All of these arguments should drive a silver stake into the heart of the big-time college-sports-equals-alumni-giving myth, but athletic department personnel and Big-time U administrators will not allow this to happen. Perpetuating the myth is in their self-interest—it provides one of the most popular justifications for big-time college sports. Its speciousness will never negate its power. As long as athletic directors want to grow their empires and university officials encourage them to do so, the myth will live on.
For all of College Sports MegaInc.’s endorsement of the myth, the real winners in alumni giving are those Division III and Division I institutions that provide undergraduates with quality educations and turn them into dependable and generous alumni. It never occurs to the proponents of College Sports Megalnc. that the Ivy League schools—the founders of intercollegiate athletics—had a reason for dropping out of big-time college sports, and that many wealthy Division III schools have a similar reason for not entering it. The officials of these institutions believe that a major sports entertainment enterprise on their campuses is incompatible with their academic missions.
But these schools, beyond their desire to give their students a first-rate education, also act out of self-interest: their institutional health depends upon their alumni, and they realize that if they provide mainly beer-and-circus to their undergraduates, this insubstantial diet will not build devoted alums, men and women whom the school can count on for ongoing contributions and support.
The most prominent alumni of a school often become members of its Board of Trustees, making general policy and guiding the institution through the present and into the future. In the 1950s, the trustees of Ivy League colleges and universities, in concert with a group of farsighted Ivy presidents, removed their schools from big-time intercollegiate athletics and, at the same time, committed them to excellence in undergraduate education. Unfortunately, both then and later, the trustees of public research universities allowed their schools to go in the opposite direction, enlarging their intercollegiate athletics programs and diminishing their undergraduate education ones. Indeed, many trustees of Big-time U’s were (and are) rabid supporters of big-time college sports, not only condoning all of its sins but sometimes participating in them.
In late 1998, Trusteeship magazine—the main journal for American college and university trustees—warned:
Much of the public believes higher education institutions are compromising their academic integrity in the name of [big-time] intercollegiate athletics … . The public has come to view college athletics as far more about entertainment and winning than about education. As a result, more boards [of trustees] will face the unpleasant challenge of determining just how much damage to institutional integrity the institution can absorb as a result of the perception that big-time college athletics are out of control.
In addition, as this book disclosed, the party scene on many campuses—the “beer” accompaniment to the college sports “circus”—is also out of control, and extremely detrimental to undergraduate education.
Meanwhile the trustees and administrators of many Big-time U’s react to these problems by calling in the consultants with their New 3 R formulas. However, the solution is simple and proven daily at numerous Division III and some Division I schools: Bring back the Old 3 R’s, and then recruitment, retention, and renewal will take care of themselves.
CONCLUSION
WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN VERSUS WHAT PROBABLY WILL HAPPEN
This book has presented a detailed critique of current conditions at large, public research universities and in big-time college sports. Two logical questions arise: Can the neglect of general undergraduate education end, and Can genuine reform come to big-time intercollegiate athletics? The answer to both questions is yes, but that response immediately prompts two other questions: Are Big-time U’s willing to alter their values and internal cultures in order to change, and Is College Sports MegaInc. capable of downsizing and allowing the majority of athletes to gain meaningful educations? Therefore, the book must conclude on two tracks: What Should Happen versus What Probably Will Happen.
The aim of the What Should Happen proposals is to nourish the academic ethos at large, public research universities and to dampen the collegiate subculture, particularly the drinking scene. However, eradicating alcohol consumption on American campuses is an impossible objective; the goal should be to transform High Binge student populations to Low Binge ones. This can occur only with the deflation of beer-and-circus at Big-time U’s.
No matter what proposals are made, the one certainty is that current conditions within general undergraduate education and big-time college sports are so unstable that major changes will happen in the next decade whether Big-time U’s want them or not.
What I would like to ask … the colleges and their professors is this: If you are so upset about the number of students who need remedial courses, why did you accept these kids in the first place?
Let’s face it; there’s only one reason: money. If these schools didn’t take in kids from the bottom of the academic barrel, many [schools] would have to fire half their faculty and administrators; a few would have to shut down.
—Patrick Welsh, an Alexandria, Virginia, high school teacher
First Proposal: Large, public research universities must slim down, losing millions of students and, in a trim mode, offer quality undergraduate education to all students who legitimately qualify for entrance.
