Ozymandias on the Erie

What is it like to teach in a state where politicians no longer care about public higher education?

By Mark Shechner

—Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

The main campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo is not in Buffalo at all but in the northern suburb of Amherst. Built in the 1970s—and still being built—on reclaimed marshland, it surrounds an artificial lake, Lake LaSalle, on whose bank stand three faux Greek columns capped by a white marble pediment salvaged from the old Federal Reserve Bank that was demolished in 1959. Our own Ozymandias? Our own symbol of lachrymae rerum? It is easy to forget that at the dawn of the American Century, when Buffalo hosted the 1901 Pan American Exposition, this city was at the peak of its civic self-assurance and did not blush at such classical allusions. The assassination of President William McKinley and the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt here were not the shame of Buffalo but its glory. It was a homemade Shakespearean tragedy being played out among our own pasteboard pavilions. There is still an icy splendor to those columns—I’m not immune—though in iconoclastic moments I look down toward the lake from my office, hoping for a Lake LaSalle monster to rise up and take a flying drop kick at the vast and trunkless legs of stone, just for the heck of it. Alas, Sallie has never shown her saurian face on my watch, and she is, after all, only my wish to have something mythical beside those columns to stir the imagination amid all this ordinariness.

There remain some obstinate holdouts from the old marsh life, including a pair of nesting hawks who perch on the light standards over the roadway, scanning the cars going in and out of the university. I asked an ornithologist why these magnificent creatures were so adapted to traffic and fumes. "They’re urbanized," he said, "and live off what our environment gives them: pigeons and road kill, both of which are plentiful around here."

I know it is preciously academic to push such symbols into human life, and a university department, however ravaged by budget cuts and hiring freezes, is not the moral equivalent of road kill. But on certain iron-gray, lackluster Buffalo days with their diffuse and shadowless light you might be moved to take these symbols to heart. Buffalo has a legacy of dreams gone sour, and even today, surrounded by the horn of American plenty, we are still very much the rust belt.

The western New York landscape is strewn with more convincing symbols of melancholy than the Greek columns: silent factories, crumbling grain elevators, railroad sidings to nowhere, and boxcars, boxcars, boxcars, all reminding us of how it used to be when Buffalo was the Queen City of the Lakes and ore and grain came pouring into its docks, to be smelted and rolled and stamped and milled and brewed and bottled and boxed and shipped off to markets all over the world. Mortals looked on its works and bought shares. The mills now are gaunt skeletons, and the silos are empty.

At SUNY Buffalo (known to most of us as UB for University of Buffalo, which joined the SUNY system in 1962), we’ve humored ourselves that education has always been exempted from the great flights of capital that produced these relics of our industrial past and that the Amherst megacampus is not the Cargill elevator of the future, waiting for the implosion charges and wrecking balls, or—best-case scenario—the guided tour. Have we been kidding ourselves?

Draconian Cuts

We are now into the second year of the hiring freeze. Only a handful of new full-time faculty will be appointed for the thirty-one departments in the academic core for fall 2001. The effects of the freeze are predictable and far-reaching. One certain consequence is that retiring faculty cannot be replaced. With faculty ages perilously high in some departments, any loss can cripple a program. In my own department, English, the median faculty age is just shy of sixty-one, and a standing joke around the department is that we don’t replace faculty, just hips and knees. (I know of four such operations.) Moreover, younger faculty, noting that other universities provide more support for their research, are putting out their vitae.

Makeshift strategies have been devised to sustain undergraduate instruction in the face of this crisis: larger classes, more teaching assistants in the classroom, more part-time faculty. Sometimes the strategies work out well. There are some great part-time instructors available in any academic community, and at $3,000 a class, applicants line up around the block to wait for an assignment. (In our region, $3,000 a class is considered top dollar. Wages go down from there.) But graduate programs can only suffer from these stopgap measures, and UB is, after all, a graduate research university.

