After a glance at yugen in mid-century America, this post explores the profound and often undisclosed consequences of economic decline on American colleges and universities today. If you are the parent of a college-bound teen, please read carefully. For more on yugen, scroll to the previous post.
yugen: profound, mysterious, subtle (Romanized E.J./J.E. Dictionary, Taiseido: 1953).
Yugen entered American popular culture–as distinct from American higher education–through the efforts of the Beat Generation. Pulitzer prize winning poet Gary Snyder and the late Zen master Philip Whalen have been key figures in popularizing Japanese aesthetics in the West. In the hands of Whalen, Snyder and other Western pioneers of Zen, yugen lost its Muromachi decadence. Especially as channeled through Snyder, the concept has been invigorated by a rugged, American individualism. And, in his “deep ecology” one can hear faint echoes of xuan, the primal Chinese antecedent of yugen.
I first associated yugen with the state of contemporary colleges and universities after reading a series of headlines in The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 2, 2010). Headlines share something of the compact intensity of poetry. Hence, I have chosen to string these headlines together in free verse and then to take the seven stanzas as topics of discussion–with apologies to Snyder and his art.
the headline poem
Germany pursues
excellence
over
egalitarianism,
field of discord
at public colleges,
farming groups sow
i n f l u e n c e,
black colleges
see a need to improve
their i m a g e,
we can end
t h r e a t s
to international students,
colleges
a t o p
gas-rich shale
weigh offers
from
d
r
i
ll
ers,
American
higher education
may need an u p g r a d e
to go global,
wrestling
with one G O D
or another.
Looking for Yugen: A-College Visiting You Go!
Summertime is a fine time to visit college campuses with your teenager. My website provides metrics to aid in making a good match, along with suggestions for stuff that your son or daughter may want to count. Any bookstore will carry volumes for planning a campus visit. If your family vehicle lacks a GPS device, you can find directions on the college website, with links for avoiding congested interstates. Armed with this abundance of information and encouragement, what could be lacking?
Lacking is the awareness of yugen, in its sense as an undercurrent of dissolution or decline. Three years ago, parents of prospective students did not need an appreciation of the deep restructuring and retrenchment on most campuses. Today, it’s foolhardy not to watch for fault lines of financial stress behind the smiles of gracious admission officers.
The Great Recession, as some have called it, is not hurting institutions of higher education equally. Colleges and universities are not marshaling identical strategies to offset shrinking endowments and cutbacks in government funding. Although trends are beginning to appear, each board of regents (for public institutions) or trustees (for private schools) is making different hard choices. The soundness of their decisions will influence the quality of your child’s undergraduate education.
We can let the stanzas of the headline poem serve as markers for the changes in American higher education. I encourage parents to heed these markers. As always, I encourage parents to take notes and photos during a campus tour and to ask more questions of admission officers than make your teen comfortable. If your teen is like most, s/he will prefer that you ask no questions and take no notes or photos.
The first stanza: Germany pursues excellence over egalitarianism
As British philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted forty years ago, the Germans gave the world the modern research university. To believe that German universities have consistently pursued an end other than excellence is to be a child playing in a sunlit garden: it’s sweet and naive. Sweetness and naivete are not desirable traits for a parent visiting a college. Appropriate behavior for a parent during a college visit is congenial and pragmatic, but in this social role, allow pragmatism to trump congeniality.
Our first headline is remarkable only in treating the ordinary as the newsworthy. For fans of cartoonist Wiley Miller (I am one), the novelty of the German pursuit of academic excellence is a case for the paunchy, bespectacled superhero, Obviousman. I have seen many cases for Obviousman on campus tours. The painstaking identification of a dining hall, a science lab, a fitness center and, yes, a bench in a sunny garden all deserve limning in Non Sequitur. Equally obvious are the needs for a wired campus, for interlibrary loan, for an evening safety patrol and for student health services.
In your role as congenially pragmatic parent, probe the extent of touted campus features and services. Ask about dead zones in the wi-fi coverage. Basements in residence halls are often out of range, and they are also recreation spaces and laundry facilities. Inquire into the screening of students who volunteer for the evening safety patrol.
When looking for yugen, ask an admission officer about hiring freezes and staff cuts in priority student services. Is there a hiring freeze at the student health center? Have the hours of physicians or the number of psychologists been cut? Alternately, has the size of the incoming class been increased, while services remain unchanged? Don’t forget to explore transport and time to hospital emergency rooms–I’ve known more than one freshman to fall out of a tree and break an arm.
The second stanza: field of discord: farming groups sow influence
In a time of budget cuts, expect competing academic interests to vie for diminishing resources. Most colleges and universities house centers for research (e.g., The Cousteau Center for Marine Sciences) and for interdisciplinary programs (e.g., The Tubman Center for African-American Studies). Bringing students and faculty from multiple disciplines together with a common purpose, academic centers generate tremendous intellectual activity. Sadly, across the land, they are becoming an endangered species, as regents and trustees push for retrenchment into traditional areas of inquiry.
