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By Viet Thanh Nguyen Viet Thanh Nguyen
How the pursuit of money and status overtook the missions of knowledge and truth.
The Trojan Shrine at the University of Southern California is a symbol of its ideals. Can the school realize them? (Mario Anzuoni/Reuters)
The
scandal around rich people buying college admissions for their
underqualified children is disgusting and disheartening for everyone,
but especially for those of us who teach and study at universities. My
own University of Southern California is described as the “epicenter”
of a crisis involving bribes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While it is tempting to say that the scandal involves only nefarious
individuals, and that we can address the problem with a fine tuning of
the bureaucracy, the problem is much deeper. There is an illness in
higher education, and its name is corruption.
Corruption,
in its most effective version, is an open secret — the “old boys’
club,” the “smoke-filled room” or the “network.” We accept that this is
the way things are, until a brazenly illegal act of corruption exposes
the status quo of legalized corruption. This is what has happened with
the bribery scandal, which is only a symptom of an illness that has
grown deeper and more pervasive over the past few decades in academia.
Treating the symptom without understanding the illness will cure
nothing.
Universities are noble enterprises
built on the basis of the pursuit of truth and knowledge. But like all
of our most noble enterprises, universities can be undermined by our own
weaknesses, our susceptibility to temptation. In this case, the
temptation comes from too much money and its attendant pathologies:
greed, power, status and celebrity. I am proud to be a professor at USC,
where the faculty and students are impressive, competitive and
ambitious — and where the school has made efforts to work with the local
community, providing admissions for neighborhood students and
committing to socioeconomic diversity among its students. But USC is
also close to Hollywood and the celebrity culture captured by one of the
students, an Instagram “influencer” with 1.3 million followers,
ensnared by the Varsity Blues scandal. (She had said online that she
found school boring and looked forward only to the football games and
the parties, suggesting that to her and other elite students,
universities are merely finishing schools and vanity projects.)
And
USC suffers from the same desire to climb the rankings as other
schools, which drives it to raise billions in a fundraising arms race.
The rankings also reward “selectivity,” which is why schools try to gain
as many applicants as possible, knowing that they will reject most. No
wonder parents are desperate enough about the admissions system to reach
for various forms of corruption: coaching (expensive), bribery (even
more expensive, and obviously illegal), and the ultimate power play, the
massive donation (the priciest, the most visible, the most lauded and
therefore the most acceptable form of corruption).
In
this way, universities are no different from those of us who obsess
over our personal rankings: How many Twitter followers we have, how many
views on YouTube and, in this case, the prestige of our degrees. The
mania about status is a marker of our new Gilded Age, one based on a
star system. In this winner-take-all society, stars are overpaid and the
rest are underpaid. Billionaires are the celebrities, the millionaires
service the billionaires, the middle class shrinks and desperately tries
to retain its status and the poor watch with ever increasing resentment
at the spectacle of the rich rewarding the rich. The parents who bribed
the coaches understand this and want every possible edge for their
children. Even the parents who follow the official process increasingly
think of themselves and their children as consumers.
Relegating
the noble goals of knowledge and truth to a secondary status after the
pursuit of money and consumption has led to the university’s corruption.
Universities protest that they do believe in higher values. But who is
naive enough to believe that a school cares more for these than for the
football team, when the football coach
is the highest-paid employee of the university (as is the case at
Stanford, University of California at Los Angeles and the University of
Texas at Austin, three of the universities involved in the admissions
scandal)? Likewise, who believes that the billionaire donor who gives
hundreds of millions to name a building or a school for himself really
cares more for the educational mission than for his vanity?
This
is why corruption in America’s university system cannot be addressed
purely by reform (although that would be a start). The system is shaped
by outside influences like celebrity, power, money and spectacular
entertainment. So what can administrators, and all those whose lives
intersect with higher education, do to meaningfully change their schools
in the new Gilded Age? Here are a few paths:
First,
acknowledge that the problem of corruption even exists. Adding more
layers of bureaucracy with ethics and compliance officers is merely
playing whack-a-mole. The patient will not be cured until the patient
admits to the illness that can be treated. This extends from university
presidents to boards of trustees to each and every one of us who
benefits in some way from the corruption, including administrators,
full-time faculty, alumni and students.