Weak State Support

Other numbers could be cited to shore up this sense of distress. Earlier this year, department chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences pooled their information and did head counts in their departments. They came up with shockingly small figures in the aggregate, especially compared with similar departments at the Universities of Pittsburgh, Virginia, and North Carolina and sometimes even with fellow university centers at Stony Brook, Albany, and Binghamton.

Reliable figures from other universities for comparative purposes are, however, hard to come by: Web sites are prone to inflate. For example, in comparing history departments (our own has nineteen faculty members), I checked the history department at UCLA, which is often held up to us as a fellow AAU (Association of American Universities) university to our own. The Web site lists some eighty-nine faculty members, plus another ten or so emeriti called back to the classroom. I wrote to a member of the UCLA history department in astonishment, asking if it really had eighty-nine professors. "No," she answered. "That can’t be right. I think we are down to about seventy-five." Down to seventy-five and bottomed out! Numbers have to be used cautiously, but department by department, comparing our campus with robust state institutions like Michigan, Penn State, Rutgers, Nebraska, Indiana, and Georgia, we come out drastically smaller, and in some instances fail to nose out Mississippi and Arkansas. New York is a major state. It is running surpluses! UB is supposed to be the flagship institution in its far-flung state educational system. What gives?

I’m often put in mind of a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, one Haines, an Englishman and a bit of a wastrel collecting folk tales in Ireland, who explains that country’s impoverishment to Stephen Dedalus: "It seems history is to blame." We’re meant to take Haines with a grain of salt: he is on a field trip among garrulous and fractious natives and can’t permit himself to say that England bears the blame.

But we’ll adopt his euphemism here and say that, yes, history is to blame. In our case, however, the history is not detailed, since SUNY does not have deep roots in New York. The critical and overwhelming fact of SUNY’s history is its founding in 1948 in a state that had no prior experience of mass public higher education and where only Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who left Albany in 1973, ever championed the system. Moreover, a fact that no one really disputes, the system was vastly overbuilt at the start, with university centers, state colleges, a maritime college, law and medical schools—sixty-four campuses in all—brought into existence during the boom years of post–World War II euphoria. No governor since Rockefeller, not Hugh Carey, not Mario Cuomo, and certainly not George Pataki, has ever waved the flag for SUNY. And it is most instructive that neither of the two most recent contests for U.S. Senate, the one in which Charles Schumer defeated Alfonse D’Amato two years ago or the campaign between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio, has had anything to say about the university or about public higher education in general.

Private Higher Education

Many of the state’s private institutions are denominational schools, mostly Catholic. In my own neck of the woods you will find St. Bonaventure and Niagara Universities and Canisius, D’Youville, Hilbert, and Daemen (formerly known as Rosary Hill) Colleges. There are thirty-eight private colleges in New York City’s five boroughs alone. On October 12, 1999, the New York Daily News cited a study by the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU) showing that these private colleges and universities "generate $18.5 billion in economic activity each year."

The CICU is a formidable lobby in New York State politics. As its board chair, Thomas Scanlan, has remarked, "Private colleges and universities are leading contributors to all regions of New York State." With some 65,000 employees, whose annual salaries total $2.4 billion, and with about 162,000 students, on whom they spend nearly $3 billion each year for instruction, student services, and financial aid, the private colleges and universities are a force to be dealt with in New York State politics. Private education in New York has history, it has tradition, and it has muscle. Only Massachusetts has more private colleges and universities than New York.

Public Higher Education

The love child of Rockefeller, SUNY was quick to become the orphan of history: tolerated but unloved. Each year its place in the state budget has grown more marginal, until today SUNY is no longer properly a state university at all. The term in fashion these days is "state assisted," meaning that a decreasing amount of its operating budget derives from New York State tax dollars, the rest from tuition, research grants, gifts, and endowments. Given this history, what is remarkable is not that SUNY has been hurt by declining state support, but that it ever had a flowering at all, for indeed it had one and was for a while—through the early 1970s—one of the up-and-coming universities in America, with UB as its signature institution.

