricula according to imagined market demands can only lead to menus of decaffeinated courses, 99.7 percent free of anything that might keep students awake at night, questioning their values or preconceptions. What William Shawn, long-time editor of The New Yorker, says about editing for the market applies to teaching for it as well. “The fallacy,” according to Shawn, “is if you edit that way to give back the readers only what they think they want, you’ll never give them something new they didn’t know about.” At their best, faculty are prepared to offer what is new, to provide students with a chance to learn what they do not already know, a chance to sort out values, to grow, to test ideas, to prepare for the challenge and responsibility of living in this difficult world, to combat fear with knowledge, insecurity with a sense of who and where and why we are.
(Written September 9, 1988)
See related post: