Ivory-tower shuffle

In 2001, university administrators will have to deal with shrinking endowments, increased demands from students, and the ongoing PC debate

by Dorie Clark

From the antiwar movement of the '60s, when student protesters clashed with the National Guard at Kent State, to the anti-apartheid movement of the '80s, college campuses have been a hotbed of social ferment. In the past year, students across the country fought living-wage campaigns for campus workers and participated in the movement to end sweatshop labor. But in 2001, the biggest change coming out of the academy will probably be independent of student activism. A number of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities -- including Harvard, Smith, Tufts, and Princeton -- are looking for new presidents. As these new academic leaders dodge the bullets of a possible economic slowdown, rapid technological change, and continuing political-correctness debates, they will have to make difficult -- and influential -- choices about what a 21st-century education should look like.

Perhaps the most pressing of these challenges will be economic. Until recently, American colleges and universities had benefited from a decade of bull-market euphoria. Between donor largesse and stock-market gains, endowments soared over the past few years. From 1996 to last year, Harvard's mushroomed from $8.7 billion to $18.3 billion. Stanford's increased nearly 32 percent, to $6 billion. Indeed, for eight of the past 10 years, the investments of college and university endowments had double-digit returns, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. And the influx of cash allowed universities to develop elaborate new programs. For example, MIT, whose endowment grew 17 percent between fiscal years 1998 and 1999, also took in substantial donations, including $350 million for the new McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

But with signs now pointing to an economic slowdown, and the Federal Reserve last month signaling concern about the possibility of recession, colleges may find their wallets growing thinner. As a result, the historic character of many schools may be forced to change. Asian investors are currently pushing to turn the Haverhill campus of Bradford College -- a small liberal-arts school that closed last year because of financial trouble -- into a high-end boarding school for foreign students. Emmanuel College, an 81-year-old Catholic women's school in the Fenway, hopes to stave off fiscal woe by going co-ed this fall. Christopher Lucas, author of Crisis in the Academy: Rethinking American Higher Education (St. Martin's Press, 1996), predicts that managing finances will be universities' biggest concern in the year ahead, and that with the expense of upgrading technology, improving infrastructure, and even keeping up with heating costs, "most administrators are caught in a squeeze."

Bread-and-butter concerns will also affect decisions about hiring and curriculum. With college tuition perpetually on the rise (last year's private-school average was a record-breaking $21,339), students are looking for ways to make education pay after graduation. "Ask an entering freshman why they're going to college," says Lucas, "and they'll give you the stock phrase `To get a good job and make lots of money.' I think universities are acceding to that demand." To that end, schools are beefing up their computer-science and engineering departments -- though they're having a hard time competing with the private sector in their search for qualified instructors. In less technical fields, colleges and universities have felt pressure to give students their money's worth by hiring brand-name academics whose reputations extend beyond the ivory tower -- professors like Cornel West, Alan Dershowitz, and Martha Nussbaum. Lured with monumental salaries, generous sabbaticals, and the privilege of teaching upper-level courses, these public intellectuals may give prospective humanities undergrads the illusion that their astronomical tuitions will buy a chance to study with the greats.

But the implicit promise of student contact -- or "face time" -- is not always fulfilled. In fact, these big-name professors force college administrators to dwell on the bottom line in ways that further shortchange students. Everywhere, college and university officials have saved money by outsourcing teaching duties to adjunct professors (who are usually paid anywhere from $1200 to $5000 per course, and who now make up nearly half of all professors in the country). Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are also frequently relied upon to lead classes for low pay.

But adjuncts in Boston and nationwide are beginning to organize for better pay and working conditions under the rubric of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor. And TAs may also begin to agitate for better treatment in 2001, thanks to a recent National Labor Relations Board decision allowing TAs at private universities to unionize (TAs at public universities already had the right). So administrators may see money get even tighter.

To take up the fiscal slack, colleges and universities may come to rely more on Web-based learning. The industry grossed $2 billion this year, and is expected to grow rapidly. But critics worry that Web-based learning, even if it offers substantial cost savings, underestimates the value of student-teacher interaction -- for which, they claim, there is no technological substitute. Lucas believes the corporate model, in general, doesn't work for academia. "How are you going to put a dollar figure on education?" he asks. "Bigger isn't always better. It'd be cheaper to have bigger classes, but if I'm an academic, I'd say we really ought to decrease the number of students per class."

