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One major critique college professors can almost guarantee
they will hear from their students year in and year out is the demand that
their curriculum be based only on what they will need to succeed out there
in the "real world". Anything not directly geared towards making them a
successful doctor, lawyer, accountant, chemist, you name it, is felt by
them to be superfluous and a means used by the university to "roll 'em
over" for more cash. For reasons which I will discuss in more detail below,
these students, and they are in the majority, have become convinced that
colleges exist to provide them with access to merely the kind of information
that will provide them with, you guessed it, a "good" job and a "reasonable"
paycheck. Of course, the question begs to be asked: What is the sort of
information which will actually help college students be "successful"
in post-collegiate life? What should they learn in college in order to
be positive contributors to themselves, their employers/employees and their
society at large? That students of higher education now act on the belief
that all they need and want is technical know-how related solely to their
"major" reflects how well they have intuitively estimated the intimate
connection that has developed between universities and the worlds of business
and industry in the 20th century.
THE BUSINESS OF HIGHER EDUCATION
The interdependent connection between universities
and business picked up a sizable head of steam about the time the U.S.
geared up for World War II. In order to put together the massive amounts
of machinery, weaponry and supplies needed for the war effort, small companies
had to come together and, thus, the modern corporation was born. Larger
companies could gather more resources quicker than smaller ones and soon
the era of the three initialed corporation (T.I.C.) was well under way.
With these large corporations came the need to supply them with workers.
Big business looked to the largest and already organized pool of
trainable workers available: the university.
The TICs of North America then proceeded to
protect their investment in their future work force by "endowing" university
departments and chairs as a means of guaranteeing that their future workers
were being trained in the particular areas of interest of these endowing
corporations. A TIC would endow a Harvard and MIT and their respective
technical and business programs; then the TIC could have their pick of
the best and brightest graduates, offer them job security, a pension, and
then proceed to place these new proteges in the mail room. From the mail
room, that person would be groomed to fit the model employee for that corporation.
These "techno-biz" prodigies were told the company ethos, its dress code,
its public image; and they were required to conform, and they were inclined
to conform, because their financial security and their professional advancement
depended on the extent to which they were "successful" in reinventing themselves
according to the ideals put forth by the TIC. All that colleges were asked
to do, therefore, was to train their pupils with the job skills required
by TIC. TIC, then, could count on a renewing supply of TIC wanna-be's
who would be pliable and malleable enough to fit into whatever mold TIC
desired. And that supply would continue to be renewed because universities
began to teach students the idea that their only goal upon graduation was
to find a place in a TIC. Students were no longer informed about the possibility
of owning and running their own business. Students were led to believe
that all they had to do for a secure future was to learn the "stuff" that
would make them an attractive candidate for TIC. Thus, GPA's soon became
all important, not because they actually represented what a student actually
knew or could learn, but because the GPA was an easy and "objective" evluative
mechanism for a TIC to choose one candidate over another. Our students,
therefore, cease being interested in learning for its own sake and began
their manic quest for the coveted Holy Grail of a high GPA.
It is no wonder then why, in forty years or
so, the United States has gone from a nation of many small business owners
fueled with apprentices to a nation of a few large business owners fueled
by the many graduates of American universities. Prior to WWII, the only
people in college were the economic elite. The rest worked their own businesses
or were workers in farms or factories. After WWII, the influx of thousands
of dutiful, unemployed and "pre-molded" GI's into the universities
forever changed the values of higher education to the point that now college
is the primary means used by every person who has hopes of landing that
"good job". Therefore, we should not be surprised that college students
are not only suspicious of such "specious" studies as art, literature,
history, sociology, etc., but they are downright hostile to any course
that does not specifically train them in a job related skill that they
have chosen under the rubric of their major. Of course, this mentality
has had its consequences for both these students and their country. Our
colleges are graduating mindless drones looking to serve the highest bidder.
Little do they care of why they work. They are so busy looking for a living
that they have no idea what life is. Mechanical in their actions and thoughts,
our best and brightest become easy prey for large organizations that would
use them up and spit them out. And that, I am beginning to think, is the
whole point of why our educational system has panned out the way it has.
Today, the largest employer is "The State".
Now before I am written off as a conspiracy theorist, consider the following.
Local, state and federal agencies employ more people than any and all corporations.
Some would call this socialism and worry that many "state" universities
are run by these governing bodies as a means, perhaps, of maintaining a
work force incapable of thinking for itself and of speaking up for itself
and thus, content to leave the status quo as is as long as workers have
their beloved job security. Many people do vote their pocket books during
an election. If they have more money than before, they keep the incumbent.
