Teaching Only What You Can Measure Is Not The Same Thing As Offering An Education
I hope that the last time I ever hear "A school should be run like a business," I'll be aware it's the last time so I can throw a martini party to celebrate the end of this stupid statement's presence in my life. The number of things wrong with the idea knock me back, but I'll start with the absurdity of the idea that "run like a business" means only one thing, as though all businesses are run the same way. Presumably, it's shorthand for "run like a successful business" but even then, there's a lot of variety. Should a school be run like JPMorgan or like Google? (and is JPMorgan even considered a "successful business" if despite making lots of money for themselves, they devastate others and end up in big trouble and paying massive fines?) Once when I questioned, "Why like a business?" I had it explained to me, painstakingly, by someone who used small words and talked slowly in order to communicate with the fluffy-headed humanities person, that it meant "efficiently." Except that again, not all businesses are run efficiently, and there is no reason to believe that a school isn't already being run efficiently as a school just because it isn't being run like whatever business you have in mind when you say "business." If you think businesses are all run efficiently, look around you.
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| nicked from collegeview.com |
I would like to point out that when you start running a school like a business it becomes a business and stops being a school. And if you want to run a business, that's awesome, but if you want to run a school then you should run a school and stop worrying about whether you're doing things the same way you would if you were a manager of a Burger King. Because a school is not, absolutely not, a business. It is a school. It is a different animal.
What is our product? Is it our students? Are they what we manufacture so that the hiring world can purchase the product from us? This turns us into a factory in which the parents of the raw material or the raw material itself pays to be manufactured into something some as-yet-undetermined corporate entity might want. Not only is that a really bad business model, it's creepy as shit. Are our students our customers, then? Do they go shopping for what they want, pick and choose the knowledge they, at age 18, think they'll need for the rest of their lives, and then pay us to transmit it to them? How can the customer be right when the customer doesn't yet know that some fields of knowledge even exist, or what they'll want to do a year later when they've discovered that they can't pass those nursing classes or that English is actually hard or that athletic training isn't what they thought it would be? Do we let the customers pick and choose the classes they think they'll need or enjoy and forgo the rest, on the principle that the customer is always right? No. Because 1) no one would ever sign up for macroeconomics, and because 2) they can't possibly make smart decisions about what they need to know when they don't know any of it yet. And that is why it is still more useful to think of them as students instead of customers.
I suggest we skip over the "run it like a business" and get to what we really want to say, that a school should be run efficiently. But we also need to think about what that means, because what's efficient in a place of learning and discovery is probably not going to resemble what is efficient in a bank or a bistro or a yarn factory. Spend a few minutes studying human cognition and you'll find out that we learn through trial and error. From birth this is how we learn. Teach a baby to touch her nose and you'll see that she'll miss a few times first before she gets that little pointer finger in the right place. In the business world, 5 failures before one success would be grounds for bringing in regional managers to audit the place and decide which heads are going to roll. In a place of learning and discovery, 5 failures before one success means you are on a path to greatness. We have different standards of efficiency in academia, because learning is supposed to be messy and chaotic, but that doesn't mean there is no efficiency at all.
So in the absence of thinking of college as a business, I suggest we return to thinking of college as COLLEGE. According to the OED, a college has been, since about 1380: "An organized society of persons performing certain common functions and possessing special rights and privileges; a body of colleagues, a guild, fellowship, association." This group of people can be religious or secular (think college of cardinals, or college of physicians). Those are the first definition. A group of people with a common purpose. A college is, in definition 4: "A society of scholars incorporated within, or in connection with, a University, or otherwise formed for purposes of study or instruction." There are multiple definitions, and in every case, a college is a group of scholars or people collected together with a mission or common goal or the location on which they gather. Nowhere does the OED define a college as a place where people pay money in exchange for information. Nowhere does it define a college as a place that is only succeeding if it is increasing its profit margin. In fact, it does not define college as a group of students. It defines it as a group of scholars. It's the people gathered there for knowledge who make it a college.
