Uno de los más importantes analistas de la educación superior, Robert Zemsky, publica su más reciente libro, que Inside Higher Ed del 4 de septiembre comenta y sitúa en el contexto del debate norteamericano sobre la educación terciaria.
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Más abajo, ver el ensayo de Zemsky: The Don’ts of Higher Ed Reform
Artículos recientes de Zemsky registrados en Google Scholar.
A Call for Change, From Within
Inside Higher Ed, September 4, 2009
Robert Zemsky has spent most of his career as what he calls “a prickly and at times just barely tolerated academic gadfly” — a higher education researcher who, though working inside the academy, was known for aggressive and (especially early on, he admits) sometimes nasty critiques of the industry he called home.
Yet as a participant on Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Zemsky was part of the triumvirate that his fellow commissioner Richard Vedder called “Dudervestsky” — a trio of panel members, with the former college presidents James Duderstadt and Charles M. Vest, who could generally be counted on to defend higher education against what were seen, depending on one’s views, as either unfair attacks or pointed and long overdue criticism. Charles Miller, the commission’s outspoken chairman, sometimes had Zemsky in mind when he railed that the “tone police” were trying to blunt the force of tough language about the academy’s perceived weaknesses.
With the Spellings Commission nearly two years in the rearview mirror now, Zemsky has once again taken on the role of critic — this time of the commission and of higher education. In Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education (Rutgers University Press), the University of Pennsylvania professor delivers what he describes as “the report the Spellings Commission should have written.” (For an excerpt from the book, see today’s Views piece.)
With that audacious statement, he acknowledges that the commission was right to deem higher education in need of significant change but argues that, by emphasizing what’s broken rather than how to fix it, and offering a “watered-down” menu of recommendations instead of a handful of bolder ideas, the commission missed the mark — and a major opportunity to motivate higher education to change. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, the commission’s chairman, Charles Miller, disagrees and in turn dismisses many of Zemsky’s own answers. Read on for that.)
“What I’ve concluded is that in this climate, people are really ready to talk about big ideas, not just big critiques,” Zemsky says. “There’s an appetite for serious discussion of change” not only among the general public, but within a higher education establishment that has often resisted significant transformation. Zemsky isn’t sure the “big ideas” he puts forward as potential “dislodging events” are the right ones — though he’s especially fond right now of the three-year degree, which he sees gaining traction — but he is confident that the time has come for state and federal political leaders, higher education administrators and faculty members, and others to undertake a systematic reassessment that “comes to consider the impossible” in a way that produces major, transformative change.
A ‘Considered View’
It’s hard not to read Zemsky’s book as a summing up of a 40-plus-year career as one of the foremost observers and prognosticators of higher education, though he discourages that characterization (in part because he doesn’t want to leave the mistaken impression that he’s anywhere close to retiring). “My earlier writings probably sounded like a ‘summing up,’ too,” Zemsky says, referring to tomes with such sweeping tableaux and highfalutin’ titles as Higher Education as a Competitive Enterprise (Jossey Bass, 2001) and Remaking the American University (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
What might distinguish this from what he’s written before, Zemsky concedes, is not only his immersion in the deliberations of the Spellings Commission, but the fact that he’s “been around a while longer and had lots of additional interesting experiences,” including significant (and increasing) involvement in studying of higher education systems outside the U.S. So while it risks suggesting that his previous writings were off the cuff, “you could say this is my considered view,” Zemsky says. “If that’s equivalent to a ‘summing up,’ okay.”
Foremost among the “interesting experiences” shaping Zemsky’s considered view, undoubtedly, was his time on the Spellings Commission. Zemsky says he wanted to avoid having the book be a “tell-all” about the behind the scenes, and he largely succeeds. But one only had to pay attention to what unfolded in the panel’s public meetings to know that Zemsky offered probably the strongest counterpoint to Miller, the chairman, in terms of both intellectual jousting and disagreements about the group’s strategic direction.
Zemsky, for instance, forcefully discouraged the commission (and Miller, for whom the issue was a favored hobby horse) from focusing too much attention on accreditation as a mechanism for reforming higher education, calling it a “thin reed” on which to hang major change. And he repeatedly counseled Miller to take a less combative approach in his and the panel’s rhetoric, saying that mean-spiritedness would be likely to diminish the commission’s odds of getting college leaders to come on board.
