The great contraction distraction

The Great Contraction

Cuts alone will not be enough to turn colleges’ fortunes around.

By Lee Gardner

The Chronicle of Higher Education

FEBRUARY 15, 2021

Indiana University of Pennsylvania was already shrinking. As regional demographics ebbed and competition for the remaining students increased between 2011 and 2020, the public college lost a third of its enrollment. Leaders had little choice but to cut back, trimming about 150 faculty positions over several years, mostly through attrition — retirements or not filling vacant positions.

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Such shifts don’t have to mean that colleges become trade schools, or that the liberal arts are dead. But Covid-19 has narrowed the options for leaders, shortened the timeline for any changes, and raised the stakes for the outcomes. Colleges may succeed in positioning themselves for a future in which they can grow, but that depends on the strategic decisions they make today.

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Inequity is one of many factors that contributed to the plight colleges found themselves in during the pandemic, and it’s one of the many factors that leaders must be mindful of as they plan how to emerge stronger. The contracting university can hope and plan for a brighter future, but unless it tries to avoid past mistakes, it’s likely to repeat them — or make them worse.

My reactions?

Primarily laden with the obvious and the self-serving, with the fat, elite elephants in the room making the decisions to protect the other fat, elite elephants, it’s no surprise that the author eventually turned to reparations and equity as the proposed fix. Or to headline with silly, pithiness aphorisms like ‘cuts alone will not be enough.’

The disingenuous if not patently dishonest claims about the problems, the solutions or those in need of protection make it hard to sympathize with those schools who seem to claim some sort of right to support for doing many wrong things and doing the right things poorly. Many turned to ‘sustainability’ only to find that they know nothing about true sustainability. Economic climate change from the market has exposed the intellectual pollution produced by the elites, like John Kerry gulfstreaming the world to lecture us on carbon.

The pandemic impact on the weak and marginalized by the entitled elite has little to do with race and it is not just in the universities or the nursing homes, just as the proclaimed science by scientists has more to do with politics and arrogance than with science or health. The race by politicians to not let a crisis go to waste by creating a bigger crisis and patently unworkable solutions has exposed college presidents, mayors and governors, like Cuomo and Newsom, and just as in the French Revolution, the mob is coming around to turn on itself.

To cite the legendary wisdom of Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

So the faculty of the University of Vermont conducted an eight-hour, online 'teach in,' starting with the usual homage to the sanctity of the 'liberal arts,' a term abused and misused as a form of intellectual elitism, arrogance and disdain for practical knowledge, quite unlike its original meaning. For more detail, download the file below.

Liberating art of Jesuit business educat.

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Among many things, they perpetuated an entirely baseless claim, the assertion that the liberal arts somehow teaches key life, business and career skills, namely "critical thinking, communications, and intercultural competency."

Let me state clearly after fifty years of higher education, all in universities with extensive liberal arts requirements, nothing could be clearer than the conclusion that the standard liberal arts requirements teach none of these skills. In fact, the liberal arts usually emphasizes the importance of feelings and opinions, and labels that rhetoric as 'critical thinking.' 'Cultural company' is the juiced up term for 'multiculturalism,' or the fact that there is nothing that established one culture or set of values as better or more conducive to key things like liberty, freedom, productivity or prosperity. And 'communication,' based on the communication skills of my students who have been inculcated with the liberal arts 'communication' courses, is a lost art, liberal or otherwise. Again, feelings, rhetoric and opinions trump data, evidence, and analysis, i.e., critical thinking. No student should be judged for his or her grammar, spelling, logic or unsubstantiated point of view. There is no 'right' way to communicate, no standards, no critical assessments.

Let me be clear. I support the liberal arts, as long as they deliver on the knowledge, values and skills their faculty claim and, most often, assume to be the result of a liberal arts core of courses. There is no faculty accountability, no substantial assessment, other than the market, parents and students making the obvious clear -- their current model is not working, not the meaningless courses, silly majors, vanity seminars, woke programs, and rhetorical excess.

Much as Covid has had a serious impact on the lives of people with marginal health, Covid is having a devastating effect on the lives of colleges with marginal health. College is not a right, a good education is a responsibility. Academic freedom and liberal arts faculty control of the curriculum must be accompanied by a profound attention and responsibility to students, parents, and the public, not just to academe or to the profession.