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Testing enthusiasm continues to grow among friends and critics of higher education. My own enthusiasm for the endless standardized testing schemes proposed tends to be limited. Nonetheless, even as some protest the effects of standardized entrance tests such as the SAT and the ACT, others extol the power of accountability based on standardized exit tests. Leaving aside for the moment, the issue of whether standardized tests serve a useful purpose for sorting students into colleges, the exit testing conversation raises some interesting questions that we should try to answer before signing up for one form of testing or another.

One problem is deciding what we want the test to tell us.

We may want to focus on an institution’s performance in producing students who, in general, meet an average standard of performance. Or, we may want to focus on the student, and certify that each individual graduate meets an individual standard of performance. These different perspectives require a different testing strategy.

The institutional perspective requires us to define a test reminiscent of industrial quality control. We sample the production of our educational process, the students, and test for quality, using statistical quality control to tell us how well our process works. While there are practical issues that may limit the success of this strategy (students selected for the sample may not take the test seriously because it does not have an individual impact and the high variability of student talent and motivation may make the statistical validity of the sampling difficult to demonstrate), the sampling technique gives institutions a way to respond to many of their accountability critics.

The individual perspective requires us to define a test reminiscent of the SAT or ACT that assesses every individual graduate’s level of achievement and certifies the level of competence achieved by each graduate. In large institutions, administering such a testing program will surely be a challenge, but the benefit in establishing a quality metric may well justify the expense.

Both systems will tell us much about the output of the institution, but the utility of either approach depends on the audience. For some, the purpose of the testing is to help parents and prospective students evaluate the expected quality of an institution before enrolling. For others, the purpose of the testing is to guarantee that the graduates can perform at an expected level.

If we want to certify institutions as having the ability to produce a reasonable product out of the student material provided, then the institutional version is useful in picking an institution. We can predict the odds of our student emerging with good skills in much the same way we can predict the chances of an airline arriving on-time. There’s no guarantee that any particular student will emerge fully qualified, but if the institutional average score is good, we can expect that the odds of a good result for our student will be high.

However, an employer may well prefer a certification of the individual student, because the employer needs individuals to perform. If the institution has a good average score, the employer might take a chance that the graduate is good, but if the graduate can pass the appropriate test as an individual, the risk for the employer disappears. This form of testing is what we do when we test students for admission to graduate or professional programs using such tests as the LSAT, the MCAT, or the GRE or require them to take certification exams for nursing or the CPA. Those tests are exit tests from college to determine whether the student, by whatever means, has graduated with the right skills required for either specific employment or particular graduate study. We may want to know that they graduated from a rigorous college, but we are much more secure in our judgment about an individual’s prospects if they can demonstrate directly their own personal capability.

The least useful testing, of course, is indirect measurements where we poll our students and ask them how they feel about their education. The very popular NSSE surveys are a prime example of this kind of test. We know that students who feel good about their education may have had a good learning experience, but absent a test of their actual academic achievement, we really don’t know what they learned as they enjoyed the learning process. Also, asking people whether they think they studied hard or think they had a good interaction with their professor, among other questions of this type, tells us about customer satisfaction, but it doesn’t tell us much of anything about what students learn. This is reminiscent of student evaluation of teaching, a process that has almost nothing to do with learning but much to do with enjoyment and perception. We know what the student learned in class when we give a rigorous test that asks questions about the material. If the student passes the test, we know what the student learned. The relationship between enjoyment or satisfaction and learning is tenuous at best.

Another issue for the testing discussion is the issue of what constitutes a reasonable standard of performance. Much study has gone into the tests that measure baseline reading, writing, mathematical, and reasoning skills. For some institutions, meeting these baseline goals, whether testing institutional performance by sampling or student performance by exit exams, may be a challenge. For highly selective institutions, however, the existence of such minimal standards may prove to be yet another differentiator. Selective institutions might test their applicants against this minimal standard and deny admission to those who do not pass or they might require students to pass the test by the end of the first year. Then, they could introduce subject-specific specialized certifications to give their graduates an additional edge in the job and graduate or professional education markets.

