Inside American Education Read Online Free PDF Page A

costs are enormous. This self-governance covers many things and not all of them are bad, by any means. At the core of its meaning is the idea that only scholars are competent to judge scholarship within their respective fields. This is undoubtedly true where those fields are genuine disciplines—structures of intellectual principles—such as mathematics or chemistry, rather than mish-mashes of subject matter, spiced with ideology and activism, like too many “interdisciplinary” ethnic, peace, feminist, or other “studies.” However, the more fundamental division is not between various academic departments, but between policy-making in individual academic fields and college-wide or university-wide policy-making.
    That chemistry professors should control the curriculum in chemistry is one thing. That they should vote on whether the college or university should permit R.O.T.C., or invest its endowment according to financial or ideological criteria, are issues on which expertise in chemistry is not germane, much less decisive. Yet all sorts of institutional decisions have become—de facto, if not de jure —subject to faculty “self-governance.” In many cases, it is no longer self-governance, but the making of institutional policy decisions by professors who are insulated from accountability for the consequences. Administrators can at least be held accountable, in the sense that they can be removed as administrators, even if they still have tenure as faculty members.
    The present system of so-called faculty self-governance reduces the accountability of administrators, as well as faculty. College presidents, provosts, and deans are not without means of influencing faculty decisions, beginning with how issues are framed, decisions timed, and information selectively released. Yet the administrators can plead “faculty self-governance” when the trustees, the public, or the legislators are upset with some policy promoted by those administrators and voted on by the faculty. Unlike Robert Burns, professors often see academia as an island, enjoying a sort of extra-territoriality which permits it to offer sanctuary and which makes the calling of police to quell riots a kind of violation of something sacred. Unaccountability breeds unreality as well as irresponsibility.
    Accountability to the outside world must be maintained institutionally, for the sake of the internal sense of reality in academia itself. Otherwise, it is all too easy for academics to degenerate into self-indulgence at others’ expense, including indulgence in self-flattering illusions. Just as outside forces have been instrumental in occasionally bringing public schools back to some sense of reality, and to their mission of teaching academic skills, so outside influences have moderated some of the worst excesses of “political correctness” and extravagant spending in academia. Trustees, alumni, and legislators need to bring to bear the rights of those who are supporting the academic enterprise with their money, as well as the rights of the students for whom these schools exist.
    As in the public schools, the key to effective monitoring is some independent source of information. If trustees, alumni, or legislators know only what academic administrators tell them, then those controlling knowledge can nullify the power of those to whom they are formally accountable. The answer is not micro-management but independent information. The crucial role of information is well understood by academic administrators themselves, and is attested to by many embarrassing revelations, often with devastating consequences when academic dirty linen is aired in public and comes to the attention of legislators and lawyers.
    While a board of trustees cannot micro-manage a college or university, it can certainly equip itself with the institutional means of receiving different views from individual students and faculty members critical of existing policies and practices.Whether