By Robert H. Atwell
Robert H. Atwell is President of the American Council on Education. This article was adapted from his statement at the organization's annual meeting in San Diego, California, on February 20, 1996.
I want to address higher education's role in the promotion of those values essential to building consensus in a society that is riven by division.
Higher education should be about values--the values of informed citizenship, the values expressed in a sense of responsibility toward those whose potential has not been realized for reasons not of their own doing. By almost any measure, we have not done well in addressing the "values thing" because with notable exceptions, such as those institutions with strong religious ties, we have confused the teaching of values with brainwashing or indoctrination, something that is not intellectually acceptable.
It seems almost as though to be an academic, one is supposed to be value-free, or at least carefully hide one's own opinions, unless they are--to use a very troubling phrase--politically correct. President Nan Keohane of Duke University put it rather well in a recent lecture: "We have been reluctant to recognize the power of what we do, or perhaps more precisely, we have been aware of that power and have been reluctant to use it. We have shied away from saying straightforwardly that our responsibility for training the next generation of citizens and leaders entails teaching some of the traditional sources of public good."
I would add that we also have been distracted indefensibly by the market-driven view that the quality of our product--our graduates--is determined more by their entering credentials than by the value we add. At times, we even have promoted the mercenary concept that the value added by college can be measured almost entirely by greater income potential. An excessive fixation on that idea has caused us to give minimal attention to how much society gains from a more educated and less dependent citizenry, and how much it loses when it fails to see the connection between education and both economic and social growth.
Legislative bodies have listened to the arguments about college improving the earning capacity of graduates and, predictably, have encouraged or forced the raising of student fees or, at the federal level, promoted the shift from grants to loans for needy students.
In many respects, we brought these perverse developments on ourselves. By buying into the economic arguments about the personal value of a college education, we shortchange the broader, more important contribution higher education makes in reducing dependency. This contribution--which is social as well as economic--saves the taxpayer more money in the long run, and, more importantly, improves the well being and enhances the reasoning and problem-solving capacities of the citizenry. It also, I would hope, creates a more fair and more healthy society.
We live in the lowest consensus society of any of the world's major democracies. And, we have lost both the capacity for compromise and the possibility of consensus when we desperately need both. I am always struck by two facts when I travel to other first world nations. First, they value public services--ranging from clean streets, to public transportation systems, to support for the arts, to the salaries of teachers--far more than we. And second, they have a high degree of consensus about the parameters of the welfare state.
By contrast, you name the public policy issue and the chances are we have nothing approaching a consensus about either the definition of the problem or the possible solutions. And so, we have political gridlock as a reflection of societal gridlock. We need to restore our view of politics as the art of the possible, regain the notion of disagreeing without being disagreeable, of understanding the important truth that reasonable people can hold differing points of view while still being committed to compromise. That is how we must conduct ourselves in a low-consensus society.
However, as leaders of educational institutions, I would argue that our responsibilities go beyond promoting civil discourse and compromise in the face of wildly differing points of view. Higher education should be contributing to the building of greater consensus.
How do we, as higher education leaders, model the behaviors of active citizenship? While I understand the often very principled reasons why college and university presidents do not take public stands on issues that don't affect their institutions directly, I believe that society loses some terribly needed direction and leadership when thoughtful persons in positions of influence and responsibility remain silent on questions that profoundly affect the capacity of the nation to rise above the "pluribus" to assert the "unum." We have abdicated our responsibilities as teachers and institutional leaders when we are silent on the great public policy debates of the day.
An important part of our responsibility to impart values is making the case that higher education serves society, and that this service goes far beyond credentialing those with high potential. When we concentrate only on the benefits to the individual and ignore or slight the benefits to society, we find ourselves in a defensive posture on a range of issues, from public sector tuitions to affirmative action.
Higher education performs a powerful service to society in general--especially when we work to ensure the success of persons whose formal entering credentials may be seriously lacking, or whose preparation is inadequate to function in the marketplace.
I want to use the example of remediation as an illustration of how we need to elevate the argument and frame it as a contribution to social and economic well being. The question concerning remediation goes beyond whether colleges and universities should be compensating for the deficiencies of the public schools.
Remediation often is an essential component of affirmative action. It is justified--indeed required--by both a sense of responsibility to those whose potential exceeds their past performance and the enormous gains to society that come from reducing the potential of these individuals for dependency. We are seeing a disturbing trend in the states and the Congress toward eliminating or minimizing the remediation function of colleges and universities. The message is: You should increase admission standards, and if people do not meet them, too bad.
Sometimes that is simply a rationale for not wanting to fund our institutions adequately or provide sufficient access for students. But it also reflects a narrow outlook that views education as benefiting only the recipients. It denies the societal benefits by failing to see that an educated work force is necessary not only in sheer competitive economic terms, but also in terms of the reduction of dependency.
Bob McCabe, the former president of Miami-Dade Community College, has developed an eloquent thesis that he calls "starving the solution." The problem as Bob sees it, and as many people more conservative than he have argued, is that an ever larger share of our population has become dependent on public funds in the form of welfare, prison and Medicaid.
In turn, the rising costs of these programs has "starved the solution," which is those activities--education is the salient example--that could reduce dependency and produce more tax payers rather than tax consumers. In many states, prison construction and operation is the number one competitor to higher education for public funding, and in a number of states it now gets a higher share of the budget. The average prison guard in California earns more than an assistant professor in the California State University. The cost of keeping a person in prison for a year exceeds the cost of tuition, room and board for a college student in over 95 percent of our institutions, including each and every community college.
It would be shortsighted for us to cut back on remediation efforts in the face of budget problems, and it makes no sense for society to "starve the solution" to dependency.
It may seem rather self-serving of those of us in higher education to point out the costs of starving the solution or, on a loftier plane, become more aggressive advocates for the social benefits of our enterprise. But if we don't do so, then higher education will continue to be looked upon as just another consumer good, and we will find ourselves competing, in many cases unsuccessfully, with high-tech accredited commercial providers of distance education via the Web or CD-ROMS or other media.
We as educators have a responsibility not simply to provide our students with employment skills, but also to instill those values that can lead to the restoration of our civic life through healthier debate and greater consensus. u