Abstract
A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education, an insightful overview of the system of American higher education, uses the term “perfect mess” as something of a pun: American higher education is perfectly messy, but it is also “perfect” in the sense of complete adaptation to its American environment. David Labaree, a professor in Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, identifies four tiers of higher education. The highest and most prestigious tier is research universities, followed by land-grant universities, and then the comprehensive regional universities that grew from the former normal or teachers’ colleges, and then community colleges. The tiers become more accessible to students as one goes lower; and as one goes higher, the tiers confer more social advantage, presumably for both the students and the faculty. A constant competition encourages schools in the lower tiers to emulate and perhaps rise into the upper tiers. Thus, there is mission creep as community colleges seek to offer bachelor’s degrees and higher tiers seek to stimulate and to highlight more faculty research.
Observers from outside the United States are usually baffled by our system of higher education. Compared with other countries, U.S. colleges and universities (terms used interchangeably in the book) are more autonomous and do not answer in the same way to an education ministry. Labaree notes the rise of the European medieval universities in the institutional space between the Church and the monarchy. Similarly, he suggests, U.S. colleges exist in the space between the government and the economy. Competition among the schools and the tiers for resources fits well into our competitive capitalism, and the relative autonomy of the institutions allows them room for entrepreneurial activities. Meeting employers’ workforce needs, for example, becomes an important activity and also a justification for the institutions’ continued existence.
A related implication is that the higher education system was never designed to be a system; indeed, it was not designed at all. Instead, the “system” arose from hundreds of small schools scattered across the country whose purposes included furthering a religious denomination’s influence, increasing local land values and attracting population to small towns, and satisfying the civic boosterism of the community. These factors help to explain the location of fine liberal arts colleges such as Middlebury and Oberlin in small towns with the same name, or Austin College, sixty miles from Dallas in Sherman, Texas.
Many of these smaller schools founded in the mid-eighteenth century are today recognized for providing an excellent education. This was not always true at their founding. A high-quality education for the students was not necessarily the overriding mission; institutional survival was. Struggling schools cut costs and looked for revenues everywhere. From the beginning, colleges were financed with tuition but also through relentless appeals to religious institutions, philanthropists, donors, and civic benefactors. In the mid-eighteenth century as well as the early twenty-first century, college presidents scrambled for resources.
A version of civic boosterism affected the states as well, as legislatures chartered public universities to bolster their state’s economy and educate their youth. The 1862 Morrill Act provided a strong impetus for further growth by providing federal lands to support higher education, and the resulting land-grant colleges were purposeful about practical curricula, including agriculture and engineering. (The “A&M” designation stood for agricultural and mechanical.) Compared with the private colleges, the public institutions struggled more to retain their autonomy because state legislatures sought to dictate admissions policies, curriculum, and funding mechanisms.
The small, private schools had, however, established the core rules and structures of the system, including the notions of shared governance, the faculty control of curriculum and hiring, and substantial autonomy in admissions standards. Because of the competitive nature of the entire system, too much legislative management threatened the position of the public colleges within the hardening stratification system. Thus the private colleges created a space in which the public colleges could resist regulation and compete more effectively.
As complex as the variety of institutions is, legislators and lay boards are also confused by the internal complexity of an institution, including the inner hierarchy of its structures and the constant turf-tending that accompanies the structures. Outsiders are confused by the proliferation of centers, institutes, departments, divisions, and other organizational forms. Some universities have multiple departments in the same discipline, just located in different schools or colleges. Labaree calls this “anarchic complexity,” which he sees as a strength of the system and not a defect.
Reformers, Labaree notes, are abundant. He classifies the calls for reform into three broad categories: calls for transparency; calls for disaggregation; and the internal threat of too much “academic principle.” Transparency sounds positive, and yet university finances are so patched together from a variety of sources that there are substantial cross-subsidies. Making those cross-subsidies transparent runs the risk of erasing support for some endeavors, such as faculty research or graduate education.
Disaggregation is an effort to reform higher education by separating its functions.
American colleges, Labaree says, have managed to be at once populist, practical, and elite, but this combination can be accomplished only by combining many different activities: academic camps for high school students; remediation for some students, and honors programs for others; clinical activities; collegiate sports; and arts programs. Streamlining functions could make institutions more cost-effective but would erode the coalition of institutional supporters.
Paradoxically, academic principle is seen as a problem because a certain amount of hypocrisy is protective. The example that Labaree offers is that the faculty of one department may secretly believe that a second department makes second-rate faculty appointments, but they do not raise the issue in a “live and let live” organizational environment. When the equilibrium is disrupted—perhaps when a budget cut is pending—then the charges of low quality may emerge in the interest of academic principle. One of the advantages of anarchic complexity is that faculty are protected from internal frictions with one another.
I believe Labaree gives too little attention to the fact that the United States does indeed have a national minister of education, except that the role is termed Secretary of Education. While the U.S. Department of Education does not have the same authority as the ministries of education in France or China, its provision of student financial aid and loans and its broad enforcement powers (Title IX, Title IV, ADA, etc.) have potentially great influence. Such a high fraction of the student population makes use of federal loans and Pell grants as to give the federal government great leverage through its control of accreditation, its regulations, and its enforcement actions. Departmental pressure applied nationally could potentially alter many of the characteristics of the system that Labaree identifies.