Higher Ed as Spectator: IHE article

[polly_mer]

If the public were asked how important postsecondary institutions have been in fighting COVID, many people would not understand the question. Higher education is viewed more as a spectator than a participant.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/04/05/higher-ed-should-learn-lessons-world-war-ii-about-serving-public-good-opinion

[dismalist]

What are most telling, however, are the differences between World War II and today. An obvious one is that the war transformed campuses into hubs of activity, whereas they have been largely deserted during the virus ... .

Yeah:

-War in Iraq. 'Til 2017?
-War in Afghanistan. Twenty years?
-War on Drugs. Fifty years?

And this clown wants another one.

When will it ever end?

[marshwiggle]

Quotation from the article:

Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, offered the government the research infrastructure of the university after Pearl Harbor. The overall emphasis of higher education was nicely summarized by James Conant, president of Harvard. He said in 1941, "Each one of us stands ready to do his part in insuring that a speedy and complete victory is ours. To this end, I pledge all the resources of Harvard University."

One huge difference now from then is the anti-government cynicism which is the norm in academia now. To be seen to totally support any government initiative would be seen by many as immoral. And to do it in such a wholehearted manner as the embodiment of evil.

[Hibush]

If the public were asked how important postsecondary institutions have been in fighting COVID, many people would not understand the question. Higher education is viewed more as a spectator than a participant.

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2021/04/05/higher-ed-should-learn-lessons-world-war-ii-about-serving-public-good-opinion

The Federal government was viewed as a spectator as well, except for a few Federal iconoclasts willing to defy leadership. University leaders were not going to put their resources in the service of such disorganization. During WWII, enrollment plunged--by >80% at my school. During Covid, enrollment didn't drop, if anything teaching and learning effort by students and faculty increased. Tierney does not recognize either of these fundamental drivers.

[polly_mer]

What are most telling, however, are the differences between World War II and today. An obvious one is that the war transformed campuses into hubs of activity, whereas they have been largely deserted during the virus ... .

Yeah:

-War in Iraq. 'Til 2017?
-War in Afghanistan. Twenty years?
-War on Drugs. Fifty years?

And this clown wants another one.

When will it ever end?

No, what this guy wants is a brain mobilization like the Manhattan Project.  We put the best minds on to a huge problem and they pulled off miracles in terms of effective research.

With all our current societal problems (some amenable to science, others needing other human knowledge), why is academia on the sidelines instead of leading the plan to fix problems? 

Why do we hear about language policing instead of concrete actions to be more inclusive by changing institutions and processes?

We actually know quite a bit on the factors that influence what criminal justice reforms will be effective in a given situation.  Why are academics signing generic letters of condemnation/support instead of leading task forces in the communities to take concrete action?

We know quite a bit about factors that affect poverty (systemic, personal, unfortunate confluences of random events).  Again, where are the academics advising the relevant decision makers and resource holders on plans and effective resource allocation?

The mad scramble for undergrad students to pay faculty to go through the motions of teaching is not the mission of higher ed and is not why public money should support higher ed.  However, that's where many higher ed institutions are in the US doing neither good education of the public nor using the best in human knowledge to address human problems, but sucking up resources that would be better spent on real education (including good humanities) and research (again, good humanities to have insight on the human factors).

[Wahoo Redux]

We often see the answers to our problems in the actions of the Greatest Generation---and certainly there is so much to admire in their selflessness, heroism, and industry that it is hard not to deify them---but World War II was a unique time in history, as was the Eisenhower era.  There are limits to the parallels that can be drawn.

We are not in the same cultural and historical situation, and the changes that Teirney notes (condensed coursework to get soldiers into the field, for instance) were responses to very specific and very acute needs.  The Manhattan Project that Polly mentions was also a very specific goal which the government threw resources at.

I love the idea of becoming agents in the community, but with all due respect to the expertise of the author of this article, one cannot get blood from a stone.  I am at wits end trying to keep up with my job as it stands now. Our resources are tapped.  What are we supposed to do? How am I or any of you meant to take our expertise out in the community?  Typical of this sort of moralizing, Tierney offers one small suggestion (use unused dorm beds to house the homeless [has Tierney ever dealt with the problems facing the homeless? Does he know the reasons that people are often homeless?]) but nothing concrete.