We’re probably locked into some form of exit testing to certify our graduates because our internal processes of evaluation no longer inspire confidence or speak to common standards of performance. Given this inevitability, institutions should think carefully about the competitive advantages of different forms of exit testing, because it is certain that the results of whatever exit exam systems emerge will be used as part of the intense competition among institutions for students and funding.

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Since at least the early 20th century, it has been fashionable to attack college athletics as distorting the priorities of American colleges and universities, and there is often much evidence to support the attacks. The difficulty in taking these challenges seriously is that they are often unclear about the context within which college athletics functions and undervalue the significance of the constituencies that support this part of the American collegiate enterprise. The latest issue involves the question of whether the increasing amount of giving to college athletics represents a shift of donor interest from academic enterprise. While it is surely true that athletic giving is increasing it is not necessarily true that it comes at the expense of academic giving, which is also on the rise. To accept this premise, we would need to be sure that those who give to athletics would, in the absence of a tax break or an athletic program, give substantially to academic activities. While evidence on giving patterns is not always entirely conclusive, what we do have appears to indicate that athletic and academic donors are substantially different groups. That is, most of the big donors to athletics do not give much to academics and most of the big donors to academics do not give much to athletics.

This reflects the fact that donors can do what they want with their money. If they want to give it to a political candidate, a church, an international charity, a scholarship fund, and endowed chair, or a college football team, it is their choice and reflects their values. The notion that we, in the university or in the government, can dramatically shift these preferences is charming but not realistic as anyone who has spent time fundraising knows. The donor’s preferences are what matter. They surely like the tax break when it’s relevant and they like matching funds for academic gifts provided by many states, but a matching program for academic gifts does not make an athletic donor decide to give an endowed chair rather than an endow a football scholarship. It might persuade a donor to give an endowed chair to one of their alma maters that has a matching program rather than to another alma mater that does not.

The public benefit of the tax break for college athletics is more complicated than our belief in the value of sports in our universities. If we want to eliminate expensive competitive intercollegiate sports from our colleges and universities, the issue of a tax break won’t make much difference. It will just raise the cost of the enterprise, and since most college sports programs (with the exception of maybe the top ten BCS football schools) run a deficit, the increased cost will fall back on institutional budgets. We can say that money- losing intercollegiate sports programs are a bad thing, but our constituencies (whether at elite private colleges or mega football factories) love their sports.

At the same time, there are many items that big time sports programs do, paid for by their donors, that do not qualify for tax breaks. When donors give money to a sports program, they only get the tax break associated with the gift portion, not the portion that buys a ticket to the game or pays for a meal or provides a team jacket. The rules require that the institution deduct all the products and services that directly benefit the donor, recognizing that these things are commercial transactions, while the gift to the athletic program that sustains its expenses in support of student-athletes and the costs of the non-revenue sports, as well as the losses of football in most institutions, does help the academic enterprise and is deserving of a tax break. These rules may need to be improved, tightened, or otherwise changed to make giving to college sports more expensive to the donors. While this may well affect some donors, the truth is that the people who give in the many-million dollar category (athletic gifts that provoke the most outrage) almost always do not need and cannot use the tax break because they have already used up every imaginable tax dodge available to the rich and super rich. In talking with major donors and extolling the opportunity for a tax break as the result of a gift, many will tell me, “that’s nice, but I can’t use that tax break and I’ll just give the money because I want to help.”

Attempting to fix what’s believed to be wrong with college sports by manipulating tax policies is likely to produce many unintended consequences, harm the smallest and most vulnerable sports programs at colleges and universities, and have almost no impact at all on the mega sports programs that offend many observers. If these mega programs are a bad thing, we should take them on and fix them directly rather than try to sneak in a fix that won’t work via the tax code. Mega college athletics is indeed a remarkable American invention, it reflects the decisions of academic administrators and governing boards at almost all colleges and universities for over a century. It prospers because for the most part we (our faculty, our staff, our alumni, our legislators, our trustees, our students, and our many other constituencies) want it. We could easily change it, IF MOST OF US WANTED TO CHANGE IT. All protestations to the contrary, we, the colleges and universities of America and our friends and supporters, do not want to change it. What we really want is to imitate the best (often the most expensive) programs in America by winning games and championships.

