One of my favorite people from graduate school (a writing program at Columbia) was Peter Temes. He worked incredibly hard, writing and teaching and raising a family all at once, which meant that he kept his head way out of the clouds, which couldn’t be said of all of our peers. He has gone on to write some books (including The Just War and The Power of Purpose), teach at some universities, and is now the president of the ILO Institute, a consortium of 60+ global companies and NGOs focused on innovation in large organizations. For three years, he was also president of the Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, N.H.
We were talking recently about the closing of Antioch College, and what it says about the state of higher education. Peter had some interesting thoughts on the subject, so I asked him to write up the following guest blog post. I hope you find it as interesting as I did.
When a College Dies
by Peter Temes
While many colleges and universities are living through a golden age of student demand, Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, known for its social-justice politics and its extensive work/study “co-op” programs, recently announced that it’s going out of business for lack of students.
So what makes one college more appealing than another?
A dozen years ago or so, as a working-stiff graduate student at Columbia and later as a (very) junior faculty member at Harvard, I sometimes found myself simultaneously teaching at a couple of the most selective colleges in the country, and at a couple of the least selective. For several terms, I taught at both Columbia and the New York Institute of Technology; later, I taught simultaneously at Harvard and Northern Essex Community College.
One lesson that leaped out at me was that the students at NYIT and Northern Essex needed their degrees, and whatever they managed to learn in class, much more than the students at Columbia and Harvard did. If you had locked the Ivy League students out of higher education entirely, they still would have prospered. The smarts and discipline that got them admitted in the first place primed them for success. Meanwhile, the community college and technical school undergrads were going to cling to their sheepskins for dear life.
There’s some center of value here that comes not from what the elite schools pour into you when you attend, but from their validation of who you already are when you are admitted. The validation and commemoration of ability are a big part of what a management consultant might call the Ivy League “value proposition.” And your local community college can’t do that, not at all. Therefore, in some ways, the local college has to pay more attention to the change it creates in students, given that the value of affiliation with the school, beyond what you learn there, is pretty close to zero.
One-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Antioch is rolling up its sidewalks because it lacked the ability to validate budding young geniuses by putting the word “Antioch” on their resumes, and it lacked the kind of skill-and-knowledge value that a good community college focuses on. (The study of gender was perhaps the most visible strand of learning in recent years — hardly a waste of time, but neither is it a useful tool to raise your income or your status among most people.)
I was the head of Antioch’s sister school, the Antioch New England Graduate School, for a couple of years not long ago, and joined an earnest group of administrators on a couple of committees dedicated to fixing the college and forestalling total collapse. The struggle of the college, I came to believe, had less to do with things like the physical state of the campus (not great, because of deferred maintenance) or the average number of piercings among the student body (off-puttingly high, according to some), than with a lack of clarity about what the college taught and why.
Recently deceased Antioch alum Theodore Levitt (no relation to Steve Levitt), a long-time distinguished professor at Harvard Business School and former editor of the Harvard Business Review, was famous for teaching that people did not buy goods or services because of what those goods and services were, but because of the jobs they did. No one wants to buy a quarter-inch drill, he would say; people really want to buy a quarter-inch hole.
Similarly, no one wanted to go to Antioch College because of how shiny the campus might be or how its system of classes might work (and it happened to work in quite a distinctive and interesting way). That is, students would not go to Antioch because of what Antioch was. Instead, it would be because of what Antioch could do for a student.
Another Antioch alum, its most famous and perhaps most important, was Coretta Scott King. Not long before her death last year, she noted in an interview with Tavis Smiley that many people underestimated her effect on Martin Luther King, and that, in turn, many underestimated the effect that her four years at Antioch had had on her.
Antioch College was useful to Coretta Scott King because of the hard work of reading, writing, and talking that she found there, the core work that creates the hard-to-grasp thing called academic quality. Antioch did great things for Ms. King and, through her, for the world.
I began to think that Antioch College would not in fact survive after a chance encounter with an influential member of one of those “save the school” committees I served on. As we were talking, I shared my opinion that the only long-term competitive advantage in higher education is academic quality.
He made a thoughtful face, paused a moment, and then said, “No, no, I don’t think so.”
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When I read about the closing of this school I was reminded almost immediately of Phillip Roth’s construction, Athena College, in The Human Stain. The only real difference between Athena and Antioch appears to be that Athena was lucky enough to have Coleman Silk to save it.
If only there were a real-world Coleman Silk. Too bad.
When I read about the closing of this school I was reminded almost immediately of Phillip Roth’s construction, Athena College, in The Human Stain. The only real difference between Athena and Antioch appears to be that Athena was lucky enough to have Coleman Silk to save it.