Diet experts constantly point out that going on a diet does not produce permanent weight toss—changing one’s diet does. Patrick Welsh indicated that many colleges and universities accept applicants who need remedial work in basic subjects and who do not belong in higher education at this point in their academic careers. One survey ascertained that, in 1995, almost 30 percent of all incoming college students required remedial courses in English and math; more recent studies indicate that the number of freshmen in need of remediation has increased. College professors complain about having to “dumb down” many courses to accommodate these students, but faculty never insist that their schools admit only those applicants who demonstrate in SAT/ACT and college placement tests that they can do university work.
A corollary of the first proposal is this: Raise admissions standards and persuade applicants who need remedial work to go to community and junior colleges—institutions that specialize in remediation and will become better schools with the added tuition revenue. For these students, the extra years spent in improving academic skills will not only prepare them for university work but also permit them to mature and to value higher education. At present, too many unprepared and immature students enter universities, and, immediately turned off by the large lecture courses and other educational impediments, they embrace the collegiate subculture, never emerging from it. These students waste their tuition dollars and would be better off if, after high school, they attended junior college or entered the workforce. Later in their lives, when willing to acquire university-level skills and serious about earning a degree, they will benefit from higher education.
This proposal would mean a sharp reduction in enrollment at Big-time U’s with residential campuses, and it would allow them to improve the quality of their undergraduate education programs. Indeed, the objective of Big-time U’s should be to transform general undergraduate education into one large honors program. Crucial to this mission is the premise of the next proposal: Establish a clear distinction between researchers and teachers.
Second Proposal: Universities should separate pure research from graduate programs.
Because corporate America is increasingly involved in university research, schools should establish their pure research programs as profit-making institutes, mainly funded by corporations (as opposed to the current situation where universities often pick up the tab while doing corporate work).
A corollary of the second proposal is this: Allow the market to dictate the size and role of each university’s research institute. Undoubted
ly, this would cause a massive shake-up in higher education. The top research institutes would thrive, but mediocre and poor ones would fail, probably most of the research programs at Upward Drift universities would be becalmed and then sink, with very little loss to the world.
In this new system, some current graduate students would become well-paid research assistants at the successful institutes, eventually working their way up the corporate institute ladder. Schools can reward them with advanced degrees, but they cannot burden them by also requiring them to work as teaching assistants in undergraduate courses.
Third Proposal: Hire, promote, and reward faculty primarily for teaching undergraduates, and very secondarily for research, with some of their research devoted to pedagogy.
Big-time U’s, as part of their massive weight loss, must shrink their graduate programs and stop pursuing ever-elusive research prestige with them. The money saved from reducing enormously expensive graduate programs should be shifted into undergraduate education, covering the shortfall of dollars in that area caused by the loss of tuition revenue (all those nonadmitted students who went to JUCOs or entered the workforce).
The separation of pure research and undergraduate education will allow the remaining and slimmed-down noninstitute graduate programs to emphasize teaching above research, to have grad students take courses in pedagogy and, ultimately, to enable them to enter undergraduate classrooms willing and able to do a good job.
Fourth Proposal: Abolish teaching methods that turn undergraduates into passive receptacles; emphasize interactive, inquiry-based learning.
Abolish almost all lecture classes; establish small classes where students and instructor constantly interact. Undergraduate courses should teach students to retrieve information by using the new technologies—instead of passively receiving data in lecture courses. Classroom time should focus on process—not product—learning; in other words, learning to think critically and processing information.
In Reinventing Undergraduate Education, the Boyer Commission offered an excellent plan for each year of an undergraduate’s academic career. It began with:
Construct an Inquiry-based Freshman Year
The first year of a [student’s] university experience needs to provide new stimulation for intellectual growth and a firm grounding in inquiry-based learning and communication of information and ideas.
The Boyer Commission suggested the abolition of lectures for freshmen and an emphasis on interactive learning; but it also argued that faculty members should continue their serious research activities and teach freshmen in labor-intensive ways. As discussed in chapter 8, “The Great Researcher = Great Teacher Myth,” very few professors can conduct important research and teach intensively at the same time. Therefore, in designing a system that serves the vast majority of undergraduates and faculty members, choices have to be made—in this case, on the side of teaching. Allow the great researchers to work full-time in the research institutes, and the great teachers to inhabit the undergraduate classrooms.
The Boyer Commission followed its recommendations for freshmen with:
Build on the Freshmen Foundation
The freshmen experience must be consolidated by extending its principles into the following years. Inquiry-based learning, collaborative experience, [high-level] writing and speaking expectations need to characterize the whole of a research university education.
