September 14, 2004
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September 13, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
What Your College President Didn’t Tell You
By JOHN M. McCARDELL Jr.
eaufort, S.C. — Much has been made in recent years of the unwillingness among college and university presidents to venture above the parapet and challenge some of the shibboleths of higher education. By this I do not mean advocacy of political positions. Presidents who would keep their campuses places where ideas are in fact freely exchanged ought to avoid signing public letters or endorsing candidates, tempting as it may be.
No, I mean something else. I retired in June as president of Middlebury College in Vermont, but during my 13-year tenure I was as guilty as any of my colleagues of failing to take bold positions on public matters that merit serious debate. Now, a less vulnerable member of the faculty once more, I dare to unburden myself of a few observations. As the new school year begins, there are many things I suspect university presidents would like to say to their various constituencies but dare not.
To faculties and governing boards: tenure is a great solution to the problems of the 1940′s, when the faculty was mostly male and academic freedom was at genuine risk. Why must institutions make a judgment that has lifetime consequences after a mere six or seven years? Publication may take longer in some fields than in others, and familial obligations frequently interrupt careers. Why not a system of contracts of varying length, including lifetime for the most valuable colleagues, that acknowledges the realities of academic life in the 21st century?
Moreover, when most tenure documents were originally adopted, faculty members had little protection. Today, almost every negative tenure decision is appealed. Appeals not upheld internally are taken to court. Few if any of these appeals have as their basis a denial of academic freedom.
To current and prospective parents (and editors of magazines that profit by the American public’s fascination with rankings): student/faculty ratio is overrated as a measure of quality. Can any faculty member persuasively argue that a class of eight or nine students is qualitatively superior to a class of 10 or 11? How many classes at any institution, large or small, are the actual size of the celebrated ratio? (Answer: very few.)
More meaningful statistics, for those seeking to measure quality of education in terms of faculty accessibility, are average class size, average instructional load, percentage of faculty members who are full-time, and how frequently professors hold office hours or take their meals in student dining halls. And not all subjects are best learned around a seminar table. The large lecture, well designed and delivered, can, in fact, be a superior way to learn certain subjects.
To lawmakers: the 21-year-old drinking age is bad social policy and terrible law. It is astonishing that college students have thus far acquiesced in so egregious an abridgment of the age of majority. Unfortunately, this acquiescence has taken the form of binge drinking. Campuses have become, depending on the enthusiasm of local law enforcement, either arms of the law or havens from the law.
Neither state is desirable. State legislators, many of whom will admit the law is bad, are held hostage by the denial of federal highway funds if they reduce the drinking age. Our latter-day prohibitionists have driven drinking behind closed doors and underground. This is the hard lesson of prohibition that each generation must relearn. No college president will say that drinking has become less of a problem in the years since the age was raised. Would we expect a student who has been denied access to oil paint to graduate with an ability to paint a portrait in oil? Colleges should be given the chance to educate students, who in all other respects are adults, in the appropriate use of alcohol, within campus boundaries and out in the open.
And please – hold your fire about drunken driving. I am a charter member of Presidents Against Drunk Driving. This has nothing to do with drunken driving. If it did, we’d raise the driving age to 21. That would surely solve the problem.
I hope the public, and the higher education community, will be willing to engage these issues seriously and respectfully. My head is now well above the parapet. Gaudeamus igitur!
John M. McCardell Jr. is college professor and president emeritus of Middlebury College.
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September 13, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Legacy of Legacies
By JEROME KARABEL
erkeley, Calif. — Admissions policy is an especially popular topic on campus this time of year. As new students arrive, they inevitably ask one another the same questions: Where did you apply? Did you get in anywhere else? Why did you decide to come here?
They are personal questions, of course, often asked more out of courtesy than curiosity, but their answers reveal a story about not only America’s system of higher education, but also America’s ideals.
