The Day the Purpose of College Changed
The governor had bad news: The state budget was in crisis, and everyone needed to tighten their belts.
High taxes threatened "economic ruin," said the newly elected Ronald Reagan. Welfare stood to be curbed, the highway patrol had fat to trim. Everything would be pared down; he’d start with his own office.
California still boasted a system of public higher education that was the envy of the world. And on February 28, 1967, a month into his term, the Republican governor assured people that he wouldn't do anything to harm it. "But," he added, "we do believe that there are certain intellectual luxuries that perhaps we could do without," for a little while at least.
Governor," a reporter asked, "what is an intellectual luxury?"
Reagan described a four-credit course at the University of California at Davis on organizing demonstrations. "I figure that carrying a picket sign is sort of like, oh, a lot of things you pick up naturally," he said, "like learning how to swim by falling off the end of a dock."
Whole academic programs in California and across the country he found similarly suspect. Taxpayers, he said, shouldn't be "subsidizing intellectual curiosity."
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(Liberal education) wasn't always a punchline. Thomas Jefferson argued for increased access to liberal education—among white males. A broadly educated populace, he said, would strengthen democracy. People "with genius and virtue should be rendered by liberal education worthy to receive and able to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens," he wrote in 1779. Such men wouldn't be easily swayed by tyrants.
Still, there were dissenters, Michael S. Roth notes in Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters. Benjamin Franklin mocked liberal education for focusing on the frivolous accouterments of privilege. Harvard College’s students "learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely and enter a room genteelly," Franklin wrote. When they graduated, they remained "great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited."
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Reagan rose to power by highlighting how colleges had veered dangerously away from mainstream values. He seized on campus unrest at Berkeley to connect with voters who hadn’t gone to college but wanted their kids to. But the buildings their tax dollars paid for were burning.
The new governor didn’t spend time talking about the tension between Jefferson’s and Franklin’s visions. There was little political payoff in nuance. Reagan, one of his campaign aides told The New York Times in 1970, doesn’t operate in shades of gray: "He lays it out there."
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By the time Reagan won the presidency, in 1980, practical degrees had become the safe and popular choice.
That year students were most likely to major in business. The discipline’s rise seemed inexorable. In the 1930s, around the time Reagan went to college, about 8 percent of students studied in "business and commerce." When he was elected governor, that share was 12 percent. By the time he moved into the White House, more students majored in business than anything else. It’s held that top spot ever since. In the early 80s, most freshmen said they’d chosen their college because they thought it would help them get a better job. The previous top reason? Learning more about things that interested them.
It was a rational response to changing federal policy. Under the Reagan administration, the maximum Pell Grant decreased by about a quarter. Student loans became a more common way to pay for college, even as the president made their interest payments ineligible for tax deductions. As student debt rose, so did the urgency of earning a living after graduation.
Free-market ideas permeated higher education. "The curriculum has given way to a marketplace philosophy," wrote the authors of "Integrity in the College Curriculum: A Report to the Academic Community," commissioned by the AAC in 1985. "It is a supermarket where students are shoppers and professors are merchants of learning."
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The word "liberal," the association acknowledges, has become a term of opprobrium. Recent research in economics found that top students from low-income backgrounds reacted to the term "liberal arts" with comments like "I am not liberal" and "I don’t like learning useless things."
When politicians mock particular disciplines, it doesn’t exactly bolster popular opinion of liberal education. "If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to a private school," Pat McCrory, the Republican governor of North Carolina, said on a radio show a couple of years ago. "I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job." In other words, it’s an intellectual luxury.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Day-the-Purpose-of-College/151359?cid=megamenu
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), I just seethe