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At one time, we imagined that students came to the university to learn, that they had an obligation to engage their courses and faculty, read, write, study, take exams, and demonstrate their achievement. This simple approach placed the responsibility for learning on the students who we assumed recognized that the privilege of attending a college carried with it a commitment to the learning process. We expected the faculty to know their subject, prepare for class, provide support and advice, hold office hours, give fair and effective examinations, mark papers with care, and provide a grade that reflected what the students had learned. This simple formulation has suffered considerable modification over the years.

Today we believe students are entitled to attend college, that they have a right to achieve a standard level of academic accomplishment, and that the institutions have an obligation to ensure that their learning meets this standard by the time they leave. The obligation to guarantee student learning and graduation is sometimes explicitly articulated, but more often appears through measures applied to demonstrate institutional success. Graduation rate, for example, is seen as a measure of institutional effectiveness and anticipates that the institution will guarantee student learning at a level acceptable for graduation and successful entry into the world of work. In this formulation, the students’ responsibilities lie in attendance, but their academic success becomes the responsibility of the institution. When graduation rates are low or students fail to meet some testable standard, we assume that the institution failed, not that the student failed. Indeed, if the student fails, the remedy is to punish the institution and its teachers.

The academic success entitlement that students enjoy reflects a broader belief that institutions need to guarantee results not opportunity. This is a notion borrowed from the manufacturing world where we demand guarantees that the products we buy be free of defects and that all products of a certain type perform their functions in the same predictable and standardized way. This model, while effective for mass produced items constructed out of standard malleable materials where the producer controls the conditions of production, has little to do with high quality education. In a high quality educational context, as we who live here know, the academic enterprise requires the direct and responsible participation of student and teacher. Neither can fail, for if the student is lazy, poorly prepared, or just doesn’t care, the academic result will be poor no matter how expert the teacher. Similarly, if the teacher is incompetent, lazy, or unprepared, the academic result will also be poor no matter how responsible the student. When we place all the responsibility for academic success or failure on the institution and its teachers, exempting the student s, we create an engine capable of predictable mediocre performance.

Our difficulty in restoring the authority of the university and its faculty in the definition of academic accomplishment, and the consequent intrusion of external agencies in the measurement of institutional success, reflects our own ambivalence about measuring and evaluating our own performance. We know quite a bit about learning and how it takes place, but most institutions are reluctant to institute programs that review and assess faculty teaching performance. While the faculty may well be doing a terrific job, updating their courses every year, adopting new teaching techniques that leverage technology and research on student learning, and otherwise performing at a high level, our ability to demonstrate this effectiveness is minimal. Mostly, what we see are outstanding examples, drawn from the work of a number of dedicated faculty with the commitment of teaching resource centers. These wonderful people and their support enterprise capture the enthusiasm of some subset of faculty, but we rarely find comprehensive institution-wide faculty teaching assessments that build confidence in the faculty part of the student-faculty collaboration. To be sure, we have student evaluations of teaching, but as almost everyone knows, these are weak tools for measuring instructional effectiveness although they often identify the outliers (very bad and very good teachers). More elaborate forms of evaluation that employ expert reviewers of faculty teaching performance are rare indeed.

We know that such reviews are expensive and time consuming (although we also know that we do this type of reviewing for research productivity and effectiveness). We know that absent significant rewards for faculty teaching performance, few faculty or institutions want to make the investment or support the controversies that will surround designing an effective process. But we are also very short sighted in this.

The external constituencies that will demand exit testing and various other forms of standardized evaluation of institutional teaching effectiveness will require expensive tests. What they test will often be the wrong things. The consequences of these tests, which will stigmatize some institutions as ineffective and their faculty as poor teachers based on perhaps wrong-headed criteria, will prove expensive for the institutions and their faculty.