Explore the status of a college’s academic centers during the Q/A at the end of the admission information session. Have academic centers recently been consolidated? Are any academic centers scheduled for closure? As an analogy that will not appear on the SAT, an academic center is to a college community as the canary is to the coal mine. When one dies, everybody is in trouble.
You may also want to ask about new academic centers. As this headline suggests, sustainability is more than a buzz word on many campuses. However, is the “new” sustainability center really just the old barn down by the duck pond out beyond the tennis courts with a fresh coat of non-VOC paint and a sign of salvaged lumber? What is the center’s mission? What events has the center sponsored in the past semester as partial fulfillment of its mission to the campus community?
The third stanza: Black colleges see a need to improve their image
The historically Black colleges and universities facing financial difficulties are not alone in their struggle to attract strong students to their campuses. Competition for the most qualified students has never been more fierce, and marketing is a hefty tool for student recruitment. (Of course, if you were the University of Chicago, inundated with applicants after unsolicited publicity by the American President, you could gleefully scratch the marketing budget.)
That said, the calibre of the image management for a college or university need not correlate with the quality of its educational offerings. There are first-rate liberal arts colleges which have chosen not to spend a fortune on marketing (think: Reed College, undergraduate alma mater of Snyder and Whalen). Disturbingly, there are also the fourth-rate degree mills that spend the lion’s share of their tuition dollars on marketing.
Do not be won over by glossy viewbooks short on substance. Viewbooks never contain the content of course catalogs, but inside their slick or thick or nubby covers, you can expect to find the institutional mission and a synopsis of the academic programs. When in doubt about the general curriculum or the degree requirements of a major, ask for a copy of the catalog. (As once happened to me at Cooper Union, an admission officer may brusquely note that the catalog is available online. I recommend asserting your interest in a print copy, to facilitate later comparisons across schools.)
Call me finicky, but I prefer that a student tour guide not be paid for trotting me around the campus (think, with kudos: Dickinson College). In this economic climate, paying tour guides wastes hours of professional staff time on the mechanics of compensating student employees. (The guides, themselves, earn a pittance.) Admission officers should recruit and train volunteers to show visitors the highlights and hallmarks of their institution.
Voluntary tour guides usually make their status known, as a point of pride. If you are fortunate to meet one, I suggest commending the guide’s ethic of service. The smile on this young person’s face will make your tour memorable.
The fourth stanza: we can end threats to international students
This could be another case for Obviousman. Serious threats directed to international students as international students are hate crimes. These offenses differ from, say, stealing the laptop of someone who happens to be an international student. Stealing a laptop is a garden variety felony.
The FBI and campus security offices are required by law to collect and publish statistics on misdemeanors and felonies. The same agencies are further required by law to collect and publish a separate category of hate crimes. For off-campus crime statistics, contact the local police department or the FBI. It is your right and responsibility as the parent of a prospective student to request statistics for misdemeanors, felonies and hate crimes on the campus.
Ask any admission officer for the latest campus crime statistics and for a description of crime prevention programs and practices at the college or university.
Among possible prevention responses, expect to find an emergency blue light program, an evening safety patrol, a rape awareness program, an alcohol reduction program, a qualified campus security force, and key cards for entering residence halls. If the surrounding community has a high crime rate (think MIT, NYU), look for additional measures such as security guards and bag checks at entry points to college buildings.
Given the yugen sensibility on many campuses, it is wise to look into prevention program cutbacks and hiring freezes for security officers. How much better it is to rely on volunteer tour guides than to cut positions in campus safety! (Not that any institution is publicly acknowledging this trade-off.)
The fifth stanza: colleges atop oil-rich shale weigh offers from drillers
The Chron article bearing this headline focussed on a handful of colleges and one public university (Binghamton, the flagship of the SUNY schools), built above natural gas deposits. New technologies now make possible the profitable exploitation of these natural resources. Will geologically favored schools accept the lucre being offered in exchange for drilling leases?
In the narrow sense, it makes no immediate difference to your child’s education if a natural gas rig goes up on a college which s/he is not attending. In the broader sense, pragmatic parents will recognize that the university is not an isolated ivory tower, as was once believed. The drilling dilemma is symptomatic of the deeper issue of outside influences upon American higher education.
The ties of higher education to the federal government and to big business have grown strong in the last decade, especially in areas of national defense and intelligence. These interests shape research and teaching in engineering and computer science, physics and biochemistry, communications and information science, foreign languages, criminology and forensics. All three branches of the liberal arts–the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, and the biological and natural sciences–are building active partnerships with national defense organizations.
