Along Washtenaw Avenue, college life seems immune to the passage of time, especially during pledge week.
A phalanx of fraternity and sorority houses lines the street, which runs from the University of Michigan campus into the town of Ann Arbor. On a crisp autumn evening, young sorority women host tea parties on their front porches, welcoming new members as they always have. Clusters of young men toss footballs across neighboring lawns, as their fathers did before them.
This tranquil scene, however, is deceiving. The fact is that for two decades, the nation`s campuses have been buffeted by winds of change. As a result, colleges and universities have tacked a host of new responsibilities onto their traditional function of bringing together students and professors in the classroom. The experiences of most undergraduates today are different from those of their parents, a contrast especially evident here.
The University of Michigan is a state school, deeply rooted in the American heartland. But it attracts professors from across the nation, the faculties of most departments ranking in quality with their Ivy League counterparts. Its 35,000 students are drawn from throughout the country. Top high school students choose to enroll here even after gaining admission to prestigious private colleges.
These demographics make Michigan less parochial and more representative of cutting-edge trends in the academic world than most state universities.
On a visit to the alma mater, older alumni still find recognizable landmarks along fraternity-house row. For the most part, though, there is little in contemporary campus life that reflects their student days.
Even within the university hierarchy, some wonder if the place has changed for the better. One of them is James Duderstadt, the 47-year-old president of the university, who thinks it is time to reinvent American higher education.
”All of society`s problems have been dumped on the nation`s universities,” says Duderstadt, reflecting in his office recently on the state of academia. ”We`re going to have to learn to say no to those extracurricular assignments and focus again on our primary role, which ought to be educating young people.”
Actually, Duderstadt says, he and his colleagues are in a foot race with the public to see who will be the first to say no. It`s open season on the universities, he says, with a growing number of critics producing unflattering portraits of life on the nation`s campuses. At least one, the University of Chicago`s Allan Bloom, struck such a responsive cord with his 1987 book,
”Closing of the American Mind,” that brisk sales put it on the best-seller lists.
Duderstadt notes that his fellow academics have been quick to dismiss Bloom`s book and similar popular studies, such as Charles Sykes` ”ProfScam,” which alleges that, while tuitions skyrocket, professors desert the classroom for the foundation-grant high life. Or Roger Kimball`s ”Tenured Radicals,”
which accuses younger faculty of politicizing the campuses.
In the midst of all this, Duderstadt recently felt compelled to go on record with the view that the academic world is making a mistake in not listening to its critics.
By training, Duderstadt is an electrical engineer, educated at Yale and the California Institute of Technology. He joined Michigan`s faculty in 1969, and rose to become dean of the college of engineering. When he became Michigan`s president two years ago, he brought to the office a scientist`s assumption that the first step toward solving a problem is squarely facing the facts.
”The truth is that we could no longer ignore our critics even if we wanted to; they will not go away,” Duderstadt told his faculty at its first meeting this semester. ”Rather, we should pay attention to what they say, since what they all appear to have in common is a question of our commitment to fundamental academic values.”
That candor sets Duderstadt apart from other college presidents, few of whom have confronted the issue of growing public frustration with the cost and quality of higher education.
Still, on one issue at least, he had a bit of coaching. Last year, a federal judge scolded the University of Michigan`s administration, reminding it of its obligation to defend, not attack, the most basic of academic values: the freedom of speech.
The university received that judicial lecture because of its overzealous response to a series of racial incidents on campus. Actually, Michigan`s problems in the area of race relations were mild in comparison to other schools, where there have been physical confrontations between black and white students. Here it was chiefly a war of words: anonymous fliers and graffiti featuring racial slurs, which prompted the administration to adopt a policy that forbade students from ”stigmatizing or victimizing” any member of the campus community.
Indeed, Duderstadt`s colleagues drew those regulations so broadly that the American Civil Liberties Union took the university to court, arguing that the policy not only violated the 1st Admendment but also prohibited the free flow of ideas upon which the life of the mind depends. U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn agreed, noting that the university had even threatened to punish some students for opinions expressed in classroom discussions.
”There is no evidence in the record that anyone at the university ever seriously attempted to reconcile their efforts to combat discrimination with the requirements of the 1st Amendment,” Cohn observed in striking down the university`s regulations.
”The apparent willingness to dilute the values of free speech is ironic in light of the university`s previous statements of policy on this matter.”
In hindsight, Duderstadt says, the affair demonstrates the intellectual quicksand into which universities can stumble when trying to be all things to all people.
The original problem, he says, is a real one. Universities are witnessing expressions of racism that have gone out of style elsewhere, reinforcing the isolation black students often feel on many campuses. Initially, Michigan`s attempt to deal with the issue was a reasonable one, Duderstadt argues.
His predecessor (when the free-speech dispute began, Duderstadt was provost, the university`s second-in-command) drew up a proposal designed to protect minority students from racial harassment. The original draft recognized that the 1st Amendment guarantee of free speech covers a lot of territory, but ends just this side of giving someone the right to cry ”fire” in a crowded theater.
Initially, the regulations were intended to eliminate verbal insults of students that might escalate into physical intimidation or otherwise interfere with a student`s right to the hassle-free pursuit of an education.
