Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some is a historical narrative with the plot structure of a Tragedy. In the final analysis, it tells a history about the origins of the college student loan debt crisis that currently threatens higher education in the United States of America. Obviously, I count myself squarely in the camp that perceives the accumulation of college student loan debt in America as a crisis that is unsustainable in the long term for our system of higher education. Clearly, this crisis did not exist sixty years ago, when my history of higher education as a field of study begins, or forty-five years ago, when the Association for the Study of Higher Education organized. A history of a national system of higher education that moves from a time when there was no crisis to a time when the crisis has become evident to many is perfectly suited to a tragic plot structure. The Preface is not explicit on this point. I wanted readers to witness the journey I took from an interest in the history of an obscure profession to the origins of the federal system of student loans for higher education.
My previous work, Outsourcing Student Success: The History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education, is similarly a historical narrative with a plot structure of a Tragedy, albeit one with a rise and decline. It tells the history of a profession that many inside and outside of higher education would not otherwise know about. An original contribution to the literature, I believe, the history shows that the field of institutional research arose from a movement to apply scientific principles to the study of higher education, which then integrated with the movement to democratize higher education (Truman Commission). In this respect, it is a positive and hopeful review of the profession’s beginnings. Events then took a turn for the worse and the profession has faced numerous challenges during the past fifty years. These challenges originate with the formation of a national association for practitioners and an official document written by two of its earliest presidents who declared: “institutional research should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance.” The text does not attack institutional research or institutional researchers in these words; it cites several leaders of the national association who have written such things in the past. Unfortunately, my work has been mischaracterized as “criticism” of the profession and it has had limited exposure to practitioners who may benefit from reading the complete history.
I hope obviously that Honors of Inequality does not suffer the same fate for its intended readers. As I note in the Preface, however, many will find the text or tone “exasperating.” Some will likely become “frustrated” with the narrative’s journey and debark before it reaches its destination. If you reach the end, I wish to explain a few of the bumps and potholes you may have felt along the way.
I begin by saying that “ideas matter” and I use the terms “ideology” and “ideological” repeatedly. I do not intend to suggest that others have ideology whereas I do not. Throughout the work, I reference Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19th-Century History (2014 [1973]) as a method to analyze the ideology operative in higher education as a field of study. His method of analysis works equally well on my ideological proclivities. White defines four archetypal historical narratives. Both of my histories on aspects of higher education aspire toward one archetype: Tragic (plot), Mechanistic (argument), and Radical (ideological implication) historical narratives (White capitalizes each of these terms). Tragic as explained above, but also Mechanistic: the “moral philosophy of institutional autonomy” articulated with anti-intellectualism, the community-consciousness of scholars, faculty’s class interests, economists’ student loan scheme, and the elite functions of higher education for the ruling class, ultimately, to produce a chain of events that transformed the American system of higher education into an perpetual motion engine of social and economic inequality.
A common critique of the archetypal historical narrative I adopt is that it is reductivist and deterministic, making events appear to be outside of the control of the historical agents. To counter this critique, I cite numerous scholars, mostly dead but some living, to build the narrative because they offered concise, elegant expressions of the ideological origins of higher education as a field of study, including the scholarship on institutional research. Nonetheless, none of these scholars worked alone. Many of these scholars co-authored the articles I cite. The articles appeared in edited volumes with the approval of still more scholars. Publication committees selected some articles for reprint as the gems of an annual conference’s papers. The directors of the new institutes for the study of higher education or the corporate-funded foundations wrote the prefaces to book-length manuscripts. Association leaders commissioned still other documents to be presented as official doctrine or policy. Literally, hundreds if not thousands of scholars, editors, institute directors, corporate foundation heads, members of publication committees, and association leaders contributed to the direction of higher education as a field of study and the consensus paradigm for institutional research during the past 55 to 60 years.
One way in which I have sought to set up the Radical ideological implication of my two histories is to emulate the discourse of the scholars of higher education as a field of study. For Outsourcing Student Success, I have read and cited several vitriolic texts that denounced institutional research as an ideology to foist a “managerial revolution” on higher education. I read so many of Paul L. Dressel’s (Michigan State University) satirical dismissals of serious scholarship and scientific inquiry that I do not wish such cruelty upon anyone else, even those determined to sift through his materials to refute my argument. Indeed, a colleague once marveled at Dressel’s harsh “rhetoric of academic self-hate” and the “many critical and unpleasant things” he could put into one text. The endless litany of articles, in the tradition of Cameron Fincher (University of Georgia), that claimed to demonstrate that institutional research is “an art, not a science” strain credulity—at the time and to this day. And, not least of all, the desideratum of the leadership of the national association for fifty years—that institutional research is learned on the job and does not require an academic discipline—recurred over and over in a dozen different forums when practitioners questioned the drift of the profession as defined by scholars’ consensus paradigm.
