Abelard to Apple: The Fate of American Colleges and Universities [Hardcover]

This is an interesting book which I would recommend to all those concerned with the opportunities and challenges of contemporary higher education. At the same time, I would argue that its central thesis is undermined by its foci, its examples and its overlooking of key issues.

The thesis is that we have a number of elite institutions in America which are capable of riding out any storm (intellectual or financial) because of their reputation and their resources. While these institutions will be affected by the changes around them, the changes do not pose a mortal threat. Princeton will survive.

Other institutions will not be so lucky. The schools in the middle, i.e., the schools which 80% of American students attend, will need to either change and adapt or die. That is because there is so much `disruptive' (the new favorite word) change on the scene or on the horizon that the middling schools will be swept away by it.

There is some truth to this. For example, the regional public institutions which enroll a vast number of students have had their budgets cut for the last forty years, as have their flagship counterparts. The flagships, however, have other options. They have expanded research; they have expanded fundraising; they have created research incubators and tech transfer offices and they have increased patent income. As their nationally-prominent athletic teams have succeeded, they have increased licensing income and television revenue. The bottom line is that they have created new revenue streams and moved, to varying degrees, toward privatization. The regional publics, by and large, do not have these options, so what are they to do?

What they do, very often, is cut costs by deleting programs and increasing the number of contingent faculty. They pursue practices that reflect desperation, as do many of the middling private colleges across the country.

Professor DeMillo's advice is to be nimble and follow a series of suggestions: Forget about who is above you; focus on what differentiates you; establish your own brand; don't romanticize your weaknesses; be open; balance faculty-centrism and student-centrism, use technology, cut costs in half, focus on your own measures of success and adopt the New Wisconsin Idea (which involves the utilization of the university on behalf of the community).

These suggestions are interesting in and of themselves and worthy of our attention. The institutions he uses as examples, however, are not really `middling' ones. He returns again and again, for example, to Arizona State and Michael Crow's efforts to redefine the 21st century public institution there. This is not a good example. ASU is not a middling institution and it has seen an uncommon growth in enrollments which has enabled it to expand programming to encompass a vast new array of fields in a vast new set of configurations. Few regional publics, e.g., have ASU's options or its leadership.

On the other hand, what is the University of Northern Arizona doing? Cal State-Dominguez Hills? Ohio State University-Lima? Professor DeMillo tells a number of very interesting stories in the course of the book (e.g., the response of a Korean university to the challenges posed by a society that dominates ship-building in a world of narrow, deep water ports); the implication is that the stories indicate the kind of nimbleness on which our middling universities should be capitalizing. The bottom line, I am afraid, is that these kinds of actions and that kind of thinking will be instructive for top 200 institutions seeking comparative advantages. The actual middling institutions have already done away with many of their science and language departments and are not positioned to be nimble. Simple survival is their current goal.

Several other issues: Professor DeMillo is a computer scientist and his goals and strategies tend to be technocratic. He seeks, e.g., ways to streamline general education courses, to, in effect, save large chunks of money by delivering them in other ways (obviating their need through prior AP work, doing them online, etc.). He does not appear to believe that their current marginalization is a significant problem. Those who hurry to become specialized, I would argue, radically reduce their ability to be nimble, since they exclude an array of established disciplines which offer content and methodology which can help ameliorate the limitations imposed by the specialist's blinders.

Professor DeMillo celebrates distinctiveness (appropriately) and urges institutions to, in effect, be their own best selves rather than mimics. I wholeheartedly agree. He then, however, compares Berkeley with Carnegie Mellon, notes that they are very different though they are ranked similarly, for various reasons, and says that they should not try to be like one another. Berkeley, he says, graduates 44% of its students, while CMU graduates 90%. That is fine; they have different missions.

I doubt that number and I don't think it's fine. The flagship publics will have lower graduation rates than the top privates, but 44% (a number common--or lower--at regional publics) is unacceptable. Professor DeMillo celebrates the importance of access, but does not seem at all bothered by the fact that many universities are graduating less than 30% of their students or that significant numbers of students are leaving school (with or without a diploma) with crippling debt and limited skills.

The bottom line is that the author's arguments, examples and foci strike me as disjunct, but the book is filled with ideas that are worthy of attention. The book gives us the relatively unique perspective of an engineer. That perspective involves a host of issues, approaches and anecdotes that those of us in the liberal arts disciplines are likely to overlook. At the same time, the book appears to be blasé with regard to the problems and challenges that continually arise in discussions of higher education by commentators whose focus is the liberal arts. For many of us, for example, "branding" is not the goal; it is the problem--a corporatist norm that evades what I would call "signature"--the curriculum and ethos that constitutes distinctiveness. To some degree this is a question of semantics, but technocratic solutions often overlook academic ones. We have, in many cases, created institutions for consumers rather than for students and the results--en masse--are not always encouraging.

I learned from this book, so in the end I'm glad I read it. Moreover, it is an interesting book to place into conversation with two other books I've reviewed here, Benjamin Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty" and Martha Nussbaum's "Not for Profit."

The author, Richard DeMillo, offers a number of sensible points about the state of higher education in the U.S. (and around the world). In particular, I like his critique of the "factory system" that so many universities have fallen into, essentially a Procrustean bed whereby every subject or topic is neatly stretched or cut to fit a set number of credit hours in an academic term of a specified length (as if in real life that's how we learn anything). Looking to a number of innovative institutions and programs, the book suggests several ways that universities can become, as they need to be, more nimble, more flexible, more adaptable, and more responsive to the needs of the future.

But the book has a few blind spots that bothered me.

