Theorizing the Resilience of American Higher Education

How Colleges and Universities Adapt to Changing Social and Economic Conditions

Geoffrey M. Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000024296
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book proposes a new theory of change in American higher education that explains the resilience of colleges and universities, and demonstrates how they adapt to new social and economic conditions. It argues that the demands for new educational missions, new sources of capital to finance innovation, and new organizational and governance models lead to the creation of institutional diversity. Using the theory of "accretive change" to predict future changes, this volume asserts that the rise of artificial intelligence and new investment models within the field of social entrepreneurship will shape the next wave of universities and educational institutions.

Part I

1
Commencing

It is a warm spring day, and the campus has been carefully manicured to look its best. Families stroll the grounds, visibly filled with a mixture of pride, happiness, and perhaps relief that this day has finally come. Their graduating daughters and sons meet the day with mixed emotions as well. They, too, are proud to have finally arrived at this turning point in life, but they are apprehensive about the prospect of leaving the familiar, supportive community in which they have lived for four years. Perhaps they are anxious about the future, or eager to get on with it, or some combination of both. It is, for everyone concerned, one of those few moments in life in which something important changes. A milestone is passed, a fork in the road is taken, a passage is completed, a page is turned. What would graduation day be without clichés?

It has been my privilege to participate in a great many commencement ceremonies over the span of more than forty years—as a student, as a parent, and as the president or senior staff member of several institutions. I have processed into the University of Chicago’s somber, majestic Rockefeller Chapel to receive a doctorate degree, and I have marched into Stanford’s football stadium in cap and gown alongside bizarrely costumed students participating in the irreverent annual Wacky Walk. Having also served as president of an institution with academic programs in four countries, I have presided over commencements in locations as diverse as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Mexico City. There is nothing quite like marching in cap and gown to music from a mariachi band!

I consider myself fortunate to have experienced commencement as an annual ritual in my personal and professional life. I still get goosebumps at the sight of the faculty marching two-by-two in their colorful academic regalia. I am proud to put on my own maroon robe and hood trimmed in dark blue, which, to initiates of the academic code, signals the institution from which I earned my doctorate degree and the discipline (Philosophy) that I studied.

The traditional commencement pageant is academia’s most visible connection to its medieval origins. Most histories of Western higher education begin with the founding of the University of Bologna in the year 1088. The European universities established in that era, including Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris, were closely aligned with the church, and today’s commencement ceremony is most fully understood as a secular liturgy. The caps and gowns are clerical in their origins, and the hooding ceremony for new doctors of the academy echoes the laying on of hands that creates new priests and bishops. The conferral of degrees formally occurs only at the moment when the university president pronounces a ritualized sentence, not unlike the administration of sacraments such as baptism and marriage.¹ The academic parade itself is an analogue of a liturgical procession, with candidates for degrees (i.e., religious novitiates) leading the way, followed by the faculty (priests), and finally the senior hierarchy of the institution; the university president brings up the rear in place of the bishop or most senior celebrant. These symbols are scarcely recognized by most graduates and families at modern commencements, but they resonate over nearly a thousand years of history. As in the church, the entire ceremony is intended to inspire awe, mystery, and respect.

My pride in participating in these ceremonies over many years stems from my affection for universities and their long history; I am an academic romantic at heart. And yet, I have often found myself observing the commencement ceremony with bemused curiosity. How is that this highly stylized ritual has survived for so long, and is replicated in places so far from its origins? How much of the commencement ceremony that we practice today would have been recognizable to our academic predecessors from previous centuries? Why do we think that this particular form of pageantry retains its authority and appeal in a modern society that otherwise has little reverence for history and ceremony?

