Making Universities Accountable

And: Biden's Cancer; Bloody Canada; A Protestant In Italy; Religious Knowledge

NYU graduates on their majors (Source)

Our friend and commentator Wafa e-mailed this, and gives me permission to post it. It’s really smart and insightful:

Like some of your subscribers, I am busy and behind on my reading, which is why I'm only now getting to the post about accountability in higher education. You asked -- in bold! -- in a democracy, what responsibility do universities, and the knowledge-producing class, have to the rest of us? In what ways should they be held accountable?

I've been a university faculty member for 17 years and an administrator for 8. We're on my turf now and I have a lot of informed opinions about this. This email is going to be an essay!

Most of my experience has been at public universities, so I'll focus on those, though some of what I have to say applies to both public and private. I'm going to stay generic because my institution is not unique regarding any of the issues that afflict higher ed. A lot of what I'm about to say is common knowledge inside the industry -- some even gets written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

1. Accountability. In theory, this ought to be easy for public universities. We report directly to boards of trustees and state higher education commissions, which are appointed by elected representatives. In Alabama, the governor is even an ex-officio member of the boards of trustees of our public universities. They do a good job monitoring our curriculum and the feasibility of our degrees, making sure unpopular programs don't stagger on and drain state resources forever. (Yes, the acronym spells ACHE, which makes me giggle every time.) They do a lot to encourage us to stay on top of technology and be responsive to workforce needs.

And yet, there is a lot that they could be doing better.

DeSantis in Florida is sort of gesturing in the right direction, along with other states that have instituted post-tenure review, but even they are barely touching the tip of the iceberg. The below-the-surface base of the iceberg is the fact that incentives are misaligned all through.

2. Incentives for faculty. Faculty are incentivized to produce research, measured as: grant funding and peer-reviewed journal publications in engineering and the hard sciences; peer-reviewed journal publications in business and the social sciences; and peer-reviewed journal publications and books in the humanities.

Research acumen is supposed to make us better teachers, but does it? Not always. Students pay very large sums of money and go into taxpayer-subsidized debt to be taught by: (a) graduate students; (b) research superstars who are phoning in their teaching; (c) competent researchers with tenure who are phoning in their teaching; (d) untenured adjuncts, lecturers, and tenure track faculty who need high student evaluation scores to be reappointed and will gladly inflate grades to get them; (e) tenured faculty who have checked out entirely and are doing the bare minimum to not get fired; and (f) some faculty who genuinely care about student learning.

Post-tenure review does address the problem of (e) and partially (c), but does nothing about any of the others. And it doesn't seriously address the fundamental problem of: how do we ensure that research and teaching are of high quality?

3. Research. Peer review is supposed to be a guarantor of quality. But most academics will admit that the process is broken in many ways. Peer reviewers never have the time or resources to redo the work and check for errors in data analysis, unless they are glaringly obvious. It's very difficult to police actual research fraud. No one has an incentive to replicate research -- only original work gets published in "good" journals. So the retractions and failed replications and plagiarism we do see are likely a tiny fraction of what's out there. A handful of people do it for reasons of pure altruism; some have graduate students replicate published studies as a way to train them.

A very good way to improve accountability would be to create incentives and mechanisms to replicate research findings and check for fraud. State commissions of higher education and the Department of Education, if it continues to exist, have the means and the ability to do this if they want to, or at least push us in the right direction.

But there are other issues that are much more difficult to address. Buddy systems between groups of coauthors, conference organizers, and journal editors can get mediocre work published over higher quality work by people who aren't as well-connected. Senior researchers can pad their profiles by coercing junior researchers to add their names to publications. Peer reviewers are experts in the field, who are human beings with a natural status quo bias. They don't want to see their own prior work overturned and will naturally be a lot harder on work that contradicts it than on work that confirms their own. This is true even if they're acting with complete integrity -- it's human nature. Quality work can sit in file drawers and never get published, because it upsets leading luminaries in the field.

Add to this the fact that each discipline sets its own standards for what counts as quality work. Which statistical methods are good enough in which cases -- these standards vary widely. Work gets published in some fields (cough cough Education) that would not pass muster for an undergraduate thesis in others. Some disciplines publish "autoethnographies" i.e. memoirs that cite Derrida and Baudelaire, and pass them off as research -- remember this lady? And she's in Australia, this is global. That's before we get to the sort of thing you mock every now and then, which I don't need to tell you about.