First, (and here's where Ginsberg's book comes in), DeMillo seems to suggest that top-down approaches from innovative college presidents are the answer to higher education's problems, and that faculty-centric institutions are somehow less likely to be centers of innovation. I found Ginsberg to be more persuasive; he argues that blunt top-down approaches are less likely to produce real innovation and creativity than a regime that privileges (and risks) real intellectual ferment from below. In my own almost 30-year experience in higher education I have seen too many grand top-down initiatives flounder while low-level faculty initiatives made a real difference (if often unrecognized) for students. And that makes sense as faculty are closer to students and have a stronger sense of what is wanted than does an administrator who is making an assessment based on abstract metrics and generalized reports.

Second, perhaps because DeMillo himself is a computer scientist, the book rarely if ever mentions the humanities or social sciences. In fact, there is one chapter that is so computer-centric that one almost needs a geek-speak glossary to understand it. This leads to the further matter that the book almost throughout seems to imply that the sole function of universities is to prepare students for jobs, and especially jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math. This is where Martha Nussbaum's book comes in -- even though in the end I wasn't keen on her book, I have to agree with her general thrust that a university ought not just train us to do a job, but also ought to teach us about how one should live, about what constitutes a good life. DeMillo seems not to care about that as long as we keep turning out engineers, even engineers who have never read Sophocles or Sartre and hence have no bead on the human beings they are going to serve.

And so I find it disturbing that DeMillo wonders why the U.S. doesn't have a "Ministry of Education." His desideratum implies that some central federal authority should have a hand in planning degrees and programs and funding and so on. For a small homogenous country like South Korea (which he holds up as an exemplar) this might make sense, but the United State's strength has always been a kind of libertarian diversity and innovation from below, not direction from atop.

And third, this book totally ignores the woeful preparation too many of our students receive in their K-12 experience (who are also learning in programs that are centrally directed by agents of the state -- given their failure at this level, why would higher ed wish to replicate it?). I realize this claim is likely to offend many hard working and earnest K-12 teachers, but the fact is, about two-thirds of the work I do with students at my college (admittedly a third-tier school) simply makes up for what they should have received but didn't, for whatever reason, in secondary school. Too many books and theories and presentations I've read and seen and heard about higher ed imagine that the most important variable in student learning is the program we provide our students, forgetting that the aptitude and dispositions our students bring to the classroom or their computer screen probably matter a lot more than anything else. If we don't fix K-12 education, everything DeMillo offers here is moot.

Which brings me to my coda: DeMillo invokes Abelard and spends a few pages discussing him, but seems to only partly understand the lesson we should take from him (DeMillo's point seems to be that Abelard represents the medieval university that was good in its day but to make progress we need to break out of the medieval structures that still dominate universities). The fact is, students flocked from across Europe to study under this brilliant teacher. That, and that only should be our goal in education: find brilliant teachers and get the students to them. It doesn't matter if it's in a traditional classroom or online or by remote TV. Students hungry to learn will seek out top teachers, and top teachers will continue to serve them, and those top teachers will figure out how to convey the knowledge and skills needed to build the future. The university's job is to connect those top teachers with those hungry students, and to develop the next generation of top teachers.

As a non-academic, unfamiliar with similar or related books, I found this book to be thoughtful, informative, and quite readable. The ideas and recommendations presented seemed plausible in general, as well as provocative and illuminating. It is notable, moreover, that a computer science professor cautions that the blithe introduction of technology is of little avail without broad, deliberative rethinking of specifically how the technology elements are to be deployed for actual prioritized benefits. "Technology does not drive this kind of (fundamental institutional) change; it enables it" (p. 276).

One of the key ideas promoted by DeMillo is the use of social networking for enriching interaction among students and faculty, as has been achieved through the use of blogs as learning spaces. Augmenting lectures with such spontaneous/discretionary two-way (web-enabled) communication exploits the advantages of ubiquitous polycentric dialogue over stationary monologue. The naturalness and convenience of using a course-oriented blog would seem compelling in the stimulation and enhancement of learning. "In a social network, giving help has as much value as getting help, and that gives it an advantage over a one-way flow of information, like a lecture" (p. 229).

The overriding message then is the urgent need for each Middle college or university to re-architect itself on an individualized basis, and not merely to fritter around the edges of the challenge in timid or disparate increments. Furthermore, a significant degree of self-styling, risk-taking, and experimentation must necessarily be admitted. And most importantly, "Serious institutional design needs to include getting costs under control" (p. 276).

Regarding the mention of "Ministry of Education" (p. 265), its inclusion is an expression of relief. The immediately following assertion is that we do not need any more enforcement of conformity or impediments to change. Moreover, the whole notion of an encompassing bureaucracy is antithetical to the spirit and message of the book. "Enduring reputations will be established by those universities that set their own agenda" (p. 37).

Virtually any book that one reads may yield an unforeseen if peripheral nugget that launches another intellectual thread. Here, the introduction of the concept of axiomatic design prompted me to order a book by its originator, Nam Suh, for reasons distinct from the scope of DeMillo's book. Here, it is intriguing that Suh applied his engineering design approach to redesign the higher education system in Korea, a human activity system, as opposed to an engineered physical system. So axiomatic design would appear to be a viable means to systematically undertake the re-architecting of a Middle college or university. "(Suh) had a palpable conviction that the axioms he is using to redesign higher education in Korea are the right ones" (p.259).

In my (non-academic) view, Abelard to Apple is a stimulating and insightful survey of the motivations, issues, and factors attendant to adapting America's institutions of higher learning for assured viability and improved performance in the immediate future. Here, someone needed to vigorously get that "ball in play" on a comprehensive basis, and it appears that Professor DeMillo has done precisely that.