“If you want to change higher education, you challenge it. If you want headlines, you insult it,” Zemsky said during the course of the commission’s deliberations in 2006. “We should be talking about ‘raising the bar,’ which is a different way of saying ‘not good enough,’ but in a much nicer way.” Miller, in turn, complained regularly during the course of the panel’s work about what he called the “tone police,” saying that college leaders were using complaints about language to object, ultimately, to being asked to fundamentally change their ways.
While the Spellings Commission most heavily motivated Zemsky to write his book, he frames his response more generally to what he calls a wide array of “lamenters” whose critiques of higher education amount, he writes, to “long litanies of failure along with generalized prescriptions for making right what has gone so horribly wrong.” On the list he puts the makers of the 2005 PBS documentary “Declining by Degrees, Higher Education at Risk” and the annual “Measuring Up” reports produced by Patrick Callan’s National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, among others. Zemsky also dissects higher education critiques from inside the academy, including those by the former Harvard president Derek Bok and David L. Kirp of the University of California at Berkeley, and finds them wanting for a variety of reasons.
A Friend, Yes, But a Critic, Too
Just because Zemsky finds fault with so many internal and external broadsides about higher education does not mean he thinks all is well in the academy — far from it. Too many socioeconomically disadvantaged students start but do not complete higher education. Most colleges still have virtually no idea whether or how much students are learning from them.
And the system for financing higher education, Zemsky writes, is “a house of cards — too dependent on tax breaks that are likely to be called into question, too dependent on credit markets that can suddenly contract, too unsure of the rationale by which it sets prices and offers discounts, and at the same time unable to imagine alternate production functions that could in fact yield substantial price rollbacks.”
It won’t be lost on anybody who followed the Spellings Commission closely that Zemsky’s diagnosis of higher education’s problems sounds quite a bit like the commission’s own — and that fact certainly is not lost on Charles Miller, the commission’s chairman. “Eventually he admits to many of the same problems in higher education others have identified, although he dresses them up with slightly different language,” Miller said in an e-mail message after Inside Higher Ed asked for his thoughts on Zemsky’s book. “He identifies ‘learning,’ ‘attainment’ and ‘money’ as real problems after repeatedly criticizing the Spellings Commission for its similar conclusions.”
Perhaps — but the big problem with the Spellings Commission’s work was not the substance of the diagnosis but the equivalent of its bedside manner and its prescription, Zemsky argues. The panel’s deliberations and report focused far too much on proving the extent and severity of the problems (“playing the blame game,” as Zemsky calls it) than on offering sharply drawn and powerful solutions, he says. “Don’t tell me it doesn’t work, or explain why it didn’t work — tell me how to fix it. That’s where my head is now,” Zemsky says.
Zemsky’s answer to the “how to fix it” question begins with the notion that change must come not one institution at a time, but systematically, through a process not unlike what the European Union has done with its Bologna Process. Such a cohesive approach, which would involve government officials, business leaders and, importantly, college administrators and professors, is likeliest to come about only if higher education is forced, through one or more “dislodging events,” to “consider changes that no one institution on its own will likely pursue,” he writes.
Beating colleges up about how expensive they are or telling professors that their students aren’t learning hasn’t helped persuade higher education leaders that their institutions must change, Zemsky says in an interview; what’s needed is something that says to faculty members and others: “The doctors have changed, even the accountants have changed. It’s your turn to change now.”
What could compel that sort of attitude adjustment? Zemsky offers three possibilities, none of which, he acknowledges, “may prove either feasible or even desirable,” but each of which could jolt the higher education system enough that it “breaks the gridlock that now holds attempts to reform higher education hostage?
One would be having Congress “metaphorically ‘nuke’ the current system of federal financial aid,” and reengineer it in ways that fundamentally change the way institutions are rewarded to encourage them to change their behavior, with increased focus on student participation and success. A second: changing federal tax rules so that money that wealthy institutions earn from their investments are taxed as if they were hedge fund revenues — unless the money was spent on education or research.
