cc >> Sara Goldrick-Rab: Today's
talk is on unequal access in the missions of public flagships.
Harry is a professor in the philosophy department and an
affiliate of educational policy studies.
Most of his teaching is in political philosophy or applied
ethics, and he has a variety of research interests spanning
political philosophy, philosophy of education and educational
policy. We're very happy to have him
here today. Harry's going to talk for about
30 minutes or so at the most, and, unfortunately, his
scheduled discussant wasn't able to be here today so we're going
to have more time to engage Harry in provocative Q&A which
I'm sure that we can count on. So, it's all yours.
Harry Brighouse: So I was very touched by Cory Mason's
comment yesterday, and I should just sort of say he's not here
today, but he didn't effect what I do a little bit.
He effected what I do quite a lot when he bugged me about the
Wisconsin Idea. I'm going to tell you a story,
basically, and it's not a very nice story, really.
I agree with what they said, by the way.
Maybe I should just sit down. Unequal access is a fact and
it's a fact that won't go away absent really radical changes in
society, which I don't think are going to happen in the time
frame I have. I don't mean in the next half
hour. I mean the time frame that I
have to do anything myself. Maybe my children, maybe my
children's children, but I don't see any political will.
And because of that fact of unequal access and the facts
about the world around it which I think are bad facts, I think
we live in an unjustly unequal society, but I don't think
that's going to change much in the time frame I'm interested
in, 20, 30, 40 years. Because of that, we, in public
flagships, play a role we'd like to think we don't play.
This is Richard Vedder's that's a bunch of bull comment, and
I'll spend a bit of time explaining that.
And that role, the role that we actually play that we wouldn't
like to play, because we play it gives rise to a bunch of
obligations that we have that are stringent and they're a bit
more demanding than we'd like them to be.
I think Sheila talking about we don't want to change what we do.
I think because of what we actually do, we have some
obligations to change some of what we do.
I'm going to start by just introducing two principles.
These are principles of justice. Those of you who read Rawls all
recognize them. The first principle is what
Rawls calls the difference principle, or it's a version of
what Rawls calls the difference principle.
And it's a principle, really, when you think about it in
relation to education, about the development of human capital and
the uses to which human capital are ultimately put.
The second principle, a quality of opportunity principle, this
is the bunch of bull principle for Richard Vedder, is an ideal
about the distribution of the development of human capital.
What the second principle says is that the distribution of the
development of human capital should be independent of
people's social origins. Those smart, poor kids that she
was talking about should be getting just as high quality
experiences in schools and in colleges as similarly smart,
wealthy kids and maybe better experiences
than dumb, wealthy kids. I will just say, Richard, I do
agree with Richard. There is a distribution of human
capability among people. I know there are some people I
don't think can take a bunch of what we offer in higher
education or what we should offer in higher education.
I will say that coming from Britain, which I do, I always
think of that group as being much smaller than I think some
people do because we have Prince Charles.
[LAUGHTER] And the native capacities really
are visibly not very great, and yet he's a remarkably,
in fact, remarkably capable functioning person.
[LAUGHTER] A lot of educational
investment went in there. >> George Bush.
Well, yeah. But he didn't take advantage of
it. Prince Charles was actually
taking advantage of what was being given to him.
And has a sense of obligation too, which is maybe part of what
my story is. Okay, now I'm just going to ask,
it takes me a little while to get to the point here, but I
hope you'll bear with me. So those are the principles I
want you to be thinking about. Now, I'm just saying Rawls'
theory of justice, equality of opportunity, has absolute
priority over the priority principle.
It's so important to get quality of opportunity that you don't do
anything that might harm a quality of opportunity for the
sake of benefiting the least advantaged.
I think that that's a totally implausible view, that quality
of opportunity is that important, even in an ideal
world. I think it's also, even if it
were plausible in sort of ideal theory, it would be the wrong
way to think about things in our actual world in which both of
these principles are very poorly instantiated.
Okay, this is the only principles I'm going to show
you. The rest of it's going to be
more straightforward. So, here is a question: what do
universities do? Here's a nice answer.
