found a highly receptive audience—those keen on disruptive innovation and all that jazz—for his vision of a future where significantly expanded elite institutions dominate a primarily online space. But I am hopeful his dystopian vision will not come to pass because if our experience of the coronavirus pandemic has shown us anything, it has shown us the limits of lives lived at a distance from each other.
This is not a critique of the modality of online education. Online courses can be just as effective as face-to-face courses in terms of helping students learn. And if we are comparing a massive face-to-face lecture—like the ones I often experienced as a student at the University of Illinois—with a well-designed online course that consists of a small cohort of students and a dedicated, engaging professor, the online course is clearly superior.
But at the same time, the embodied experience of college matters. While online courses can provide excellent options for some students, they are not an adequate replacement for everybody. Those of us—like Galloway and myself—who were fortunate enough to use college not only to earn a credential but to become a more expansive person than we were before, know this to be true.
College is where I met my wife. It is where I was tested as a leader, where I both succeeded and failed as president of a fraternity. It’s where I took a class with Professor Philip Graham, who counseled me toward a graduate program two years after I got my degree and then, years later, helped me secure my first college teaching job back at the University of Illinois. College is where I became so inebriated the night before an 8:00 a.m. Econ 101 exam that I vomited in the bushes outside the lecture hall and answered the multiple choice questions almost at random, receiving my well-deserved F, and where I had to ace everything else the rest of the semester to pull myself up to a B.
Animal House meets a lesson in personal responsibility.
Yes, I was credentialed with my BA in rhetoric at the end of four years, but college was also the place where I took a desktop publishing course in the early days of PageMaker and got comfortable wrestling with unfamiliar software, a skill that has paid off time and again over the course of my career. In a nonfiction writing course, we were asked to write a column that could potentially be published in a national newspaper or magazine. I chose Esquire,3 and in an end-of-semester vote by my classmates, my column was voted “most entertaining.” Objectively, it was probably pretty terrible, but it is impossible to quantify how much even this small encouragement meant in my overall trajectory as a writer.
I cannot imagine a life without these experiences. So why should subsequent generations be denied these opportunities simply because those who came before them lack the will to reorient the system around the values we claim are so important?
In many ways, I graduated at the last gasps of broadly affordable higher education. Just under 50 percent of the students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 1993 borrowed money for their education. By 2000, that number had increased to 65 percent. In 1993, only one-quarter of those in the highest-income quartile borrowed money for college. By 2000, that number had nearly doubled.4 That’s how you end up with $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.
The system as it exists now is clearly exhausted. It seems the only place to go would look something like Galloway’s vision, where tech company behemoths wield more power than the government itself,5 and where workers will be indentured to corporations from cradle to grave. We may even be paid in digital scrip. That’ll be fun.6 Perhaps students could settle for a significantly diluted experience like a three-year degree, where the first year consists of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) assessed by algorithms, a literally disembodied experience. I suppose another option would be to just give up on the notion of public higher education entirely.
But why would we go down that path if there is an alternative?
A New Narrative
I write this book as someone who deeply believes in the mission of education. I can get a little misty-eyed walking around university campuses contemplating the awesome potential embodied in such places. But I’m also someone who has been betrayed and exploited by institutions that have failed to live up to that potential.
As a career contingent (or adjunct) instructor, I have received a fraction of the pay that tenured faculty receive for the identical work of teaching credit-bearing courses. My labor has produced a surplus of tuition dollars so that others could pursue their research or teach courses that run at a deficit of tuition revenue. No doubt, I consented to these conditions with my agreement to be employed under them. But they are an injustice that is inconsistent with the academic mission. That they are entirely common to the world of higher education does not change this fact.
I know it is difficult, if not completely impossible, to divorce my view of the problems plaguing higher education from my own lived experience and frame of reference. But that’s true for anyone. Galloway, the marketing professor, cannot help but see what ails institutions as a problem of branding and their need to reposition in the marketplace. My career, on the other hand, has been spent working literally below those concerns, trying to figure out how to help students learn to write. And what I’ve seen in this role is a system that is fundamentally hostile to that mission.
In truth, the challenges facing public higher education are not unique but are instead a by-product of the belief, which took root during the Reagan era, that markets and competition are beneficial to us all. This ethos is obviously exhausted. As we’ve seen, the once most-powerful country in the world has struggled to provide basic protective equipment to its frontline health care workers during a pandemic, many months after that need became readily apparent. The coronavirus is remaking society in ways we could not possibly conceive of before, revealing fault lines that many have been trying to alert us to for years and that now finally seem impossible to ignore.
I have been told by those who work in the upper levels of higher education administration that I do not understand reality, that I do not appreciate how difficult it is to meet the competing demands of student “consumers” or to manage legislatures that can be unhelpful, or even hostile, toward the aims of higher education, that everyone is doing the best they can. I do not doubt their intentions, but I question the results. If this is everyone doing the best they can, we must change course. We must make our public higher education institutions sustainable, resilient, and free.
The first step toward doing that is to understand the origins of how things went so wrong.
CHAPTER 3
The Wrong Turn
In 1983, US News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities. And then, over the course of thirty years or so, higher education slowly and inexorably went to shit.
We have reached the end point of what it means for colleges and universities to be run with what I call an “operations on down” approach, rather than a strategy focused from the “mission (pedagogy) on up.” This is because schools are not currently in the teaching and learning business. They are machines meant to capture education-related revenue.
Carol Christ, the current chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, made it plain in a 2016 interview, “Colleges and universities are fundamentally in the business of enrolling students for tuition dollars.”1 In other words, as explicitly stated by the leader of one of the top public universities in the country, in our system as it is currently structured, colleges and universities are not oriented around the mission of teaching and learning, but instead exist to recruit students, enroll students, collect tuition, and hold class—operations. Oh, also football.2
These conditions are not unique to public higher education. We
