Tonight in this village of 2,300 people, the theater troupe is debuting a work by a local writer while, in a nearby building, a visiting physicist is explaining competing ideas about gaps in our understanding of gravity. An Oscar-winning foreign film is playing at the student union, the Irish ambassador to the U.N. is speaking on his country’s recent history, choral singers are rehearsing, and a soccer match is under way.
And that’s not even half of what is going on in this amazing village on a single early-spring evening. You might expect such a list for a medium-sized city, but for a village of 2,300? Such a place must be unique.
But of course it is not. I have taken this list from an actual calendar of events at a strong but not renowned small liberal-arts college. And the very next morning, the villagers on this extraordinary but normative campus will be engaged in a myriad of science labs, writing groups, and classroom discussions.
All of which shows why we must not simply save our liberal-arts institutions but extend them beyond their campus oases to inform national life and create a 21st-century renaissance. We need to enlarge them, not pare them, because, while a college campus is not a perfect place—some of those late-night parties in the village, for instance, sponsor binge drinking and other troubling behavior—it is still about the best community that humanity can create.
We need to grow these villages in two senses: their enrollment and their social influence. Today, private liberal-arts colleges and small universities enroll shockingly few students, well under 5 percent of B.A. recipients. Why would we ever wish them to enroll less? In several columns over the next few months, I want to suggest how we can achieve this growth, and while I will focus on liberal-arts institutions, I mean often to include the liberal-arts wings of large research universities as well.
A plea and a plan for growth sound an odd note, I recognize, at a time when public discussions of higher education are dominated by jeremiads, by accusations from outside and a sense of crisis within. Many liberal-arts institutions are now advocating downsizing so as not to hang themselves, like the farmer in Macbeth, on the expectation of plenty. But the very cause of complaints is a disappointed idealism: They testify to the conviction that college should be utopian, the chief instrument of civilization, the embodiment of the deep human qualities of curiosity and interest, and the guarantor of the social justice that lets people improve their lot by merit.
Can college be that again, and can it be more than it has ever been? Can academe be not just an illustration of what a great society should be but an active instigator of that reality in the greater world?
Not unless we can disrupt the current conversation. I began with an account of a routine night at a liberal-arts college because I fear that, while we educators seek to sell our colleges and universities to potential applicants and their parents, we sometimes fail to remind ourselves of their value and of our amazing luck to have such a variety of institutions in every national region.
But downsizing and cutting expenses are the panacea du jour for private colleges and small universities. Like any hallucinogen, the diet drug has an allure. In an academic era when CFO’s have usurped the proper roles of many college and university presidents and Moody’s determines the campus mood, when demographic projections appear scary and tuition seems out of control, it’s natural for financially challenged institutions to wish to cut expenses and, thus, people and resources. Lose some staff, fail to replace retired professors, leave a spare dorm or class building unused, become more selective in admitting students (though that is wishful thinking, as these cuts will make a college less attractive to applicants).
The philosophy of shrinkage is natural but deeply unwise, for wisdom seldom arises out of a sense of panic, just as improved learning cannot occur when the primary energies of a learning community are diverted to amateurish cost-cutting. The surgery will likely be fatal, as the greatest college costs, human and material, are fixed. Fewer students may improve an abstract figure like endowment dollars per student, but shrinking also means fewer tuition dollars balancing fixed costs. And meanwhile morale suffers. The resultant loss of quality will lead to further decline and possibly even demise.
Smaller won’t be better. Smaller will be worse, and then smaller won’t be at all.
The real hope for private institutions with endowments well under the gazillions exists in the creativity of the community: increasing revenues and raising quality via new and renewed practices of the best traditions.
The other alternative, the status quo, is just as risky as downsizing and may even be riskier, because the status quo disguises itself as safe. But outside of the 1 percent of richest colleges and universities, the status quo has already proved disastrous. Or haven’t you noticed the crisis in enrollments and faculty positions?
Still, growth is distrusted on many small campuses because, it is said, even mild growth of numbers or programs will disrupt and disfigure the particular character of a college. But that will only happen if that institution’s identity is faint to begin with. I attended Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, as one of 1,200 male students. Four decades later, my daughter attended a Wesleyan of 2,800 students (both male and female). Yet it was strikingly clear to both of us that the Wesleyan we each attended was the same Wesleyan, permanently and delightfully levitated.
Now a column like this one usually proceeds at this point with a self-aggrandizing narrative of personal and institutional success that illustrates the general advice. Not this time, ruefully. When I was a university president, I knew the institution I was leading needed to grow but I gravely underestimated the tasks for making growth happen. I am hardly alone in having made that error; and the very number of institutions that have stumbled on the path of hope has added to the furor for focusing on cutbacks. That’s because expenses are the one thing you can control, while revenue is always speculative.
Even so, getting smaller is small-minded, the wrong lesson to have learned. Cutting expenses will lead most often to a reduction of revenue, which will lead only to the next cut in expenses and loss of revenues and so on. The death throes, as the faculty watches its privileges as well as its number dwindle, will be still more painful than the actual death, which will come as something of a relief. My mistake was in not ensuring we had the programs to make growth natural and pleasurable, but I had the growth part right.
In fact, the real lessons are more complex and have chiefly to do with the revenue-creativity side. Instead of the spurious claim of spending less for more, we can make our campus village as intellectually and socially exciting as possible, and in the process we will indeed reduce some costs but we will reinvest the savings. The difference I propose is the distance between sour necessity and the joy of discovery.
To skip to the end, I promise that in my next few columns, if you consider the subjects that can lead to growth, excellence, and equality of opportunity, I will propose for you a means to grow that does not give away any part of that precious campus village to outside developers or cause the institution to take out a loan that will shatter its bank account.
But first, we need to discover a program for growth that doesn’t make matters worse by planning for an increase that never happens. Details to follow, but here is a preview of measures I am going to propose that would take months, not years, to put in place.
We’re going to flip the faculty. It doesn’t help to tell 17-year-olds about all the great opportunities that await them four years up the pike. Instead, we’re going to focus on particular student interests from the start rather than to say to them “we’re nice, you’re nice, join us.” And we are going to choose a class by judging the distance a student has traveled rather than relying on standardized tests that are, as President Obama has said, anything but standard.
We’re going to be aware that the new B.A. is an M.A. and, more broadly, that the divide between liberal and professional education is a gaping wound that we can heal. We’re going to move from dumb competition to smart collaboration; and on the beginning end of the college experience, that will include revolutionary collaborations with high schools. We’re going to maximize creativity and timeliness by a shared-governance process that is not, as it so often is now, snared governance. And once the institution can pass a rigorous growth test, we’re going to discover a means to improve our material campus that doesn’t bankrupt our values or our endowments.
So who is this “we”? A hackneyed rhetorical hypocrisy at worst, but at best a reality. Because while the nature of an essayist is to assert, I know that I am going to get some things wrong and all things less right than a village of Chronicle readers can improve upon. I am hoping the comments will be the best part.
This ought to be fun. It’s about time for some.