If their standard of living has decreased, it is time for a change, and
that change has occurred in our economy today and people are beginning
to wake up, however slowly. Now that job security has given way to downsizing
and de-jobbing, people, young and old, are literally up-in-arms because
they feel they have been taught by colleges to be obsolete in an ever changing
world where today's answer becomes tomorrow's question, and they are presently
looking to universities as both culprit and answer.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MODERN UNIVERSITY?
Because the economy and the alarming rate of change that new technologies
bring to the marketplace have become too unpredictable to outguess, people
are beginning to blame the ones who promised them that a "good" education
would equal a good job, ie their alma mater. One area where students are
starting to rebel most vocally is in the quality, or lack thereof, of teaching
they are receiving from their college professorate. As long as there were
jobs aplenty, no one bothered to question the emphasis universities were
placing on research over teaching. After all, everyone in college administration
knows the money is not in teaching but in contributing, through research,
to the very changes in our economy and technology that will make their
graduates irrelevant like last year's computer. Money from corporations
and government grants has become so important to running a university (both
private and public) that research has been given priority over teaching
when choosing and maintaining its professorate. The money a "rainmaker"
researcher can bring to a university often covers a multitude of sins in
the classroom. Researchers who do enjoy teaching and commit some of their
precious time to teaching are steered by the tenure committees to spend
more time on research and less on their students. Professors who devote
most of their time and energy to teaching are politely "not-retained" in
favor of mo' money. The only real problem with this way of doing business
as a university is that the very circumstances which encouraged and perpetuated
university policies and curricula for 40 years or more have radically and
quickly changed with no signs of slowing down. The world that generated
our present system of higher education with its limited, and some would
say "specialized", needs and offerings is gone forever, and universities
must immediately change the way they do business if they are not to be
swept away by the winds of change.
One area of college tradition that is being
heavily challenged by students, state legislators, and the economics of
higher education is the idea of tenure. Many students complain that tenured
professors are ignorant in the ways of teaching because these "educators"
would rather spend time on their lucrative research projects than their
unrewarding students. State legislators feel that tenured professors are
not doing their job of teaching the next generation of productive citizens
because gone is the incentive to remain productive, ie the potential loss
of employment. Administrators are complaining because tenured full professors
cost too much money to keep, especially if they are in a field that has
lost prominence in recent years. Thus, from all ends, professors are under
the gun to justify their work and their place in society, and I wonder
how long it will be before the professorate either completely reinvents
itself as a viable and meaningful element of society with work that matters,
or it will be the first Dodo bird of the early 21st century.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE JOB?
The problem for universities is that the very nature of work (ie the job) in America is changing so as to make all the "standbys" of college education irrelevant. The so-called "Major" of today's college student is quickly becoming as much as a social artifact as the job it is supposed to prepare our students for. As Fortune put it in 1994: ("The End of the Job": Sept. 19. pp.62-74)
The reality [of the work world today] is ... troubling, for what is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs--or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself: the job. That much sought after, much maligned social entity, a job, is vanishing like a species that has outlived its evolutionary time.(62)
If the reality of the job changes, then everything geared to making
the "job track" into the "fast track" has to change as well. For example,
with in the next 10-20 years, the whole idea of qualifications and the
GPA, the sacred cows of both professors and students, will become obsolete:
The old qualifications included degrees or
other formal certification, length of experience in a similar job, and
recommendations. Today most recommendations are known to be hot air and
tail-covering platitudes. Experience is more likely to produce a repetition
of the past than the kind of new approaches that today's conditions demand.
And there often isn't any degree or certification in the activity that
today's organizations needs. The new qualifications are that you really
want to work (desire), that you are good at what the work requires (ability),
that you fit that kind of situation (temperament), and that you have whatever
other resources the work requires (assets). Those so called D.A.T.A. are
the only qualifications that matter in a rapidly changing work world.(Fortune
(pg72)).
Passing are the days when employers look for people to fill job positions
with specific and set tasks which are repeated over and over again. We
are now moving into the time when people will be hired to fulfill tasks
rather than positions. These new fangled jobs will resemble outsourcing
with the individual hired being expected to figure out for herself what
tasks are needed to accomplish the mission set by the corporation. At times,
these employees of the 21st century will move from mission to mission and
maybe even from company to company like an independent contractor.
In this rapidly evolving world of work, the rules for survival
and "fitness" have dramatically changed. For example, future successful
workers need to be generalists in the sense that they must be informed
in many different and disparate ways of doing business as well as open
to new and different possibilities of handling situations which are unique
to the world of business and industry, research and development. A person
convinced of a single mode or "major" path will fail because their rigidity
and "small-mindedness" will make it difficult to respond to unfamiliar
environments creatively.
