I am an admirer of Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class, a new book by Christopher Newfield, who writes in this issue of The Chronicle about how certain myths exacerbate the financial plight of those institutions. Newfield, a professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, expands on his argument in the book. I am particularly drawn to his claims that the crises threatening public universities are not primarily the result of economic downturns or altered cost structures. They stem, rather, from a conservative-led campaign to end higher education’s democratizing influence on the nation.
“Conservative elites,” he writes, challenged by “the postwar rise of [a] college-educated economic majority have put that majority back in its place.” Their weapon, he says, “has been the culture wars” — on both higher education and the “progressive ... trends” it fosters. The success of the right’s cultural crusade has “severed the public university from [its] broader base,” and has led to the “abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses.” Tough words.
My own controversial tenure as president of the College of William and Mary offers a good deal of evidence to ratify Newfield’s claims. After altering the way a Christian cross was displayed in a public facility, on a public-university campus, in a chapel used regularly for secular events both voluntary and mandatory, I was treated to a potent dose of cultural contest. When I then refused to ban a student-sponsored, sexually tinged performance-art program — a ban that would have flatly violated the First Amendment — the controversy became acute beyond the campus walls. I’ve seen at close hand the impact that battling bloggers, right-wing donors, fevered Fox News firebrands, demagogic legislators, and trustees unschooled in and uncommitted to the core values of a university can have upon a presidency and an institution. They are nothing to scoff at.
And there is much to the “unmaking,” or privatization, that Newfield abhors. The bold compact conjoining excellence and equality — assuring that students from humble origins compete alongside colleagues of every circumstance — is frayed. Public universities, especially our most famed ones, increasingly emulate their elite private competitors, in the process shunning traditional cornerstones of public obligation.
Despite my experiences with the culture warriors, however, I’m convinced that Newfield overstates their influence. Public higher education’s strategies and ambitions are dominated, appropriately, by the nation’s great flagship institutions. It is here that the trends toward privatization that Newfield decries have had their fullest flower. And although our strongest public institutions have ample experience with ideological assault, I’d guess that one could wait a very long time indeed before seeing universities like Berkeley, Carolina, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin cry uncle in the culture wars.
Still, the “severing” of the “public university from its broad base” that Newfield outlines is real. The causes are just considerably closer to home.
State universities have been established as bold testament to the democratic belief that, regardless of students’ race, status, or economic condition, the doors of learning and promise will be opened equally to all with the wit and will to master the challenge. But the universities don’t always operate that way.
Family income has a relentless and too often determinative impact on access to American higher education. The likelihood that a low-income student will graduate from college hasn’t improved in three decades. Only a dismal 6 percent of such students graduated by age 24 in 1970; the same was true in 2002. What’s more, students from families earning $90,000 or more a year have an even chance of obtaining degrees by the age of 24. For those coming from families making $35,000 or less, the odds are about one in 17.
There are many reasons for this stark departure from our long declared, and long unrealized, national ideal. Soaring costs, diminished state support, federal policies on taxation and financial aid, shifts of state aid from need-based to merit-based — the list is long. But over the past decade, the response of our best public universities to such challenges says more about the abandonment of the public mission than anything from the lips of Bill Bennett, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, or Bill O’Reilly.
As a recent report by the Education Trust, “Engines of Inequality: Diminishing Equity in the Nation’s Premier Public Universities,” has documented, our flagship public universities have become less accessible to low-income and minority students since 1995. The enrollment of students eligible for Pell Grants at public universities has declined, while the number of such students at other colleges and universities has significantly risen. Flagships have also, the report concluded, “become much less representative of the racial composition of the nation’s high-school graduates.” As more students of poverty and color have prepared themselves for the unique opportunities of their states’ strongest publics, those institutions have become “whiter and richer.”
And despite rhetoric to the contrary, the flagships themselves have apparently been guilty of piling on. As tuition costs have risen, flagships have shifted their own institutional financial-aid resources from economic need to merit-based grants favoring the wealthiest applicants. At major research universities, institutional aid to students from families making at least $100,000 a year more than quadrupled from 1995 to 2003. Remarkably, the average institutional grant to high-income students is now larger — that’s right, larger — than the support offered to their low-income and middle-income peers. Where’s Thomas Jefferson when we need him?
If our best public institutions have not embraced the culture wars, they have turned steadily to another field of battle: the relentless struggle for resources and rankings. No outsiders had to compel their entry into that contest. Faculty members are mobile and marketable. Brilliant students, wooed with sweetened financial-aid packages, help assure ascendancy in U.S. News & World Report’s “best colleges” rankings. Aping their private competitors, they master the art of dedicating more and more resources to fewer and fewer people. That is a stage where all steps are costly, and the fruits of economic privilege are coin of the realm.
Most of the incentives and actors that dominate strong public universities seem positioned to look past the prospects of the economically marginalized. Presidents are seen, almost exclusively, as fund raisers. Trustees as well are chosen primarily for their philanthropic prowess — actual or anticipated. Neither group presents likely candidates to press the claims of economic and social justice. The compelling human desire for reputation and status pervades our campuses. Poverty, and the plight of those struggling to make unraveling ends meet, is often nowhere on the agenda. Homilies of public mission and obligation ring hollow.
That’s OK, of course, for the economically blessed. But it threatens to betray the central, ennobling purpose of the most essential institutions in American life. The marvelous Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1930 to 1949, promised a public university built upon flames of learning that “would light up the heavens of the commonwealth ... for the poorest youth, ... an outpost of light and liberty among all the frontiers of mankind.” For too many, the lamp grows dim.
Gene R. Nichol is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as president of the College of William and Mary from 2005 to 2008.
http://chronicle.com Section: Commentary Volume 55, Issue 10, Page A50