What Business Wants From Higher Education: (American Council on Education Oryx Press Series on Higher Education)

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Summary: This book urges universities to adopt corporate values.
Review: "What Business Wants from Higher Education" lays out a blueprint for transforming higher education into a farm system for corporate America. At no point do Oblinger and Verville entertain the idea that a university and a corporation might have different (and perhaps incompatible) functions and values, or that one social contribution of a university might even be to provide an alternative to the corporate world. A university is simply a training ground for future corporate employees. It is a business like any other, with a product (degrees), customers (students), and "stakeholders" (that's right: "stakeholders," sort of like "stockholders"). And like a business, it must be competitive and strive for greater "productivity." How is productivity measured in a university? By extruding degrees more quickly, easily, and cheaply. And how is this to be accomplished? By heavy reliance on IT (instructional technology) and distance learning (spell: more sales of PC's, a not undesirable prospect for these two IBM employees). In addition to pitching electronic correspondence courses, "What Business Wants from Higher Education" endorses other educational panaceas du jour: students need less "seat time" (students don't need to go to class so darned often); students should be able to get academic credit for non-academic activities (internships and "life experience"); students need to become "active, lifetime learners" (an obvious truism the authors invoke to diminish the importance of school learning); and--oh yes--institutions must adopt "outcomes assessment" to ensure accountability. What is outcomes assessment? A euphemism for simplifying and dumbing down course objectives so that the "efficiency" of university classes can supposedly be measured. Oblinger and Verville are to be commended for their honesty, though. They make it clear that one principal attraction of outcomes assessment is that it will allow students to challenge and test out of courses more easily (we can already see campus entrepreneurs gearing up to crank out the inevitable study guides). Of course students will get their credits simply by displaying a minimal level of competency, but that is fine with the authors. Our lifetime learners are after easy credits and a quick certification, a realization that has made the founder of the University of Phoenix rich. Why all these changes? The stodgy university is falling behind the corporate world, where no paradigm lasts for more than six months (except perhaps for ideas like sending jobs offshore, employing as few people as possible, paying them the minimum, withholding job security and retirement benefits, and overcompensating corporate chieftains). Like corporations, the modern university needs to be in a constant mode of change, adopting innovations in the blink of an eye. The best way to prepare students for corporate life (presumably the only economically defensible function of a university) is to give them an early dose of impermanence, transient loyalty, and mercenary values. But knowing which band wagons to mount will require leaders with vision, leaders with flexibility, leaders with autocratic power. Our universities stand poised to leap into the future, if only their chancellors and presidents can be given dictatorial power to inflict the kind of relatively untested changes proposed by Oblinger and Verville. But they have an obstacle--those stodgy, ossified people called the faculty, the teachers and researchers who do the fundamental and defining work of the university. And trying to move them, as someone has said, is like trying to herd cats. And why can't faculty be compelled to move obediently and with sufficient dispatch? They have tenure, the power that enables them to exercise their best professional judgment. So what happens when an upper-echelon educrat proposes wide scale use of electronic correspondence courses? These mossbacks want to discuss the proposal, debate its merits, field test it, analyze its successes and failures. Only then will they consider adoption. Faculty want to look before they leap, look before they agree to turn universities into the kind of educational vending machines proposed by the authors. In sum, what does the book propose, besides a university devoted to Mammon, to the production of serfs for corporate America? In the name of competitiveness and productivity, it proposes to turn the modern American university into an Eden for educrats, a lovely field of dreams for ambitious higher education administrators. Like the person who wrote the forward (Molly Corbett Broad) and the last person quoted in this manifesto (Barry Munitz), they want to make glamorous career moves--Broad left the California State University system to become the president of the University of North Carolina system, and Munitz jumped from the chancellorship of the CSU to the Getty foundation. To make such leaps, one must have gaudy entries in one's resume, like dramatic innovations in educational structure and delivery, but under the current dispensation--where faculty still make most of the decisions governing curriculum and pedagogy--such entries are difficult to come by. But no longer if Oblinger and Verville get their way. They envision a university where the president is a CEO with autocratic power, and faculty are as weak and discardable as corporate employees. Tenure will be a thing of the past, and full professors will be an endangered species. The role of faculty will be to obey their administrative masters. A field of dreams for administrators, indeed, and all we have to do is turn our universities into diploma mills. It is not by accident that most of the changes proposed by Oblinger and Verville are already familiar fixtures of enterprises like Nova University, National University, and the University of Phoenix. For students of the corporatization of America and the bureaucratization of the university, a must read.