Some of the most familiar aspects of the modern commencement ceremony are in fact relatively recent innovations. For example, the codification of academic regalia (i.e. different colored gowns and hoods representing specific institutions and disciplines, respectively) began to take shape in 1895 when a group of U.S. institutions met to agree to some common rules, but wasn’t fully formalized until 1932 when the American Council on Education decided to lend its authority to the matter (American Council on Education, 2018). The custom of shifting the tassel on one’s mortarboard from right to left at the end of the ceremony is prescribed nowhere, but has in recent years become a firm part of the tradition at some institutions, so much so that I was criticized once when I, as president, neglected to tell the graduates that they could move their tassels at the end of the ceremony. Celebrity commencement speakers are certainly a phenomenon of our star-struck times, as is the practice of awarding them honorary degrees as part of their compensation for appearing. Even the universal soundtrack of graduation processions—Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance—achieved that status only after it was first played at Yale’s commencement in 1905 and began to spread among other institutions after that (Duddleston, 2016). Many of the trappings we most associate with graduations are not of medieval origin, nor ecclesiastical, nor even European, but instead are American variations on an old set of themes.

For all of the dignity and formality of the commencement ceremony, it has always had a rowdy undercurrent as well. The old graduation hymn Gaudeamus Igitur (Now Let Us Rejoice) is a bawdy drinking song dressed up as a sentimental ode to college days. At many institutions today, graduates feel free to decorate their regalia with sequins, dollar bills, and just about anything else that can be glued to a mortarboard. Pity the poor commencement speaker whose charge is to inspire a moment of reflection about the significance of the day, but who must sometimes compete with beach balls bouncing through the crowd. Graduation day is a study in contrast: a blend of the ancient and quasi-sacred, on the one hand, and youthful energy and irreverence on the other.

The commencement ceremony is an appropriate metaphor for modern higher education in general. Today’s colleges and universities are deeply rooted in a long and continuous history, and for this reason they can appear out of place in a fast-paced society in which history seems to mean little more than the most recent news cycle. To many, including plenty of the students and faculty who populate their campuses, the ways of these institutions often seem to be mysteriously archaic, if not at times ridiculous. At the same time, many things that we most associate with academic life are relatively recent additions. Faculty tenure; shared governance among trustees, administrators, and faculty; semester units and transfer credits; undergraduate majors; and even the idea of doing basic scientific research on campus are all relatively modern inventions, many of which originated in American institutions in the early twentieth century (Davidson, 2017).

This mixture of old and new characterizes the public’s perception of higher education as well. A college or university degree is one of the highest goals of modern life, and something to which students and families devote enormous energy and resources to achieve. Institutions of higher education are integral parts of an elaborate social system that identifies, cultivates, and rewards talent, and yet the institutions themselves are often seen as being isolated from the very society for which they are preparing the next generation of leaders. The most iconic images of these institutions—from the leafy campuses to the eccentric professors—seem to be extravagant anachronisms, yet they remain central to our belief in progress.

We live in a time of decreasing confidence in institutions of all kinds, and universities have not been exempt from this trend. Recent public polls (Pew Research Center, 2018) suggest growing dissatisfaction with higher education, especially among political conservatives who tend to see campuses as effete training grounds for liberals. Those with a sense of both history and irony will recall that it has been just fifty years since university campuses were rocked by violent protests instigated by liberal students who thought their institutions were too closely allied with “the establishment,” to recall a word then in vogue (Horowitz, 1986). Contrary to both of these caricatures, most large universities are sufficiently diverse and multi-faceted that they typically house a broad range of political views; on most campuses one can find free-market fundamentalists in the Economics department working alongside die-hard socialists in the humanities. Although academic respect for free speech has come under severe pressure in our polarized times, large university campuses remain among the few enduring institutions where one might have even hope of finding serious diversity of opinion and genuine exchanges of ideas. The academic enterprise also includes many institutions that are more homogenous by design, but among these there is also broad diversity, ranging from those that are formally committed to religious fundamentalism and political conservatism to others that seem only to attract secular liberals. This cacophony within the ranks of higher education is bound to disappoint critics on both ends of the political spectrum, who would prefer to see the prestige of the academy unequivocally on their preferred side of every political question.