The third — and the one Zemsky seems genuinely enthused about — is if the idea of the three-year undergraduate degree were to take hold in a major way, which he argues could have beneficial effects in making high school more meaningful and lowering the costs of educating college undergrads, among other things.
Miller, the Spellings Commission chair, offered a critique of Zemsky’s “dislodging events,” questioning how realistic the three-year degree is, for instance, at a time when “the median time to a bachelor’s degree is closer to six years than four years, when students are reported to be unprepared for college, when most students spend inadequate time on task even during a four-year period,” etc.
But most fundamentally, unsurprisingly, he warns that the sort of carefully planned out, deliberative process that Zemsky advocates is perhaps less likely than “a public policy process which includes more public and political engagement and which could appear to central planners to be much messier than they prefer. When all stakeholders are involved, not just the professoriate, some significant changes will take place for higher education. What is hoped is that the change will be productive, not destructive. That calls for the academy to recognize its precarious position and to stop questioning the motives or the intelligence of its critics.”
In many ways, what Miller warns about differs very little from some of Zemsky’s “dislodging events” — events that happen to higher education, compelling its leaders to change.
But he remains skeptical about Zemsky’s vision in which the men and women of higher education, perhaps motivated by one or more of those dislodging events, take charge of their own destiny to instigate or at least willingly participate in a process that it designed to produce fundamental change.
Is Zemsky himself sanguine about the likelihood of such a scenario? Confident, probably not. But hopeful? If it’s framed the right way, he suggests.
“People are ready for serious discussion,” Zemsky says, “about ‘how can we be better?’ ”
— Doug Lederman

The Don’ts of Higher Ed Reform
By Robert Zemsky
Inside Higher Ed, September 4, 2009
The 18 months that I spent on Margaret Spellings’ Commission on the Future of Higher Education left me convinced that American higher education must undergo dramatic change if it is to keep thriving. The commission got that part right, even if — as I believe and argue in my new book, Making Reform Work: The Case for Transforming American Higher Education (Rutgers University Press) — many of its preconceptions and strategies were deeply flawed.
The book is my attempt to write the report that the Spellings Commission should have. I try to make sense of all of the public criticism and debate that is now swirling about higher education — and to offer what the commission did not: a challenge for the future and a strategy for enlisting the very instincts of the academy to do more, to be bolder, to take the kinds of risks that the academy, from time to time, has taken. (See related news article here.)
To make reform I would start with the wisdom of the Wharton School’s Greg Shea, who, in talks he used to give to presidents and deans at Penn’s Institute for Research on Higher Education, frequently discussed what he called the “necessity of the don’t-do list.” To avoid getting hung up on endless lists of potentially tangential things “to do,” Shea told the campus leaders attending a week-long executive education seminar that they should construct don’t-do lists to accompany their to-do lists.
That approach would work wonders for higher ed reform as well. Too often, calls for change begin with a nearly exhaustive list of the problems and challenges facing the enterprise, followed by an even longer list of the steps that need to be taken in response to those ills so carefully catalogued. The report of the Spellings Commission is as good an example as any of what happens when no problem or challenge is considered too small or too tangential to be included in the list of things that must be done. The result is an agenda that overwhelms precisely because it has failed to discriminate.
My to-do list — the issues and challenges I think American higher education needs to address during the next decade – will follow in a forthcoming essay. But the don’t do list is just as important. Two are on it because, for the moment at least, no practical solution is at hand and to pretend otherwise would be to waste time and energy. One represents a kind of third rail that trying to change becomes not just quixotic but outright dangerous. The last item, for all its importance to the nation, belongs on a different to-do list, one more focused on higher education’s research as opposed to its educational mission.
Don’t Try to Reform the NCAA’s Big Money Sports
In the realm of higher education reform, intercollegiate athletics is the one that got away — permanently. Derek Bok is right when he laments that it’s already too late to reverse the tide of athletic commercialism. The sums are too large, the constituencies too powerful, the absence of agreed-upon purposes all too readily apparent.
Is reform necessary? — yes. Is it possible? — no, just ask the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics. Ten years after their initial report, the distinguished panel that composed the commission was painfully blunt in assessing the Commission’s lack of success.
