Ernest L. Boyer

The late Ernest Boyer was a hugely influential voice in higher education policy during the latter part of the 20th century. He was the chancellor of the giant State University of New York (SUNY) system, before becoming the U.S. commissioner of education (a position that later was changed to “secretary”); he ended his career as the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Boyer was very comfortable taking on the higher education establishment and calling out its weaknesses as he perceived them. For example, he believed that American higher education began to lose its way after WW-II, when the National Science Foundation was established (1950) and the National Institutes of Health were greatly expanded, making federal research dollars available, in increasingly larger amounts, to campus-based researchers. Boyer was visibly concerned that the growing emphasis on university-based research was coming at the expense of the historic emphasis on high-quality undergraduate education.

In 1994, Boyer published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “Creating the New American College.” He opened the article with these words:

“How can American higher education successfully contribute to national renewal? Is it possible for the work of the academy to relate more effectively to our most pressing social, economic, and civic problems?”

Later in his article Boyer said the following:

“I’m concerned that in recent years, higher education’s historic commitment to service seems to have diminished. I’m troubled that many now view the campus as a place where professors get tenured and students get credentialed… And what I find most disturbing is the growing feeling in this country that higher education is a private benefit, not a public good” [emphasis in the original].

Boyer makes it abundantly clear that the designation of research (“publish or perish”) as the primary mission of today’s universities is very much a modern phenomenon, and one that takes the American university far away from its origins. He points out that, while in the colonial era the first colleges were founded by various religious denominations for the purpose of training clergymen and educating pious gentlemen (there were no women’s colleges at that time), purely secular institutions became the norm after Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1740 – and their purpose was broader and more inclusive than the mission of the original church-related colleges.

Franklin stated the purpose (or mission) of the University of Pennsylvania “as consisting in an Inclination join’d with an Ability to serve Mankind, one’s Country, Friends, and Family” [spelling, capitalization and italics in the original].

“Service to society” as a mission was embraced by the public universities as they were established in the closing years of the 18th century and in the first few decades of the 19th century – and service was also very clearly the purpose behind the founding of the land-grant universities (beginning in 1862, following passage of the Morrill Act).

Even when graduate education and research began at major universities in the latter part of the 19th century, service to society remained their primary mission. Daniel Coit Gilman, the founding president of The Johns Hopkins University (1876), the first university in America to be established using the German research university model, had this to say in his inaugural address:

“[Universities should] make for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospitals, less fraud in business, less folly in politics.”

The presidents of Harvard, Princeton and Stanford offered similar comments at various times over the following three decades. My point is: Service to society was the stated purpose of even the most prestigious American universities well into the 20th century – and in his paper, Boyer points out that this theme of service was, in large part, the basis for the G.I. Bill and the Peace Corps, mid-20th century initiatives.

Boyer challenged the higher education community to restore service to society as its primary value, when he said:

“Violence, unemployment, poverty, poor housing, and pollution often occur at the very doorsteps of some of our most distinguished colleges and universities. How can the nation’s campuses stay disengaged?”

He called on the faculty:

To “apply knowledge to real-life problems [and] use that experience to revise their theories.”

He said:

That “institutions must become less imitative and more creative.”

He suggested:

That “the goal of such colleges would be to bring knowledge into intimate relationships with the small, daily problems of real people and real neighborhoods.”

Boyer’s paper, coming as it did from one of the great leaders in higher education, was widely praised and celebrated – but it was ultimately all but ignored. Sadly, very little has changed in higher education in the 21 years since the paper’s publication. And the irony is that Boyer’s call for action, for the reinstitution of service to society as the primary mission of higher education institutions, is at least as relevant today as it was in Boyer’s day.

Roger Williams University responded to Boyer’s call by engaging in a campus-wide, yearlong review of its core values, core purpose and overarching university goal. Our new core purpose, or mission, is just eight words long: To strengthen society through engaged teaching and learning. Coincidentally, our new overarching university goal is also just eight words: To build the university the world needs now.

Taken together, it is our stated purpose to give each one of our students the opportunity for at least one meaningful experiential education project – often a semester-long project-based learning experience. This approach will ensure that students learn how to apply theoretical knowledge learned in the classroom to practical, community-based (and community-identified) problems.

Project-based learning will ensure that, in addition to acquiring experience in their discipline, students will obtain experience in working with students from different disciplines; in perfecting their negotiation and collaboration skills; in working with clients; in meeting deadlines; in oral and written communication; in analysis and synthesis – the very skills that employers say are too often missing in today’s college graduates.

But the value of this approach is not limited to the student. The organization that identified the project on which the students are working also benefits, by receiving the value that a team of intelligent, eager and competent students (under the guidance of one or more professors) brings to the problem at hand. In one Roger Williams University project, now completed, the work of the student team allowed the community to receive a federal grant of more than $800,000, and made the students’ plan a reality.

Students on these projects are clearly moved and motivated by the gratitude they receive from the organizations with which they work – and many of our students commit to doing more community-based work once they graduate. To the extent they do, they will continue to strengthen society throughout their lives.

Roger Williams University thinks of itself as epitomizing The New American College. We hope that Ernie Boyer would have approved.

