Colleges and universities have survived many challenges. In this episode, Ian McNeely joins us to discuss how public higher ed institutions continued to thrive despite the challenges of the Great Recession, low-quality online diploma mills, and the COVID pandemic. Ian is a Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, He specializes in German history and the history of knowledge. Ian is the author of The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption, which examines how modern research universities responded to the disruptions in higher education between the Great Recession and COVID-19 and the lessons learned from these experiences.
Show Notes
- McNeely, Ian F. (2025). The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption. Columbia University Press.
- Club Mate
- Baumol, W.J. (1967). Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis. American Economic Review. June. pp. 415-26.
- Krueger, A. B. (2001). An Interview with William J. Baumol. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 15(3), 211-231.
- Todd, E. M., Watts, L. L., Mulhearn, T. J., Torrence, B. S., Turner, M. R., Connelly, S., & Mumford, M. D. (2017). A Meta-analytic Comparison of Face-to-Face and Online Delivery in Ethics Instruction: The Case for a Hybrid Approach. Science and engineering ethics, 23(6), 1719–1754. (an example of a meta-analysis comparing alternative instructional modalities)
Transcript
John: Colleges and universities have survived many challenges. In this episode, we discuss how public higher ed institutions continued to thrive despite the challenges of the great recession, low-quality online diploma mills, and the COVID pandemic.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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Rebecca: Our guest today is Ian McNeely. Ian is a Professor of History and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, He specializes in German history and the history of knowledge. Ian is the author of The University Unfettered: Public Higher Education in an Age of Disruption, which examines how modern research universities responded to the disruptions in higher education between the Great Recession and COVID-19 and the lessons learned from these experiences. Welcome, Ian.
Ian: Thanks for having me.
John: Thank you for joining us. Today’s teas are:… Ian, are you drinking any tea?
Ian: Recently I’ve been drinking, I’m not sure it qualifies as a tea, it’s technically a soft drink that’s extremely popular in Berlin. It’s called Club Mate, and it’s a yerba mate drink with carbonation and a little bit of sugar, not as sugary as we have over here, but more caffeinated. So it gives you a nice little buzz.
Rebecca: I think it fits in the right category then. [LAUGHTER]
Ian: Yeah, very much so.
Rebecca: I have Lady Grey today, John.
John: And I have wild blueberry today.
Rebecca: Oh, switching it up.
John: Yes, it’s a black tea with a little bit of blueberries added to it.
Ian: Sounds yummy.
Rebecca: Of course, my description is interesting because it sounds like it might fit in that same category of those black teas that had cherry in it that I didn’t like. So we invited you here today to discuss The University Unfettered. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of the book?
Ian: Yeah. So it goes back to my first foray, first into faculty shared governance, and then to formal administrative roles. I’d gotten tenure in the mid-aughts, and then a couple years later, the Great Recession came in 2008-09, that was when I was really just beginning to get into faculty service and figuring out what campus was like. And I sensed at that time that this event would have a kind of epical impact on higher education, I just didn’t know how. So I kind of developed a desire to kind of run into this burning building [LAUGHTER] that I thought higher ed would become. And long story short, after a few years of doing kind of faculty senate stuff, I got my first admin job of seeing undergraduate education at my former institution. So I should be clear for listeners that I’m not talking about UNC Chapel Hill, I’m talking about another public flagship where I’d been a faculty member for 24 years until last year, and I spent the entire decade, the 2010s, really delving down into the way universities work and kind of learning at the coal face or down in the engine room, or where the sausage is made, or whatever metaphor you want to pick, about things that I’d never understood before, and frankly, had been socialized to be a little bit skeptical of. I mean, what do Deans actually do? Why are these decisions made? Why is our Xerox copying budget being cut? And then, on a much broader scale, what is happening to higher ed? There had already been a lot of critiques of research and teaching, escalating tuition, political concerns, not yet the types of attacks we see now, and just a general kind of loss of confidence in the public mission of higher ed and of public universities, particularly. So when I got done with that stint in administration, this was more or less after the pandemic ended, I had a sabbatical coming. I thought these two events were a great set of bookends for a study of how universities work on the inside and what that tells us about higher education today. So the Great Recession, 2008-09, all the way down to the pandemic and its aftermath, more or less ending in 2022, went on sabbatical, wrote the thing up. I hadn’t been publishing very much during my admin career, and this thing came out in six months of writing. It just flowed out of my fingertips into the Microsoft Word, and it was a joy to write. It’s a kind of warts and all, this is the way universities work. But despite all the mid-level and minor flaws that we experience in higher ed, the enterprise is fundamentally sound. So it’s a comedy, not a tragedy. There are [LAUGHTER] lots of crazy things that happen along the way, and whether we’re still living in a comedy or a tragedy is something we get to do later. But above all, I wanted folks, particularly in faculty and administrative roles, hopefully, maybe some readers outside the academy, can use this and say, well, at least until recently, this was how the machine was supposed to function, and did a remarkably good job despite it all.
