One of the great paradoxes of higher education has to do with our dueling outlooks on the world.  Why do professionals who have devoted their careers to the notion that they can improve the lives of individuals through education and therefore improve the world—an inherently optimistic leap of faith—simultaneously wallow in the contemplation of the demise of their very undertaking and the extinction of all they value?

I am referring, of course, to the current spate of academic criticism, what I call the “literature of academic eschatology.”  We go to meetings, read articles and books, and listen to talks all dedicated to the assumption that higher education, as we know it, and particularly the liberal arts, is doomed.  And we, the professional optimists, seem to love it.  I know I do.

Certainly there is nothing new about all this doom and gloom in higher ed.  For decades we have heard about the corporatization of education, the canon wars, laments about the lack of high school preparation, and so on, and many of these threats are still present in some form or other.  Some have likely increased.  Worries about disruptive technology and college affordability are largely variations on the themes of the past, which is not to say that these threats are not real or we should be dismissive of them.  In fact, it may be our very propensity toward pessimistic anxiety that gives us the wherewithal to adapt and survive.  I imagine university dons in the Middle Ages similarly bemoaning that, given the continued influx of lunkheads and roustabouts as students, there would be no way for their institutions to survive into future generations.  And yet here we are.

The Thursday AAC&U Annual Meeting session titled “Preparing for the Apocalypse? The Liberal Arts in the Era of ‘Higher Education Reform’” touched on many of these themes—sometimes indirectly—and unsurprisingly drew a large and enthusiastic crowd.  During the session, two presenters—Johann Neem, an associate professor of history at Western Washington University, and Scott Cohen, an associate professor of English at Stonehill College—gave their views on what we could do to keep liberal arts education intact in the face of elimination from its traditional perch in institutions of higher education.  Afterward, responsive commentaries from Benjamin Ginsberg of the Washington Center of American Government at Johns Hopkins and Goldie Blumenstyk from The Chronicle of Higher Education rounded out the session.

The title of the session alone is troubling: “Preparing for the Apocalypse?”  The question mark can either be a provocation or a dodge.  As for the session, in the best academic tradition, it raised many more questions than it answered.

Neem and Cohen offered intriguing alternate strategies to protect the liberal arts in the face of the threat of extinction.  They both assumed, as did the audience presumably, theexistential value of the liberal arts.  Neem, though, frequently asserted that he was not convinced of the imminent demise of liberal arts but that he wanted to be prepared, “like a Boy 

Scout.”  He suggested four alternatives to teaching the liberal arts in a traditional university setting, including seeking out philanthropic patrons and starting instructional service networks along the lines of yoga communities.  Cohen focused exclusively on building niche or boutique universities for the liberal arts, but he also expressed misgivings.  For instance, he cited Joseph Turow’s Niche Envy to suggest that boutique culture can erode the very coherence of society.  After all, if everyone has their niche, where is the common ground on which we can all gather?

Ginsberg picked up on this point to critique Neem’s and Cohen’s ideas by decrying the potential loss of the egalitarian reach of the liberal arts as they are currently offered.  He described Neem’s recommendations as a form of “immigration”—that is, departing from problems to find a new land of possibility—and Cohen’s niche as a “retreat.” The irony that these suggestions were offered to empower faculty but instead felt reactive supports Ginsberg’s assessment.  But Ginsberg also laid blame at the feet of the faculty who, as he claims, do not spend enough time or effort forcefully and explicitly promoting liberal arts through their teaching.  Ginsberg’s idealism was most apparent when he cited Richard Vedder’s observation that many cab drivers have liberal arts degrees, which Ginsberg sees not as a symbol of liberal arts’ uselessness, but a mark of our culture’s great strength.  Even our cab drivers are informed citizens of our democracy, he declared.  Nonetheless, his comments seemed to assume that the main audience for lauding the liberal arts would be found in the university classroom, which presents a dilemma in an age of shrinking liberal arts enrollments.

The ensuing questions and comments at times provided more heat (not entirely unwelcome on a frigid morning) than light.  Is there “a common body of knowledge” we must teach, or is it a set of “common cultural understandings?”  Or perhaps we should ask “a common set of questions” and guide students as they grapple with answers.

And there, in the final discussion, we returned to the beginning.  There is a crisis in academia, an imminent failure that threatens to undo all we hold in the highest esteem.  It is so malign that we cannot even formulate the question that it comprises.  Our only communal agreement is that we know there is a threat and that it imperils what we all most value.  As academics, we debate the details but take the fundamentals for granted.  No matter our perspectives or backgrounds or philosophical stances, we all react to the menace and move to protect our core.  Maybe, even in the midst of our disputes, we can pause and take stock of our common ground.  We can celebrate what we all agree to be most true—the inherent value of the liberal arts—and communicate that value boldly in the public sphere.  We instinctively react to threats to the liberal arts because of this common belief.  So, let us celebrate the transformational power of the liberal arts we all seek to preserve…

Good.  Now we can resume the debate.