Nevertheless, American universities still
emphasize the virtues of specialization while general studies students
are mocked as having no direction. Ironically, and perhaps it is poetic
justice, those same specialists could become dinosaurs in their respecitve
fields because they have been taught to think in one specific way to deal
with an ever-changing work envirnoment and international economy.
From medical and law schools to Fortune 500 companies, employers
are less interested in tech know-how than in people who can demonstrate
the ability to be creative thinkers coming up with new solutions rather
than the tried and true. They are also looking for people who have strong
general interests and backgrounds as well as interpersonal skills and the
ability to communicate without being prompted all the time. The self-motivated
worker who is able to reinvent themselves as the circumstances require
will be the successful employee or business owner of the future. Those
who hope to learn just their major will find themselves isolated from both
the fast track and the corporate boardroom. Business is fed up with non-thinkers,
It can no longer afford them as they once could. The economy moves too
fast and is far too global to have employees waiting for the "go" command.
Employees are needed now who can initiate their own "Go" command creatively
and constructively, but most of all quickly:
Everyone agrees that tomorrow's worker, untrammeled by old constraints of hierarchy and job boundaries, will be far more independent and self-directed than today's. Fortune (pg74).
The future of business and industry will need to be taken out of the
hands of the mindless mechanical drone and put into the hands of a self-actualized
and independent worker who can give himself orders.
HOW WELL ARE UNIVERSITIES RESPONDING TO THESE CHANGES?
So how are universities preparing its students for this brave
new world of capitalism. According to a 1993 article of the Journal of
Education for Business, not very well:
American business schools are undergoing a major period of change.
Practitioners have criticized business schools for producing students who
lack the requisite skills to successfully perform in the dynamic world
of business. Students have been cited for lacking sufficient communications
skills, reasoning, and analytical skills, and general knowledge skills,
e.g., history and geography. Businesses are forced to educate or conduct
remedial training to bring employees to a satisfactory level of training.
Consequently, practitioners feel they are receiving inferior students who
cannot successfully compete in a global economy, particularly if they do
not possess an understanding of global politics and economics or cannot
interpret future business trends based on current economic signals." (Jrnl
of Education for Business, 11-01-1993, pg.89.)
Of course, we really should not be surprised that schools are not producing
the best possible workers. Without having an environment conducive to creativity,
the best and brightest leave the university and business schools to make
their own way. Some stunning examples of this include three of the wealthiest
businessmen this nation has ever produced. Sam Walton, of Wal-mart, never
went to college. He innovated the marketing and distribution process of
goods in this country while thousands of Harvard MBA's were learning to
do things business as usual.
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, left Harvard after one semester
of college because he felt that what he was being taught was obsolete and
pointless. And while others were touting the power and future potential
of computer hardware manufacturers like IBM, Gates took America into the
future of technology with software, making Microsoft one of the most powerful
corporations today while leaving IBM and Apple in the dust.
Fred Smith, founder of Federal Express received a "C" on his
master's thesis at Harvard. That thesis drew out the plans for an new overnight
mailing service. Add the money these uneducated or "average" college students
contribute to the economy and the impact they have had on changing our
lives these last 15 years, and then ask why it is that they had to leave
or abandon their college education to be successful. Does it really need
to be this way? What do all these changes in the economy and the increasing
incongruities between the college experience and the "real world" mean
for "higher education"? What should colleges be teaching its charges?
SO WHAT SHOULD UNIVERSITIES BE DOING TO KEEP UP?
For an answer, maybe we should turn the clock
back about one hundred years when science and technology were getting their
first foothold in the college curriculum in England. The debate over what
constituted a college "education" raged then even as it does today with
many of the same questions we face. The only difference is that we have
not yet heeded the concerns and warnings voiced by the main proponents
of using the university to deliver a "liberal education."
