Creation of the Future

Frank H. T. Rhodes

Read February 2005

The US has evolved a remarkable system of higher education. In no other country will you find such a diversity of educational institutions, with extremely strong schools in every ecological niche. The spectra from community college to research university, local to national, tiny to huge, private to public (yes, even that is a spectrum), and so on represent a dazzling array of choice that is richly differentiated in nearly every aspect but price (but this isn't the place for that discussion!). For the US to remain competitive, it's clear that this sytem must grow and evolve further.

To understand this system better, I informally took Brown's course uc0170, a seminar on the modern research university. Rhodes's book was one of the course readings. Rhodes was president of Cornell.

This book promises a great deal and does several things well, but it falls short of being really good. If only Rhodes could have kept just a little more from writing like an academic, this could have been a great book—but by the time you've become a college president, I think there are certain habits that are simply beyond cure.

This book is principally a defense of the modern American research university. To Rhodes, a ``research university'' is a place like Cornell or Michigan (his two most recent academic homes). In this context, it's worth noting that the Cornell of Rhodes's experience is virtually a large and bustling state university, not the extension of a liberal arts college one might expect of an Ivy League institution.

To be sure, the book has many strong points beyond the usual platitudes. Rhodes rebels against received education, wants to create scholarly communities, and respects universities expanding their mission to engage public schools. He wants to reform PhD programs. He provides superb examples of just what the very best professors can accomplish as teachers and creators of knowledge.

On the other hand, there are many things Rhodes does poorly:

• Rhodes wants to reduce the drop-out rate from PhD programs, but he seems to have little understanding of what causes those rates in the first place. While we should at least be concerned about rates as high as 50%, it's a system with many strange attributes, and it's unclear what a ``good'' percentage should be! (How can we attack a problem without knowing roughly where we want to head in terms of a solution?)
• There is a decent discussion of the cost of higher education, but it simply isn't concrete enough. I just can't imagine a parent reading this will find it satisfying.
• It's great to suggest we should interact more with high schools (a topic dear to my heart), but what he has to offer is disappointingly weak.
• One of the more important problems facing the classroom aspect of higher education is where junior faculty learn to teach. Rhodes is surprisingly and disappointingly silent on this question.
• Reading Rhodes's worries about the ``chill winds of competition'' from on-line education (p. 214)—observe that the book was published in 2001, and was thus probably written at the height of the .com boom—I spent some time worrying about how this would affect my classroom. Then I realized that Rhodes isn't thinking about my class at all, but rather one with over an order of magnitude more students (say 500—he thinks such mega-classes are actually a good idea).
• For a trend-spotting president, there is woefully little about lifelong learning or alumni education.
• With little context, and with no explanation, Rhodes states (p. 70) that every professor should teach at least two courses a semester. While he makes some allowance for exceptions such as lab-based courses, he seems to not understand what professors can accomplish with their time, such as high-quality research with undergrads (a topic about which I am especially sensitive, personally).

What the general readership market really needs is a different book, written without the long and flowing sentences of academia. Some parts of this book would stay, such as his case studies of successful faculty. But what the book really must do is explain to the many consumers—parents, bosses, senators, even those whose social programs are affected by spending on higher education—how research universities work. In an era where many people genuinely ask, ``If you teach one course in a semester, and the course meets three hours a week, what do you do the other thirty-seven hours?'', our profession must provide firm but respectful answers. The people asking these questions are not dumb, just underinformed; even if sometimes hostile, they are primarily curious; and most of all, if left in the dark on questions such as this, they can turn hostile and dismantle the entire system. Rhodes's book is too weak, too shorn of details, and too full of platitudes to keep the curious from turning into a mob.

A more creatively presented complement is Kirp's book, which touches on much less but does it better (at least for a lay reader).