The long retreat from the dream of Berkeley-on-the-Erie began as belt-tightening in the economic trough that followed the Vietnam War. That national trend was amplified in a state whose sluggish economy, burdened by high taxes, was particularly stagnant. But behind the bulls and bears of the market was always the ruthless logic of public versus private and SUNY versus CUNY. The extra measure of good will that a university needs in hard times—the proteksia of loyal and powerful alumni—has never been there at crunch time. Through the boom and bust years in New York, SUNY was too young to generate that kind of power base.

Look at long-standing and successful public universities around the country—Michigan, Wisconsin, the vast California system, Ohio State, Penn State, Minnesota—and what they all have in common is a hot line to power that is poised to spring to its defense. Whether it be through identification with athletic teams or the largesse of grateful alumni, the land grant universities are fully integrated into the structures of power in their states. Half of America can hum "On Wisconsin" or the Notre Dame fight song. Does anyone in Buffalo know the fight song of the UB Bulls? Keenly aware of this problem, New York State legislators in 1997 passed legislation calling for no fewer than four of the fifteen members of the SUNY board of trustees to be alumni, an inconsequential enough minority. The bill passed 121 to 25 in the state assembly and 60 to 0 in the senate, but was vetoed by Governor Pataki, who claimed interference with his power to appoint trustees.

It is easy to point a finger at a governor who has been openly hostile to public education. But all politicians with an instinct for survival work to some degree within the prevailing economy of forces, and the state of New York’s ambivalence toward its university and the latter’s long slide from distinction is finally a bipartisan undertaking. It is only during the Pataki years, however, that university-baiting became a blood sport and the university went from being an afterthought to being the symbol of an exhausted culture.

Cultural Cold War

De Russy first gained attention during the governor’s race in 1995 when, as cofounder of the lobbying group Change N.Y., she helped draft the platform of the Pataki campaign: privatize the public sector, streamline government, roll back entitlements, reduce welfare, and lower taxes. These themes struck home with many voters, since New York State has one of the nation’s highest tax rates and a bloated central bureaucracy, both of which have prompted a flight of business to low-taxed, small-government, union-free southern states or to the Texas-Mexico border.

Change N.Y. had an educational program, as well, for which de Russy was largely the voice. It challenged tenure, in the name of flexibility, efficiency, and accountability. It saw the dead hand of "political correctness" everywhere, and it called for a uniform, statewide general education curriculum. It recommended raising admissions standards, allowing individual colleges to charge differential—and much higher—tuition, and closing some campuses. And it called for an end to duplicated services, like law schools and the state’s four medical schools, which are provided by private institutions. "SUNY cannot be all things to all people," de Russy wrote, adding that the role of access in the university’s mission statement should be reconsidered.

For some of these changes there was a broad consensus. But fiscal conservatism comes as often as not with a sectarian price tag, and an entirely different note was struck when the board of trustees began to inquire into curricula and course content. Yes, evolution appears to be safe in New York State, but other expressions of liberalism, like multiculturalism and world civilization, are on shakier ground. And the "race, class, and gender" studies that dominated the past two decades are on the thinnest ice of all. The foundations for this reaction are deep in the cultural "cold war" that has lingered in and around the academic community ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960s propelled radicals into the classroom and the dean’s office. An irony of history is that the radicals who occupied deans’ offices in the 1960s did so again in the 1990s, only as deans. First time as tragedy, second time as farce?

The crystallization of cultural-cold-war attitudes in New York State can be found in a July 1996 report, SUNY’s Core Curricula: The Failure to Set Consistent and High Academic Standards, by two private lobbying groups, the New York Association of Scholars and the Empire Foundation for Policy Research. Describing a survey of core-curriculum requirements for undergraduates, the document disclosed that standards and programs varied from campus to campus and that instead of an academic and intellectual core, general education curricula were marked by "an almost unlimited choice of cafeteria-style educational requirements." The result, it concluded, was the compromising and trivializing of the SUNY degree.

