A Veteran President Calls on Colleges to Stop the Snobbery

As a college president, it’s easy to become consumed by short-term concerns about finances, enrollment, fund raising, and the like. Elaine Maimon has been there.

For two years, she had to keep Governors State University running without much help from the state of Illinois, which was locked in a budget crisis that left its public institutions scrambling.

She drew carefully from reserves and made a series of difficult choices and cuts. At one point last year, she eliminated two dozen academic programs and raised tuition by 15 percent. Could the university front the money for students who relied on the state’s low-income grant program? She had to decide. (The university did cover the mainly first-generation students, reassuring them that they wouldn’t be unexpectedly billed for thousands of dollars.)

In her new book, Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation (Stylus Publishing), Maimon implores campus leaders not to forget about the less pressing but still paramount issues in higher education today: improving pathways from community colleges to universities, reforming teaching and learning, and getting underrepresented students across the finish line.

“People ask me, how did you write this book while the budget crisis was going on?” says Maimon, who has been at Governors State since 2007. “It became a necessity to write the book, because it kept my eyes on the big picture.” Drawing on three decades as a senior administrator, she outlines — with “missionary zeal” — what she believes educators should do about those core problems.

Maimon spoke with The Chronicle about changing the college-cost narrative, improving freshman writing courses, and reforming teaching and learning to develop wisdom.

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In calling for transformation in higher education, you suggest that academe is, in many ways, stuck in the status quo. For instance, you say Ph.D. programs in English are “on a death march.” What is driving that?

Hierarchies are hard to break down because there’s such a strong emotional quality to them. People really connect their identities to being at a university that is “prestigious,” in part because it rejects large numbers of students. We have to turn that all around. We really have to be focused on making society better. That’s why we’re in this profession to begin with.

Right now, in the United States, we have a new majority. We have a large number of students who are not being well served and who have never been well served. And it’s our challenge to make sure that they are. First-generation students, students of color, returning adults, and veterans.

People ask us at Governors State, What’s your biggest competitor for students? Is it this whole thing in Illinois about people going out of state? Well, our biggest competitor is not the University of Wisconsin, or Indiana University, or private universities, or community colleges. Our biggest competitor is nowhere. Thirty-four percent of the freshmen that we admitted for the last three years, fully qualified, went nowhere. That loss of human capital to this democracy is something that we should all be very concerned about.

My book is very much a call for all of us in higher education to work together to educate this new majority. This does cost money. So from a political standpoint, the powers that be need to understand how important it is to invest in the institutions that are really committed to the new majority.

In the book, you outline your concerns about the state of freshman education. You talk about the idea many professors hold, that if I teach graduate students and you teach undergrads, or if I teach seniors and you teach freshmen, I must be smarter than you. How does that mind-set develop?

In the academic world we grow many of our own problems. I’m looking particularly at Ph.D. programs in English — my field — and in the humanities in general. When I was doing my Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, I was in a fellowship program sponsored by the National Defense Education Act. It was believed then to be in the national interest to create more English professors. Isn’t that amazing? My program was very structured, with intentional mentoring. It helped me think in nonhierarchical terms about my career in the academy.

Later, in the 1980s, I was consulting with Penn about writing across the curriculum. At a Research I university, you don’t expect that every single English-composition section is going to be taught by a full-time faculty member. What Penn did was have a prestigious senior scholar and a team of graduate students teach composition. He was mentoring them to be nonhierarchical in their thinking about teaching. Then the regional publics could employ them.

Now I see the Modern Language Association, for example, focusing on the fact that there are not enough jobs of the old sort at Research I universities. They’re looking at, How do we get people with Ph.D.s jobs outside the academy? I look at that and I say, Come on! We have to change the snobbism. We have to make it so that we’re preparing Ph.D. students in English and in the humanities to have jobs inside the academy, where they take the teaching and the scholarship of first-year learning and English composition seriously.

You say that colleges have a responsibility to develop wisdom. What does that mean?

Education can no longer be — if it ever should have been — simply about information. We have to be focused on the evaluation of information. The information that comes up when you click can be a big lie, or it can be something you need to put in context. Then we need to help students connect the dots, connect one piece of information to others, so that they can get a picture.

Wisdom is also something that involves the application of knowledge to a wide variety of circumstances. You may know something, for example, about how to analyze character and voice in a short story. But you’ll be developing what I’m calling wisdom if you know how to apply that to other circumstances.

There should be very substantial reform of teaching and learning. That’s what we should be talking about. Not, Should we have mergers of institutions? Should we have a regional system rather than a board of trustees? All of those questions I see as more or less rearranging the deck chairs. What must happen in education is this rethinking of what it means to educate individuals who are going to be good citizens who are fully employed and leading a fulfilling life.

You talk about the difference between “transactional” and “transformational” leadership, consolidating power versus being collaborative and open. Are you concerned that there are too many so-called transactional leaders these days?

I really see it another way: We have to highlight the kinds of transformative work that’s going on, and we have to change the national narrative. What we see too much are stories about the high cost of education and students just being crushed by debt. For many of the students who go nowhere, it’s because they hear all this stuff about how they’re going to put their families in debt. Universities really do know how to counsel students on financial literacy so that won’t happen. We need to highlight the universities that are doing this excellent work.

To be fair, college costs are going up and financial aid isn’t necessarily keeping pace. Is it really about changing a narrative?

If you look at the actual statistics, and you take out the debt that students are incurring for medical school and so forth, and the debt that they’re incurring at some of the for-profit institutions, then you get an average debt that is manageable. We have to get the facts straight.

Second of all, I know that we can counsel students and families. I mean, how many first-generation families know that if you qualify for Harvard, it will probably cost you less than to go to a flagship university? Yet Harvard’s tuition would be held up as something to be scared about. Also, I don’t know how many first-generation families understand what a regional public university’s mission is. For example, in Illinois, if you qualify for both the Pell Grant and for the state grant for low-income students, you are going to have a total of about $10,000 in aid. Our tuition and fees for next year are $12,000. Now you’re pretty close. We can then help with a low-interest loan, if you’re going to take out something like $1,500 a year. We can help with work-study. We also have some private scholarships.

But it doesn’t help when you see all this stuff about, You’re going to ruin your family with debt. Don’t even think about college because it’s not worth it. That’s the narrative that gets in our way. We need to get our message out there. Go and talk to your local regional university. They will help you. They’ll show you what you’re going to be able to do so that you won’t have this crushing debt. That’s why I think the narrative is the problem.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.