I just read Jon Meacham’s piece,

What Colleges Will Teach in 2025

America must resolve the conflict between knowledge and  know-how

Read more: http://nation.time.com/2013/09/26/the-class-of-2025/#ixzz2huhvoTUz

He is a well known figure and the author of several books.  He writes about how little graduates learn, how little students work, and how, in spite of all this, they think they are well-educated.  And then he seems to blame all this on some kind of theoretical conflict in education.  Can’t he tell that students are being offered a deal that is too good to be true?  Students are told, “Don’t worry about hard work; you’ve learned – just look at the semester reports I send you (grades)” but then they don’t get the education they paid for – though many get the one they think they want.

Wouldn’t  Jon Meacham laugh if I told him to put his money in an investment that will give him a much greater return than ever dreamed of before (the analog to believing that he can learn as well as previous generations with only half the work) and that he will know that his investment is growing because he will get a bi-annual report showing how much he made (the equivalent of grades) and that I (the professor) would be the person assessing how much he was making?  Of course he would laugh.  He might even warn the authorities about me.

So why do such an astute observers not ask, “Is there an integrity issue here?”  Obviously, I’m not sure but I have some guesses.  I think it is hard to internalize just how bad and corrupt the educational part of higher education can be.  But if people like Mr. Meacham would apply their knowledge of history and people to higher education, I think they would immediately see that when there are rewards to bad behavior, penalties to good behavior, and no accountability, the crooked will rise to the top.  I am sure Mr. Meacham and others know that, but because of their own experience they have an emotional and cognitive problem believing that it could really be that bad – maybe some bad apples, they think, but not permeated throughout the system.

As one of my friends likes to say, “There is a cancer in higher education and it is metastisizing”.  Clark Kerr and David Riesman saw it, and, boy has it metastisized since then.

By the way, I did make a comment on Mr. Meacham’s piece.  Here it is.

I am a former professor who taught at an “elite” school. The problem in higher education is not “who needs to know what?”. The problem is integrity. It was spotted in 1980 by two keen minds, Clark Kerr and David Riesman. Clark Kerr wrote that the “..shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction …in higher education..” Riesman wrote that “…advantage can still be taken of [students] by unscrupulous instructors and institutions…”

Until the integrity problem is solved, no amount of discussion about “who should learn what” will help. The professors are the ones who know what real learning is. Until they are held responsible, not much will improve.

Most people would be shocked to see how far administrators and professors feel they can go in following their own interests. Anyone interested in changing higher ed needs to understand this. My article A Tale Out of School – A Case Study in Higher Education on my blog www.inside-higher-ed.com documents what happens. It demonstrates how Riesman and Kerr’s warning now play out in practice.