The UNC presidential search committee has done its work and the new president of the UNC system will be Erskine Bowles. Although the North Carolina Press Association has said that it may challenge the legality of the selection process under the Open Meetings Act, no one doubts that Mr. Bowles will succeed Molly Broad in this important position.
An accomplished, multi-talented man, Mr. Bowles will take the UNC helm with this notable advantage — he isn’t an education “insider.” People who have been immersed in higher education administration for most if not all of their careers tend to uncritically accept most of the “conventional wisdom” about how our colleges and universities supposedly need to function. That fact produces tunnel vision much like a horse with blinders. Bowles doesn’t appear to be wearing them.
We at the Pope Center hope that Bowles will not be the kind of higher education leader whose approach can be summed up in the sentence, “Things are great, but we just need a lot more money.” Things are not great and more money isn’t the solution.
To focus on two significant shortcomings of the UNC system, Bowles would do well if he managed to ratchet up the degree of academic rigor for UNC students while at the same time ratcheting down the politicization that students often find in their classes. As this month’s annual Pope Center conference entitled “Higher Education in America: Do Students and Taxpayers Get Their Money’s Worth?” showed, there are strong reasons to doubt that students are getting the education they need. Also, evidence abounds that some professors use their classrooms as soapboxes for political advocacy.
Bowles should tackle both problems.
While we frequently hear that our higher education system is the world’s best, the truth is that many students enter college (and not just the UNC system) with low levels of fundamental skills in reading, writing and math, then graduate four or more years later without having improved much. At our conference, retired NC State and Meredith College English professor Nan Miller explained how writing instruction has deteriorated under the spell of “progressive” educational theorists. Business leaders often complain that the college graduates who apply for jobs are so weak in basic skills that those whom they hire need remedial help before they can be entrusted with such simple tasks as writing a memo.
For the great amount of money that college education costs these days, the very least we should expect of schools is that students would graduate with strong abilities in the good old 3 Rs. Sadly, it’s quite possible for students to make it through to their BA degrees without them.
What should the UNC president do? He should institute a system that would evaluate students in their final year as to their fundamental skills. No matter what a student majored in, he ought to be able to write a clear paragraph and perform basic math. If UNC required an exit exam that would test students on basic skills, that would help to discourage them from loading their schedules with creampuff courses.
That’s not the only way to begin ratcheting up the level of academic rigor, but it would be a good start.
The phenomenon that Bowles should attempt to ratchet down is politicization. Some professors simply cannot resist the temptation to abuse their position and act more as “change agents” than as conveyors of knowledge. At the Pope Center’s recent conference, a panel of three students agreed that they had all encountered professors who gave them reason to feel that speaking their minds would be unwise.
Sometimes professors go so far as to put their opinions into their exams. In a Sociology course at NC State this term, students encountered this tendentious question: “Over the last twenty years, the U.S. has experienced the most dramatic and political change of the post-World War II era. This change has contributed to a wave of elite deviance that is virtually out of control (deregulation, lax enforcement, little accountability to the public.) True or False?” Disagreeing with that prof’s politics will lower your grade.
Bowles should use the bully pulpit of the UNC presidency to let it be known that classrooms are to be used for teaching, not preaching and that transgressions will result in sanctions. It’s not a violation of academic freedom to insist the faculty members try to save the world on their own time.