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| Hogarth's "Scholars at a Lecture," nicked from maximiliangeneology.co.uk |
A college is a collection of scholars to which students go so that they may study with those scholars and learn from them. I realize that in contemporary society's it's-all-about-empowering-the-children mentality that what I am writing here is heresy. What - you're saying we're not here for the children??????? Of course our instruction is geared towards our students' needs and goals. Of course it is. And I'm not saying the students are here for us. I'm saying we're all here for knowledge. And some of us are farther along in the life-journey of pursuing it, and so people who want to get a serious start on that path come to where we are to learn what we already know, as well as what we don't know so that maybe they can try to solve those problems down the line. In order to have a real college you need scholars, senior and junior. Now since we have to eat we charge for the mentoring, but the point isn't to make a profit, it's to make a living. Administrators and staff come into the picture because we can't possibly manage all the logistics of this enterprise by ourselves.* And it is good to do assessment because it's good to have goals and it's good to know if we're meeting them.
The problem is when profit margins start to matter. When money is tied to objectives that we assess because we're told what matters and that we have to reach those things no matter what. When things that can't be assessed (like passion) fall by the wayside because we can't assess them, and if it can't be in the chart then you don't have time for it. Can you imagine college theatres if they were dependent on ticket sales and investors to decide which shows to do? Audiences are awesome, but college theatre is there for college theatre students to learn amazing plays and how to do them, and the whole point is to hire amateurs who are learning their craft, and you can't do that if you're risk averse. It would be Macbeth, Our Town, and The Sound of Music over and over again. Great shows, but not much of a theatre education.
When administrator salaries are 20 times that of the senior scholars with whom the students have come to study, because (and I am not kidding you, this is the thinking in some places and I have heard this with my own ears) the school has to pay administrators so much so the school can attract the best talent. When administrative salaries are designed to attract the best talent but faculty salaries are decided based on the absolute least for which you can get someone decent. When the activities that make it possible for senior scholars to stay on top of their game -- time to stay current in their research, salaries enough to pay off student loans and settle down on a property a reasonable distance from the school, opportunities to gather and learn from other scholars -- are not considered "cost effective" and are dropped so that the strangely-still-increasing tuition can be spent elsewhere. At such a time, it risks no longer being a college, and becomes something else. It may be "efficient," but at what? It certainly stops being an efficient college.
This is why corporatization of academia is responsible for the current adjunct crisis. Only a for-profit mentality could come up with the scheme of deliberately hiring more adjuncts to teach fewer classes, rather than having a few full-time people teach more sections each. This is a way to pay them less and deprive them of benefits in order to get more for less out of employees. This is not a collection of colleagues. This is grunt labor. This shit is not the department chair's idea, I promise you. The department chair doesn't like seeing people, people he or she thinks of not as just employees but as colleagues, coming and going looking hungrier and sicker every day. You know who doesn't mind? The people who don't see it - administrators and board members who spend their time looking at balance sheets and make sweeping decisions that affect the quality of teaching but who have zero teaching experience themselves and can't even be bothered to stop and shake hands with the teachers they pass on campus on the way to trustee meetings and dinners. These are board members recruited for their "business experience." Not every college is like that. Some colleges work very hard to treat their faculty, all of them, like the professionals and scholars they are. But nearly all colleges are facing the business mentality and being asked to look at bottom lines, and then making cuts, often to faculty. Because faculty are the largest expense when you put all the expenses of a college into a pie chart. My question: shouldn't they be the largest expense? The faculty are, in fact, what make it a college.
I will not dehumanize my students by thinking of them as customers, or as products. I know stuff they need/want to know, even if they don't realize it when they sign up for the class they don't think they need until years from now when it turns out that having internalized parts of Paradise Lost actually make you a more substantial person, and being a more substantial person suddenly means something they couldn't have possibly understood at age 18. I will not dehumanize myself or my fellow scholars by thinking of us as delivering assessible material to future employees of the world.
No student is going to choose a college, no matter how flashy the campus, if the faculty suck. And it can happen, if you treat faculty like cogs in a wheel. Education is not retail. We are not selling anything over here. We are studying, and we are learning. We would love for you to join us.
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*At least, not efficiently. Or in some cases, at all. I couldn't survive without Julie and Carol, who keep me going on my craziest days. At Auburn, I would not have finished my degree, or had a book to teach from, without Frances and Jean. And our whole schools would collapse without the fundraisers who make sure we have buildings and stuff because tuition doesn't cover those things. These people, when they are treated as professionals themselves offer immensely important opportunities for our students to learn, as apprentices in those offices. To me, they, too, are scholars, bringing not only the work they do but the mentoring for students learning those work skills.