[A Becker Aside: To learn which universities received defense contracts in 2009, go to the website, www.governmentcontractswon.com/search. Select the type of contract and input a name. The defense contract page helpfully notes, “ TIP: partial names can be entered; for example, searching on the word tech will return a list of all contractor names containing the word tech.”
Following the tip, I typed “university,” clicked the link and generated 147 pages of names. Among the five pages of universities that begin with the letter “A,” Auburn University in Alabama was the big winner last year. Auburn netted 111 defense contracts totaling more than $32 million dollars. Arizona State University in Tempe, where I once took a Chinese language course, garnered 88 contracts for eleven million dollars. I didn’t extend the exercise to colleges, but the comparison could be interesting.]
Defense and intelligence is not the only sector funding academic research. Agribusiness, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, entertainment and media, and alcohol and tobacco routinely make grant monies available to faculty members. In turn, faculty grant recipients create opportunities for their top undergraduate students, often in the form of summer research stipends, to collaborate in these studies.
To name an American college or university, public or private, that is more fiscally sound today than it was three years ago would be a Herculean undertaking. From the cozy college next door to the state university that dwarfs a small town, endowments have shrunk–some by upwards of forty percent. Pipelines to external funding have also contracted, but expect to see their salience increase relative to other income streams.
For an expose on “the corporate corruption of higher educations,” read Jennifer Washburn’s book, University, Inc, which has the quote as its subtitle (2005). The abuses documented by Washburn are clear, but equally undeniable are the positive relationships between external funders and academic departments, which generate unbiased, valuable findings. Collusion between funders and researchers is no different from corporate corruption or government fraud: it exists; it is never the whole story, and responsible adults recognize the need to watch for it.
As the pragamtic parent of a college-bound child, keep in mind that many departments have money from the government and the private sector. Be aware also that pipelines sometimes flow two directions: as research money floods into the campus, well-trained graduates are funneled into jobs with the funding organizations.
Unless aiming for medicine, the law or academe itself, your son or daughter has a good chance of subsequently working for an organization that is on the recruiting list and/or the funding list of the school where s/he matriculates. Undergraduates employed on externally funded research projects have an increased likelihood of working for the funding organization. If those employment prospects disturb you, then encourage your son or daughter to continue the college search. Not all institutions of higher education play the pipeline game in equal measure. In general, major research universities are more serious pipeline players than the liberal arts colleges.
During a quiet moment, ask an admission officer to provide you with the names of the corporations and the government agencies that have: 1) recruited on campus in the past year, and 2) funded faculty research in the past three years.
Remember to take the business card of this individual and be prepared to leave an email address. The admission officer may need to contact the career center and the development office to obtain this information. Follow-up with an email after one week of your campus visit, if you haven’t been contacted.
The sixth stanza: American higher education may need an upgrade to go global
In yet another case for Obviousman, it should go without saying that American education is vastly more international today than at any point in the history of this nation. More American citizens study abroad. More foreign students enroll at American institutions–and at every level from the certificate programs of community colleges to the doctoral programs of premier research universities. More faculty conduct research with colleagues abroad, and most fields of study now have international professional associations. (For example, I am an occasional member of a rarified group called The International Visual Sociology Association.) With the deep disturbance of yugen, the latest trend in the globalization of American education is the international branch campus.
Global efforts are not fiscally equal. There are international ventures that cost an institution money, as when a college converts “soft” scholarships into hard currency to support undergraduate study abroad (think, with smiles: Drew University). Other global connections are institutionally neutral. Faculty sabbaticals overseas funded, for example, by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts fall in this group. Again from an institutional perspective, there are two global money-makers: international students and international branch campuses. Neither source of the overseas money now flowing into US institutions of higher education is stable.
First are the wealthy international parents eager at this moment for their children to have an American education. Two years from now, for still non-existent reasons, those parents may be unwilling to send their children back to America to study. Domestic pressures may reduce the emigration of students, or another destination may become more attractive. (Australia is becoming more attractive to East Asian families.) Meanwhile, international students are a lucrative proposition for American schools.
Non-resident aliens are seldom eligible for financial aid. A private university like NYU can earn 200 million dollars per annum from the tuition of its non-resident alien undergraduates and graduate students. In a tough economy, it’s easy for a college or university to become dependent on the money that international students pay in full tuition.
As a pragmatic parent, you can determine the international tuition dollars at any accredited college or university. (Other income, such as housing for internationals, is trickier to measure.) The College Board provides the total number of students and the percent of non-resident aliens attending an institution, free of charge. Multiply the percent non-resident by the total number to determine the number of international students. Find the cost of tuition–also on the College Board site. Multiply number of international students by cost of tuition, and, voila, you obtain my estimate for NYU or the school of your choice.
