[Orig to FB]
This “Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education” is worth reading, or a least a serious skim. The committee that drafted it was given an impossible task, and it shows. There’s a lot of slippery rhetoric in it — for example, “Families want to know why college costs so much and why costs keep rising. Economists have identified a variety of structural factors, including the labor-intensive nature of education, the need for competitive salaries to attract skilled professionals, and the flow of federal student aid. In public discourse, the most common critiques point to administrative bloat, spending on buildings, and the ‘corporatization’ of the university. Opinion polls show widespread suspicion that colleges and universities, like other businesses, are primarily out to make a profit—though most are, legally speaking, not-for-profit institutions.” That’s the only substantive mention of real estate development, which is a major culprit in distorting and distracting from “the mission.” And the larger criticism isn’t the “corporatization” of higher ed, it’s the financialization — which that last bit tiptoes around. The recommendations (p. 23ff.) aren’t bad, though they’re awfully vague. #9, “Open the gates,” is a good one and it mirrors what I told the New School back when I chaired the faculty senate: The cost of running university in an urban core is guaranteed to skyrocket, making it entirely dependent on catering to the wealthy. The only alternatives were either (1) move the entire school somewhere cheaper, or (2) fundamentally rethink its relationship to the city at different scales — by opening up to it. Instead, they blew multiples of the university endowment on an lavish architectural white elephant, then elevated the person who was largely responsible for guiding that to the presidency, where most of his time is spent frantically trying to keep it from going bust. But urban schools are just a bleeding edge of a growing massacre in US higher ed.