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Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money
Reviewed by Larry Singell
James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Higher education is in genuine trouble. Imagine a college whose primary source of funds is sales of beer and other products, and whose professors are beholden to an outside corporate interest with an agenda that limits the pursuit of knowledge. Does this describe the modern American university? No; it describes Corpus Christi College of the University of Cambridge, which was founded in 1352 with funds from the Beer and Bakers Guild and with the requirement that its professors be priests.
In Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield recognize that there has never been a golden age in which higher education was free from the considerations of money or other interests. Nonetheless, the book chronicles how the current challenges facing U.S. universities differ from those of the past and, in particular, how a new primacy of money threatens to alter higher education for the worse. The authors offer numerous examples of how the pursuit of money as an end and not a means has altered the production of knowledge to emphasize the “practical” over the “speculative.” The book makes the case for the importance of universities’ maintaining the reciprocal and productive relationship between learning for its own sake and learning for utility. Thus, in the view of the authors, higher education has lost sight of its mission and must be saved.
The notion that financial considerations are playing a greater role in higher education is not new and has been thoroughly researched. The real intellectual contribution of this book is the consideration of what the authors refer to as “the entelechy of higher education” (that is, its purpose and nature), which provides a framework to assess these changes. Specifically, the authors argue that higher education is: (a) an instrumental economic good because knowledge permits its holders to perform tasks that raise individual productivity, wages, and, thereby, economic growth; (b) an instrumental social good because reasoned discussion can instill social responsibility and build communities; and (c) an instrumental civic good because scholarly debate is the model for a democratic society’s procedures of verification and dispute over ideas and policy.
The authors exhaustively detail how the economic function of higher education, which has always been relatively important in U.S. universities, has become the primary goal of students, faculty, and administrators. Consequently, there is a new emphasis in universities on fields of study that offer: (a) the promise of money, in terms of improved chances of securing an occupation that promises above-average lifetime earnings; (b) the knowledge of money, in terms of business, financial, or economic matters and markets; and (c) a source of money, in terms of significant external support through research contracts, federal grants, or corporate underwriting. In consequence, the humanities are becoming marginalized because the skills these fields are uniquely suited to impart (for example, rhetoric, ethics, and logic) do not directly relate to money.
The book contends that the preeminence of the economic function in the university is problematic not only because it supplants the university’s other important functions, but also because two primary goals of higher education are deformed by a purely economic interest. First, higher education seeks as a goal the ethical application of knowledge and its relationship to human conduct. Thus, while primary research led to the ability to split the atom, such knowledge without the reasoned ability to apply it wisely can be disastrous. Second, higher education is manifestly a search to discover and order knowledge and ideas. It follows that, although much of the economic function of the university argues for applied research directed at producing a particular end, many of the long-term benefits of the university stem from general research that seeks knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Nuclear physics first arose as a theoretical exercise and only later did “the exigencies of circumstance and the sophistication of technologies” come together to yield its applications to nuclear power plants, radiation therapy, and weaponry.
The take-away message of the book is then that “education pursued exclusively as an instrumental economic good will attenuate education as an associative intellectual and social good, erode it as a civic good in a free society, diminish it as a moral good, and ultimately destroy it as a final good in which knowledge is sought regardless of its perceived usefulness.” Moreover, it is precisely the skills provided by the humanities that give individuals the perspective to evaluate the tradeoffs between the monetary and nonmonetary realms of knowledge. Thus, higher education is losing the perspective of its longterm mission, and the authors argue that, once these humanist skills are lost, they may be impossible to retrieve.
Overall, the book is a convincing testament to the logic and reasoned argument that the humanities can bring to bear on problems facing institutions and society. However, it also demonstrates why humanist arguments are incomplete. The authors suggest that the source of the problems facing higher education is a broad cultural shift that makes this the “Age of Money,” and that the recognition and repentance of our sin is sufficient to correct these problems. Whereas contrition may be a necessary first step toward freeing ourselves from any addiction, it is insufficient in itself, and additional steps are required. The Age of Money is upon us not because cultural preferences have changed in any fundamental way, but because of a broad set of economic and technological factors that are independent of preferences. For example, tuition has not increased at rates that exceed inflation because of a general cultural shift, but because of the rising economic importance of higher education and the properties that limit universities’ ability to take advantage of labor-saving technological changes available in other highly skilled areas (after all, small classes still matter). It follows that the solutions to the problems facing higher education will require a restructuring of incentives that rely (ironically) on the skills emphasized by fields that have a knowledge of money. The authors provide the necessary intellectual rationale for why professions linked to the knowledge of money (for example, economic) should join the fight against (or at least fight to modify) a climate that would appear at first blush to be in their favor.
Larry Singell is professor of economics at the University of Oregon. He has published a number of articles on the changing role of financial aid in higher education and is currently an associate editor of the Economics of Education Review. He can be reached by e-mail at lsingell@uoregon.edu.
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