Pondering the forces shaping higher education

By Robert Arnove, Professor of Education, IU Bloomington

Arnove

Last semester, Sheila Slaughter delivered an extremely stimulating talk on the IU Bloomington campus about recent trends in higher education: "Who Gets What and Why in Public Research Universities: Supply-Side Institutional Research Allocation Policy and Restructuring." Her lecture and a workshop the next day were co-sponsored by the Long-Range Planning Committee of the Bloomington Faculty Council, the University Research Policy Committee, and the academic vice president and chancellor of the Bloomington campus. Slaughter, a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, is the co-author of the best selling book, Academic Capitalism: Policies, Politics and the Entrepreneurial University, from which she drew the data to document the growing commercialization and privatization of higher education in the United States.

Members of the Long Range Planning Committee thought the following points were significant:

€ Universities should get out of the business of intellectual property rights. Citing various studies, Slaughter pointed out that, contrary to widespread notions, they often cost more money than they bring in. Intellectual property rights agreements are frequently subject to litigation, subvert the public mission of the university to disseminate information freely and cause antagonistic relations with the business world. Moreover, a focus on property rights often leads to preferential funding for specialized, low-enrollment graduate programs as against undergraduate teaching and higher enrollment graduate programs.

€ Universities should try less to attend to the interests of Fortune 500 companies, which have not generated jobs in the last decade, and instead concentrate on serving the social service sector (education and health) as well as smaller, more local businesses that do generate jobs and income, and contribute to the well being of their immediate communities.

€ The role of the university should continue to be that of providing a liberal education, not confined to specific job training, in order to prepare students to be critically aware and participatory citizens of a democracy and a more interconnected world.

€ While new instructional technologies may enhance learning and help provide instruction to nontraditional students, they also have serious implications. They may lead to different roles and missions for different campuses and contribute to stratification and segmentation of faculty, with some developing curricular content and modes of presentation, others delivering mediated instruction, others involved in traditional, face-to-face instruction, and still others involved primarily in research.

Slaughter's talk and workshop drew attention to the need to take cognizance of global economic, political and social forces shaping the future of American higher education, often in detrimental ways.

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