How little we know about each other

Not only is this the season for graduation, it is also one for retirement parties.

The fact that higher education is explicitly hierarchical in the United States is hardly surprising, nor does it seem strange that the different sections of the education system have very little to do with each other, but what catches me off guard repeatedly is how little educational institutions know about each other.

All schools tend to be insular; they pretend that the only way in which to organize knowledge is according to the rules they are currently using, which is why educational institutions tend to replicate themselves. Their ingrained patterns of decision-making stretch on for decades, if not centuries. Such institutional habits can mean that universities are protected from sudden shifts and changes in the political world.  How many Happy Valleys are there across the country?  It takes much more than short term funding cuts to alter the habits of universities. On the other hand, this ingrained behavior also has its unnerving side. One of the secondary revelations that university scandals bring forth is the simple fact that this terrible thing that has us all outraged (hazing, sexual assault, cheating, murderous drinking) has been going on, overlooked and unaltered, for decades.

Nostalgia for the years we spent at school, along with the fund raising that fosters such sentimentalism, depends on the principle that university life now looks much the same as it did forty years ago. Not only does the campus look almost the same as it did when we were students, the students, deans and professors behave much the same. The undergraduates carry on with their social dramas now as we did then—this is the implicit message universities like to send their graduates as a reminder of their youth.  Higher administrators carefully preserve this sentimental stability while students and professors reenact it unwittingly.  Implicit in this nostalgia is the distinction between the world out there that constantly changes and the process of learning in here which carries on unabated.

But this insularity is not just a ruse to foster donations, it operates on so many levels within each university and between them, so that different institutions have no idea about each other.

It is always a marvel how little Ivy League and land grant universities understand each other.  If you have studied and taught at both types, you can see how they replicate their insularity on a larger scale, so that professors from each set often have the strangest ideas about each other. The one set looks down on the other, but what really surprises me always is that the snobbery cuts both ways.  Professors at land grant universities often insist that the Ivies don’t really teach you anything other than a small sliver of trendy theory. Ivy league professors shun land grant universities for having a medieval mindset. I remember my astonishment the first time I head a Midwest professor said he would never send his best students to an Ivy League university because they don’t learn anything there. Not to mention the East coast professors who believe that sending their kids to a state university was the kiss of death.

Underneath all these prejudices, which includes the number one prejudice that we have no prejudices, there are large-scale trends that affect us all.  Change does come to the university and the problems that you think are unique to your own institution often turn out to be shared. 

Professors and students always imagine that the things that disturb their sleep are the unique burden of their own special institution, when in fact they happen on Broadway as well as on the leafy campus.  The cruelties at one institution are accepted at another. Ivy League academics cling and claw to the hierarchy that tolerates them. Land grant scholars mutter that they deserve better than this corporate treatment.

Both sets of institutions depend on the army of under paid and unappreciated lecturers, yet each has a different explanation for why the system has to be the way it is.  Even in their misery, academics cling to the notion that their situation is unique and could be improved if they only went somewhere else like here only better—the peer institution that actually appreciates you.

All Stick, No Carrot--How to Judge Scholarship

All stick and no carrot characterizes a common administrative approach to improving the quality of academic programs at state universities. 

There are several problems with the punitive approach to fostering quality scholarship and teaching: the first involves the long term effectiveness of bullying people to work harder—as soon as the pressure is off, they start to relax.  Threats work only as long as they are applied.  Far more effective motivations are ambition, desire and a competitive urge.  Punitive measures dull these forms of inspiration by discouraging independent thinking.

A second problem with the unwavering and strict application of narrow standards is that all shades of nuance are lost in the process of pressing all scholars into the same mold.  For example, the demand that assistant professors publish in flagship journals ignores the often complex relations within academic disciplines.  Cutting edge research is often not published in the mainstream journals.  If you have an assistant professor engaged in truly innovative research, requiring them to publish in flagship journals functions as a brake on their thinking. 

Mainstream journals tend to be quite conservative; they are often the last journals to adopt new ideas, rather than the first.  Institutions are certainly capable of recognizing this tendency.  At the elite coastal universities, it is often taken as a sign of mediocrity, if a scholar publishes in a “flagship” journal. 

Before coming to my current position at a state university, I was taught that you wanted to avoid these journals at all costs because by publishing in them, you showed everyone that you could not do better and that you really had nothing new to say. 

State universities in the middle of the US often look resentfully at Ivy League expectations as just so much snobbery, while the coastal elite see state universities’ mainstream tendencies as sign of plodding backwardness.  What both sides overlook, of course, are the insecurities behind both standards. 

State universities tend to overemphasize bureaucratic standards and procedures because they fundamentally do not have the confidence required decide what constitutes “quality” scholarship.  Is an article really innovative?  State university administrators fundamentally do not trust their faculty to judge; instead they want indicators, such as the ranking of the journal in which an article appears. 

Ivy League universities on the other hand live for the marginal difference between institutions.  They want to always demonstrate that they are better than other institutions, not just their peers, but more importantly they want to keep a long distance between themselves and all other universities in the world.  Thus, they will emphasize innovation over mainstream consensus and conformity. 

The trouble with this approach is that often an argument that seems radically new has only a short lifespan and once a trendy line of reasoning has passed, little remains of the argument and the scholar who made it.  Thus the double insecurity of the Ivy League department: is this young scholar truly innovative and will he/she continue to innovate in the long run. 

Ivy League academics want to know fundamentally whether someone is really and truly brilliant, the indicators that state universities require ultimately matter little in elite departments, in fact, those indicators tend to operate negatively—the more you publish in mainstream journals, the less clever you are.