Harry Targ
Measuring Educational Outcomes
A Purdue University press release of
December 17, 2013 announced a dramatic new collaboration with the Gallup
polling organization (and funded by the Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation)
to “conduct the largest representative study of college graduates in U.S.
history….The Gallup-Purdue Index will provide the first measure that evaluates the
long-term success of graduates in their pursuit of ‘great jobs’ and ‘great
lives.’ ”
While the details of the study
instrument are still to be disclosed, the Purdue/Gallup/Lumina collaboration
has raised a variety of concerns from scholars and other citizens. Why is
Purdue collaborating with the much criticized Gallup organization? Who is the
Lumina Foundation? Why is the large body of research on issues of educational
impacts not being considered? Have reservations about survey research as a tool
to understand and predict outcomes related to the college experience being
considered in the research agenda? And, finally, is there a non-transparent
political agenda from the federal government, state government, prominent
institutions of higher education, the corporate sector or all of the above to
restructure the role of faculty, students, traditional curricula, in the 21st
century?
Becoming an Educator
These questions reminded me of some
of my own experiences as a professor who came to Purdue University in 1967,
unclear about my own goals about what I wanted to achieve as an educator. As a
young professor entering the teaching profession in the midst of campus
activism and debates about race, class, gender, escalating war, and
environmental devastation, I came to the view that the university was a place
where students and teachers could reflect on this complicated world in a
setting that encourages open discussion and debate. Education for careers and
happiness were surely important to the educational process but so was understanding
and reflection about how all of us (students and teachers) could help make the
world a better place.
I reported on some of these
reflections in an essay (“Higher Education Today: Theory and Practice,” MRzine, 2009) some of which is revised, edited
and presented below.
When I came to Purdue University, I
was assigned to teach courses on introductory international relations. I was
troubled by the fact that the professional literature in the field did not help
me understand the escalating war in Vietnam. I was also increasingly
troubled by the assumption that it was not my place as a professor to publicly
comment on or otherwise actively engage in expressions of my informed views on
United States foreign policy, as teacher and citizen.
I also started teaching a course
with the ambiguous title "Contemporary Political Problems," and
through it my students and I explored the writings of the day that we thought
bore upon our place in the world. These ranged from The Autobiography
of Malcolm X (1965), to the Port Huron Statement (1995),
to Camus' The Rebel (1992), to C. Wright Mills' The Power
Elite (1959), to William Appleman Williams' The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy (1972). Later on I added literature from anarchist, utopian
and Marxist traditions.
Almost invariably, our discussions
ended up exploring what the various theorists and activists we read thought
about education. We added to our readings in these courses essays on
education by Paul Goodman, Compulsory
Mis-Education and the Community of Scholars (1964); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society: Social Questions
(1999); Jonathan Kozol, Death at an Early
Age (1968); Herbert Kohl, 36 Children
(1988); Robert Paul Wolff, The Idea of
the University (1970); and Lewis
Mumford, Technics and Civilization
(1963). Later writers such as Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), Henry Giroux.The University in Chains (2007), Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Friere, and the Pedagogy
of Revolution, (2000), and other radical educational theorists continued
the discussion. When Howard Zinn published A
People’s History of the United States, (1980) my students and I discussed
the author’s claims about who makes history and the various ways in which it is
made.
Out of all this, I began to develop
an analysis of the political and economic contexts of higher education; a sense
of the contradictory character of education, particularly higher education; a
conception of how my education had been shaped by the Cold War and U.S. empire;
how the modern university was "contested terrain" (a metaphor drawn
from writings on worker/management conflict) as to ideas and behavior; how
"theory and practice" were connected; and, for me, what the
obligations of the educator were in the modern world.
Interests Served by Higher Education
In his presidential address to the
Society for the Study of Social Problems in 2000, Robert Perrucci refers to
"Galileo's crime." He argues that while most claim that Galileo
was punished for proposing that the planets moved around the sun, others have pointed
out that he was condemned because "he chose to communicate his findings
about the earth and the sun, not in Latin, the medium of the educated elite,
but in Italian, the public vernacular, parola del popolo," Robert Perrucci,
“Inventing Social Justice: SSSP and the Twenty-First Century, Social Problems, May, 2001.