This is the answer that we have when they evaluate us for
tenure, this is sort of the answer that we have on our
sheets. What we do is we teach
undergraduates ,and you have to do it pretty badly not to get
tenure, but I think you can do it badly enough not to get
tenure. We do research, and that's
really important because that's what we like to do, and the
world really needs that 25,000th article on Shakespeare
in the last 20 years. Then we do service.
It's not quite clear what service is.
I think these interact, and I think of a lot of undergraduate
teaching as being service. I also think of a lot of service
which is not for undergraduates as being teaching.
Going out and talking to people in the community or writing
op-eds or whatever, that's teaching, it's just teaching
people who didn't ask to be taught.
[LAUGHTER] So, that's what we
like to say about what we do. I think that's a nice answer.
In fact, it's not exactly what we do, or at least it's not the
full story. So there's a certain normative
story about higher ed in the US which higher ed is a motor of
social mobility. It's a mechanism for equality of
opportunity. And it really is not.
I don't know the over time changes but I do know the over
time changes in Britain. Actually, contrary to what David
Ward said is that over time the proportion of working class or
lower class kids in university relative to their proportionate
population compared with the proportion of upper class kids
has not changed in a hundred years.
Higher ed has done nothing to increase relative mobility.
The extent to which it has effected relative mobility
hasn't changed over a 100 year period.
I imagine in the US it has a bit.
And it may have done in the last 15-20 years in Britain, though I
doubt that. Let's just look at the social
origins of kids. I think Richard, I can't
remember who said this but somebody said this.
If you look at the percentage of students in the 150 elite
colleges, thankfully is us and a lot of state flagships, only
3% from the bottom quartile, 74% from the top quartile.
And then the next 256 that are somewhat selective
or moderately selective, you get 46% versus 7%.
That's the top 10% or so of colleges in terms of
selectivity.
This actually could change some, but I'm inclined to agree with
Sheila. I think higher ed in a world
that is stratified in a way that ours is and is going to continue
to be, higher ed performs this function, and there are huge
political pressures for it to continue to perform this
function, of essentially replicating elites.
Now, you take those kids from the more advantaged parts of our
population and, I'm pointing this in the wrong direction,
there we are, and what do you do for them?
So there are three things that colleges do for students, but
I'm really interested in undergraduate education here.
I'm not really interested in the research function.
We can talk about that later if you want to, but it's the
teaching undergraduates function that I'm interested in.
So, we do a number of things that benefit undergraduates.
One is that increase their competitiveness for the
desirable positions in society and the benefits attached to
them. When college recruiters go out
to high schools, or middle schools even, what they do is
tell them, my daughter got this when she was in middle school,
they came and told us why we should go to college there.
I said, why is that? So we can get a good job.
And I just looked at them and I think who the hell
told you that? [LAUGHTER]
Yeah, there are lots of people who should go to college for
that, but you should not be going to college for that.
That's outrageous. She also shouldn't be going to
college for this. I'm glad to say I didn't get
that. I really had a horrible time.
[LAUGHTER] But most people seem to, and
I am glad they do, it's just not the point of going there.
There's also the intrinsic value of learning, and I think, again,
this is going back to Sheila. In a world in which only, first
of all, I think there would be relatively small numbers of
people in college if the only people who went to college were
the people who really wanted to get just the intrinsic value of
learning. So actually there wouldn't be
that many jobs. But the truth is, lots of people
go to college and get the intrinsic value of doing the
learning even though it's not what they wanted.
And if we do our jobs properly, and I'll say something about
what that would mean later, then it doesn't matter whether they
want to or not, they're going to get it.
You get these kids, all they want to do is increase their
competitiveness, but you force them to get this intrinsic value
of learning, and they think, wow, that was great, I got that,
fantastic. [INAUDIBLE]
Seduced by the pleasures of analysis, yeah that's great.
I know people in this room...
for whom I'd like to think I played a role in that.
So, there's a premium that attaches to going to college.
This is the higher earnings, and we think about higher earnings
and we talk about higher earnings a lot.
But, in fact, and by the way, professional degrees are really
a good deal in terms of higher earnings.
But we'll just say that philosophy PhDs...
[LAUGHTER] Which is sort of the secondary
bit of my business, don't. If they say on the philosophy
grad school site, "We will increase your earning potential,
they're lying." [LAUGHTER]
And they just might be sufficiently out of contact
with the real world enough not to know it.