Our failure to take full ownership of the issue of teaching and learning effectiveness and evaluation, recognizing both the student and teacher as required partners in producing success, gives influence to meddlesome bureaucrats with often ideological agenda, empowers academic entrepreneurs exploiting our abdication of responsibility by selling us the latest in testing methodologies, and further erodes the authority of the university and its faculty and their ability to determine the definitions of academic quality.

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It is rankings time again, as everyone interested in colleges and universities know. This annual celebration gives everyone something. It gives the rich elite colleges a way to demonstrate their presumed superiority and it gives everyone else an opportunity to identify the errors, misconceptions and ideological biases that inform the lists. As often observed, when institutions rise in spurious rankings, they publicize the results; when they fall in the same rankings, they critique the methodology. While the debate is entertaining and often significant in substance, the key issues in rankings sometimes get lost.

Rankings are what they are because the American public likes lists. It knows that they are mostly artifacts of wealth and publicity, it understands that the qualities represented may or may not have anything to do with effectiveness of institutions, and it recognizes that the institutions and the rankings organizations may well manipulate the data and the calculations to match anticipated results. Nonetheless, people like to buy the magazines and reports, they like to see who is where and who may have risen or fallen.

Most institutions, except for those ranked No. 1, find fault with the whole process, and while some college leaders have tried to opt out of a competition that is flawed in almost every way, their public wants to see them listed in the top 10, 20, 50, or whatever category matters. Best dressed, most talented, best small college, most popular movie, No. 1 football team, all these designations feed Americans insecurity about their own ability to make a judgment. So they make some choice — my college, my football team, my favorite movie — and then seek validation in a pseudo-scientific ranking system.

We can surely complain, try to help the organizations that produce these things do them better, and point out the failings in the different rankings, but since the public wants them, likes them, buys them, and argues about them; clearly the organizations that produce them are delivering a popular item. That the results distort the educational purposes of many institutions, that the structure of most of these rankings reflect wealth, that the issues of prestige and effectiveness are confused in the data simply demonstrate that in the absence of serious academic evaluations of substance and reliability, pop science will fill the void.

Having shunned this marketplace of ideas, having failed to engage the question of measuring institutional effectiveness and value in any meaningful way, and having continued in large measure to voluntarily cooperate with these commercial products, we should be embarrassed to take the high ground that the commercial ratings are deficient in academic seriousness. Actually, it is the academic industry that is deficient in evaluation seriousness; the commercial folks are just doing what they do by selling a popular product to the public in the absence of significant competition.

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Nothing gets our academic principles exercised quite as quickly as a conflict between athletic excellence and academic standards. Any issue in this domain quickly escalates to the extremes, as various commentators leverage a specific issue into a cosmic debate about values. The recent flap triggered by my good friend Steve Spurrier is an example of this process. Sometimes it helps to be a little less extreme. For example, no one really expects to delegate academic admission decisions to an athletic department and no one really expects that academic admissions decisions will ignore non-academic issues related to special talents or circumstances. The trick is to get the balance right.

In the case of athletics, the issue really is about timing. A letter of intent may, technically, not be an admissions document, but for a recruited student-athlete, it is a mutual commitment between the student-athlete and the institution. The university guarantees a scholarship for one year in exchange for the student-athlete attending and participating in whatever sport is involved (not just football). The letter of intent also prohibits most other institutions from recruiting the student-athlete and for all practical purposes removes the student-athlete from the national recruitment competition. Once the student-athlete signs the letter of intent offered by the university’s representatives, that student is no longer able to compete for scholarships from other institutions. So while we can parse the technicalities of the letter of intent, if the athletic department, which is reasonably taken by prospective students and their parents to be a fully authorized representative of the university, commits to a scholarship if the student attends and meets the NCAA minimum eligibility requirements, the university is probably not being fair to then say that it did not mean to admit the student-athlete. It may be that the athletic department exceeded its authority in offering a letter of intent to an academically inadmissible student-athlete who is otherwise eligible under NCAA rules, but this failure is not the student’s failure. Instead, it is a failure of institutional control if representatives of the institution who do not have the appropriate authority, nonetheless make commitments to prospective student-athletes. This is not the student’s problem it is the university’s problem.

