ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050008
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WAYNE G. REILLY AND ERIC TRETHEWEY
ABOUT A year ago, a meeting was held in Richmond to discuss the role of higher education in Virginia. At that meeting a state education official and a former business CEO both argued for a program of Total Quality Management with respect to the future management of the commonwealth's colleges and universities.
In essence, the argument was that Virginia's institutions of higher learning ought to make themselves increasingly responsive to their clientele by offering more courses in what the public believes it wants, by training people for jobs in the 21st century, and, above all, by operating in such a way that would assist Virginia in attracting new businesses.
To that end, participating educators were encouraged to constantly evaluate what courses were offered in terms of "how much was learned" that met these TQM criteria. Lest there be any misunderstanding on our part regarding what was called for, we were advised that we should find ways to "measure the appropriate learning," and "if it cannot be measured, don't do it."
There are significant indications, both in Virginia and across the nation at large, that this approach to higher education has become the new orthodoxy among politicians, government officials, and college and university administrators.
The kind of program outlined above has a superficially seductive aspect to it, for, on the face of things, who can argue against such criteria as "quality," offering people what they want (after all, they pay for it), ensuring effective learning, and creating new jobs? All of these criteria are defensible in one context or another, and indeed the various motivations behind them shape much of the thinking about higher education in Virginia today.
Nevertheless, we believe that they are profoundly injurious to higher education when they become the standards by which the academic enterprise is measured. What they amount to in actuality is good old Gradgrindian philistinism tricked out in the colors of common sense.
The end of higher education - as distinguished from professional education - has been traditionally, and ought to be, the discovery, creation and transmission of knowledge without regard to its immediate practical utility, along with the cultivation of skills requisite to achieving this end. Some knowledge, like some skills, is practical, offering specific, though limited, rewards: the creation of a new software program or the ability to operate a PC.
But other knowledge and skills appear to have far less immediate practical import. The rewards they offer are either intrinsic or not easily demonstrable in the short term: the analytic, critical habit of mind necessary to an understanding of Aristotle's Ethics; the capacity to appreciate, intellectually and emotionally, "King Lear" or "Middlemarch"; or the intellectual discipline that may culminate in the discovery of the structure of the deoxyribonucleic acid molecule.
Both kinds of knowledge and skills are necessary - one must learn the alphabet before one can read, to say nothing of understand, Edmund Burke or the Declaration of Independence - but to permit attention to one to displace concern for the other is to neglect the image of the whole person to which the idea of a university has been directed over much of the course of our civilization.
At the present time, because of the kind of thinking noted above, the intrinsic, nonpractical, long-term ends of education are being slighted, if not ignored, by many academic policy-makers. No doubt this seems perfectly reasonable to them, given that their vision of higher education is shallowly grounded historically, narrow in scope, and driven less by philosophical imperatives than by political agendas.
After all, how does one measure the worth to a culture of philosophers and poets, painters, musicians and theoretical physicists?
How does one gauge with exactitude those qualities of mind that John Henry Newman invoked in his magisterial "The Idea of A University": "the habits of mind ... which last through a life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom"?
How does one reliably evaluate at the conclusion of each passing semester teaching and learning that has as its end the shaping of citizens dedicated to the old-fashioned idea of "civic virtue" rather than the current passion for "getting what's mine"?
How does one responsibly apply TQM criteria and educational responsiveness to determining what the customer wants when one of the principal reasons that students attend a college or university is that they do not know what they need and ought to know, to say nothing of what they would eventually like to know?
Let there be no misunderstanding. We are not dismissing practical knowledge and skills attained at the university or elsewhere. Improved driving skills alone would represent a significant boon to our culture, both in civility and lives spared.
All of us owe a debt of gratitude to those men and women responsible for the practical knowledge that has eradicated so many diseases, provided us with the capability of producing abundant food, made travel comparatively easy, and generally improved the quality of our daily existence. With increasing frequency such improvements have been consequent upon knowledge produced in our colleges and universities, and few would want to gainsay that happy production.
What we are criticizing is a growing tendency to make immediate, practical payoffs the litmus test of higher education. We believe that if our society is to endure and prosper, we will need to foster a greater concern for what may appear to be impractical knowledge and skills of a sort not easily measured in any way that would satisfy proponents of the new educational orthodoxy - but which are crucial to our future well-being.
A vital modern society requires an educational vision that directs itself toward something more, and fundamentally other, than short-term criteria and goals. It needs an idea of higher education that allows for, and indeed encourages, limitless speculation, long-term research projects, and the reading and creation of imaginative works that criticize, or that may even be deeply subversive of what many of us take to be common sense - as deeply subversive of the disposition of our public and private affairs as the words of Jeremiah or Socrates, or those of the Sermon on the Mount.
Such an educational idea may have few immediate, measurable results; however, it may in the long run nurture human qualities that are worthy of informing our individual lives and the spirit of our communities.
The current emphasis on measurable outcomes and Total Quality Management in higher education is, in our view, a misguided, simplistic, at times intellectually dishonest attempt to rationalize higher education's social role according to the bottom-line criteria of the business world. Though bottom-line criteria are certainly relevant to the successful operation of a college or university, the less they are allowed to determine what an institution of higher learning is or ought to teach, the better off we are. Not to insist on this is to be complicit in enabling the kind of joyless, amoral and uncultured existence that Aldous Huxley depicted in his "Brave New World."
For the sake of our students and the health of our culture we can and must do better.
Wayne G. Reilly is a professor of political science and Eric Trethewey is a professor of English at Hollins College.
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