Yale does research magnificently and prepares graduates for the present upper class.
University of Missouri does research well and prepares graduates to work for Yale graduates in the present upper class.
Both schools are broken and by imitating them, Christian colleges are not always better. Google American university in the news and you will get the problem. If you are borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to be taught by part-time teachers or full time ideologues, you already know the problem.
Why repeat the obvious? Instead, let’s propose a solution.
Fire most administrators and “support” people. Give professors back their jobs.
College administration and support staff have grown, even at Christian colleges. Titles and salaries have swollen. Start by cutting (or raising) the pay of the President to one dollar more than the best paid professor. Pay no administrator or coach more than the President.
Make sure the total number of non-teaching administrators and staff is smaller than the total number of full time professors (not full time equivalent!). Make sure there are fewer deans, vice-presidents, and associate deans and associate vice-presidents in total than there are professors in the smallest departments.
Have professors do more of the work that they used to do mentoring students. Let students make their own fun. Make sure sports stop being a professional activity for a few. Time for the football coach to teach at least one real class a semester. In fact, all necessary support professionals should periodically teach or do research.
College is not, or should not, be merely business. Presidents should come from the professoriate.
Hire more full-time professors.
Professors actually work very hard at most schools. Many schools refuse to hire full time professors and make do on adjuncts. Ask your school: do any of your general education classes have a majority of teachers who are part time? Such colleges are balancing the budget (and bloated administrative costs) on the backs of your teachers and your education.
Try this experiment: go through the list of Vice-Presidents at your school. Google their accomplishments. Look up their pay on the “990” the school must release. If you are happy with the result, you have found a good school.
Get out of the housing business or allow a diversity of ethical perspectives in campus housing.
Can you choose a dorm that supports your values if you came to State U to earn a degree in engineering? The “co-curricular” staff will make sure that you have many options unless you agree with Pope Francis on sexual values even at many Catholic schools.
You will never be forced to share an apartment or bathroom with people you did not choose again. This is not preparing you for real life. It can be a good community experience, I value it, but only if you know what you are being taught. Students and parents: pay more attention to the goals and values of the resident advisors and co-curricular staff. See if the “student life” part of the school routinely mocks your ethics.
It is good to have your ethics challenged in the classroom and even over a beer and pizza in the dorm, but it is not good to have ideologues force you to adopt their perspective just to live on campus.
While we are at, let’s dissolve the massive central campus which can be isolated from the community. Research parks and small undergraduate institutions should be scattered around the area. No more insular bubbles for professors and grads. Let’s shoot for three to four thousand at most on a single campus.
Give generous release time for research. Allow peers to decide the value of the research.
A good college or university will allow genuine research to flourish. Allow peers to decide the value of that research and give professors time to do the work. They will be better teachers as a result.
In state schools, the faculty should reflect the community as much as possible: true diversity.
The faculty of a school in Texas does not think or vote much differently than the faculty in California. If you think this is because they “know the truth,” you do not understand the limits of specialized knowledge or the power of groupthink. We have developed an international college professor culture that has strengths, but also all the dangers of intellectual homogeneity. We may not colonize countries militarily much any more, but we practice moral, intellectual, and cultural colonization all the time in the educational world.
To earn a doctorate, a person becomes an expert in a very limited area, and that specialized knowledge is a great good for humanity, but it does not imply any particular savvy in other areas or an ability to follow reasoning in areas outside the discipline.
Traditional ethics, Christian ethics, do not even get a place at the table. This is not because faculty must be purged: give the faculty freedom to assert that gender is or is not a social construct. Purge the campus of noxious administrative codes that privilege leftist ethical theories at the expense of any other point of view.
Support free speech, even transgressive speech. Allow the argument to go where it goes.
College is about intellectual exploration and forming citizens for a Republic that can reason well. We need intellectual tough leadership for the hard times that are always ahead.
Just as Christian colleges should encourage intellectual dissent in an argument, all schools should allow calm and reasoned discourse on any topic. Nobody gets to end the argument by shouting down the opposition . . . even on distasteful topics. College is for becoming a hardy grownup, not a play date to produce self-esteem.
Cut the true cost of education and eliminate the tuition discount.
Many schools do not have funds to give a scholarship, so they discount their own tuition to “award” a student with a price cut. Why play this game where the real price is different for almost every applicant? People like thinking they have earned something. One of my own children even received an award letter from a state school congratulating them on their winning the ability to borrow one hundred thousand dollars in student loan debt.
Let’s tell parents what the school really budgets per student and charge that amount. Scholarships should come from funds backed up by the endowments or gifts. No more complex formulas for mysterious financial aid so parents have a hard time comparing prices.
American universities do many things well, but they need to avoid being four year indoctrination resorts that leave students deeply in debt. They need to stop paying people with degrees in university administration more than people with degrees in the area students came to study. We need to value intellectual inquiry over safety.
I am working with a team of teachers at The Saint Constantine School to put these ideas in practice here in Houston.
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