John: You noted that when you entered this position, you were a little concerned about entering this burning building, and you note in your book that state funding for higher ed had been declining for several years prior to the Great Recession, and we saw reductions in state tax revenues during that period, leading to lower state support for higher ed. And also, this was a time there was a lot of for-profit online competitors, some of them of very sketchy quality, and there was a lot of concern in general about the future of higher ed. You note, though, that in response to the challenges that were expected, higher ed continued to thrive during and immediately after the financial crisis. Why were the outcomes so much better than many expected to occur during that period?
Ian: Yeah, great question. So just to cut to the chase, the argument is that over the 2010s market competition reigned supreme, and public universities triumphed in that competition.. There was a flight to quality as students and parents and employers all looked to our established institutions to do what they already had done well. We did not know that at the time. Again, that was why I, myself, got into this line of work, and I think a lot of folks were concerned about: A) cutbacks in state funding, and B) as you said, the threat represented by for-profit online providers. So just to flesh that out a little bit more, a lot of states, including the state where I formally taught, had experienced the declining allocations from state legislators, already for decades, or at least years, running up to the financial crisis. When the financial crisis hit, that put a very big additional debt and the monies available for universities. The reason being that states, A) are often subject to limitations on taxes in general, citizens don’t like to pay that much, B) they’re often obligated to fund Medicare or prisons or K-12 education or unemployment insurance, lots of other things are ahead of the line, from a state legislator’s point of view, before higher education gets its cut. And so the question really was, at the time, would private demand for higher education compensate for the decline in public revenues? We know from generations of economic history that recessions have a counter-cyclical effect, that when the economy goes down, people go back to school to get more educational credentials, but we didn’t know that would counterbalance the cuts that we saw, and part of the reason was the rise of these for-profit online competitors. It’s hard to remember now, but I remember at the time thinking like, are they going to eat our lunch? Are they going to automate education? Are they going to replace liberal arts with vocational training? Are they going to act as the disruptive innovators that run circles around these lumbering, conservative, ancient institutions, and the long story short was that: no, that enterprise failed. And in particular, by the end of the pandemic, we all were treated to what at the beginning of the decade felt like a utopian scenario, and ended up being more of a dystopian scenario where everybody, all of a sudden, had to go online, all at once. And we learned at the end of that that even though online is great, it’s not a replacement for the face-to-face teaching that we’ve done for centuries. And so again, the pandemic was a nice bookend to a decade that started off very uncertain, had a lot of rocky periods during the middle and toward the end, especially with the pandemic, but that ended on a high note, I think. And it was that outcome that we could not have expected to be so good at the end. And again, just a few short years ago, it looked like it was poised to stay that way.