One way to fix this is to recognize that all applicants, athletic or otherwise, fall into three broad categories: those whose academic accomplishments in high school are stellar or obviously acceptable, those whose academic accomplishments in high school are poor and obviously unacceptable, and a group in the middle who may be OK and may not be OK. The first group, we admit enthusiastically, offer merit scholarships or early admission, and otherwise court. The second group we gracefully reject. The middle group however, we agonize over. How many of these should we admit, knowing that many may have difficulty achieving academic success? Some may have special talents we want (they sing, they dance, they play tennis, they write poetry) even if the rest of their academic credentials are marginal. Perhaps they belong to a group we need to balance the diversity of our student population by region, ethnicity, gender, or international perspective. Some in this group may have famous or influential parents or patrons. All of these elements enter into a decision about admission for members of this middle group. Whatever the special circumstances, these student are rarely admitted on a simple merit basis referenced to rigid numerical standards driven by standardized tests and high school GPA’s.

One way to deal with the recruitment of stellar but perhaps marginally prepared student-athletes is to have a special admissions committee that deals with these marginal cases (high talent or other desirable quality in one area, marginal academic preparation otherwise). This committee, appointed by the academic side of the university and including admission professionals, reviews these cases and makes a judgment based primarily on whether they believe the desirable if not fully prepared applicant has a reasonable chance to succeed academically. They may also consider whether the unit of the university seeking admission for this candidate has support systems in place capable of helping the student succeed with special tutoring and remediation where needed. If the committee says YES, then the athletic department, the music department, or other interested departments can recruit the prospective student. If the committee says NO, then this student is no longer eligible to be recruited by anyone in the university. The committee should make its decision as early as necessary for the recruitment to take place, and the timing issues will be different for violinists and tennis stars. As in all things controversial, an interested department (music, dance, or track) can appeal a negative decision to the provost or chancellor/president, but these worthies would likely find it wise to strongly back a carefully appointed academic committee.

The university must keep track of the results of these decisions. If the committee admits talented but academically marginal students, do these students eventually graduate? If they drop out, why did they drop out? Over a relatively short time, the institution will have a good sense of how well its committee predicts academic success in these special cases.

The university should not permit its representatives to promise what they cannot deliver and it should not deny its own departments and programs timely decisions about who can be recruited for admission. If there are issues about intercollegiate athletics in general or the academic performance of student-athletes, these issues should be addressed directly, rather than through controversies about special admissions which affect many more prospective students than just those with athletic talent.

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The New York Times noticed in its edition of July 29, 2007 the introduction of differential tuition by field into some public universities. While the notion of explicitly charging more for business or engineering majors than for history or English is hardly new, the desperate search for additional revenue to sustain university operations has led to more explicit pricing strategies such as this one. Partly this is because the consumers, the students and their parents, can be convinced that the extra cost of a business or engineering degree will be recovered after graduation, and the extra quality the premium price buys will be reflected in the marketability of the graduates. Sometimes these strategies reflect state rules that may permit additional specific fees but not general tuition increases. All of this reflects the continued shift of parts of public higher education into the fee for services rather than the public service business.

However, even though this may appear dramatic and ominous, in fact, most large universities, as well as many small colleges, have always used an invisible form of differential pricing. When a campus charges the same fee for all majors, and some majors cost more to produce than others, the participants in the low cost majors are subsidizing the participants in the high cost majors. Similarly, when the tuition and fees for all students are uniform, those students who take small classes taught by distinguished professors, participate in honors programs, and otherwise enjoy high cost instructional environments are subsidized by the tuition and fees of those students who take ordinary large classes taught by adjunct professors, who do not qualify for honors programs, and who move through the university without requiring special services.