The survey discovered, as if an examination of curricula were a guided tour of Dracula’s castle, academic core courses titled "Psychology of Prejudice," "Horror Literature," and "World Food Crisis." Braving the more ghastly alcoves, it reported that SUNY New Paltz allowed its writing-intensive core requirement to be satisfied with a course titled "Saints, Witches, and Madwomen," that Old Westbury permitted its creativity and arts core requirement to be satisfied with "Sin and Sexuality in Literature," and that SUNY Binghamton had a physical education mandate that could be satisfied by "Aerobic Dance," "Bowling," "Scuba," or "Running to Awareness."

Moreover, "multiculturalism" classes were required parts of the core on each of the sixteen campuses surveyed. What the researchers discovered was a house of misrule that called out desperately for a stern hand and steady nerves. Such surveys and their predictable results appear wherever there are local activists to carry them out. See, for example, the March 2000 report, Lowering the Bar: Washington Public Universities Fail to Maintain High Core Curriculum Standards, published by the Washington Institute Foundation and the Washington Association of Scholars <www.wips.org/Studies/Curriculumstudy. htm>. There is virtually nothing in the Washington report that can’t be found, sometimes almost verbatim, in the report on SUNY, indicating a national template that local activists fill with regional data.

Aside from the sin-and-sensuality horror show, which was good for anecdotal color but was hardly a cause for national mobilization, the report on SUNY’s core curriculum had two steady and insistent messages: (1) SUNY does not have a common core curriculum, and a SUNY diploma could mean very much or very little depending on which campus a student attends and what courses he or she happens to select; and (2) a SUNY diploma does not universally guarantee that graduates can write well, understand mathematics, or have a broad understanding of the underpinnings of history, literature, philosophy, arts, and science. Both propositions are beyond dispute. Any dean, any chair, any professor would concede as much.

Those conclusions, so broad as to be truisms, were not in themselves evidence of ideological parti pris or sectarian bias on the part of the Empire Foundation. Other findings were more pointed. "Eight of the sixteen surveyed SUNY campuses have crafted core curricula that do not require any courses in Western Civilization," the report noted. "These eight campuses simultaneously do mandate that students attend classes in multiculturalism." Not only do these campuses fail to teach (and defend and uphold) Western civilization, they "mandate that students take courses on non-Western cultures and special-interest or ‘victim-group’ studies, course offerings that typically fall under the rubric of ‘multiculturalism.’" (These offerings would include African American, Native American, and women’s studies, as well as courses in immigrant history, working-class history, and Latino studies. On trial is an entire ethos of post-1960s inquiry, that of "history from below.") Politicized grievance studies, we are told, have replaced the great narratives of Western civilization and American history, and a reform of general education would demand a return to those narratives.

Although this article is not the occasion to engage the issues raised by this report, one might observe three things in passing. The first is that the issues are not trivial and that the consciousness of future generations is to a degree formed in the classroom. How history is taught has consequences, which is precisely why the curriculum is a battleground. The second point is that nobody has a monopoly on how history will be taught, and that the attitudes toward social and historical studies in the Empire Foundation manifesto and in a parent publication, The Dissolution of General Education: 1914–1993, by the National Association of Scholars, are not invalidated by their biases, by the sponsors who pay for them, or by the partisan interests they serve. General education requirements, no matter who raises the flag, call for serious reflection. And the third thing is that victim studies and history from below are here to stay. If ever balanced views of historical cruelty are mandated, then we are on the path toward giving equal time to Jewish and Nazi histories of the Holocaust, something at which even the National Association of Scholars might well draw the line.

Behind Closed Doors

Why? On the face of it, the mandate was apple pie. The ten "learning outcomes" were in mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, American history, Western civilization, other world civilizations, humanities, the arts, foreign languages, and basic communication. The "competencies" were critical thinking (reasoning) and information management. One would be hard pressed to challenge the language of the mandate (which has yet to be implemented), although the mere thirty hours seemed like a cop-out. Existing programs at UB require fifty-six credits, at Stony Brook forty-eight credits, and elsewhere up to sixty-six credits (Buffalo State College). Even the conservative commentator Lynne Cheney, in her book, In 50 Hours: A Core Curriculum for College Students, calls for fifty hours of general education.