Rebecca: Picking up on the thread of competition. One of the arguments that you make is that competition among higher education institutions has allowed them to effectively respond to challenging conditions and to better meet the demands of their stakeholders. Can you explain how competition among colleges has resulted in desirable outcomes in the period of declining state support?
Ian: Yeah, in a nutshell, competition forces universities and university administrators specifically to be responsive to the demands of stakeholders, whether that be students or faculty members or other administrative professionals, who are all competing in a giant market. So it’s an endorsement that I want to be careful about offering, because I’m not trying to offer a brief for unrestricted laissez faire, Adam Smith style capitalism. But as an historian of knowledge, when I look at the way universities have developed over centuries, going all the way back to ancient Greece and Rome, the city states of ancient Greece, going to the Middle Ages, where urban universities in Paris and Bologna and Oxford and Cambridge were competing with one another. The German Research universities of the 19th century: Berlin, Göttingen, Halle, Freiburg, Heidelberg, and then, of course, the state universities of the United States: Michigan, California, North Carolina, New York. They’re all driven by competition in a common cultural space, a common linguistic area, and that has been a dynamic that repeats itself over time. What I tried to do in the book was to really concretize that at an empirical level, to look at the ways that universities market themselves to students, to look at the ways that universities compete for faculty and try to give them working conditions and salaries that meet the demands of very highly trained professionals, that look at the necessities to provide student services and other fringe benefits and amenities that will bring both faculty, staff and students into being willing to relocate to these universities and work there for a time. And the long and short of it is that those mechanisms are, in themselves, sufficient to guarantee a high quality product, if you will, even apart from the regulation that state governments do to keep those universities true to their public mission. It’s not that the state regulation is entirely unwelcome, it’s that it’s sometimes counterproductive, and that it works best when states provide an overall guideline and, of course, as much funding as they can afford, and then let universities be responsive to their stakeholders. And so it’s the burden of the book to demonstrate, as empirically as I possibly can, the way that dynamic alone keeps universities true to their public missions, despite the fact that they seem more and more to be private consumer goods with a very high price tag attached. That’s a problem. We need to look at it. But it doesn’t undermine the public character of universities like ours.
John: A lot of faculty, though, are concerned that this sort of focus on competition or on corporate-style tactics can damage that public purpose that you’re referring to. But instead, you argue that the market pressure has strengthened this commitment to the public good. Could you elaborate a little bit on that part of the argument?
Ian: Sure, and I should say I started off the book, and I started off my administrative career, being one of those faculty who was irked, ticked off, skeptical of, cynical about, key performance indicators and brand management and the role of athletics and a lot of things that do clearly derive from a kind of corporate-style internal management. But I’ll give you two examples of internal management of universities where, despite the adoption of those tactics, the public mission, the commitment to knowledge, the commitment to teaching and research, was maintained, and one of them is kind of more of a pure positive and one of them’s more ambiguous, so it’s not like it’s all roses. Let me explain a bit. So there’s one chapter on… basically it tracks the student tuition dollar as it moves through the administration, and specifically what we call a budget model, a formulaic allocation of student tuition based on the number of credit hours and the number of majors and the number of degrees that any given department produces. And this is clearly a very capitalist type of system, the departments that compete for students that get those butts in seats. If you’ve ever been to a faculty meeting, you know that’s what the Deans want. It does feel very corporate, but what I try to show in very great detail is the way that those incentives: A) really do encourage departments to be responsive to student needs, to be in service to their stakeholders, but B) are counteracted by cross-subsidies that don’t simply steer dollars to whatever an institution-wide popularity contest run by undergraduate students dictates. There are decisions made as a part of that that balance, again, public goods and the pursuit of knowledge against the competition for budget dollars and satisfying consumer demand. The other example, and I devote another chapter of this book, is around research metrics, around efforts to measure research productivity, not only in terms of NSF and NIH federal grant dollars, but in terms of attempts to count and quantify the value of publishing an article or a book: how many readers does it get? How many citations does it get? How do I stack up relative to my colleagues? How does my department stack up? Can we measure something as complex and ineffable as creativity, as scholarly and scientific creativity, and there, as I mentioned earlier, the record is a little bit more ambiguous. Yes, in some ways, it really does help to not just trust that faculty are off thinking big thoughts in the lab or at the library, but there are ways in which there’s a limit to how much we can attempt to measure and to increase productivity and creativity by measuring things even more intensively, article citation counts, federal grant dollars, et cetera. But even in those cases, I argue these kind of quantifiable corporate-style performance metrics and indicators don’t undermine the fundamental commitments of faculty and administrators to do some version of what we’ve always done, which is to pursue knowledge for its own sake. So that’s what I would tell to my former self as a skeptical faculty member, and then to anyone else who might be coming into this wondering, I think rightly so, “How do these decisions get made in administrative conference rooms?”
