sustaining the unsustainable, for four hundred years

OK, so Your Humble Blogger is almost certainly wildly off-base on this stuff, but I keep worrying at it, in my mind, and I thought I’d share. Because I am seriously perplexed, and have been for many years, about the economics of higher education.

Let’s begin, if you don’t mind, Gentle Readers, with an assumption I think we share: academic research of the sort done by college professors is a Good Thing. Not all of it, of course, but in the aggregate and in the abstract. I don’t, by the way, mean just the obviously useful stuff like medical research and whatnot; I mean studies into how influential Plato or Aristotle actually were among the early Muslim theologians or what second-language acquisition can tell us about comparative grammars. You know, the stuff that gets published in journals, read by other academics, and which has as its directly observable result only the existence of other journal articles. I could argue for that, I suppose, but for the sake of the next bit, let’s just take it as my position, yes? Good.

Now, society can arrange itself to provide such research in different ways. Up until quite recently, in Western Europe, the dominant measures were (a) a stigma against manual or commercial labor, (2) concentration of vast wealth in a few families, and (iii) cultural cachet of a sort given to the production of monographs and whatnot. That is, there were men (and eventually a few women) who did not have to produce revenue for themselves and their families, and they could get into the right clubs and dinner parties by doing this sort of research. It was a mutual admiration society, and for the sort of fellow who found that sort of thing suited him, it provided enough of a motivation to go on with. And, of course, such a person could settle in or near a University and tutor students for money without the taint that working in a shop would have.

At any rate, that sort of thing was exploded long ago. Now, colleges and universities will pay people to do research in return for undergraduate teaching. This is, in some sense, like a video store paying somebody to both work the counter and write a film-review blog. The film-review blog doesn’t provide direct revenue to the store, but it could boost the name-recognition of the store a bit, and it could provoke interest in films generally, which would be good for the business, and therefore for the store. And, to some extent, there are a few customers and situations where the extensive knowledge of the counter-worker would come in handy. On the whole, though, counter work and reviewing are totally different skills, and the customers only really require counter work.

So. Follow the money. Colleges and Universities get the money to pay for research from ... where, exactly? Partially from undergraduate tuition, although the tuition itself does not pay enough to cover the cost of the research. Partially from alumni donations. But the alumni, I have to think, are not donating so that the research we’re talking about can be done. I haven’t seen studies and surveys, but I have to think that most alums who donate are donating to support the undergraduate experience, to make available to more people the experience they had as undergraduates. I suppose some people must donate to their graduate departments, but that’s got to be few and far between, and I wouldn’t be surprised if alum giving in general were inversely correlated with advanced degrees.

Which leaves money from government and foundation grants and from individuals that donate specifically for such research, which just passes the question along another step. But leaving aside where that money comes from, is there enough of it to actually support the current set-up? Remember that unlike the video store clerk who is blogging only when there are no customers in the shop, (many) colleges are paying (many) professors to focus their attention on their research and only secondarily to teach.

My suspicion is that the system is essentially robbing from money that donors intend to be for undergraduate teaching to encourage research. Now, this isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing, and (I mentioned this above) I’m in favor of some of that research being done. But it doesn’t seem ... sustainable.

And in conversation recently I wound up talking about sustainability, and the way that it can be understood. Of course the economy of higher education could be sustained if everybody agreed to keep sustaining it. I mean, it’s not like it’s some sort of secret that professors have to publish or perish, and you could argue that any alum donating to their alma mater is doing so to sustain that set-up, consciously or no. It doesn’t have to be efficient to be last a good many generations, it doesn’t have to pay for itself if it can be paid for somewhere else, it doesn’t have to be sustainable to survive. But I wonder.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.