Americans expect some pretty unreasonable things from higher education, most notably, guaranteed "good" (i.e. high-paying) jobs.  In this way, Americans often envision the university as a mere extension of high school, only this time with tastier employment prospects.  Indeed, raw job-placement data has become a crude criterion of academic achievement in the American mind, and the sweeter and juicier the jobs (and their salaries), the better the education.  Or so goes the assumption.

But is tastier always better?  Few things in life are as satisfying as, say, a fast food burger served with a side of fries and pie for dessert, but a moment's pleasure is not a reasonable gauge of a healthy diet.  No human can survive long on such trans-fat laden fare.

Unnaturally occurring trans fats saturate manufactured comfort foods.  They satisfy, yes, but they also present a hidden double danger by simultaneously raising levels of bad cholesterol and lowering levels of good cholesterol.

And, you may wonder, what does trans fat have to do with higher education?  Well, nothing really except for the similar double danger lurking in our universities.  Like trans fat, it plays on our desire for personal gratification.  As with the double carbon bond of trans fats, “trans ed”--as I call it--features an unnatural double bind of rising student entitlement and plummeting expectations of academic standards.  If every student is a mere customer in the convenience store of higher ed, just what has that student “purchased?”  Ostensibly, easy assignments, good grades, and guaranteed (juicy) jobs--all wrapped in a tortilla diploma and warmed up in a low-wattage classroom.

Students and their parents--our "consumers"--demand more for less.  They incongruously insist on a lower-cost, higher-quality university "experience," complete with snazzy facilities and doting faculty, while the demand for the de facto currency of education--grades, course credits, degrees, and the assurance of jobs--grows shriller and more arbitrary, particularly in such a sour economy.  Inevitably, the professoriate and academic administrators collapse under the morbid pressure of relentless expectation.

Consider, for instance, the plan the Obama Department of Education cooked up to "measure college performance through a new ratings system so students and families have the information to select schools that provide the best value." (I am quoting from a Fact Sheet on whitehouse.gov). These ratings will eventually be used to award federal aid and will rely on certain measures (and I am quoting the Fact Sheet again):

"-Access, such as percentage of students receiving Pell grants;
-Affordability, such as average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt; and
-Outcomes [and this is the one that really concerns me], such as graduation and transfer rates, _graduate earnings_, and advanced degrees of college graduates."

"Graduate earnings?" This scheme, whatever merits it may have, will potentially de-incentivize the development or even continuation of programs that lead to low-earning fields. Yes, that means, no more community organizers straight out of college. More insidious though, is how this recipe, however inadvertently, promotes the hardening of the national perception that a college education is a burdensome 

formality--a plain salad on the way to or--more likely--in the way of the coveted big greasy burger with fries.

To grasp this situation, think of the students' perspective as "transactional," a view of education as a linear series of exchanges with a final payout.  Many or even most students imagine a perfectly predictable path to remuneration: tuition, assignments, grades, course credits, degree, job.  You do your time; you get your (melted) cheddar.

Simultaneously, we educators frequently spin highfalutin fantasies of the "transformational" power of rigorous university learning.  Students, we dream, will strive to become more well-rounded, broader minded, and deeper thinking.  Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, argues that “higher education’s highest purpose is to give all citizens the opportunity to find 'large and human significance' in their lives and work.”  Neat.  We educators are peddling steamed broccoli and vegan "bacon" amid the funnel cake and deep-fried chocolate bars at the state fair.
 
The dichotomy between the expectations of the end-users--students and their parents--and the presumptions of professors cannot be more stark.  The disconnect between students' transactional experience and their professors' transformational idealism is nothing short of absurd.

But wait!  It gets more complicated.  Even as we academics decry the transactional expectations of our students, we own and operate that very system--doling out grades, credits, and degrees like so many coins of the realm.  More troubling, we manage the transactional and transformational models of education side by side with little apparent awareness and near-zero acknowledgment--the unhealthy double bind of trans ed.  As a result, students' expectations for easy, satisfying grades rise, like bad cholesterol.  Professors, meanwhile, caught in the double bind, compromise their professional integrity, and the healthy rigor of transformational learning, like good cholesterol, decreases.  Trans ed, like trans fat, satisfies at first, but its inherit unhealthfulness threatens to undo us all.

Yes, my analogy is decidedly labored, but I trust you get the idea.  Besides, its laborious imperfection helps make the point. Richard Keeling and Richard Hersh, coauthors of *We're Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education*, have noted that higher learning, done well, can and should never be efficient (a reasoned counterblow to recent calls for $10,000 degrees and the like). Just as there is no perfect way to remove trans fats from the American diet, there is no perfect balance between transactional and transformational learning, but we can do much better.  Eliminating trans ed's double bind from the classrooms of the American university will be as challenging and necessary and take as much tenacity and honest dedication as removing trans fats from the shelves of the American pantry.  The Obama FDA recently banned trans fats, thus proving more enlightened about the overall wellbeing of the citizenry than the Department of Education.

Where to start with trans ed?  Step one: admit we--anyone with an interest in higher education--have a problem.

Until then, trans ed will remain to American higher education as trans fat is to the American diet: pervasive, pernicious, and deliciously fatal.