President Bush appealed to these ideals last month when he acknowledged that while he was the beneficiary of a so-called legacy preference (that is, he was admitted to Yale in part because other members of his family had gone there), he believed that admission to college “ought to be based on merit.”
It is an admirable goal. Yet the persistence of legacy preferences may not be fully appreciated by either Mr. Bush or his opponent,
John Kerry, who has also called for their abolition – and whose father also went to Yale. If America is to take advantage of this rare bipartisan opportunity to end this form of affirmative action for the privileged, it may be helpful to know the full story of legacy preferences in general and Mr. Bush’s in particular.
In the fall of 1963, George W. Bush was a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., facing the same dilemma confronting his 232 classmates: where to apply to college. He had never made the honor roll, and his verbal score on the SAT was a mediocre 566. Although popular among his classmates, he was neither an exceptional athlete nor did he possess any particularly outstanding extracurricular talents. Looking over his record, Andover’s dean of students suggested that the young Mr. Bush consider applying to schools other than Yale, the alma mater of his father and grandfather.
But unbeknownst to the dean and Mr. Bush, Yale had quietly changed its admissions policy toward alumni sons during the very months when his application was under consideration. As the number of applicants to Yale increased, the administration decided that it could no longer afford to treat all legacy applicants equally. Instead, it would differentiate among alumni sons, giving extra preference on the basis of the family’s contribution to Yale and its importance to American society.
As the son of a prominent Texas oilman then running for the United States Senate – and the grandson of a United States senator from Connecticut who had recently served as a member of the Yale Corporation – George W. Bush was no ordinary applicant. In April 1964, he was accepted to Yale – unlike 49 percent of all alumni sons who applied that year.
Less than two years later, in an abrupt change in policy, Yale’s new dean of admissions, R. Inslee Clark, presided over a radical reduction in legacy preference. By 1967, Mr. Clark’s second year in office, the proportion of alumni sons in the freshman class plummeted to 12 percent from 17 percent in the class of 1968, George W. Bush’s class.
The reaction of the alumni was swift and furious. By the end of 1966, the alumni were in open revolt, and Yale’s alumni board hastily formed a special committee to investigate the matter. In 1967, William F. Buckley, an alumnus then running an insurgent campaign for a seat on the Yale Corporation, declared that Yale had ceased to be the “kind of place where your family goes for generations” and had been transformed into an institution where “the son of an alumnus, who goes to a private preparatory school, now has less chance of getting in than some boy from P.S. 109 somewhere.”
In truth, Yale had not eliminated the legacy preference even under Mr. Clark. But the new dean had brought the admissions rate of legacy applicants closer to that of non-legacy applicants than at any point in Yale’s history. By 1970, Mr. Clark was gone, and by 1974 – just as a major fund-raising effort was beginning – the legacy preference was even stronger than when George W. Bush and John F. Kerry had applied more than a decade earlier.
Yale’s chief competitors, Harvard and Princeton, took due note of the turmoil created by this radical experiment, and neither ever tried an admissions policy remotely as meritocratic as Yale’s under Dean Clark. (Recently, both Harvard and Princeton have admitted legacy applicants at a rate more than triple that of non-legacy applicants.)
The consequences of the Yale episode are with us still, for the elite colleges drew from it the lesson that the costs of seriously encroaching on alumni privileges are simply too high. Because of the elite universities’ investment in the current system, change is unlikely to come from within. But President Bush’s denunciation of legacy preference may well have set in motion a public debate that will bring about the demise of this anachronistic policy.
A useful first step would be consideration of a bill introduced last fall by Senator Edward Kennedy that would require universities “to publish data on the racial and socioeconomic composition of legatees.” So, too, would a requirement that universities disclose the admission rate of legacies and non-legacies as a way of casting a spotlight on a policy that is, in the end, indefensible.
Such legislation may not end legacy preferences. But it would subject them to the public scrutiny befitting a democratic society – a scrutiny that could well be fatal.
Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Chosen: Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900 to Today.”
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