So we think about that a lot. But, in fact, that's only a
small part of what going to college gets for you.
What does money matter? Money can't buy you love, right?
People who care about money and so care about what I just talked
about, they're kind of shallow people.
But there are lots of other things that you get.
Maybe if you care about status, you're a shallow person too, but
it gets you higher status. You get the position to which
higher status is attached. Now, it's not so shallow to care
about your job being interesting.
People care about having interesting jobs, and being more
competitive helps you get a more interesting job.
Control over your daily life, that's something everybody cares
about and everybody should care about.
It's really important for avoiding stress.
And one of the reasons that poverty is so awful, it's not
really because you don't have any money, it's because you lost
control over your daily life. You're at the beckon of
a landlord at the beckon call of a low level manager who is,
A, incompetent and, B, doesn't care about you.
It also gets you better health. The education seems to get you
better health, and being in the more interesting job and having
the highest status and more control over you life gets you
better health and a longer life. And I'm willing to say that
people who care about higher incomes are shallow.
I have to say that having a relatively high income myself I
feel kind of safe to say that. I wouldn't say that about people
who had lower incomes and cared about higher incomes, but
nobody's shallow for caring about better health and a longer
life. Those are important goods that
everybody cares about and should care about for themselves.
Except for totally weird religious people who want to die
because it gets them to heaven, but that's actually a small
proportion of even totally weird religious people.
I'm not implying the religious people are weird.
Weirdness is well distributed between religious and
nonreligious people, in my opinion.
[LAUGHTER] So, this has all been about
elite education. Most public flagships would
count as elite in the terms that I gave above, and some of these
schools that are not flagships, etc., but what, is there
something particular, specific, about the public flagships
relative to other elite institutions.
Well, it's really, public flagships are established and
supported directly by the state. And they're more heavily
subsidized by the state, or at least I thought they were until
Richard told me that Princeton was more heavily subsidized by
the state with respect to the undergraduate teaching.
This is what elite universities did.
This is the not so nice answer. This is the answer we don't want
to tell ourselves. What we do is we use public
subsidies to help relatively advantaged parents secure a
relative advantage for their children in the competition, the
rewards of which are fairly unequal and the rewards of which
are really important. They're not like winning, my
little boy, my 5-year-old, is very concerned about getting a
trophy, about winning a trophy. And we're not talking about a
trophy, we're talking about longer life, health, status,
things that really matter. I love this quote.
I was really struck by this quote in Zemsky/Wegner/Massy's
book, Remaking the American University, because this is
what I always thought higher education was about until I
encountered these people who talk about liberal education and
the liberal arts and improving people.
When I went to college, I thought I was learning how to do
philosophy and everybody else was learning how to make money.
Going through a process they had to go through in order to get
into the positions that they wanted to get into.
I went to a relatively elite college, not the top-top elite,
and it always seemed to me that lots of people sort of
misunderstand the core business. The core business is supplying
competitive advantage at necessarily high prices.
One of the reasons that tuition at elite institutions has gone
up so much is because so much more money, relative to 30 years
ago, is in the hands of a very small proportion of people who
now can outbid everybody else and want to be able to outbid
everybody else. And those top elite institutions
actually, I'm friends with people who are in those
institutions and have senior positions in those institutions,
they're my friends so they're not bad people because I
wouldn't be friends with bad people.
They're trapped partly by this, and they try and do their best,
in fact, to use the resources they get to do good things.
But, still, this is what they're doing.
And to some extent, we're doing that too, but we're doing that
not as a private institution that's set up to do that but as
a public institution that is set up and does that.
The state authorizes us and, to some extent that I don't know,
I'm sure Sara can tell exactly, but to some extent it
subsidizes. So what could possibly justify
us in existing? The first answer is there's
nothing. We should just get rid of, we
should privatize, we nearly did, we should privatize these
institutions. Michigan, Virginia have
effectively done that or nearly done that.
Or abolish them. Abolishing something this size
is hard, but I bet you could do it.
So the state shouldn't, it's bad enough that there are these
private institutions doing this awful thing, the public
institutions with public money should be doing them is just
unforgivable. We're not going to privatize,
well, we might, but we're not going to abolish public
flagships. And I don't even think we should
privatize them fully. Why?