Beyond these political critiques, higher education is buffeted by anxieties about technology, globalization, and other forces that seem to have escaped our control. We are told by pundits and futurists that most of the jobs we hold today are set to vanish within a generation, that robotics and artificially intelligent machines will increasingly displace us, that our personal and private identities are mere data points in a ubiquitous cloud of information that is subject to exploitation by the digital elite, and that the cultures and traditions that have long bound communities together are being swept aside in a vast, homogenizing wave of global integration. We are also told that a college degree is more critical than ever to navigating these turbulent times, but its apparent cost floats ever farther out of reach for everyone except those already at the top of the economic strata. If universities are supposed to prepare us for this future world, they do not seem up to the task. If they are keepers of our traditions and values, they seem derelict in their duty. If they are gatekeepers to the good life, they seem to be failing many of those who most need help getting there.

As a result of these criticisms and anxieties, it has become increasingly common to hear that colleges and universities are dinosaurs—out of touch with the contemporary environment and too slow to move and change. Some commentators seem sad but resigned to the apparently inevitable decline and fall of higher education, while others can barely conceal their glee. Ambitious attempts to “disrupt” the established academic order attract talented entrepreneurs and big-time investments. Politicians score rhetorical points by lambasting out-of-touch elitists on college campuses, while they steadily whittle away at public funding for both institutions and students. In the face of such criticism, the higher education community seems at times unable to explain itself, much less defend its principles and purposes.

This is not entirely new, nor, in my view, does it herald the imminent demise of colleges and universities. Campus life has long been the object of parody and criticism, especially given the persistent anti-intellectual streak that runs through the American polity (Hofstadter, 1963). Higher education has, from time to time, needed an infusion of new ideas in order to bring itself into line with the needs and demands of society. The thesis of this book is a simple one: higher education has been remarkably adept at changing with the times, and there is no reason to think that this capacity has been lost. I propose to develop an argument in support of this position in two parts. In Part One, I will show that American higher education has gone through periods of rapid innovation at fairly frequent intervals, especially since the Civil War. These periods of change have been marked by three factors in the external environment: new social demands on colleges and universities; the availability of capital from new sources to finance innovation; and the emergence of new organizational models that can be adapted to academic goals. These external forces have been met with and matched by changes in the internal environments of colleges and universities, characterized by new academic missions, new business models, and new ways of organizing authority and control. These are the adaptive mechanisms of individual colleges and universities. From a systemic perspective, higher education has been unusual in the extent to which innovations have spread through informal networks of cooperation and emulation across organizational types. Thus, the diversity of forms that allows for different adaptive responses persists, benefiting all parts of the system and not just innovative newcomers. In this respect, higher education, with its collegial culture, differs from winner-take-all systems such as those often found in business and industry.

Part Two of this book is more speculative, but I intend to show that it is nonetheless grounded in the same theory of change that we can discover by looking back in time. I will argue that the three dynamics of change that we have seen in the past will re-occur, and with broadly foreseeable results. What we can reasonably surmise is that innovation will continue with respect to academic missions, organizational structures, and methods of financing. As in the past, innovative institutions will arise in response to new demands on the higher education system, but they are unlikely to displace most older organizations or institutional forms. Instead, some of the innovations developed by new institutions will be adopted and refined by incumbent colleges and universities. While there will be casualties along the way—institutions that cannot keep pace with the need for change or that fail to respond to environmental cues—the mainstream of higher education will continue to flow into the future.

As I have already admitted, I am a romantic about the traditions of academia, but I hope to avoid being naively optimistic. Higher education must change if it is to continue to be relevant to society. My contention is that the capacity for change is built into the loosely knit fabric of the higher education system, especially in the United States. If there is an even simpler way to formulate my premise, it is by inverting a familiar catchphrase: the more things stay the same, the more they will change. In other words, change has been and will continue to be a constant in higher educati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• PART I
• PART II
• Afterword
• Index