In addition to continuing interactive learning for each student, the commission suggested “long-term mentorship”: a faculty member taking an undergraduate under his or her wing and serving as a faculty advisor and mentor. Obviously, this proposal would benefit student and professor. However, few activities are more labor-intensive and time-consuming for a faculty member, particularly because he or she would mentor a substantial number of students throughout their undergraduate careers. Again, the Boyer Commission has to acknowledge that for faculty members to engage in this activity, they must be teachers first and foremost, not full-time or even half-time researchers.
According to the commission, the student’s undergraduate education should “culminate with a capstone experience: The final semester(s) should focus on a major project and utilize to the fullest the … skills learned in the previous semesters.” Currently, honors programs require this of most of their students—an honors thesis is a typical and valuable “capstone” of the years spent in the program—but a faculty member must spend a significant amount of time working with each undergraduate on his or her major project. The current honors thesis system succeeds because an individual professor directs a small number of honors dissertations per year; what would occur when faculty have to direct many students in this endeavor? Only a full-time commitment to teaching would enable the average professor to undertake “capstone experiences” on a large scale.
Fifth Proposal: Require all undergraduates to attain a minimum score on the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) before they receive their bachelor’s degrees.
Because of the current debasement of general undergraduate education, the questionable nature of many college degrees, and the lack of proof that a graduating senior has actually learned anything in college, universities should agree to a standard “outcomes and assessment” test. Despite the controversies surrounding all national tests, many authorities accept the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) as the best one in existence, presently required of graduating seniors for entrance to most graduate schools. In addition, the GRE is free of the controversies about cultural and racial biases that burden the SAT exam.
Alexander Astin, after testing more undergraduates than any other higher education expert has ever done, concluded that the GRE
measures at least three cognitive skills that undergraduate education is supposed to facilitate: facility with language, scientific and mathematical skills, and analytic and problem-solving skills … . As a consequence, developing the undergraduate student’s ability to perform well on these tests should be an important goal of any undergraduate program.
The GRE does not test information acquisition; for example, “Was Taming of the Shrew written by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe? The GRE assumes that students wanting to know the answer to this and other factual questions can quickly retrieve them from electronic databases. The GRE attempts to test whether a person has learned how to process information, including the facts in databases; whether a student can make sense of verbal and mathematical entities; and whether a student can solve a large variety of cognitive problems.
Most important, the GRE assumes that after four years of undergraduate education, a student has attained a high level of cognitive skills. Universities now require minimum GRE scores for entrance to advanced-degree programs; they should also use a minimum score as a requirement for graduation. The GRE component will certify the value of the student’s degree.
An ancillary benefit of the GRE graduation requirement would be the elimination of “gut” courses and “mickey” majors. To obtain a decent GRE score, a student would have to take meaningful courses; “guts” and “mickeys” would be a waste of time. Hopefully, under this system, these courses and majors would disappear from the university.
The proposal on the GRE exam provides an appropriate transition from What Should Happen at Big-time U’s to What Probably Will Happen. If, in the year 2000, these schools instituted a minimum GRE score as a graduation requirement, probably many of their baccalaureate students would fall far below the minimum, revealing how little they had learned during their time in college, and the impoverished state of general undergraduate education at Big-time U’s. In fact, the huge gap between the GRE scores of the honors students and the regular undergraduates would provide further proof of the current neglect of general undergraduate education.
Big state universities are like ocean liners that set sail ages ago, and are somewhere on the ocean, and no one knows for sure where they’re going. When you get to be president of one of these schools, you think that you can make major changes but, re
ally, you are just a ship captain who gets his hands on the wheel in the wheelhouse, and as hard as you try, the best you can do is turn the ship maybe a half degree to starboard … . That’s why these schools never really change, that’s also why a president can never really get control of a big-time athletic department.
—William Atchley, former president of Clemson
University, and of the University of the Pacific
President Atchley made his comments a decade ago during a major economic recession and at a demographic low point in the enrollment history of the modern Big-time U. He believed that large, public universities required reforming, but he was pessimistic about whether fundamental changes would take place. Ten years later, the need for reform is greater, but because we live in one of the most unusual eras in American history—the longest period of prosperity on record—the current money flow and the increased enrollments mask the basic problems in higher education, temporarily paving them over with dollars.
Beer and Circus Page 34