And again, this great era of American higher ed is without precedent which Tierney even acknowledges:

After World War II, American higher education rapidly expanded and became an engine of opportunity and a model for the world. The GI Bill enabled enlisted men and women to access the funds necessary to attend college; it was also a windfall for colleges and universities financially hammered by the war. In addition, federal, state and foundation funding for research grew exponentially, in large part because of the impressive research that universities carried out throughout the war.

I love Polly's notion that higher ed should become an active participant rather than a mere "spectator" (which I don't think we are, anyway).  I would love to see that and it is definitely a meritorious philosophy.  But someone is going to have to pay for it.  We don't want to pay for what we have now.

[mythbuster]

At least within the biomedical sciences, there was a Manhattan Project style series of collectives.  As starting point I give you, from NIH: https://ncats.nih.gov/covid19-translational-approach/collaboration

Over the Fall, MIT had a fabulous series of public lectures on COVID and up to moment state of research. Every presentation was the result of collective efforts of scientists who had dropped their previous work to shift to COVID. You can see the lectures here: https://biology.mit.edu/undergraduate/current-students/subject-offerings/covid-19-sars-cov-2-and-the-pandemic/

The difference is that today, collaboration is much more the norm than not for these scientific fields. So the collaborative aspect goes unreported.

[polly_mer]

I love Polly's notion that higher ed should become an active participant rather than a mere "spectator" (which I don't think we are, anyway).  I would love to see that and it is definitely a meritorious philosophy.  But someone is going to have to pay for it.  We don't want to pay for what we have now.

Resource allocation is the key.  While we need undergrad education, we don't need to try desperately to preserve institutions whose time has passed. 

We can free up a lot of resources by limiting college to people who want to learn.  In particular, we could do a lot more community involvement by existing faculty by letting them be professors---experts in their fields who do some teaching, some research, and some service.  It would be much more useful to have many of the current humanities faculty teaching more than a 3/3 to get to scale back and spend much of their service time participating in discussions with local leaders to make and implement plans.

Dismantle the adjunct armies in favor of getting more good minds paid to be working on the community problems.  Redirecting public funds from propping up the zombie colleges to paying smart people to work our known problems as their primary job will benefit us all.  Teaching is not the only valuable way to make a positive difference in the community.

Having that awareness of the human factors during regular, ongoing discussions would be very useful, much more than the one-off gen ed course however great that course is.

[Wahoo Redux]

Those are good points, Polly----and I am all for dismantling the adjunct army and hiring FT faculty----but there is a paradox in advising colleges to be participants in their communities and then removing the participants from the community.

As I have posted before, these little rural colleges which are about to crash are sometimes THE participant in their communities.  Our school, which fails on many accounts, is incredibly important to our economically ravaged city for a lot of reasons.  The number of people we employ is pretty central to our city, for one thing. The opportunities we provide for people who would not or could not travel up the road to the bigger, more prestigious universities are pretty valuable. 

I don't think there is any argument that the crash is coming, but it will leave the big schools in the relatively rich regions as the only ones able to participate.  I suspect you are right about the necessity of reallocating resources; the problem is that the reallocation is going to further impoverish the impoverished.  And the poor people are about to lose their participants.

[polly_mer]

I don't think there is any argument that the crash is coming, but it will leave the big schools in the relatively rich regions as the only ones able to participate.  I suspect you are right about the necessity of reallocating resources; the problem is that the reallocation is going to further impoverish the impoverished.  And the poor people are about to lose their participants.

People are mobile. 

If we plan instead of just twiddling our thumbs while watching the inevitable unfold, then those individuals could be much better off by giving them options to relocate in groups and start a new life.  In many cases, a consolidation within a hundred-mile radius would be sufficient.   A handful of large Western states are harder, but those aren't the places with hundreds of the tiny colleges that will close.