This thought, for me, constitutes a
parable for the history of higher education as we know it. In my view it
is not unfair to suggest that institutions of higher education have always been
created and shaped by the interests of the ruling classes and elites in the
societies in which they exist. This means they serve to reinforce the
economic, political, ideological, and cultural interests of those who create them,
fund them, and populate them.
In Robert Paul Wolff ‘s book, The
Ideal of the University (1970), the author identifies the historical
university as the training ground for theology, literature, and law. In
each case, sacred or secular canonical texts were studied with a
microscope. Their study was designed to reify and transmit the core
knowledge claims, ethics, and laws across generations. Wolff's
description, quoted below and written forty years ago, about a reality hundreds
of years earlier might still resonate with us today:
Thus the activity of scholarship is in the first instance a
religious and literary activity, directed toward a given corpus of texts,
either divine or secular, around which a literature of commentary
accumulated. The corpus is finite, clearly defined, growing slowly as
each stage in the progress of Western civilization deposited its masterpieces
in the Great Tradition. Though the tradition may contain pregnant,
emotionally powerful commentaries upon life and men's affairs, the scholar's
concern is with the textual world, not with the world about which the text
speaks. (Wolff, 5)
Wolff (1970), James Berlin, Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, Refiguring
College English Studies, (1996), David N. Smith, Who Rules the Universities? An Essay on Class Analysis (1974) as
well as others added to this discussion an analysis of how the university
changed in the late nineteenth century to serve the needs of rising industrial
capitalism in Europe and North America. The university shifted in the
direction of serving new masters: from the clerics and judges to the
capitalists. Plans were instituted in elite universities to develop
"departments," compartmentalizing knowledge so it could be fashioned
for use in research and development, human relations, making the modern
corporation more efficient, developing communications and accounting skills,
and developing good citizens. Elite universities initiated the changes
that made higher education more compatible with and an instrumentality of
modern capitalism. The model then "trickled down" to less prestigious
universities, which in the end became even more effective developers and
purveyors of knowledge for use in capitalist societies.
Wolff quoted Clark Kerr,
the former president of the University of California system and the target of
the student movement in that state in the 1960s, who hinted at this theme of
connectedness between certain societal needs, power, and education, and a
parallelism between the era of the industrial revolution and the quarter
century after World War II:
The American University is currently undergoing its second
great transformation. The first occurred during roughly the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, when the land grant movement and German intellectualism
were together bringing extraordinary change. The current transformation
will cover roughly the quarter century after World War II. The university
is being called upon to educate previously unimagined numbers of students; to
respond to the expanding claims of national service; to merge its activities
with industry as never before; to adapt to and rechannel new intellectual
currents. By the end of this period, there will be a truly American
university; an institution unique in world history, an institution not looking
to other models but serving, itself, as a model for universities in other parts
of the globe. (Wolff, 33-34)
For Kerr, the modern
"multiversity," responding to the needs of society as reflected in
federal and corporate research funding, was obliged to produce scientists,
engineers, and doctors, what we call today the STEM fields. This
university, he said, was "a model" for higher education around the
world.
During World War II and the Cold War,
the modern university began to serve powerful new masters. As Charles
Wilson, president of General Electric, advocated in 1944, there was a need to
maintain the coalition of forces that defeated fascism in Europe and Japanese
imperialism in Asia, to stave off new threats to U.S. and global capitalism, and
to forestall a return to the grim Depression economy of the 1930s. To do
that, Wilson said, we needed to justify the need for government (particularly
the defense department)/corporate/and university collaboration, a collaboration
that did so much to secure victory during the war. His vision was
referred to as "a permanent war economy." Shortly after the war that justification was
created, the threat of international communism. The military, defense-related
corporations, and research institutions had a reason to work together: to lobby
for dollars, do the research, produce the technologies, train future scientists
and engineers for the Cold War, and educate the broader non-technically trained
population in and out of the university to accept the basic parameters of the
Cold War struggle.