Second,
increase transparency and expand democratic governance, because
corruption grows in darkness and secrecy. This would mean reforming
boards of trustees so that they are not composed purely of the corporate
class of billionaires and millionaires. Including faculty, students,
staff and community members as trustees would help to ensure that
fiduciary and administrative responsibilities are more democratic. As
for university management, faculty, staff and students are often
sidelined in favor of a professional, nonacademic class of bureaucrats.
But the excluded people are the heart of the university, and they need
to serve on committees, have oversight responsibilities and help
determine university policy and direction through empowered academic
senates (at my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley,
undergraduates can serve on university administrative committees, and the UC system has a student regent
on its Board of Regents). When faculty, staff and students aren’t
allowed to serve, they feel powerless and have no incentive to do things
like report on corruption and abuse.
Third,
university presidents must take the lead in negotiating an arms treaty.
Universities are held hostage by magazine and other rankings, which
drives them to practices like artificially inflating the competitiveness
of their admissions systems. Universities should uniformly refuse to
participate. By giving the ranking systems information, universities aid
in their own commodification.
Fourth, star
donors should stop paying for gigantic edifices. Instead, they should
donate their money to scholarships for students in need. This will have
much more human impact, whereas everyone knows the edifices are, at
their foundation, about ego and reputation.
Fifth,
get big money out of college sports. The bribery scandal revolves
around minor sports, but major sports like football and basketball have
regularly led to various ethical collapses in the past few decades, like
the protection of football and the legacy of Joe Paterno over the lives
of children at Penn State, or the “epidemic of academic fraud”
involving athletes at more than a dozen universities.
Sports have a noble place at a school where the Greek ideal is to test
both body and mind. But big money has corrupted bodies and minds, too,
pressing unpaid players toward injury while denying them full access to
an education. This is where alumni and students are implicated. Too many
of them treat big money sports as a religion, enabling rot within the
university. “That rot,” sportswriter Dave Zirin tells me, “is expressed
most clearly in the taking in of billions of revenue for football and
basketball while predominantly black athletes are left holding an empty
bag.” The head coaches in the five major college athletic conferences
earn more than their schools spend on all athletic scholarships combined.
Sixth, taxpayers should agree to be taxed enough to benefit education at all levels, including higher education. Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges
in the 2017 school year was nearly $9 billion below its 2008 level,
after adjusting for inflation. Public universities have had to increase
tuition and pursue donors, leading to all the problems that elite
private universities have. If taxpayers are upset at seeing the rich buy
college seats, legally or illegally, they need to recognize that they
have abdicated their collective responsibility by not demanding greater
public support for a more equitable and just educational system. Falling
public support for higher education is a cost that is transferred to
students, who have reduced access to education, are burdened with
greater debt loads and are increasingly taught by poorly paid adjunct
(nonpermanent) faculty who make up more than 70 percent of college teachers.
Seventh,
students and parents should stop seeing themselves as consumers and
universities as brands with luxury amenities. Universities are spending
enormous amounts of money on ever more spectacular dorms, restaurants,
recreational centers and the like, responding to the marketplace of
consumption. Students walk away with huge debts that have financed these
luxuries, which have nothing to do with education. Universities should
do their part and stop providing these luxuries, even at the cost of not
attracting as many students. Parents and students who complain about
rising university costs should know that they are complicit when they
demand frills that have nothing to do with education.
Eighth,
reduce costs and pass the benefits to students. Presidents, the
managerial class and faculty stars are overpaid (I speak as one who has
entered this stratum in the past couple of years). The accelerating
costs of tuition are related to how universities have added layers of
management and pursued expensive faculty. What if — allow me this
fantasy — a university’s president, senior administrators and full
professors agreed to a 10 percent cut in salary, all of which would go
to fund scholarships for needy students? Perhaps such a powerful
symbolic move by the most rewarded stratum in a university is unlikely
in a capitalist marketplace. And yet we have the example of Gregory
Fenves, who turned down a $1 million salary to become president of UT
Austin, accepting $750,000
instead. That is still a great deal of money. But we live in a
capitalist system where we value getting the most money we can, rather
than being happy with enough money. That, too, is a kind of corruption
we pass on to students, who are smart enough to watch what we do and not
just listen to what we say. And we — the adults — have not done enough.
Finally,
after admitting to corruption, university leadership should take the
lead and do what the faculty have demanded for years: Commit
universities, first and foremost, above money, reputation or ranking, to
their noble mission, the light of which still remains, the pursuit of
truth and knowledge. We cannot be resigned to less.
Source: The Washington Post
