In the past few years, a growing group of pundits, critics, scholars and legislators have argued that K–12 is not the only education sector in need of improvement. Higher education, long the jewel of the American education system, turns out to have similar problems: ineffective teaching, high dropout rates (particularly for minorities) and, perhaps most disturbingly, a lack of initiative to tackle these problems. Two former university presidents—Derek Bok of Harvard and Harold Shapiro of the University of Michigan and Princeton—recently stepped into this fray with books that promise to shed a critical eye on the purposes and prospects of universities today.  

Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges is the weightier of the two. Aiming to bring empirical evidence to a subject dominated by polemical critiques, the book's jacket promises "a candid look at how much students are learning and why they should be learning more." Unfortunately, it falls short on the first count, because very little rigorous, empirical evidence is available to document college student learning. Bok is forced to rely heavily on data such as students' self-evaluation of their academic improvement, which are generally positive but hardly objective. Bok occasionally cites studies that estimate the difference in skills between freshmen and seniors, which show moderate gains in “critical thinking” and writing. But even Bok admits that the measures used in those studies are notoriously contestable. In comparison to what we know about K-12 education, the body of evidence on what students have learned in college is remarkably thin.  

Bok is on much stronger ground when he critiques contemporary universities, particularly research universities. He is particularly critical of the quality of teaching those institutions provide. The problem, Bok argues, is not that professors don't care about teaching; he cites surveys indicating that more professors care about teaching than research. However, professors don't have the same incentives to improve their teaching as they do to conduct research, and there is no feedback process (akin to peer review for research) that supports professor's efforts to continually improve their teaching skills. Nor does the quality of teaching affect the academic reputations of institutions.     

The consequence, Bok argues, is that while professors are reasonably conscientious about keeping course content updated with the latest research in their field, they make almost no effort to improve the teaching of those courses with newer or more effective methods. The continued use of large lecture courses is a particular topic of Bok's ire; he quotes a study that found that students were not able to recall most of the factual content of a lecture within 15 minutes of the end of class. Only 8 percent of professors even claim to have consulted the research on student learning, and much of the research they cite, in Bok's view, consists of "outmoded theories and conclusions." Instead, most stick with what's comfortable and familiar.  

Bok also faults the efforts of higher education institutions to teach writing, broaden students' interests beyond job-related goals, and prepare students for living in a diverse, global society. These critiques are greatly strengthened by his detailed knowledge of how universities function and the financial, institutional, and cultural obstacles to reform. Consider Bok's discussion of a "Great Books curriculum"—an idea favored by many of higher education's critics—which would require all undergraduates to take a core group of common courses focused on the classics of literature, philosophy, and scientific thought. He notes that many faculty members are unwilling and/or unable to teach such courses, and increasingly job-focused students often don't want to take them. Columbia University has had to hire adjuncts to teach its Great Books courses, and St. John's College—one of the few institutions whose calling card is a four-year Western civilization sequence—draws few applicants and has a low matriculation rate. Bok speaks from long experience—for each proposal that might sound promising on its face, he offers an appraisal of the costs and tradeoffs that such a change might entail.  

However, Bok's experience also seems to have produced a kind of conservatism about the possibility of change, particularly change provoked by pressure from outside higher education itself. Bok's preferred vehicle for reform is almost always institutional self-study, because externally driven reforms would presumably compromise the institutional autonomy he believes is the greatest strength of our university system. But while Bok is rightly wary of a No Child Left Behind-like accountability system for higher education, he seems unwilling to advocate the kind of bold internal changes that would ward off outside reformers.  

For instance, people have been complaining about professors' focus on research over teaching since American universities took their modern form a century ago. This problem seems unlikely to change without either strong institutional leadership or new mandates from prospective students or public officials. The obvious solution would be to give teaching significantly greater weight in tenure decisions. But that has long been anathema at institutions like Harvard, where Bok was president for 20 years. (The scuttlebutt among some Harvard junior faculty is that being known as a good teacher can actually reduce the already slim chances for tenure because it suggests that time and attention has been diverted from research.) To Bok's credit, he encourages the incorporation of student learning measures into the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, which could create greater competitive pressure to improve teaching. But until higher education leaders like Bok himself make the hard choices his preferred reforms require, external pressure is unlikely to disappear.  

In contrast to Bok's focus on the current state of American colleges and universities, former Princeton president Harold Shapiro steps back to tackle more sweeping questions about higher education. A Larger Sense of Purpose is comprised of four essays given as a lecture series in honor of former University of California President Clark Kerr. The essays range from bioethics (Shapiro was the head of President Clinton's bioethics panel) to the antebellum college, but the consistent theme is the role that universities should play in a liberal society. Shapiro believes that universities should serve a dual role as “society's servant and society's critic,” a nice if not particularly novel formulation. A self-professed "Enlightenment liberal," Shapiro argues that universities exist to create the knowledge, judgment and skills needed for progress (society's servant), but also to speak uncomfortable truths and to question and examine the forces that propel us ever forward (society's critic).    

But Shapiro consistently fails to translate this position into concrete ideas about what universities should or shouldn't do. Robert Frost's famous quip that “a liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument,” fits Shapiro to a tee. Here is his take on the role of the market in academic medicine: “Whether the public welfare is better served by a research agenda shaped by market forces or by the scholarly priorities of a relatively independent professoriate is an open question.” On intercollegiate athletics: “The separation of the nation's most gifted young athletes from the athletic programs of academic institutions may or may not be a useful development.” And, finally, on the Bush tax cuts: “Thus, while some see President Bush's tax proposals as yet another unearned dividend to the rich and undeserving, others see them as part of a strategy to make everyone better off.” Even for those who appreciate the virtues of complexity and balance, reading Shapiro makes one long for a simple declarative statement, a willingness to take a stand—any stand.   

American higher education has long been shielded from substantial external scrutiny or oversight. Colleges and universities have been protected by their general reputation for excellence, the notion that their strength lies in autonomy, and the belief that market forces provide sufficient accountability for success. As a result, higher education institutions are much less regulated than their primary and secondary education counterparts and provide far less public information about how well they fulfill their missions and serve their students. Bok's work joins a growing chorus of voices charging that colleges and universities are not doing as well as their reputations suggest. It seems unlikely that higher education will be able to resist this pressure indefinitely. The challenge will be preserving the distinct strengths that Shapiro highlights—the ability of higher education to independently produce both useful knowledge and social criticism—while at the same time demanding that colleges and universities shed their complacency when it comes to their most important task of educating their students.  

Jal Mehta is co-director of New Vision: An Institute for Policy and Progress, and is a doctoral candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard University. He can be reached at jmehta@newvisioninstitute.org.