Financial issues and vocational concerns have already threatened the traditional liberal-arts education, some observers believe. According to Roger Kimball, author of the conservative critique Tenured Radicals: How Politics Is Corrupting Our Higher Education (Harper & Row, 1990), philosophy and Shakespeare have given way to health-care administration and accounting, and something has been lost in the process. "A liberal-arts education doesn't allow you to get a better job or learn how to do something," he says, "but for centuries people have thought it useful to learn what Matthew Arnold called the `best that has been thought and said in the world.'"

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Indeed, the challenge for the new generation of university leaders will be to determine what students need to learn and how they should learn it. As they confront these questions and the financial issues that complicate them, they will also have to continue the debate over which areas of knowledge should be passed on -- the classical Western canon or a multicultural alternative. And they will find "political correctness" debates extending far beyond the classroom.

Worries about political correctness have already filtered into faculty research, says Christopher Lucas. "There's a lot of self-censorship," he says. "Professors aren't anxious to incur the legal risks of being thought ... sexist or racist." Conservative political scientist Peter Berkowitz filed suit against Harvard University last year, claiming that he was denied tenure because of his political views. Also last year, Harvard University Press came under fire when Linda Waite of the University of Chicago accused them of rejecting a book they had commissioned from her, The Case for Marriage: Why Married People are Happier, Healthier & Better Off Financially (Doubleday, 2000), because of its conservative tone. (Harvard vehemently denies the charges.) Author Roger Kimball agrees with Waite, Berkowitz, and others that free speech on campus has been stifled on all levels. He says that although there is more cynicism about political correctness than in the past, "the tenets of [PC] have been more widely institutionalized. They're taken for granted now in a way they weren't when they were new."

Campus life is being profoundly affected as well, with First Amendment rights brushing up against protections for minorities. Last fall at Tufts University, students vehemently protested the student judiciary's decision to let an evangelical Christian group exclude a lesbian from a leadership position -- despite the school's non-discrimination policy -- because they said her pro-gay beliefs didn't square with their own. Columbia University's new policy for dealing with sexual assaults on campus, which allows the victim to testify privately and without having to face the accused, is drawing fire from civil-liberties groups. Conservative law students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison filed suit against the university, angered that their student-activities fees went toward groups, such as gay-student organizations, that they found objectionable. (The Supreme Court unanimously ruled against them.)

Students are also pushing new, more dramatic visions of diversity. At California State University at Northridge, a male-to-female transgender student is attempting to start a trans-inclusive sorority. Even Smith College, the prestigious women's school, is home to an active "Transgender Committee"; some students now even refer to themselves with male pronouns. And though a push at Tufts University to allow opposite-sex roommates was unsuccessful last year, a similar measure was approved at Pennsylvania's Haverford College.

Ironically, administrators will have to find ways to navigate these issues in the midst of the most dramatic threat to campus diversity in nearly 40 years: affirmative action is quite possibly dying, and at some schools it's already gone. State universities in California, Florida, and Texas have ended the practice, and the courts have rendered mixed verdicts.

Some university presidents, including Neil Rudenstine of Harvard, have spoken in favor of continuing affirmative action, and student activism on race issues and multiculturalism remains strong. Last year, student activists at the University of Maryland got the university to offer a certificate program in Asian-American studies, and the University of New Mexico added a minor in Native American studies. But with the institutional bedrock of affirmative action crumbling, universities will have to decide where they stand on issues related to diversity. As Kimball and other conservatives see it, some schools have already done so -- loud and clear. "I believe the new president of Brown [Ruth Simmons, a black woman] fits a certain sexual and ethnic profile and that's why she was picked," he says. "Not for her qualifications, but for affirmative-action reasons." Of course university officials see it differently -- Brown chancellor Stephen Robert said at the time of the appointment, "We have selected an extraordinary leader, a person of character, of integrity, and of depth."

But regardless of who they are, next year's crop of high-profile academic leaders will have to go out on the stump and raise money for their schools, as college presidents always have -- though the task will prove harder if the recent economic gold rush slows down. They'll have to make tough decisions about learning models and the importance of student-teacher contact, navigate contentious issues on campus, and determine how -- and whether -- to diversify the student body and the curriculum. But above all, they'll set the tone for institutions of higher learning and for society at large on what an educated person needs to know -- from software to Sartre -- in 2001 and beyond.

Dorie Clark can be reached at dclark[a]phx.com.