When I shifted to the study of the origins of higher education as a field of study, I soon encountered a body of literature rife with scurrilous assessments (Francis R. Rourke, John Hopkins University) and ominous denunciations (Merritt M. Chambers, Indiana University) of administration. This time, from my graduate studies, I knew of one origin for the tenor of the literature: Thorstein Veblen. Veblen regarded “the culture of business enterprise,” its managerial ethos, to be anathema to higher learning, the pursuits of knowledge by scholars and students. I did not expect to find Paul Goodman’s stirring call to action for students and teachers to purge the colleges and universities of the “plague” of administration, but also their own “administrative mentality…the peculiar disease of modern Administration.” At the time of Goodman’s death in 1972, retrospectives emphasized his influence and admiration among the generation of scholars who came of age in the 1960s. The invective is not in the past, it has persisted until the present era in which administrators are accused of engaging in a “shell game” with students’ tuition by advancing “uncaring and unethical policies, which are also bordering on illegal practices” (Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, March 7, 2016).
Although scholars and faculty have stoked the tradition of animosity for trustees, executives, and administration for nearly one hundred years now, they largely tried to bury the divisiveness that once existed in academic circles. Veblen made an important distinction between “faculty” and “schoolmasters” in higher education. The former is a type of student committed to “the higher learning,” whereas the latter is a type of teacher beholden to “worldly wisdom.” As Veblen warned one hundred years ago, faculty and the higher learning ran the risk of succumbing to the values and priorities of schoolmasters: “the university man (graduate faculty) is properly, a student, not a schoolmaster.” Later, Goodman questioned the manliness and maturity of the community of scholars: “The scholars are not acting, not being men; and therefore within the communities of scholars, there is very little education or growing up.” Subsequently, the early scholars of higher education as a field of study betrayed their colleagues of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s when they determined that “institutional research should not be expected to produce knowledge of pervasive and lasting significance.” Lastly, the self-described conservative, Martin Trow (University of California), scribbled diligently to protect the elite, autonomous functions of higher education that “shape the mind and character of the ruling class” against the baneful tide of mass and universal higher education.
I am unable to count the number of times that I came across an article in which an academic scholar proclaimed an impending crisis that threatened to destroy the very nature of higher education during the past sixty years. Crisis and conflict may be the first two memes of the culture of higher education scholarship. In that tradition, my Radical solution to the plight of institutional research is that its practitioners take back control of their association and dedicate their resources to the scientific study of higher learning and its administration; scholars of higher education as a field of study rejected this line of inquiry fifty years ago and it remains open to those who are best positioned to take the initiative. Likewise, my Radical solutions to the impending student loan debt crisis are completely in line with the tone and urgency of the literature, past and present. In fact, without spoiling the conclusion, I must acknowledge that I borrowed one conceptual solution popularized by Veblen, Goodman, and the scholars who continue to publish articles under the same school of thought: we simply need to go to the organ responsible for the irritation to lop off the source of the current crisis and stop its “propagandist intrigue” in higher education. I certainly am not alone in writing a text about a crisis in higher education, the conflict inherent to the business enterprise of higher education, and the extraordinary means necessary to correct the course of history.
So, who are the intended readers for Honors of Inequality? Despite the subject matter and all of its stylistic consistencies with the scholarship of higher education as a field of study, I do not aspire to reach those scholars comfortably ensconced in their ivory tower.
My hope is that this text finds the faculty, true scholars, who esteem higher learning and social justice above the elitist priority to shape the mind and character of the American ruling class. Or the college students who question the vacuous concept of academic freedom as “a privileged sanctuary for the whole spectrum of ideas,” or “a free market in thought” (Robert O. Berdahl, University of Maryland), that promotes and protects the threatening speeches of white male supremacists on American campuses—without regard for higher learning and at the students’ expense (tuition). Or the college graduates who incur $50,000 or more in federal student loan debt in order to pursue the higher learning in America and to obtain an advanced degree in the field of their own choice without practical regard for the priorities of business competencies or return on investment. Or the administrators who struggle to find enjoyment in their work on behalf of American college students due to the daily onslaught of antipathy for data expertise, centralization, organizational management, statewide planning, institutional effectiveness, “administrative mentality,” “linear thinking,” and intellectualism in college administration.
Hayden White defined four archetypes of ideological implication: Conservative, Anarchist, Liberal, and Radical. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, wrote, “The essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs is certainly one reason” that reforms failed in higher education during the late twentieth century. The Anarchist reformers behind the student protests and movements of the 1960s achieved a few lasting reforms to college administration, favorable to the conservatism of faculty, but eventually splintered and fell apart against the inertia of academic culture. The Liberal reformers retreated to the side of Conservatism when “‘the incipient revolt’ of students,” as Kerr called it, retrogressed into violent antiwar protests and campus “shootings” by law-enforcement authorities. By the 1980s, Conservative forces prevailed on America’s college campuses and in Washington, D.C., where the federal student loan system took shape. Not surprisingly, Kerr foresaw that the most likely outcome for the twenty-first century would be more conservatism: “more commitment to the status quo—the status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.”
So, perhaps, it is time to let the Radical ideological implication have a go at higher education reform—there is nothing left to lose but the status quo.
Postscript: I invite all to read Martin Trow’s obituary at the New York Times from 2007. The homage leaves out his repeated statements about the elite and autonomous functions of higher education for the ruling class and his vocal opposition to the organization of the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley in 1969, but is consistent with my characterization of him. Chapters 8 and 9 of Honors of Inequality describe how his self-avowed Conservativism influenced higher education in America during the late twentieth century.