Politicians as Students

Universities cannot compete in high-level politics, but they have a financial need to do so.

As European and American universities are racing each other to establish a top-tier of elite institutions that will command respect globally, they have increasingly enjoyed the attention of politicians, who want the caché of an academic degree and a smooth rhetorical command over complex political discourse. Seems like a nice match, but alas in their eagerness to show that they attract the upper echelon to their seminars, universities have gotten themselves caught in political fights they have no control over.

Saif, son of Khadaffi, ruler of Libya, and the doctorate he earned from the London School of Economics provides the clearest example these days. As of this last week, the LSE is distancing itself as quickly as possible from its former student. Yet not too long ago, there was a lot of understated, self-congratulatory talk that the institution was grooming the next ruler of Libya.

After the uprising in Libya and Saif's defense of his father's crack down, the professorial tone has changed dramatically. Never mind the minor controversy about whether he received help from a consulting company or whether financial donations had any role to play in his education, as this week's broadcasts from Tripoli show, the Enlightened son speaks of civil war and blood flowing, in order to justify his father stomping out democracy.

What was the title of Saif's dissertation? "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From 'Soft Power' to Collective Decision-Making?" In other words, the transition to democracy Saif and his professors discussed is now underway in a surprisingly radical way ---and there is no soft power coming from the guns of mercenaries defending the old regime.

The contradiction between the content of the dissertation and the political repression its author condones is too much for the university, but what can they really do about it?

Similarly the University of Bayreuth is back-peddling from the German defense minister, who, as everyone now recognizes, presented a plagiarized dissertation to earn a doctorate. To top it off, and to make the comparison with Saif even more explicit, there are questions whether Guttenberg arranged a donation for an endowed professorship in the same institute where he earned his PhD.

The major difference: The London School of Economics attracts the ruling elite from around the world whereas the University of Bayreuth plays in a lesser league.

But here is a lesson for the admissions committees: When these scandals erupt, there is almost nothing a university can do except retreat. They have no means of actively engaging in a power struggle except to refuse to participate, to preserve their autonomy. We have little or no influence on what students do once they graduate.

As Voltaire and any number of Enlightenment intellectuals learned, educating the prince, even if you are sleeping with him, never works out well.

American universities do operate their own kind of soft power: they have remarkably sophisticated means of tracking former students and they know how to inspire nostalgia and idealism for a lost youth. But the donations that follow these emotions are made long after the degrees have been granted, and they have more to do with first kisses and football games than with changing the face of Middle East democracy.

Manufacturing an Education

Lots of thought has gone into figuring out why the cost of college tuition has risen faster than inflation over the last decades and the easiest target has been the faculty. Administrators point out that labor costs are the largest proportion of any annual budget.

This is of course true for many institutions,

How to reduce labor costs is the concern of every institutional head, capitalist or otherwise. For a while the higher-ups imagined that applying corporate budget analysis would help sift out the "unproductive" elements of the university, classes with low enrollment, for example.

Industrial production has been mechanized tremendously over the last century, but higher education has not found any way to reduce the number of faculty comparable to the reduction in factory workers.

Perhaps this means that education requires personal attention. Humans interacting with other humans. The product is still an idealistic one, which is to say it requires more than manufacturing, it requires both the producer and the product to believe that more is happening in the exchange than simple creation of economic value.

The return of the Generalist

As the size of humanities departments diminishes, graduate programs need to reconsider how narrowly new PhDs should specialize. From the Ivy League to state universities to traditional colleges, liberal arts departments have shrunk, even as the discipline continues to find new methods and questions.

To keep up with the expanding subjects, departments need to train students to become more flexible, capable of teaching and writing in more than one field. If a history department has just one French scholar, it is not enough for that professor to focus only on the newest specialty. Somehow it is necessary to teach it all, to cover seventeenth-century Absolutism along with the colonization of Algeria—a tricky move if there is only one French history professor.

Yet increasingly we are confronted with the reality that if we don’t teach a subject, no one else will.

Lots of professors are less than eager to teach beyond their specialty. How is teaching a distant subject matter going to foster your publication record? If the Cold War is your domain, how is teaching the eighteenth century going to help you finish your book on the Berlin Wall?

Ultimately, we have to move in both fields, the ones in which we teach, and the ones in which we publish. The result may be less narrowly defined publications and less historicist courses. Classes may ask bluntly what does the French Revolution have to do with the Cuban missile crisis or the Iraq war? Essays may more inclined to explore the longue durée.

Either way, we will have to think more broadly.

Corporate University?

Now with the news that GM has had too many brands that need to be pared away, one is reminded of all the downsizing that humanities departments have undergone. The Liberal Arts have been subjected to a corporate model of accounting while GM it seems has been following a different pattern, one that preserved old brands --not unlike preserving old languages. Is Pontiac the practical equivalent of Latin? or Old Hittite? Should we applaud GM for its commitment to history?