The faculty reaction was the result of two factors: the process of decision making and the difficulties of implementation. The apple pie came with a crust. Decisions were made behind closed doors. According to the April 21, 1999, issue of the Albany Times-Union:

Though the measure requiring thirty semester hours in ten core subjects did borrow some faculty suggestions, the motion was announced and passed within a week without direct input from faculty—and even excluded some trustees. Several faculty members and university presidents who traveled to Brooklyn to air criticisms of the measure were told to wait until after the trustees voted and completed a lengthy budget discussion. The vote convinced many professors that the core curriculum was yet another attempt to move power out of their hands and into the hands of the central administration.

From the same article:

A statewide vote of no confidence is extremely rare in higher education. . . . "In New York, there is a flavor of distrust that I believe is singular in the nation," said Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. Tom Carroll, conservative head of the influential Center for Excellence in Higher Education, saw the faculty move in a more positive light. "It’s a sign that the board of trustees have hit their stride," he said. "If there were no complaints, we’d wonder if they were doing anything meaningful. They’re making major reforms, which is not what boards of trustees usually do."

The problem wasn’t just the closed process but the potential costs of adoption, which the statewide faculty senate estimated at over $27 million. Who was going to teach these courses, especially in the more resource-poor colleges or in underfunded departments, where hiring is not an option? Where was the faculty time going to come from? Moreover, it turns out that what was meant by American history, all of it, from the Mayflower to the Mayflower Madam, was to be taught in a single semester. Could more than a week of such a course be given to the ethnic complexity of American life? Where would Ellis Island fit in between the Alamo and Pearl Harbor?

As I write this, although the process of implementing the "reform" is unresolved, on every campus there is at least one faculty member working on the issue virtually full time. Some campuses are coping and some are not. It has become a morass with no clear resolution in view. What started as a crusade has turned into a quagmire, as purification movements often do when applied to the real world.

Road Ahead

One doubts that the entire dynamic is clear even to SUNY’s new chancellor, Robert King, who graduated into the position from being Pataki’s chief of finance. As for trustee de Russy, one senses that she is so armored from reality that nothing of the institutional crisis she has precipitated can make an impression. She had no direct experience of public higher education until called upon to oversee it; how can she possibly know what she has tinkered with and what she has damaged?

Revolution by handbook, from the right or the left, is always the same. The revolutionary brings a jihad mentality into complex situations and holds him or herself innocent of the consequences. One of the problems of the trustee system in public institutions is that zealots can commit major blunders and walk away untouched by what they’ve done. Indeed, it is difficult to know whether de Russy’s aria of indignation really explains anything or is just a minidrama of the absurd to distract us from the real issues; it is never easy to tell in these matters whether ideology drives policy or masks partisan interests.

Perhaps the 1995 call for the elimination of state-funded programs that are already provided by private institutions tells us all that we need to know, and the rest is smoke and mirrors. We can say with some certainty that the New York State experience is a trial run for battles to be fought in other states. One need only consider the strident prose of the report on public universities in Washington to anticipate what is on the horizon:

Washington’s public universities are consigning students to an impoverished intellectual life and denying them the opportunity to develop to their fullest potential. Students, parents, and taxpayers deserve a well-structured, integrated core curriculum which will encourage academic excellence and prepare students to join fully in life beyond the university.

Impoverished intellectual lives? The Northwest explained at last! Compared to that assault, the Empire Foundation report is a model of decorum.

An adage that is current on the left these days, "think globally, act locally," has a nasty underside. It describes in fact what goes wrong when any ideologue goes after an institution with a sledgehammer: someone has been thinking globally and acting locally. My preferred watchword is "think locally, act locally." Keep the small, the immediate, the ordinary, the practical, the human scale in plain view. And above all, trust only authorities who have to live with the consequences of what they do.

