Author of Wannabe U visits UMass

Gaye Tuchman, the author of Wannabe U (here's a review), visited UMass and met with a group of faculty and administrators. Based on comments I made at the chancellor's search committee, I got invited to the meeting. There was a far-ranging discussion of the situation in which public higher education finds itself and an exploration of avenues for trying to move forward.

I think the short answer is that public higher education is f***ed. We have allowed the plutocracy to brand education as a private good and have allowed the entire system to be reconstructed around a model of high tuition and self-funded high aid. Unless we can reach a new social contract that reconsiders that arrangement, public universities will go away. Several are only receiving 5-10% of their funding from the state anymore and are, for all intents and purposes, already private. And all are headed in that direction.

I suggested that our best hope was for PHENOM to build a coalition based on parents of high-school students, aiming at juniors. These are the folks who haven't yet figured out how to pay for college and who stand to benefit the most from solving the problem. Unfortunately, PHENOM has been just organizing college students. College students are a much more selective group: they're the ones who've already solved the problem of how to pay for college in some way. I should probably try to get more involved with PHENOM, but since they never seem to listen to anything I tell them, I've felt too discouraged to get involved.

One interesting part of the discussion was related to the circumstances that led to the current chancellor getting canned. We were talking about the institution's goal of being an AAU campus and Gaye said, "Not unless you have a medical school..." And, of course, that's exactly what led to the chancellor getting the axe: he set up a committee to explore the idea of creating a medical school in Springfield that could be part of the Amherst campus. It is about the only way for Amherst to achieve AAU status and it would have fleshed out the Amherst/Springfield collaboration, which has been largely skeletal. But proposing either a medical school or law school associated with the Amherst campus is the third rail in Massachusetts politics.

I see the chancellor as a somewhat tragic figure -- especially given his speech to the faculty senate yesterday, where he all but pleaded with faculty to get behind his plan. But it's hard to feel sorry for him. I've always wondered that he seemed to make no effort to build bridges with the faculty. Even the secretary of the faculty senate, who has always been an unapologetic supporter of the chancellor described his style as "management by fait accompli". That was exactly it: he never consulted in any public way and when consultation was forced upon him, he would issue his decision just before the committee was due to report. And the performance yesterday, where the deans were trotted into the Faculty Senate and made to stand to demonstrate the administration's opposition to the will of the faculty? Truly pathetic.

Unfortunately, Gaye didn't really have any answers. "Maybe the Occupy movement will save us," she said. "I think in my book I managed to understand one side of one institution, but to fix public higher education is going to require reforming the whole economy." But recognizing the scope of the problem is the first step toward building a solution.