Since 2011, Tom Ross has been the president of the UNC system, but the UNC Board of Governors recently decided to replace him. (No one has been named yet; doing that will probably consume a lot of time and money.) On Tuesday, Ross delivered a talk in Raleigh that was full of the sort of complaining we have come to expect from college administrators, especially about insufficient funding. Today’s Pope Center piece by the John Locke Foundation’s Dan Way covers this discordant swan song.
“We hear constant calls to drive out costs and produce more product at less cost,” he stated. “There is far less talk about academic quality and excellence, and more about operational efficiency.”
Oh, but there is plenty of talk about academic quality. It isn’t very good for a wide swath of American college students, including those enrolled in UNC schools. Outcomes could be improved by insisting on higher standards and that wouldn’t cost more money. But trying to get the faculty to raise academic expectations and work more closely with students (especially in carefully reading and editing papers, as Professor Murray Sperber has written) is a very difficult task.
Ross also resorted to the old bromides about the “greater benefits” that students supposedly get from college — benefits that are apparently so great that citizens should just stop thinking about how much the system costs. What are those benefits? Ross listed: “students learning how to think for themselves, work collaboratively with others, to foster a value for lifelong learning, and to communicate more effectively.” Unfortunately, many students derive hardly any of those benefits from college. Often they don’t learn to think for themselves, but instead learn to repeat cliches; they don’t learn to work collaboratively, but to shun anyone who disagrees with them; they don’t become lifelong learners, but are content with the worldview they’ve been fed; they don’t communicate effectively, but need extra training once employed simply to write the most basic sorts of memos and letters. Besides, you can learn all of that at least as well if you aren’t in college.
Another standard complaint: the state isn’t spending enough on professors and risks faculty flight. But if a UNC system prof leaves for private industry or another school, there are many, many applicants eager to apply for the opening, and whatever great work that departed prof does elsewhere is not lost to the people of the state or the nation. Where a star prof happens to have a faculty appointment is immaterial to everyone except the school officials who either gain or lose in the prestige game.
I’m not sure that anyone else could have handled the job of UNC president much better, given the systemic inertia, but Ross was too steeped in the conventional, liberal thinking about higher education to do more than slightly tinker with its serious problems.