What Universities Are For: an Open Letter to UTPA President Nelsen

Dear President Nelsen:

Toward the end of this semester I hurriedly completed my evaluation of all the administrators who serve above me, including you. Since then I've been fretting about one of my answers, even though I was (obviously) anonymous. I gave you the highest score possible on "Demonstrates concern for the students" but then in the optional comment field I wrote "Sometimes a bit too dang concerned about the students." Can't you just imagine my careless remark quoted on talk radio, exploited to reinforce the caricature of tenured radicals who at best condescend to the public they're supposed to be serving, who are more concerned with faculty privilege than anything else? So here is the thing I am willing to breach my anonymity to explain: yes, for me there is something in the university enterprise—for now I'll call it academic ideals—that looms even larger than the students. As I think it should for all of us at the university.

Mind you, teaching at a "student-centered" institution suits me fine. I'm a passionate teacher; I reckon the lion's share of my professional energies is devoted to my students—somewhat at the expense of my own writing time and career advancement. But I'm still uncomfortable with the unending local refrain that nothing matters except "what's best for the students." There is no such thing as best-for-the-students simpliciter, only competing desiderata and tradeoffs. What's best for my least savvy students is accessible and entertaining materials to whet their intellectual appetite; the structure and review that they need to feel secure even as I try to wean them from the idea that their relationship to me is as employees whose chief duty is obedience; and exposure to a seminar atmosphere in which they can see others genuinely curious and engaged in intellectual pursuits. What's best for my most advanced students, meanwhile, is to be segregated away from the laggards; they would be better served by much higher admissions standards and less concern for retention. They need the bar set high enough to challenge them, they need to sample the most rigorous studies, and they need to know that competition is stiffer in many places than what they're used to from their previous education in south Texas.

What many of my students regard as their best educational interest is maximizing the ratio of output earned (the grade or credential) to effort put in. What some others regard as their best interest is whatever will maximize their lifetime income. These are both rational, outcome-oriented positions, but I take it that relatively few educators see their "product" primarily in such terms. Many legislators, though, are thinking along similar outcome-oriented lines when they impose credit-hour caps and other measures designed to reduce time to degree, or seek to configure university education to the anticipated job market. They want education to be the shortest distance between two points, with no wasteful meanders in it. For me, the meanders are the education. How do students aged 17, 18, 19 have the wherewithal to make a one-time, binding choice about the mental furniture they'll have for a lifetime when they have no idea even what the range of options is?

Clearly, educational policy decisions aren't made in a context-free vacuum but are relative to other philosophical commitments. Certain legislators are thinking of students mainly as potential participants in the national economy and so they want what's best for business interests—er, the students, I mean—in economic terms. But I am thinking of students as participants and potential participants in something I consider much more significant: the grand, centuries-long human quest for knowledge and understanding. This quest is intimately connected with but is not identical to promoting the material wellbeing of humankind. "Education is my religion," I say in class sometimes. The students laugh, but I'm not really joking.

My ideal of the university is an institution firmly set apart from either commercial or state interests; though it may derive funding from some combination of those two major social forces, it should never be beholden to either. The purpose of the university is to study the nature of things as they really are irrespective of what may be immediately profitable or what would consolidate and preserve power. In the long run holding accurate information about things as they really are benefits a nation and thus wise governments have motive enough to support universities but also to avoid interfering with them. Tenure and academic freedom are the safeguards that maintain the necessary separation of university and state, university and commerce. They have a price but the price is worth it.

During the 1980s, I used to make a living as a Russian translator. Where US politicians relied on certain stock phrases, Soviet politicians rolled out whole stock paragraphs extolling the virtues of their rationalized central economic planning—waste free, unlike the West! Workers' councils were said to be enthusiastically supporting the Five-Year Plan, competing in friendly fashion to "fulfill and overfulfill" their quotas even earlier than last quarter, though the quotas were set even higher now and will be set higher still for next quarter. Some of the conversations going on at UTPA now remind me of those olden days. The provost, for instance, discusses tenure in terms eerily similar to Soviet lingo: continual escalation of targets is desirable and supposedly achievable; faculty should "meet and exceed," not just meet, tenure requirements. And the revision of the core curriculum is a monument to central planning if there ever was one—do you think the (presumably capitalism-loving) planners that kicked off this curriculum reform in THECB will be able to predict and control the future better than the communist ones did back in the failed, fallen command economy of the USSR? Even by the early 1980s it was obvious that no one, not even the speakers themselves, believed those words about the plans, the overfulfillment, the enthusiasm. It was just what they thought they had to say to maintain their own positions.

I wonder if many people in the US today still have faith in the fad for numerical accountability at every level of education. Every time you turn around some fresh scandal about fudged assessments is in the news. Anyone's who watched The Wire understands how official pressure from above leads to "juking the stats." How many of our education-reforming politicians are sincere, and how many, like the Soviet blatherers, are completely cynical? The problem with all outcome-oriented approaches to education is the same thing that did the Soviets in: if we're really committed to progress we can't know in advance where we're going to end up. If we're really committed to what is actually true then that, not ever-increasing numbers, has to be our top priority.

Dr. Nelsen, I regret my choice of words on the administrator evaluation form. I love my students, I do. But I could not love them, dear, so much, loved I not academic ideals—disinterested and unfettered intellectual inquiry into what is actually the case in the real world— more.

Sincerely yours,

Jean Braithwaite,
Associate Professor (the nonfiction person),
English Department