In the humanities, there is the deeper problem of digging into critical theory and Foucault and all sorts of reinterpretations of work because professors need to publish to get tenure and promotions. What universities and students need are people to teach Shakespeare, not necessarily write the 753rd critical feminist interpretation of The Tempest. But if all you do is teach, you get paid way less, you have much less job security, and the little job security you do have is tied to keeping students happy. Which brings me to...

4. Teaching. Let me begin with the assumption that most students in college want to learn and be intellectually challenged. (I'm being like a physicist assuming a vacuum; suppress the snort of laughter for now and I will relax the assumption later.) Our accrediting bodies do make us assess student learning through subject matter tests and coursework, but those are almost never used to evaluate faculty. Instead, department chairs rely largely on student evaluations, and the easiest way to buy those is to make a class as easy as possible. Especially if you're in category (d) above and your employment depends on high student evaluation scores. Minimal intellectual challenge + little to no policing of cheating, especially in online courses = shortcut to high student evaluation scores. Students who really want to learn and be challenged will be disappointed, but they can sob into their 4.0 GPA on the way to the next party.

Once you've created a culture where students expect this, though, the first time they find themselves in a difficult class with a professor who doesn't tolerate ChatGPT work, their howls of anguish ring through the department chair and deans' offices. At private universities, it's often their parents' howls of anguish (or more likely rage); we are starting to see some of that too. Only the most stubborn faculty with tenure can stand firm against all that pressure. Eventually the scared junior faculty earn tenure, but by then they are used to teaching in a way that pleases students first, and most won't change.

Now, let's relax the unrealistic assumption, and recognize that the vast majority of students are there to earn a credential that gets them a white-collar job, and have fun along the way. What do you think that does to the vicious cycle?

(It does have one benefit: if you challenge students in class and explain how it will help them get a job, they don't resent it.)

(It also makes me chuckle sadly when I see conservatives bemoan liberal brainwashing in the classroom. I don't deny that some liberal faculty are condescending to their conservative students and colleagues, and that's not ok. But most of us have no idea how to brainwash -- we would be happy if our students just read the dang syllabus.)

In K-12 schools, growth in achievement scores and classroom observations are used to evaluate faculty. There are a handful of universities doing that, but it's not common and it would require a culture shift. However, it is something that boards of trustees and state higher education commissions could require, and it would increase accountability.

At the same time, it's not clear that anything K-12 does is a model, since we spend a lot of time remediating knowledge students ought to have coming in, and helping them unlearn bad habits. I polled my freshman students after the first midterm this semester, and only 15% of them had read the textbook. Perhaps this is different at elite schools, though Harvard also now has remedial college algebra.

Since fun and employability are students' and parents' top priorities respectively, administrators, who think of their students as customers, have very clear incentives to prioritize those two things. Which leads me to...

5. Incentives for administrators. Administrators want the following things, often in this order, though that varies: I. A happy board of trustees, which requires II. Revenue, III. A high USNews ranking, IV. Happy parents, and V. Happy state legislators.

Revenue requires either high student enrollment or lots of research grants, or both.

High student enrollment requires a fun college experience and decent job placement rates at the end.

Those in turn require a wide array of high quality student services -- fitness centers with lazy rivers, residence halls that look like nice apartments (we don't call them dorms any more), counseling centers with relaxation zones and massage chairs, and activities ranging from coloring books and therapy dogs to food trucks and giant inflatable hamster balls. Of course, we also have etiquette dinners, networking events, career fairs, and resume and interview workshops.

All of these need staff to organize and run them. So do research grants and labs. (If you ever wonder where administrative bloat in universities comes from, that's your answer, along with compliance requirements.)

A high USNews ranking requires the following: a high graduation rate relative to what's expected for the incoming class (~30% of the score), faculty resources (~10%), "expert opinion" (~20%), which is literally a long cumbersome opinion poll filled out by administrators at other colleges in the country, high incoming student GPA and SAT/ACT scores (~5%), high graduation rates for Pell students (~10%), financial strength (~10%), low graduate debt relative to earnings (~10%), and well-published faculty research (~5%). So here is how you get a high USNews ranking.

Step 1: Be rich. If you don't have a huge endowment, a successful football team will do: both TV revenues and alumni donations will skyrocket. Maybe you can even get a sports betting app to sponsor you!

Step 2: Get students with good grades and test scores to apply. You could send recruiters everywhere, make applications free, send them mailers and handwritten postcards, you get the idea. Billboards, TV ads, all of it, even if it means multiple taxpayer-funded institutions in the same state using state resources to compete with each other. If you have generous donors you can also fund scholarships for them. A good football team will also boost applications. (See Step 1.)

Step 3: Hire superstar faculty. (See Step 1.)