I try hard to avoid words like "left" and "right," "liberal" and "conservative," "radical" and "reactionary." Yes, they are to be found here—sometimes there are no alternatives to them—but they don’t illuminate the emerging terms of the general education wars in which, it seems, everyone yearns for a shared base of human understanding. Even the utterly bogus face-off between "world civilization" and "Western civilization" is an empty signifier if ever there was one. The fetishizing of a tradition that gave us the Inquisition, the slave trade, the Holocaust, and the dildo, coupled with the anathematizing of "multiculturalism," which teaches us that differences are inevitable and okay, is mystifying.

If I were dragooned tomorrow into teaching Western civ, I would raise my hand for the second semester, from Torquemada to Hitler. Let the world civ folks handle Genghis Khan to Mao. The dirty little secret of both courses is that nobody wants to teach them. They are grueling service. But, then, that is the essence of teaching. There is something here that I’m not getting exactly: the source of the rage that fuels these crusades. How mortifying were those dildos at New Paltz after all? Freud may still have more to tell us than we care to admit.

What I do get clearly is how fragile our institutions are, how difficult they are to construct, and how easy to dismantle. We do have a use, after all, for the Greek columns outside my window and for the Bethlehem Steel plant, desolate down the road. They remind us of the fragility of things. Buffalo was once the home of Larkin Soap, Pierce-Arrow autos, Bell Aircraft (which made the P-39 Aircobra here), Trico Wiper Blades, Bethlehem Steel, and Kittinger Furniture. The final demolition of the Kittinger plant took place just months ago. It felt like part of a long, long slide down that slippery slope of obsolescence.

Our county, Erie County, is losing population at an alarming rate—7,745 people between 1998 and 1999—with nearby Niagara and Chautauqua Counties close behind. Statewide, fifty-three of sixty-two New York counties lost population in the 1990s. Erie County just happened to lead the way. In fact, it is ahead of most of the nation—it has had the eighth highest population loss among U.S. counties since 1990. The weakness of the western New York economy, whose major export is its children, was the prime reason Nelson Rockefeller in 1962 established the University of Buffalo as the premier of the four university centers at SUNY, the others being at Albany, Stony Brook, and Binghamton. No one defends that vision now. One is hard pressed to hear it articulated anywhere.

As for the actual educational results of the general education revolution, I don’t claim to understand the details, but I have a colleague who does, having devoted most of his career at UB to the championship of general education. I asked him about the likely consequences of the trustees’ mandate, and he wrote the following:

There are four consequences of the trustees’ mandates. First, we have to add another arts/humanities course (and figure out how to waive it for the professional schools). Second, but more consequential, we have lost the ability to consider that students with two-year A.A. and A.S. degrees have met their (and our) gen ed requirements before they arrive as juniors (with the trustees’ requirement that they be able to graduate in two more years). This will clearly invite two-year transfers to consider private rather than SUNY degrees, because there is much less hassle in articulating courses and requirements. Third, the standards (one size fits all) are lower than ours and those on several campuses, so that we will be unable to long maintain the faculty effort and costs associated with our higher standards. We will inevitably reduce requirements to be more like most SUNY campuses. I think that math, science, writing, and language are the first candidates. Fourth, our American pluralism course requirement must become more explicitly historical to stay in the program. . . . The acceptable definition of explicitly historical will be the assignment of an American history text as part of the syllabus.

I trust my colleague on this, that neither the apocalypse nor the millennium is at hand. And truth to tell, I find the historicizing of pluralism a step forward. It is the third point that troubles me: the shrinking of requirements and the compression of general education. Behind the sound and the fury, one finds the shabby fact of mandatory mediocrity. The revolution, when it hits, is a revolution of reduced expectations after all, which makes it completely consistent with messages we have been getting for a long time.

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