The most frustrating thing I encounter daily is people who look at the data like the rural poor areas and having a dying college/hospital/k-12 system be the main industry and then try to solve the problem by pouring resources down the toilet to preserve the status quo instead of looking at all the options.

The failure of the faculty to be creative and work towards improving the region or figuring out how to get people redistributed such that the resources support the redistributed population drives me nuts.

If academics were participants in the community, then they wouldn't be so worried about saving their own current jobs that they just let the crash happen.  Active participants who know how power works would be working the power system to get the long-term changes made to fix things.

Writing your politicians on your pet interest is far, far less effective than leading the relevant task forces at the regional/state/national levels and being the go-to person by the people with power because of a reputation of being expert in getting things done.  Focusing on teaching gen ed courses and keeping fingers crossed regarding enrollment is being a bystander instead of being active in the community in ways that matter. 

Someone who can do the literature review, contact the experts as consultants, and lead the discussion that develops the plan through implementation is invaluable.  Most academics should be able to do that, even if they themselves are not experts in the relevant areas.  But, life is hard, and it's easier to hope the entirely foreseeable events really won't happen instead of doing the work necessary to have a prayer of getting on a different path. 

After all, many of these academics already denied personal reality and have declined to do the much easier work to get a non-academic job in a thriving region.  People who can assimilate data and use data to plan have nearly always already left by the time the college crashes closed instead of closing gracefully.

[Wahoo Redux]

What would a college "participant" realistically look like on the ground?  I know we are ruining higher ed with our gen eds and data illiteracy, but what should a college or uni actually do now if they want to participate in their communities?

[Sun_Worshiper]

There has been a lot of talk in the social science world about how academics need make their voices heard in policy circles. There are now big workshops and well-funded projects along these lines, and they have had some tangible effects. However, the career incentives are to publish in journals for a small and specialized audience, so that's what people mostly do, and this will continue to be the case as long as promotion criteria are build more-or-less exclusively around academic publishing (as well as teaching and service).

[marshwiggle]

There has been a lot of talk in the social science world about how academics need make their voices heard in policy circles.

If these voices are presenting evidence-based and expertise-informed insights, then this is a good idea. On the other hand, if they're merely presenting ideologically-driven lobbying, then they're just like other lobbyists. (Think of all of the celebrities weighing in on all kinds of topics about which they have no more knowledge than the average citizen, and yet feel they deserve to be listened to more than other people merely because they have an unrelated skill that is popular.)

[Hibush]

There has been a lot of talk in the social science world about how academics need make their voices heard in policy circles.

If these voices are presenting evidence-based and expertise-informed insights, then this is a good idea. On the other hand, if they're merely presenting ideologically-driven lobbying, then they're just like other lobbyists.

I have found that in the policy circles of Congressional staff and Federal-agency policy staff, evidence-based and expertise-informed insights are readily recognized and valued. This impression is based on many conversations in their offices in DC with one to three experts. Larger groups and other venues are less effective for such conversations and end up being more of the glad-handing variety.

There is one other place the expertise is taken very seriously, and that is when there is a request for public comment on a new regulation. You see these published regularly in the Federal Register.

[Sun_Worshiper]

There has been a lot of talk in the social science world about how academics need make their voices heard in policy circles.

If these voices are presenting evidence-based and expertise-informed insights, then this is a good idea. On the other hand, if they're merely presenting ideologically-driven lobbying, then they're just like other lobbyists. (Think of all of the celebrities weighing in on all kinds of topics about which they have no more knowledge than the average citizen, and yet feel they deserve to be listened to more than other people merely because they have an unrelated skill that is popular.)

The academics in my field who are promoting more academic influence on policymaking and who are making their own voices heard in policy circles do empirically and theoretically driven research, publish that work in top journals and with top presses, and then translate that research for public consumption via op-eds or other kinds of efforts. These people have far more expertise than the average citizen on the policy issues that they focus on and they are not at all like the know-nothing celebrities that weigh in on policy topics or even occasionally become president.