The bad news is hard to miss. The truth is manifested regularly in a cascade of scandalous acts that, against a backdrop of institutional complicity and capitulation, threaten the health of American higher education. The good name of the nation’s academic enterprise is even more threatened today than it was when the Knight Commission published its first report a decade ago. Despite progress in some areas, new problems have arisen, and the condition of big-time college sports has deteriorated.
Big-time football and basketball will not likely change any time soon — witness current discussions as to whether athletes in these money sports deserve to be paid given the substantial funds the sponsoring universities derive from their athletic prowess. The best higher education can hope for is that eventually universities will cut loose their programs in football and basketball, making the university a sponsor rather than an owner of the enterprise.
Don’t Tackle Tenure
For much the same reason, though the issues are fundamentally different, higher education’s reform agenda should not tackle the issue of tenure. The circumstances of academic tenure have changed and will likely continue to change, perhaps even dramatically. Among university and college staff members who are fully academically qualified — which usually means an individual with an earned doctorate or a corresponding terminal degree — the proportion either with tenure or serving a tenure probationary period has declined steadily over three decades. In many large research universities, the proportion of academically qualified faculty not on the tenure track now exceeds the proportion of those eligible for tenure.
So what is tenure’s future? The easy answer is that there will be more of the same — a decrease in the proportion of academically trained personnel who either enjoy or are eligible for tenure, adjustments to the tenure clock to accommodate the growing prevalence of two-career academic families, and continued fussing about how to keep older faculty, in particular, productive and accountable. Nothing on the horizon suggests these trends will either abate or be reversed.
Still, too many of the academy’s critics cannot seem to leave the question of tenure alone. To the populists among them, tenure is synonymous with elitism and privilege. To the efficiency pundits, tenure is a way of ensuring that a faculty member never has to work too hard. To others, tenure is the stone wall against which every attempt at curricular reform ultimately crashes.
I don’t rule out the possibility of a significant public outcry by those who have never liked tenure. Why, they will ask, should the academy be exempt from the discipline of the labor market? Were there to be a perfect storm — a perception of out-of-control costs, a sense of students not being served, and a steady stream of arrogant pronouncements by faculty spokesmen to the effect that the academy is different and hence exempt from public scrutiny — the result could be a state in which the legislature abolishes tenure in a fit of spite.
However undesirable or, from the academy’s point of view, irrational such a political coup de grace would be, it is not beyond the realm of possibility. Could there be a successful battle to do away with or limit the privileges of tenure? Probably yes, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory followed by a decade or more of campus turmoil. Higher education would not be transformed, but stalled, consumed by an angry battle that would employ symbols, not actual change.
There is a second reason for not tackling the question of tenure now. The spread of for-profit higher education and its very different ways of employing instructional staff suggest that the labor market itself could be an agent of change. Here the model is the University of Phoenix, a business that has proved remarkably resilient despite the disdain of traditional academics.
The University of Phoenix has academic employees rather than faculty; those who there or at one of its principal competitors or imitators are not independent contractors, let alone tenure-eligible faculty. They do not own their own courses. They are not the final arbitrators of either what or how they teach. The academic staffs of the University of Phoenix and similar institutions are contingent workers in both the best and most restrictive sense of that term. They are well rewarded but only as long as what they have to offer in terms of both teaching content and style is valued in the marketplace; Phoenix is not interested in supporting either subjects or individuals whose efforts do not tap an ongoing revenue stream.
Few doubt that this labor model will continue to spread — first through the growth of for-profit entities and eventually by spreading to nonprofit institutions, particularly those serving adult and part-time student markets. Already most of these institutions — principally community colleges, less selective liberal arts colleges, and state comprehensive universities — employ large numbers of adjunct faculty, many of whom work simultaneously for more than one institution. Today they are the academy’s gypsies — poorly paid, ordinarily without benefits, often without offices, and almost always without standing in the institutions they serve.
The University of Phoenix treats its contingent work force much better. Were a University of Phoenix-like contingent-labor model to spread, the working conditions for the professionals who serve these markets might actually improve in the sense they would likely be treated as contingent professionals rather than academic gypsies. But that improvement would depend on the institutions that employ them, like the University of Phoenix, abandoning the distinction between “regular” and “adjunct” faculty; instead, the institutions would treat everyone as a part of a contingent academic labor force.