There are a number of reasons. One is there are lots of good
things about public flagships, and I'm a conservative in a sort
of general sense. I think, basically, human beings
are quite good at destroying good things, and it takes them
quite a long time to create good things.
And when there are good things, even when they're attached to
bad things, you want to be pretty cautious about getting
rid of the whole things that you're getting rid of because
you may end up replicating the bad and not replicating the
good. So just a general conservative
principle makes me reluctant to abolish these institutions.
I also think that nothing would fundamentally change.
The injustices would be just as bad without them.
I don't think that privatizing UW Madison a high state, etc,
would suddenly, would do anything, in fact, to improve
more equal access or to improve the quality of what happens in
the colleges and what happens beyond them.
It may be easier to exert pressure to diversify access to
elite positions. And it may be easier, and this
is what I want to talk about the rest of the time really,
to orient developed talent to socially valuable ends
through public institutions. And it may even be the public
institutions exerts some pressure on private institutions
to do this. I would just say, this is more
about the diversify access to elite positions, actually,
contrary to what you said earlier, in the last 10 years on
any measure of disadvantage, the proportions in absolute numbers
of students at UW Madison undergraduates who are
disadvantaged has increased. And the graduation rates have
increased for those students as well.
Not dramatically in either case, but it hasn't gotten worse.
Okay, so what could justify the institution--
sorry-- There's a joke about a really
horrible old man who dies and people come to his funeral and
the preacher says, look, now somebody is going to give
an exaltation about him and nobody says anything.
He says, somebody must have something nice to say about him.
And they sit there in absolute silence, and then finally an old
man at the back stands up and he says, "I knew his brother,
he was worse." [LAUGHTER]
How much worse things would be if we got rid of these
institutions depends on what, that is to say, it depends on
what we currently do and what we would do if we weren't
abolished, what we decide we're going to do in the future.
So, let's see. Why doesn't this do what I want
it to do? I've already talked for a long
time, and I've got a couple of things I want to say.
Maybe that's it. Okay, that's it.
I've got to fiddle with that. So, maybe.
I just want to make an observation then about what the
missions of elite institutions, and in particular the missions
of public undergraduate colleges, should be.
So I'm at mission variability, which David talked about.
I think it's right. I think it's absolutely fine
that there should be religious institutions with religious
missions. It's absolutely fine that even
public institutions that are flagships should have different
missions. But the fact that we're
complicit in a system that incurs unfair advantage incurs
obligations. One is the modification of real
unequal access, that is the decrease of unequal access.
I don't think we can do a lot about that, but we can do some
about it. And by real access I don't mean
getting low income disadvantaged students on to college so they
can drop out after a year. I mean getting them to college
so they get taught in ways that enable them, actually, to
graduate after however many years it take people to
graduate, five-year, six-year rates.
The thing I want to focus on is service to the public, service
to the public interest. This is something I think we
could do a lot more about. And I think that we, if you
like, some institutions sort of miss some of what they could be
doing. Sorry, I'm going to skip through
this.
How is it that undergraduate teaching serves the public
interest? So, how we serve the public
interest depends. Assume just to stratify entry.
So assume the same students are coming from the more advantaged
places. Whether we're serving the public
interest in teaching them depends on these factors.
Are we just passing them, credentially passing them, or
are we actually building their human capital?
That's the first question. To the extent that we're
building their human capital, we are increasing the pool of human
capital available for everybody to use.
Then, to what extent do they use that human capital simply for
their own interests, their own ends, and to what extent do they
use them to the public benefit, in particular, the benefit of
the least advantaged? And to what extent, however they
use it, does the human capital and its uses get widely
dispersed. Obviously different answers for
different institutions. Sorry, this is really
frustrating. Well, maybe I should just give
up on this. I'll just tell you.
I just thought I'd give you an example of two institutions.
Harvard. In 2007, the proportion of
Harvard graduates, I've actually got two different figures, I'm
not sure which is the right one, who didn't attend law school or
graduate school but who got jobs on Wall Street was either 47% or
65% depending on who you listen to.
Now let's compare that with the UW Milwaukee School of Nursing.
The proportion of those graduates who got jobs on Wall
Street in 2007 is zero percent. I called them up and asked.
[LAUGHTER] And they told me zero percent.
And I said, how many of them went into nursing?