Step 4: Have some easy majors that students who fail out of their first choice can switch to and graduate, so your graduation rate stays high. We call them "landing spots."

Step 5: Get administrators at other universities to say nice things about you on the long cumbersome opinion poll. This could mean sending them mailers talking up your accomplishments, handing out swag at conferences, or sending them tchotchkes in the mail. I have received all manner of notebooks, pens, mints, bags, post-its, and one hand towel.

(I do use the towel, so...)

(Also: see Step 1.)

Accountability is very challenging here, because boards of trustees often set higher rankings as an explicit goal for college presidents.

Parents are usually happy as long as their kids are happy, aren't complaining, and get a good job at the end. Fun parties, easy classes, and a strong, happy alumni network help with that. A strong football team keeps the alumni happy.

State legislators ought to care about accountability, but in reality, they are often alumni of the land grant public universities in their state, and if the football team is doing well and their interns aren't totally incompetent, they are happy.

If there's anyone who can force some market discipline here, it's employers. Placement data is notoriously difficult to collect once students graduate, but the Census Bureau collects long term outcomes for schools who volunteer to be part of the data collection. The Department of Education, if it still exists, or boards of trustees, or state commissions of higher education could require schools to sign up. Outcomes could be made public. Boards could pay more attention to rankings like the Wall Street Journal's, which emphasizes student outcomes over reputation and resources.

Notice how I have barely said anything at all about student loans. Those can be a source of accountability, but the system is such a horrendous mess, it won't be easy. There is a proposal in the House of Representatives to hold colleges accountable for students who don't repay their loans, but honestly I find the idea terrifying. Do we want colleges to be on the hook for the unpaid loans of their deadbeat graduates and dropouts?

That proposal does include lifetime caps for graduate school loans, though, and I think that is long overdue. It will help with some of the worst offenders.

My broader suggestion, though, is one that conservatives might find difficult to swallow. The current student loan system shifts funding from states to the federal government, enables colleges to raise tuition at will, and reduces the leverage that elected officials have over their universities. If we want more accountability, we are going to need more state funding, paired with tighter controls over tuition increases and expenditures. This will reduce reliance on the federal government.

Fantastic commentary. Thank you, Wafa!

I’m curious too about — how to put this? — social accountability. Is that the phrase I’m looking for? I’m thinking about how universities ought to regard their moral responsibility to the rest of society, as the chief custodians of knowledge.

Universities are an important part of the community. Here in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban very controversially drove the Soros-founded Central European University out of Budapest, to Vienna. To the Western mind, this is a scandal. And yeah, it’s not a good look. On the other hand, Orban understood perfectly well that universities are unavoidably political actors. He also understood that what Soros was trying to do is to form the coming generations of Hungarian elites in his particular philosophy of liberalism, which entails globalist economics (including open borders), LGBT ideology, and the usual things. In a small country like this, an elite that has been catechized in Soros Thought could make a profound difference in the country’s future.

I’m not saying that I agree with what Orban did, but I am saying it is understandable. This is what Trump is up to in using government policy to compel US universities to stop discriminating according to DEI principles. This is not quite the same thing — Trump is not interested, apparently, in the qualities taught in the classroom, as Orban was. But it’s still a matter of the government, as an expression of the popular will in a democracy, reining in the liberties of universities to set policies.

The point I’m trying to make here is to raise the question of what moral and social responsibilities do universities have to the rest of society? The main reason, I think, that America got the Great Awokening is because of the teaching in our universities, especially the ones who formed rising elites, who took those teachings into the institutions where they found jobs after graduation.

I am generally not in favor of the state having anything to do with telling universities what they can and cannot teach. That said, do you think universities — by which I mean teachers, administrators, trustees, and so forth — ever think self-critically about their role in shaping the polis? My guess is that if they think about it at all, it’s only to pat themselves on the back as a sort of conscience of society, leading students away from all their prejudices, etc. If that’s true, then can they really be surprised when people who share the polis with them come to resent them as enemies? After all, many of them act as if people who don’t agree with them are enemies of all that is True and Good. Right?

I don’t know if there is a policy fix for this. But I do wish that the people within universities would think, and think self-critically, about their moral and intellectual relationship with the rest of the community. The screenshot I used to illustrate this item comes from a video put out by New York University in 2023 (featured in this Dave Rubin segment), in which graduates name their majors. What does it mean when a leading university allows students to “study” bizarre woke crap like that? You might laugh at what suckers these kids are, but there’s a serious issue here. When one can be considered to have been university-educated as bearers of that sort of pseudo-knowledge, what does that say about universities and their responsibility to the societies of which they are a part?