Don’t Try to Reform Accreditation
The more external the critic, the more likely he or she will turn to accreditation as a means of reforming individual colleges and universities. To the uninitiated, the accrediting agencies, particularly those responsible for accrediting institutions offering the baccalaureate degree, have (or should have) the power to change both how and what institutions teach.
The reason accreditation has not been an agent of enforceable reform, these critics argue, is that there is an all-too-cozy relationship between the accreditors and the institutions they accredit. In support of their argument, they often point out how often the officials of the accrediting agencies and the experts they place on their accreditation teams are drawn from the ranks of established colleges and universities.
Right question, wrong answer. Accreditation has not been an agent of enforceable reform because the accreditation industry is itself a hopeless mess: six different regional agencies are responsible for undergraduate and graduate education, while two dozen separate, professionally focused accrediting agencies each jealously protects its own turf and prerogatives. Although the regional accrediting agencies share insights and occasionally personnel, there is both no common methodology and an irritating tendency to abruptly change how they monitor both themselves and the institutions for which they are responsible.
To make accreditation an agent of national reform would require a major, probably exhaustive campaign to make the accrediting agencies much more like one agency in their ability to gauge the quality of education an institution provides. Testing regimes would have to be agreed upon, as would common definitions of the educational outcomes that accredited institutions are expected to supply — in short, an agreed-upon set of national standards.
To make such an accrediting system work on a national scale would require a fundamentally different methodology. The United Kingdom and Australia have both experimented with what they call “quality audits.” The Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA) defines a quality audit as a “systematic and independent examination to determine whether activities and related results comply with planned arrangements and whether these arrangements are implemented effectively and are suitable to achieve objectives.”
Though the language suggests something like a financial audit, even in this national agency independently charted by the Australian federal government, the quality process involves very little statistical data testifying to the learning outcomes achieved by the audited institutions. Were there in fact data that could be audited, the result would be more like what the reformers have in mind when they link testing and accreditation.
Perhaps the largest problem is that almost no one outside and very few inside the academy either care about or are familiar with how institutions are accredited. Parents and students simply assume the institutions in which they are interested are accredited because they are. Most accrediting reports are not made public, but then again, it is doubtful that higher education’s consumers would know how to interpret what are almost always highly nuanced and somewhat opaque essays.
The exceptions to this rule are the agencies that accredit professional programs. Not to be accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), for example, is to be at a significant disadvantage in the market for an MBA education. AACSB sets high standards, mostly reflecting the resources an institution invests in its MBA program. Once accredited, however, and despite a regular review cycle, there is not much mystery surrounding a particular program’s accreditation reaffirmation.
Tackling these issues would be a Herculean task promising at best uncertain results. One painful lesson Margaret Spellings learned when she tried to transform the regional accrediting bodies into federal enforcement agencies was just how unpopular that idea was. While the hue and cry was less than what would have been a parallel plan to make the NCAA a federal enforcement agency, the effort taught the same lesson. Some opportunities were lost long ago.
Leave Investments in Research Infrastructure to Others
One of the most important but worst-named federal reports of the past 20 years was “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” by the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. It is comprehensive and, like too many such efforts, has a little bit of something for everyone, but its central thrust is nonetheless true to its central intent: The federal government, in particular, must substantially increase its investment in basic research in the physical sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
The report also talks about the need to make sustained investments in the teaching of the STEM disciplines. Any higher education agenda needs to address that particular need, but one focusing on the general transformation of the enterprise need not — indeed, should not — invest any of its fire power in promoting support of an agenda for basic research. No doubt increased expenditures on basic science research will trickle down to the rest of higher education, if only because America’s top research universities train the bulk of college and university faculty.
But let me note — maybe even shout — that transforming American higher education and revitalizing the nation’s capacity for basic research in the physical and related sciences are separate agendas and should remain so.
That’s my don’t do list. I hope you’ll check back for my to do list in the days ahead.
Robert Zemsky is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and chair and CEO of its Learning Alliance for Higher Education.This essay, the first of two parts, is drawn from his new book, Making Reform Work, from Rutgers University Press.