Albright College is a traditional liberal arts college in Reading, Pennsylvania, that is in deep financial trouble. Reading itself is an old industrial town with fewer people today than a century ago, with relatively low average incomes. Pennsylvania has had a number of college mergers and consolidations, including a number of public regional universities.
Like many liberal arts colleges with no substantial national reputation, Albright has faced downward enrollment trends, and press accounts recently said it has cut faculty and staff and is trying to borrow $25 million from its modest endowment to stay in business.
So, its latest plan to stave off the “creative destruction” integral to the success of the private market economy? It has opened a “new golf performance center to enhance student athletes’ skills and recruitment,” according to a press release sent to Minding the Campus. It wants to import top student golfers from around the world to make the school a golfing mecca. Down with language and history professors, but increase sporting opportunities for presumably mostly relatively affluent students. Additionally, the school is starting wrestling programs, including a women’s wrestling team.
College is indeed more than about the discovery and dissemination of knowledge and creative ideas. It is a place where young people engage in the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and that involves more than going to classes. More crudely, college for many is mainly a consumption good, a four or five-year period where, hopefully, participants mature, but also where many want to have a lot of fun, get drunk, have copious amounts of sex, and experiment with strange drugs.
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As enrollment stagnates, more schools have emphasized the country club dimension of college—climbing walls, lazy rivers, and, yes, golf courses. One Carolina school purportedly has valet parking for affluent students driving to campus and a high-quality gourmet restaurant available to take a date to on special occasions. I had a half-decent Old Fashion (whiskey drink) at a nice restaurant in my own university’s student union recently. Gorgeous atriums have made some classroom buildings much nicer than the boringly utilitarian structures of a generation or two ago.
I have zero animosity towards Albright College. Indeed, I love the concept of small liberal arts schools and had a wonderful year once teaching at one of the better ones—Claremont McKenna. I think a solid liberal arts education can be good preparation for a lifetime in the world of work. But the odds are against small liberal arts colleges, mostly dependent on tuition fees for income. The birth dearth is continuing. Public support for colleges has waned significantly in light of the antics and despicable behavior displayed by students, faculty, and administrators at prestigious, elite, wealthy schools like Columbia and UPenn.
The private sector constantly confronts change. Most of the top 25 companies in the Fortune 500 list today were not there, at least in their current form, in the year 2000. Eastman Kodak failed to foresee the devastation that new technology would have on traditional photography, for example. His company is now a very small shadow of its former self. The creative destruction that Joseph Schumpeter so perceptively championed in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in 1942 led to corporate deaths and helped finance new companies. The U.S. Steel Corporation, which was at the top of the heap in 1900, was replaced by other leaders—car and oil companies in the middle of the last century, the IBMs later on, then the Apples and Microsofts, and Nvidias now.
That doesn’t happen much with universities. Governments and well-meaning private supporters try to protect them from closure when they fail. Yet the employees of the universities are terribly risk-averse. They crave tenure, job protection, and certainty in their affairs, willing to sacrifice income for security. School closings scare the hell out of them. That fright might lead them reluctantly to make changes necessary for survival, getting rid of expensive progressive obsessions like “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” working on letting kids graduate in three years—maybe by going to school year around—putting brakes on huge subsidies for ball throwing entertainments—full disclosure: I have been watching some of March Madness.
I sometimes say that, with the possible exception of prostitution, teaching is the only profession that has seen zero productivity advance since Socrates taught the youth of Athens. But that has to change.
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This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