And they said, somewhere between 95% and 98%, we're not exactly
sure. One of those institutions is
attempting to build a capital of people who are going to put that
capital to widely dispersed use. And others, the other
institution, well, not so much. Now I seem to be on it.
I really don't think this is my incompetence.
This is a rare case where I don't think it's me just not
being able to do it. [LAUGHTER]
Oh, yeah. >> Just use the keyboard.
Oh, yeah. That doesn't work.
Oh, yeah it does. I want to do five more minutes.
Is that all right? So, how might undergraduate
education serve the public interest better than it
currently does? How might flagships serve the
public interest better than they do?
I've just given three main, just three simple thoughts about how
we might do better, what we might be doing better than we
do. The key thing I wanted to talk
about is the last, the fourth, which is in red, which is how
you know that it's the one I want to talk about.
If you think about to improve undergraduate education,
yesterday David Ward was saying a lot of this falls on us, and I
think that's right. I wish it wasn't right, but I
think it is right because I don't think national and state
level policymakers, certainly as a faculty member I've got very
little control over what they do.
I don't think they are going to respond particularly well to the
crisis we're in, or if they do, as I've indicated, I don't
think they're going to do it in ways that really are about
building human capital, getting it disperse properly, and
diversifying access and making for better public service.
Institution level administrators and leaders, I'll be honest, I
think institution level administration leaders have
relatively little power in universities.
Though, I also think, my experience, certainly, on this
campus has been that they are well willed and competent and
just not very powerful. So I'm not worried about them.
I think they've got things looking the right way.
But I'm an individual faculty member within a department, and
that's what I can really do. Whatever those guys do, I have
some sort of space for action. I can change what I do to some
extent, as can all of my colleagues.
And what we could do, we can improve our instruction.
I think we need to have, maybe we should be teaching four-four,
but whether we teach two-two or four-four or whatever it is, we
could be doing it better, in my opinion, than we do.
Think about, those of you who do research, think about who looks
at and provides feedback on your research.
And how you do this. What you do is you watch what
other people do who are really experts at it and you mimic them
and you learn how to do it and you get feedback from experts
and you change what you, you put enormous amounts of time,
energy, and effort into this and then think about what you do
with the teaching. The feedback is some numbers,
essentially, from students and some of the things they say, if
you bother to read what they can say.
And some of what they say is really worth reading.
But you don't have continuous feedback, that happens at the
end of the semester. You don't have somebody in the
class coming up to you at the end of every class saying you
did this wrong and this wrong and this wrong.
That would be a rude way of saying it.
But you know what I mean. [LAUGHTER]
We could have people who do that.
We could have people who, we could be watching each other or
we could just spend 10 minutes with a student that we've picked
out and said at the beginning of class, okay, you watch a lot of
people teach, I'd like to know at the end of the class what you
think I did right and what you think I did wrong.
You don't get to control what I do.
I get to listen to what you do, and then make more own judgment.
We could be putting, if you thought about changing faculty,
tenure track faculty have enormous power I think in these
institutions, tenure faculty, sorry.
Tenure faculty have enormous power in these institutions.
If you thought about having them devote maybe 10 hours a year,
15 hours a year, to talking to a student after class and watching
themselves teach, say, twice on a video with a group of students
who point out all that you only did was talk to her, or you're
going back and forth like a ping pong ball rather than letting
them talk to each other, or have you noticed that you keep
interrupting them as they finish.
These are all things that students have said to me.
[LAUGHTER] No, I did not notice I was
interrupting them every time they said anything.
She did. So, I think there's a lot that
we can do that would, there are also other things that we could
be doing. We can think about how we
mentor, who we mentor. Do we, as in the disciplines, we
tend to think about students who are going to become philosophy
professors eventually, which is, and this is a very good thing,
a minuscule proportion of the students we teach, and mentor
them. I'm not saying we shouldn't
mentor them. I have done.
Or should we think about people who are not like us?
Think about finding students, or at least be very open
to students who are going to do other kinds of things in the
world that are valuable things, not that philosophy isn't
valuable, but that are valuable things in the world where we
could really play a role in improving the quality of their
human capital and influencing how they use it, as well as
seducing them with the pleasures of analysis.
I'm just going to stop there. >> Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]