Education II

Following up on Paddy’s post of the NYT story about Berea College, I wanted to share this lengthy critique of Ivy League education from The American Scholar. The author, a Yale English prof, argues that elite institutions of higher education prepare students for nothing but upper-class careers (as hedge-fund managers, political commentators, or research scientists) and the attendant lifestyle. He portrays this as part of the larger “class-ing” of American higher education – the increasing correlation between the college one attends and the economic vitality of one’s career – and a threat to democratic governance.

There is a connection, I think, between this phenomenon and the massive endowments schools like Harvard can amass. In short, elite institutions are becoming much more like the students they’re producing – economically voracious, culturally isolated, and fundamentally self-serving. The threat, I think, is not so much to democratic governance (though that should be a concern) as to the vitality of American higher education. When a small set of institutions wield both their traditional academic strength and their new previously-unheard-of fortunes, they begin to affect the American academy disproportionately.

JChris is right that much of Harvard’s current wealth is due to exceptional money and investment management in a time of economic downturn. However, that only widens the chasm separating Harvard and its ilk from those institutions whose endowments are not large enough to survive such times unscathed.

More insidiously, it demonstrates how insulated they are from market forces and, by extension, the marketplace of ideas. More than ever, schools like Harvard are intellectual taste-makers rather than index cases. They dictate the direction of scholarly movements rather than reveal them. The result is a frighteningly top-heavy academe. For young scholars across any number of disciplines, the only real research worth attaching one’s name to is going on at the most elite institutions. The Harvards of the world are able to attract, retain, and fund the best research programs, staff them with the choicest grad students, and churn out young PhD’s anxious to carry word of the greatness of their projects to the far reaches of the academic map. The result is the increased visibility and value of the Ivy League “brand” on the academic job market. Among those vying for coveted tenure-track positions, those with ties to “name” institutions have a significant advantage. In this way, research at institutions far from the ivy walls of the Northeast is dictated to a significant degree by the whims of faculty members at elite institutions.

Parallel to this top-heavy distribution of institutional power is individual institutions’ turn to top-heavy faculties. This phenomenon, just now manifesting itself in the humanities, involves a shrinking numbers of tenure-track faculty lines that are significantly better funded than previous generations of scholars. By putting more resources into fewer “star” researchers, departments increase their visibility. Counter-balancing this investment is a growing reliance on contingent faculty, part-time faculty, and grad student teaching assistants – labor that can take up the teaching slack without taking up significant financial resources. The logical end of this division of labor is what we see today at elite institutions like the University of Chicago and Yale: there are those that teach and those that research; the wall separating the more valuable latter category from its teaching counterparts is insurmountable.

Should elite institutions be required or expected to spend money making themselves financially available to economically disadvantaged students? It seems to me such a move is meaningless without a concomitant attitudinal shift. If Harvard et al continue to churn out alumni seeking upper-class careers, lifestyles, and dispositions it won’t matter what economic pool they skim for students. The situation will look much as it does today. Meaningful changes, I would argue, should begin at the back-end (graduation and job-placement) rather than the front (recruitment and financial aid). That’s why I’d like to see more of these massive endowments spent on programs like this one that encourages Harvard Law grads to work in the public sector. This kind of program may put more graduates of elite institutions on alternative career paths, ones that will not isolate them or their respective alma maters from the problems outside their traditional boundaries. The gains for democracy may prove significant; the benefits for the American academy may prove vital.