Henry Giroux paraphrased President
Eisenhower's warning, referred to above: ". . . the conditions for
production of violence, the amassing of huge profits by defense industries, and
the corruption of government officials in the interest of making war the
organizing principle of society had created a set of conditions in which the
very idea of democracy, if not the possibility of politics itself, was at stake."
(Giroux, 14-15).
What kind of claims can be derived
from these formative statements; the variety of literatures of more recent
vintage, arguments of educational theorists
such as Giroux; and our observations of universities, curricula, and academic
professions?
First, higher education remains subject to, influenced by, and
financially beholden to governments and corporations. These influences
profoundly shape what professors and graduate students teach and research.
Second, as history shows, conceptions of disciplines, fields,
bodies of knowledge, appropriate methods, fundamental truths pervasive in
disciplines (rational choice in economics and the pursuit of power in political
science) and the academic organization of universities are shaped by
economic interest and political power.
Third, the structure of academic professions -- professional
associations, journals, peer review, the validation of professional work,
definitions of the substance of courses, dominant paradigms governing
disciplines -- is largely shaped by economic and political interest.
Fourth, in the main, the university as an institution is, and has
always been, designed to serve the interests of the status quo, a status quo,
again governed by economic and political interest.
Discourse and Contradiction in
Higher Education: The University as “Contested Terrain”
It would be a mistake to leave the
impression that all that the university does is diabolical, even as it is
shaped by and serves the dominant economic and political interests in society.
Within the confines of what Thomas Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, (1962) called "normal
science," researchers and educators have made enormous contributions to society.
But even this is not the whole story.
There emerged over the centuries and
decades a view that this institution, the university, should have a special
place in society. It should be, in a term Christopher Lasch used to refer
to the family, "a haven in a heartless world." Through its
seclusion, professors could reflect critically on their society and develop
knowledge that could be productively used by society to solve human puzzles and
problems. This view of higher education diametrically conflicts with the
reality described above.
The Galileo case suggests he was
punished for his theoretical and communications transgressions by the academic
hierarchy of his day. More recently, scholars such as Scott Nearing were
fired for opposing World War I, and over the years hundreds more for being communists,
eccentrics, radicals of one sort or another, or for challenging accepted
professional paradigms. Of particular virulence have been periods of
"red scares," when faculty who taught and/or engaged in activism
outside some mainstream were labeled "communists," which by
definition meant they were traitors to the United States.
In response to the ideal of the
free-thinking scholar who must have the freedom to pursue her/his work,
professional organizations and unions embraced and defended the idea of "academic
freedom." Academic freedom proclaimed that researchers and teachers
had the right to pursue and disseminate knowledge in their field unencumbered
by political constraints and various efforts to silence them and their
work. To encourage young scholars to embrace occupations in higher
education and to encourage diversity of views, most universities in the United
States gave lip service to academic freedom and in the main have sought to
protect the principle in the face of attacks on the university in general and
controversial scholars in particular.
During periods of controversy and
conflict in society at large, universities become "contested
terrain." That is, external pressures on universities lead
administrators to act in ways to stifle controversy and dissent. The
targets of that dissent and their supporters, and students and colleagues at
large, raise their voices to protest efforts to squelch it. Interestingly
enough, the university, which on the one hand serves outside interests, on the
other hand, prizes independence from outside interests.
The
University in the 21st Century
If the university is conceptualized as the site of
“contested terrain,” as a place where ideas are debated and contested, and students and teachers alike connect
these ideas to their activity in the world beyond the campus, then conceiving
of the impacts only in terms of careers, job satisfaction, and vague references
to “well-being” in terms of “purpose, social, physical, financial, and
community” dimensions is too limited and simplistic. The university should be a place where traditional and non-traditional
students are stimulated to develop a deeper understanding of the world and some
sense of how it can be changed for the better.
In addition, the model of the university as “contested terrain” is a communal one, involving
teachers and students in the ongoing collective struggle to better understand
the world and conceptualize ways to engage in it.
I am afraid the Gallup-Purdue Index, and other such
measures, will not be motivated to or be able to help assess how higher
education aided students to understand
and change the world. In the end,
this new set of metrics likely will be designed to measure the interests of
those who control higher education today, not those who see the university as a
vital institution that participates in the process of change.