”But that draft proposal was quickly modified by special-interest groups,” Duderstadt recalls. ”People with their own private agendas shaped the policy`s implementation.”
There were protest marches. Jesse Jackson showed up on campus, trailed by reporters and cameramen. Suddenly all sorts of groups began demanding that their grievances, too, be addressed. Thus besieged, the administration allowed an academic discussion to be turned into a media circus. Under the TV lights` glare, administrators even overlooked the fact that they had faculty members on campus who study such issues for a living.
Lee Bollinger, dean of the Michigan law school, says he was never asked to review the final policy, even though he`d written a textbook on 1st Amendment law. Instead, the university`s office of affirmative action issued the guidelines, alerting students that certain kinds of conduct were no longer permitted on campus. Included in conduct outlawed by the new regulations:
”You laugh at a joke about someone in your class who stutters.”
Looking back, Duderstadt now agrees with Judge Cohn that when a university gets to the point of regulating laughter, it is nearing
intellectual bankruptcy.
”The affirmative action office put out regulations that were clearly unconstitutional,” Duderstadt says. ”The problem is that this
(administration) building sees not the vast majority of students, but an activist minority.”
That myopia isn`t confined to Fleming Hall, where Duderstadt has his office. A tour of the Michigan campus can leave a visitor with the feeling that the average student-the member of the silent majority of which Duderstadt speaks-has become the ”invisible man” of the university community.
Twenty-five years ago, even at universities as large as Michigan, there was some sense of human scale. Since then, on most campuses, classes have since taken a quantum leap in size. Some of Michigan`s lecture halls, with their great curving rows of seats rising sharply from distant podiums, look like ancient Greek amphitheaters moved indoors.
Especially in their first two years, undergraduates are herded into these auditoriums, 500 or 600 at a time, to be addressed largely by graduate students. Other courses are taught by ”lecturers”-a new professorial proletariat paid minimum academic wages to serve as stand-ins for tenured faculty members who are less and less involved in teaching.
Traditionally, professors have enjoyed relatively light teaching loads
(compared with elementary and high school teachers) on the premise that they are also scholars who need free time for research. Recently, the balance between scholarship and teaching has tipped decidedly in the direction of the former. More and more professors are serving as consultants to business and government, with less time available for appearances in the classroom. Hotshot young faculty members go from one research grant to another; some are absent from campus every third year, reports Elizabeth Douvan, a psychology professor.
”Ten years ago, the average teaching load here was three courses a term,” says Bert Hornback, a senior professor in the English department.
”Now it`s two. My generation asked for `released time` to do research, sure. But we felt guilty about being away from our students. Now younger faculty look at teaching as something nasty and to be avoided.”
Professors at a distance
Based on extensive interviews with current students, faculty members and administrators, a visitor to Ann Arbor comes away with a troubling picture of life on the American campus today.
Undergraduates take it for granted that they and their professors inhabit different worlds. Students move in and out of the massive lecture halls, hardly daring to approach those tiny figures at distant lecterns. Unlike earlier generations of students, this one no longer thinks of professors as people with whom to share ideas and feelings. Instead, students are hyperconscious of the body English with which their teachers say: ”Stop, come no closer.”
Consider the case of the faculty member whom students here consider an excellent teacher. It`s easy to see how he got that reputation: A dynamic lecturer, he bounds around the room, peppering students with a mesmerizing barrage of questions and quips. The show stops, though, when the bell rings. His syllabus notes that, when students have questions, they are to send him a computer message instead of knocking on his office door.
”Sure, you can get a good education here, but it doesn`t come from contact with the faculty,” says Brian Meadors, a senior nuclear-engineering major from Ft. Smith, Ark. ”It`s very competitive to get into Michigan, and the quality of the student body provides a level of excellence on campus that`s bound to rub off.”
Students and professors are also divided by a generational gap, more cultural than chronological. The faculty`s middle ranks are populated by men and women who were students in the 1960s and `70s. Many remain deeply committed to the great social causes of that era: civil rights, the women`s and gay-liberation movements. The country`s political turn to the Right has only reinforced their resolve to keep the faith on campus.
To many younger ears, though, those old war cries can seem strident. Mitch Deskings, a junior English major from Armada, Mich., observes that in his experience professors sometimes try to get their political messages across by issuing demands for linguistic purity.
”Like you`ll happen to say `he` and the teacher will say: `Of course you can use any pronoun you wish, but I prefer to use non-sexist terms,`
” Deskings says. ”Pretty quick you learn to cover yourself with the all-purpose qualifier: `He, she, it.”`
Of course, such ideological skirmishes don`t have much to do with education, president Duderstadt notes.
”Walking around campus,” he says, ”I get the clear feeling that 90 percent of our students are completely detached from the political issues that produce all the noise around here.”
He would like to see the university again become a place where students and faculty exchange ideas, not political salvos. The time has come, he argues, to return the teaching of undergraduates to the top of the
university`s agenda.
Indeed, as he takes the public pulse, he believes the move is already overdue. He only wishes, he says, that more faculty members shared his sense of urgency.
”Confidence in the nation`s universities has never been lower,” he says. ”The problem is that, on campus, change is a four-letter word.”