If only there were a real-world Coleman Silk. Too bad.
Torkel, a prime location or good team attracts *customers*, not good students. If you’re in the business of selling dorm space and a stupid piece of paper to the highest bidders, then that’s fine. If your goal is to turn a good student into an educated person, then real estate and sports are largely irrelevant.
Torkel, a prime location or good team attracts *customers*, not good students. If you’re in the business of selling dorm space and a stupid piece of paper to the highest bidders, then that’s fine. If your goal is to turn a good student into an educated person, then real estate and sports are largely irrelevant.
“If you had locked the Ivy League students out of higher education entirely, they still would have prospered. The smarts and discipline that got them admitted in the first place primed them for success.”
“There’s some center of value here that comes not from what the elite schools pour into you when you attend, but from their validation of who you already are when you are admitted”
There is a contradiction here. If the unsuccessful (locked out) applicant is left to infer that they were not good enough because they were denied that “validation”, then their potential for future success will suffer. What’s validated for many attending Ivy League schools is their sense of entitlement.
If you are old enough you might have noticed that the word “entitlement” has shifted in common discourse to refer more often to an “unjustified sense” of having an effortless right to the benefits of income redistribution or affirmative action. It used to be that “entitlement” was exclusive to the upper class. Similarly the meaning of the phrase “politically correct” has also shifted significantly from when I first heard it. In the mid-sixties when anti-establishment types publicized certain unflattering facts regarding US history, e.g. Washington’s wooden teeth (and expense account) or Jefferson’s slaves or the abuse of Native Americans, they were called disrespectful of US history and it’s heroes. Their retort was that the critics were actually labeling them as “politically incorrect”, which term explicitly alluded to the authoritarian control over political speech exercised in Soviet Russia.
Slightly off topic, but the primary utility of schools has also suffered from reactionary politics. While the conservative right has co-opted the language of the liberal left, the left has politicized higher education. My most rewarding experiences in higher education have come from those teachers who demanded the most, though oddly many of them were quite political. I think that, overall, that may have been a mistake on their part.
“If you had locked the Ivy League students out of higher education entirely, they still would have prospered. The smarts and discipline that got them admitted in the first place primed them for success.”
“There’s some center of value here that comes not from what the elite schools pour into you when you attend, but from their validation of who you already are when you are admitted”
There is a contradiction here. If the unsuccessful (locked out) applicant is left to infer that they were not good enough because they were denied that “validation”, then their potential for future success will suffer. What’s validated for many attending Ivy League schools is their sense of entitlement.
If you are old enough you might have noticed that the word “entitlement” has shifted in common discourse to refer more often to an “unjustified sense” of having an effortless right to the benefits of income redistribution or affirmative action. It used to be that “entitlement” was exclusive to the upper class. Similarly the meaning of the phrase “politically correct” has also shifted significantly from when I first heard it. In the mid-sixties when anti-establishment types publicized certain unflattering facts regarding US history, e.g. Washington’s wooden teeth (and expense account) or Jefferson’s slaves or the abuse of Native Americans, they were called disrespectful of US history and it’s heroes. Their retort was that the critics were actually labeling them as “politically incorrect”, which term explicitly alluded to the authoritarian control over political speech exercised in Soviet Russia.
Slightly off topic, but the primary utility of schools has also suffered from reactionary politics. While the conservative right has co-opted the language of the liberal left, the left has politicized higher education. My most rewarding experiences in higher education have come from those teachers who demanded the most, though oddly many of them were quite political. I think that, overall, that may have been a mistake on their part.
The irony that this blog entry was posted on the same day that US News & World Report’s Best Colleges of 2008 went live on their website was not lost on me. I agree that the value of a college degree lies entirely in what it can “do” for the recipient. However, the value of each degree is not based on academic quality… entirely. That may be part of it, but today choosing a college is just like choosing any other commodity or product. It’s more about name recognition and reputation than quality. When they say it’s not about WHAT you know, but WHO you know… they are talking about the difference between the quality of your education and the alumni network you have when you leave. It’s all about where your college ranks in US News. Sad, but true.
The irony that this blog entry was posted on the same day that US News & World Report’s Best Colleges of 2008 went live on their website was not lost on me. I agree that the value of a college degree lies entirely in what it can “do” for the recipient. However, the value of each degree is not based on academic quality… entirely. That may be part of it, but today choosing a college is just like choosing any other commodity or product. It’s more about name recognition and reputation than quality. When they say it’s not about WHAT you know, but WHO you know… they are talking about the difference between the quality of your education and the alumni network you have when you leave. It’s all about where your college ranks in US News. Sad, but true.