Second, there are the branch campuses sprouting across the globe. Today, a student in Qatar can enroll at local campuses of Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown or Weill Medical College of Cornell. (The Cornell connection saddens me, as this is my doctoral alma mater.) Northwestern University is in Abu Dhabi, and NYU will be there this year. In Dubai, students can chose between Rochester Institute of Technology and Michigan State, my husband’s undergraduate institution. Globe-trotting Georgia Tech has outposts in China, France, Italy, Singapore and South Africa, with a campus in India opening soon. This account is far from exhaustive, and the list of international branch campuses will continue to grow as long as the money continues to flow.
It is a safe bet that international branch campuses are operating in the black. Material costs are subsidized, and operating costs are low. Without regional accrediting bodies or guidelines from The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), overseas branches function in an unregulated environment. Settings like Dubai Knowledge Village are, literally, educational free trade zones. The preponderance of temporary and part-time appointments suppresses faculty salaries and benefits. Student services are minimal; professional staff are few.
As long as costs are kept low and while tuition and enrollment at its international branch campus are high, the main US institution of higher education will benefit from the windfalls. Should the international branch fail–for reasons of geopolitics, mismanagement or another normal accident–the institution will stand to lose the unsecured portion of its investment. Obviously, the inflow of overseas money to the main institution will dry up.
A university will identify international branches, if any, in its publicity. The viewbook is a good place to begin. However, you cannot glean sufficient data to calculate the profitability of a branch, and a private institution will not share proprietary information. My guess is that the margins vary, being higher, for example, in the UAE than France. Last time I checked, there were no educational free trade zones in Western Europe.
Finally, or rather, initially, there may be substantial inducements for American universities to open outposts in far-flung locations. In one well-publicized case, the government of Abu Dhabi donated 50 million dollars to NYU before negotiating its branch campus. In the financial short term, Auburn University, with those 111 defense contracts, could do better approaching Omar Saif Ghobash, the billionaire who brokered the NYU deal and who is the current UAE ambassador to Russia. In his new post, Ghobash is backing Russian mega-corporation Gazprom in its bid to grab ‘distressed’ oil assets. Meanwhile, NYU President John Sexton anticipates the flow of students and faculty between New York and Abu Dhabi.
International “earnest money,” especially Arab earnest money, is the latest source of external funding for American colleges and universities. Like tuition from non-resident aliens and windfalls from branches abroad, international donations are inherently unstable. As more yugen, those one-time inducements entangle top administrators like John Sexton in webs of reciprocity that will be opaque, in the beginning, to almost everyone outside the funding culture. (When can we expect to see a Ghobash Center for Arabic Studies in Washington Square?)
Pragmatic parents can review donations to the prospective colleges and universities of their children. In a quiet moment or by phone, ask either an admission officer or a development officer for a copy of this year’s list of donors. The list usually appears in small print, organized by dollar amount, at the back of an annual alumni publication. If you approach the admission officer, expect to wait a few days for the information to filter down. Follow up with a phone call, if needed.
Once you have the list, check for contributions from foreign governments and overseas foundations–or, for that matter, any donor of concern to you. Monies passed through US foundations and anonymous donations cannot be tracked. The good news is that deep sleuthing should not be necessary. The UAE donation to NYU was a transparent transaction, covered in The New York Times.
The seventh stanza: wrestling with one God or another
Stephen Prothero, the author of the article bearing this title and of the book God is Not One (2010), is an interesting person. This is not to say that I like or agree with him. Not knowing the man personally, I don’t like or dislike him. Not being a scholar of religion, I won’t take a public stand for or against his arguments. However, as a woman concerned with excellence in higher education, I find Prothero interesting, and, as any faculty member will tell you, interesting is an educational asset.
In a time of budget cuts, program closings, hiring freezes, hate crimes, influence peddling and dubious overseas ventures, Americans need to return to what is urgent and profound in higher education: to the yugen of learning. And, used here, I mean yugen in its early Chinese and later American connotations, as that which is profound. Prothero challenges us and our undergraduates to ponder the big mysteries: the scope of the universe, the origins of life, the nature of justice, the reality of God. For Prothero, as for Snyder and Whalen, it is only in wrestling with the big mysteries that we grow into our full humanity.
He observes, “Of course we are born human beings, but only in the most trivial sense. Often our humanity lies ahead of us–an achievement rather than an inheritance, and a far-from-trivial achievement at that.”
Could there be a more sublime purpose for higher education than the achievement of full humanity? On your next campus visit–between watching out for symptoms of economic decline–look also for signs of intellectual vitality. Only a vital academic community will encourage your son or daughter to emerge into mindful adulthood. Even in this time of retrenchment, havens of profound learning await the parent and the child who make the effort to reach them.
cheers to good college visiting,
Campus Notes 