The rationale for these cross subsidies is that the standardized tuition and fee pricing permits students to make choices about their academic careers without consideration of differential costs. This charming notion comes of course from the experience of small private liberal arts colleges where the academic environment is limited, most classes in all fields are small, and the institution may not support the highest cost programs available at major research universities. Also, of course, some elite private colleges have the high tuition and endowment income to support subsidies of whatever kind to produce whatever instructional environment seems appropriate to them.

As public higher education continues to struggle with the tremendous pressure to deliver the highest level of quality to its students (and their parents) and the lowest cost to their political sponsors (legislatures), we can expect to continue to see various forms of pricing designed to resolve the conflict between quality and cost. In the end, the most successful public institutions will probably find a way to use all the possible techniques: raise general tuition and fees, increase financial aid for the needy, create special fees for special programs, and raise external dollars to support quality enhancements. The critical challenge for all quality public institution is acquiring the revenue required to purchase the quality demanded by its constituencies.

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University presidents are a varied lot: some charismatic and charming, some dour and solid, some charlatans and others true believers. Those of us who have watched, and lived the cycle of presidential performance often wonder if there’s a predictable set of characteristics that would define the successful, triumphant institutional leader. We read studies of the university presidency, follow the ups and downs of individual careers, handicap the likely outcome of this or that public presidential controversy, but in the end, we find it difficult to sort out the elements of singular leadership. Of course, many successful presidents imagine that the quality of their achievement came from within themselves, while those whose time in office was painful and unproductive will emphasize the context that prevented success. Truth of course is somewhere in the middle, success coming from a combination of personal characteristics, talents, and skills matched to particular opportunities and limitations of place and time, combinations rarely repeated and difficult to emulate.

In the genre of presidential memoirs, one of the best is by the legendary president of Indiana University, Herman B Wells, whose book Being Lucky: Reminiscences and Reflections (1980) provided a sane, fascinating, and realistic appraisal of his long and remarkably successful reign with an admirable recognition of the luck that made success possible. A more recent addition to this literature comes from the pen of James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan. A long-time leader of the Michigan enterprise in many roles ending up as president for most of a decade, Duderstad offers his perspective in The View from the Helm: Leading the American University during an Era of Change (2007), and produces a fine example of the genre. Reflecting a deep understanding of the challenges and rewards of a lifetime of university engagement, and with the wisdom born of many battles, mostly won, a few lost, the book is required reading for those interested in the career and inner life of major public university presidents.

Duderstadt’s approach, surely a reflection of his engineer’s background, is thorough, comprehensive, complete, and careful. At times, the effort to fully explain and celebrate the history and accomplishments of the University of Michigan wears a bit, but in the end, the reward is a truly perceptive and candid commentary on the changing nature of the public university and its impact on the presidency. No short commentary can do this book justice, except to recommend it. The analyses of governance issues, of the increasing difficulty of managing politically generated boards, and of the fragmented nature of campus culture are exceptionally useful. Duderstadt works hard to keep his optimism intact and his enthusiasm for the game high, but in the end, this is not an altogether cheerful story.

And we ask ourselves, we who live in similar contexts: If one of the most successful university presidents of our time, who lived and worked in one of America’s premier research universities, leaves the helm with concern and misgivings, what foolhardy instinct keeps the rest of us at it?

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Many of us find it challenging to explain the American higher education system to non-academic audiences (and sometimes to academic audiences as well). The remarkable complexity and range of institutional types, organizations, financing, and governance often defy simple explanations, and global generalizations rarely convey much useful information. If we try to be comprehensive and thorough, people’s eyes glaze over quickly. Fortunately, the ACE publishes A Brief Guide to U.S. Higher Education, a very useful item now available in its 2007 edition. In about 60 pages, this guide provides a clear, concise, and effective survey of the landscape of America higher education along with a number of tables that offer a perspective on the scope and scale of the enterprise.

The publication not only offers information describing the missions and characteristics of two-year, four-year, and other types of institutions, but gives a good synopsis of the roles of government, the nature of institutional finance, and the purpose of accreditation. The authors provide a good description of the administrative structure of these institutions as well as a clear understanding of the organization of the faculty. The summary of undergraduate studies is effective as the survey of graduate studies helpful. Finally the publication offers a perspective on international students, describes the major higher education organizations, and outlines current public policy issues.