In Part 1 of this series, “Attack of the Politicians,” I pointed out just how pervasive has become the branding of higher education by politicians and media pundits as being primarily – even exclusively – a mechanism for job preparation. And this idea is apparently not a passing fad. The idea that the value of college is to provide the training young people need to “get a good job” is being treated as a truism among a number of probable candidates for the Republican nomination for president in the 2016 election. In Part 1, I quoted Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin as a specific example.

Because the proposition that the purpose of higher education is job preparation is likely to become even more prominent in the coming months, it is important that we consider the origins and merits of this idea.

I briefly reviewed the complex and ever-changing history of higher education in America in my last post, wherein I noted that the original liberal arts colleges were largely decoupled from anything to do with job training (teaching and the ministry excepted). However, with the expansion of higher education into professional and applied fields beginning in the latter half of the 19^th century, a link between higher education and specific areas of employment was quickly established, and it exists to this day. Beginning with agricultural science and engineering, and then expanding into professional fields such as medicine and law (it is no longer possible to enter these professions by apprenticing with practicing doctors and lawyers, as was once the case), there are many well-marked pathways from certain college majors to specific career fields.

Moreover, the rapid expansion of what are now generally called “community colleges” from the 1950s through the 1970s dramatically increased the number of two-year schools having two distinct educational tracks, leading to the associate of arts or the associate of science degrees, respectively. Students in the associate of arts track are able to transfer their work to a four-year college or university, and (at least in theory) obtain their baccalaureate with two additional years of study. Students in the associate of science track generally do not have that option, inasmuch as their track is intended to lead to a terminal degree in applied fields ranging from nursing to electronics technician to auto mechanic.

This expansion of what constituted post-secondary education in America was alarming to faculty in the liberal arts, because they saw their fundamental belief in the virtue of education for education’s sake – the broadening and deepening of understanding, the ethical and social growth of the individual, the commitment to lifelong learning – being corrupted by a focus on specific learning for a specific field of endeavor.

On the other hand, expansion into graduate education and research in fields within the liberal arts, and the shift from an almost exclusive focus on the classics to a continually expanding set of disciplines known as “majors” was, for the most part, accepted much more readily.

The result has been an uneasy truce, wherein faculty from the liberal arts and faculty from applied and professional fields exist side-by-side on many campuses, separated by curricular boundaries that are generally accepted and rarely challenged. The liberal arts faculty claim exclusive jurisdiction over the courses that are included in the “General Education” portion of the curriculum, and typically oppose faculty members in applied fields should they argue for reducing the number of credit hours required in General Education, or for including an introductory course in an applied field within the course options available in the General Education curriculum.

At the same time, the liberal arts faculty at four-year schools acknowledge that students in the associate of science track in community colleges exist, but since these students rarely attempt to transfer to a four-year college or university, they are seen as being “trained,” rather than “educated.” Training is fine, just as long as it doesn’t creep into baccalaureate curricula.

So the mental picture I am trying to create is of a growing landmass, called “higher education,” the boundaries of which are expanding as the ocean levels recede. The high point of this landmass represents the liberal arts and sciences, fields of study that have been present from the time when, in my metaphor, the ocean levels were much higher. As long as the liberal arts, through its program of General Education, can inform the rest of the higher education landmass without being tainted by it, all will be well in the kingdom.

But all is not well today. Especially since the Great Recession of 2008, the liberal arts have been besieged. Many politicians, pundits, parents and even “heretics” from within the higher education establishment see a liberal arts education as an expensive frill, an anachronism and an impediment that stands in the way of the need to streamline, modernize and make less expensive the entire notion of higher education.

The consequence is that the battle lines have been drawn. On one side stand the liberal arts adherents, armed with tradition, history and moral outrage. Everything in which they believe – and their very way of life – are imperiled by the forces of evil and ignorance that oppose them.

On the other side are those who believe higher education must be made more affordable, more accessible, more efficient and more relevant to the needs of America today. They do not see themselves as “forces of evil,” but as realists who are astonished at the recalcitrance of the other side to face reality, and to agree on the need to modernize our system of higher education.

It is not an equal fight. The liberal arts adherents are armed with little more than a voice with which to make thoughtful and well-reasoned arguments, accompanied by (as happened at the University of Wisconsin, in response to Gov. Walker’s expressed desire to reduce state appropriations to higher education and to change the university’s mission) statements of disapproval and condemnation (The New York Times, “Walker’s Wisconsin Budget Has a National Message,” Feb. 4, 2015) or letters to the editor (The New York Times, April 8, 2013, letter to the editor, “What Is the Mission of a University?,” in response to a column by David Brooks, The New York Times, “The Practical University,” April 4, 2013).

Facing what amounts to a few catapults and an occasional vat of hot oil, the other side has tanks, artillery and jet fighters. They have the purse strings, a majority of the political and economic will, and the ear of a public anxious to have access to a less expensive college education that leads to a good job.

The liberal arts are attempting to fend off an overwhelming force. People of good will exist on both sides, but the conversation is becoming increasingly shrill and contentious – and a forum does not seem to exist in which can be had a rational discussion of the pros and cons of the views of each side. Increasingly, the sides are becoming entrenched, and there is no question in my mind that traditional liberal arts education is, as a consequence, in extreme peril.

It is both ironic and tragic that there exists, at this very moment, new and objective data that demonstrate a middle ground exists, one that would, if recognized, allow this destructive war of ideology to be brought to an end. Such an outcome is not just desirable. It is absolutely necessary if we are to preserve the American economy and our way of life.

Next week: Part 3: A New Hope.