One such voice was that of John Henry Cardinal Newman. In his
book, Idea of a University, Newman identifies what he believes is the problem
of focusing on and elevating specialized knowledge in a university curriculum:
You see, then, here are are two methods of Education; the end of one is to be philosophical, of the other to be mechanical; the one rises toward general ideas, the other is exhausted upon what is particular and practical ... (Discourse V: Idea of a University)
And the problem with focusing on knowledge in the particular is that it undermines the purpose of education, which is to learn about humanity in all its possible contexts:
...Knowledge, in proportion as it tends more and more to be particular,
ceases to be knowledge. (Discourse V: Idea of a University)
The problem for Newman, therefore, was that he felt that the "business"
of universities was to expose its students to the knowledge necessary to
have a good life, to be flexible and capable of handling all situations
because that student could depend on his desire and openness to learning
as a process and not a product. A university should dedicate its existence
to providing students with knowledge that transcended time and space and
certain economic realities; it should give knowledge which can be used
at all times to adapt, adopt, and improve the species in terms of its interior
balance and not its exterior balance sheet:
... knowledge is not a mere extrinsic or accidental advantage, which is ours today and another's tomorrow, which may be got up from a book, and easily forgotten again, which we can borrow for the occasion, carry about in our hand, and take into the market; it is an acquired illumination, it is a habit, a personal possession, and an inward endowment. And this is the reason why it is more correct, as well as more usual, to speak of a University as a place of education than of instruction. ... We are instructed, for instance, in manual exercises, in the fine and useful arts, in trades, and in ways of business; for these are methods, which have little or no effect upon the mind itself, nor contained in rules committed to memory, to tradition or to use. ... But education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue. (Discourse V: Idea of a University)
And to this end of forming character and nature should the pragmatic concerns of a university be focused, not on the expedient and short-term profitability of a particular technology or business but on the long-term values which help humanity weather and overcome any storm:
If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society. Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world.(Discourse VII: Idea of a University)
Now some skeptics may argue that Newman was devoted to the fine arts
and liberal education, so of course he would be biased in their favor.
Nevertheless, he was not the only voice of his age which spoke loudly for
the university as a harbor or space for developing the entire human being
and not one speciality of a human doing.
The great champion of natural science in the
Victorian age, Thomas Henry Huxley, argued that liberal education should
provide more than technical expertise in a given and specialized subject
area. He felt that educating one in the laws of nature was undertaken by
a university to make for a person aware of the vast interconnections of
all things in the world.
... what I mean by Education is learning the rules of this mighty game. In other words, education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and living desire to move in harmony with those laws. (A Liberal Education)
It would appear then that Huxley, even in his exuberant desire to make
natural science an integral part of university studies, intended those
studies to supplement and add context and relevance to the goals of education
set forth by Newman. Yet, today, science and business are taught with little
if any thought to the vast interconnections between people or the environments
is which they live, breathe, and have their being. Students are taught
that they only need to be an expert in their little piece of the equation,
thus they neither learn to listen or think or interrelate their knowledge
to anything other than what their primary goal is: ie to make money as
a _____. And this "teaching" has left students bereft of passion, compassion,
or any sense of the "big picture." They lack understanding of their fellow
human beings on this blue globe and do not even seem to care.
As a teacher of literature, I would be remiss
if I did not refer to a literary work to illustrate my point. In the novel
Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, the main character allows himself to be employed
by a wealthy merchant, Kamaswami, in order to acquire "stuff" which will
impress the woman of his desires, Kamala. During his time with Kamaswami,
Siddhartha observes Kamaswami and his trials with the very demanding world
of commodities and exchanges. At one point in the novel, Kamaswami tries
to impress Siddhartha with how much he has learned from his "merchant-master",
trying to make Siddhartha feel indebted and maybe even indentured to Kamaswami
for his graciousness in choosing Siddhartha as the pupil of this all-important
knowledge:
When Kamaswami once reminded him [Siddhartha] that he had learned
everything from him, he [Siddhartha] replied: "Do not make such jokes.
I have learned from you how much a basket of fish costs and how much interest
one can claim for lending money. That is your knowledge. But I did not
learn how to think from you, my dear Kamaswami. It would be better if you
learned that from me. (69)
The last comment to Kamaswami comes from Siddhartha's sense that even
though Kamaswami makes a lot of money and has a lot of technical know-how
about how to run business, he does not have the ability to ponder on "WHY"
he does business. What good is his business, and what would he be able
to do if, all of a sudden, the rules changed. That is the same quandry
universities have placed their students and this country in by shifting
the focus on techniques and away from the substance of living: its meaning
and purpose. Higher education has left its disciples deprived of any anchor
in the storm of these uncertain times where a college major is nigh irrelevant,
where they more than likely will never work in their chosen field of study,
and where they are likely to go through at least three major career changes
in their lifetime. Our universities must be willing to reassess their emphasis
on specializations when forcing students to put themselves in a niche (ie
a major accompanied with a set flowchart for courses to be taken) might
be the very cause for their professional extinction.
So, maybe what can be drawn from all of this
is that the one-time most popular question of students and teachers alike,
"What's Your Major", is now irrelevant and even counterproductive. Perhaps
the question "What kind of person do you see yourself becoming and what
do you want to give your life to today" should be the defining interrogative
for our students in this neo-millenial age.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at figueroaf@mail.brcc.cc.la.us
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