This is all presented in clear prose with a careful effort to make meaningful distinctions on one side and accurate generalizations on the other. This is a publication that should be mandatory reading for all new institutional trustees and members of higher education committees in the various state legislatures. People on blue ribbon committees and commissions might also acquire some useful background from this report.

Although it’s a great publication, highly recommended, it has one significant drawback: It sells for $25 dollars and is not available on line.

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The liberal arts have been in crisis in American colleges and universities in one way or another throughout my academic life. Whether challenged by Sputnik, assaulted by the rise of vocationally oriented education, or rejected by the fine arts as irrelevant to performance, we in the liberal arts have found ourselves playing defense for a long time. We watched as many of our traditional liberal arts courses declined in enrollment, we saw our graduate student populations decline, and we witnessed the rise of an instrumental argument for the liberal arts (it turns out liberal arts are practical).

The commitment from our institutions, enshrined in the core, distribution, or general education requirements, became a curricular battlefield over the ability of the academy to absorb the dramatic social, political, and cultural transformations of the late 20th century. We fretted as the nation turned towards a crusade to enhance the STEM disciplines which divided the liberal arts and sciences into two camps: the nationally significant mathematically based disciplines and the perhaps useful and charming but less important social, behavioral, and humanistic studies.

We learned that college was critical to the nation’s future and that everyone should have an opportunity to attend, but we also learned that we should add programs and activities to support those students arriving from high school with one or many academic deficiencies. We found ourselves asked to support economic development in our communities and state, we responded to calls for community involvement and service learning, we engaged in outreach to many off-campus constituencies, and we pursued various forms of distance learning. All this effort produced dramatically increased enrollments in higher education but also constant discontent from one or another of our many constituencies. Ideologues of all persuasions found our values suspect, employers found our graduates not as well prepared as expected, governments complained that students graduated with different levels of skill and performance and that some did not graduate at all, testing concerns lobbied for regulated uniformity through standardized outcome measurements, and our national associations and other interested groups issued call after call for dramatic reform, rededication, reconfiguration, and renewal.

One elegant and comprehensive call to arms for the liberal arts comes from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) perhaps the most focused on liberal arts of the lobbying organizations in Washington DC. Their campaign carries the inspiring title Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP) and their challenge appears in the publication, College Learning for the New Global Century (2007) available online. This report is wonderful in its rhetoric, purposes, and recognition of the many remarkable things being done for liberal education across the nation. It outlines The Essential Learning Outcomes, seven Principles of Excellence, and fifteen Recommendations to implement these principles. The AACU LEAP leadership council includes representatives of colleges and universities of varying types and sizes. All in all, it is a fine report. One of its great strengths is that it makes a strong case for flexible, effective, and specific outcomes measurement tailored to the particular academic objectives of the widely varying institutions in the country and makes an effective critique of the simple, one test serves all, methodology proposed by many accountability advocates.

Still, as I read through this report, cheering on my colleagues whose broad definition of the liberal arts seems to encompass everything a modern college or university does, some nagging doubt restrained my enthusiasm. Although presented as a remarkably new proposal, much of the rationale and content have been part of our liberal arts rhetoric and agenda for at least a generation or two, and most of the principles, perhaps ineffectively implemented, have provided the justification for every college and university’s general education or core requirements. The described innovations, admirable in every way, actually exist in most colleges and universities in some form or another, providing undergraduates with real world experience, taking multidisciplinary courses, working on team projects, and otherwise broadening and deepening their engagement with multiple facets of the curriculum. That these admirable accomplishments should get more attention and visibility is surely a good thing, and that our colleagues have been enhancing curriculum and the opportunities for students to meet the goals echoed by this report is reason to rejoice.

The great challenge for the achievement of all these fine principles and recommendations comes from more practical considerations. Almost everyone would agree with these broad recommendations and principles, for they have been the stuff of our discussions on these topics for years, but not everyone will see a clear method for implementation. While the LEAP document asks us to put our experiments into a complete reform of the undergraduate process, this is not as easy as it might appear. Most colleges and universities have 120 hours, more or less, to provide all the things everyone wants from their undergraduate experience. Most of the recommendations in the report speak of adding onto the current curriculum, by enhancing the core and extending the principles of liberal learning into the structure of majors. Indeed, LEAP reinforces the importance of the strong in-depth major. The challenge may be worth accepting, but it is not trivial, and especially for large complex universities, the integrative approach presented here may prove somewhat more difficult to achieve. Most colleges and universities are doing some of the things recommended in this report, but not many are implementing them all in a systematic fashion.

This is not for lack of leadership, imagination, or good will, but instead, it reflects the real practical and economic challenges of implementing comprehensive, sweeping reforms. All of us appreciate the call to arms of the AACU, we who are of the traditional liberal arts cannot help but resonate to the rhetoric, but we look forward with anticipation to the development of a strategy that will help us find the money and the space within our highly regulated environments to engage the fundamental reforms outlined here.

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Friday, May 11, 2007

ACE, the American Council on Education, is a remarkable organization. Their mission, to speak for and about the entire range of higher education institutions, is admirable for its impossibility. Even so, ACE is almost always there when we need someone saying the right things about significant national issues related to higher education. Indeed, David Ward’s reign, which is sadly nearing its end, has been a model of effective representation, and we are sorry to lose his charm, insight, and forthright courage in speaking on our behalf.

ACE does lots of things for different constituencies, but it always pays special attention to institutional presidents/chancellors because these people are the primary constituents of the organization. Presidents have many interests and concerns, but they are always interested in themselves. ACE responds in a variety of ways as it reflects the presidents’ personal perspectives. A list of the titles for sale from ACE’s publications on leadership and institutional effectiveness provides a sample: the flagship magazine, The Presidency; On Assuming a College or University Presidency: Lessons and Advice from the Field; and especially, The American College President.

This last item (most recently published in 2007 and on sale through ACE) appeared on my desk, and in looking through it, I marveled at our fascination with conversations about ourselves. Since 1986, ACE and its collaborators have been asking college presidents what they think about their jobs, seeking a profile of the work and performance, challenges and opportunities, as seen by the occupants of these high visibility positions. Much of the information is very interesting, especially related to the changes in presidential characteristics by race and gender, age, previous experience, and other descriptive characteristics of this carefully selected population.

In other sections of the report, the presidents portray themselves as hard working, over-stressed individuals, denied much privacy, and consumed by the struggle to make their institutions successful. However, there is also a sense in the commentary that accompanies these responses that perhaps something is wrong with a system of higher education that requires its presidents to seek money and deal with demanding external constituencies, cope with accountability and the changing requirements of the marketplace, and grapple with the difficulties of governance. As the report says “The mystery is why any individuals would subject themselves to such sacrifices and, because they obviously do, how they survive.”

This is not something we should worry about. It is rare that an individual who becomes a college president imagines that the job is about pure thought, charming conversations with colleagues, and thoughtful discussions of the curriculum. Everybody, in or out of a presidency, knows that the success of colleges and universities depends on the acquisition of adequate funding. Everybody is clear that a president who avoids donors, does not like to speak with legislators, is uninterested in working with parents, and ignores corporations should probably not be president. The data in the ACE report highlight this consensus about the job of president, although the commentary appears to question the fairness of the requirements.

College presidents are actually not worth their price unless they are willing to deal with all those issues, as well as everything else that comes with the territory: faculty, unions, students, athletics, and communities, each with a long and impossible to resolve, conflict-related agenda. The list of presidential aggravations may be long in our own minds, but that is the job. It is the point of the exercise, to manage these complex interactions with the assistance of very smart people who will make the college or university more successful in competing for students, faculty, and staff, who will then deliver the performance that defines quality.

When the lure of academic life in its purer forms becomes great, presidents fade into the faculty or some other more graceful place, but while they are presidents, we should expect them to engage the battle and enjoy the fight. As one respondent to the survey accurately commented, “You do it because you love it.”