Rebecca: I think maybe staying on the thread of faculty skeptics, [LAUGHTER] faculty often voice concerns that institutions are shutting down traditional liberal arts majors in the humanities and social sciences to focus more on STEM disciplines. You argue, though, that this is not a very cost-effective strategy given differences in education costs across disciplines. Can you talk a little bit about the cost difference between traditional liberal arts and the STEM disciplines and some of that decision making that’s happening.
Ian: Yeah, it’s a misconception that STEM disciplines are highly profitable and they kick off subsidies that then have to backstop the declining budgets of their poorer cousins in the arts and the humanities. It varies from institution to institution. But what I found in the case study that I used is a fairly widespread pattern whereby, in fact, if you look at the expenditures per credit hour delivered, it’s the natural sciences that run at a loss, if you want to adopt that kind of crude profit and loss, and it’s the social sciences, think those large introductory sociology lectures, for example, where you have one faculty member and a small team of graduate students generating 1000s of credit hours, those departments actually run a surplus, and that surplus within a college of arts and sciences often can be used to backstop the losses that are run in STEM disciplines. In that equation, as I found, at least in this case study, it was the arts and the humanities programs that more or less broke even. So from a sheer profit and loss perspective, if a trustee were to come to me and say, “We need to shut down all those departments that aren’t making money and steer money to the ones that are efficient and good,” they might be expecting a dean or the administrator to say, “Well, we need to keep the English department. We can’t just give all the money to the biology department,” when the answer might well be, “Well, we’re not going to close down the Biology department simply because they lose money, and we’re not going to reward the English department, simply because they’re so profitable an enterprise. We have other considerations at play.” The takeaway is, and this varies from institution to institution, it shouldn’t be surprising that STEM is more expensive, science is expensive, laboratories are expensive, equipment is expensive, and we should cross-subsidize that. It’s just not the case that the liberal arts run a loss. This is a whole separate conversation we can have. But another thing that we know is that liberal arts degrees pay off handsomely over a lifetime. If you are concerned about: “What can I do with a degree in liberal arts? Do I have to major in STEM or business?” The answer is no. If you major in STEM, yes, if you become a medical doctor or an engineer, you’re going to make a lot more money over your lifetime. That should be no surprise. But if you major in a humanities field or one of the humanistic social sciences, your lifetime earnings capacity is equal to, if not greater than, business, journalism, and indeed, many of the STEM fields, like biology.
John: And adding to that just a little bit, the probability of a student entering into a discipline and succeeding and graduating with a degree in that discipline is much higher in the humanities and social sciences than it is in many STEM fields, which is a separate issue that also needs to be addressed. I was at a meeting this morning where it was noted that the Department of Education is using College Scorecards that look at the earnings of new graduates based on their entering major, which is a bit troubling in a lot of ways, because, as you mentioned, the return to education is best measured by students’ lifetime earnings, and also students change majors quite often over the course of their college career. When you just look at the earnings of recent graduates, it’s a relatively poor predictor of lifetime earnings, because the earnings of college graduates rise quite a bit over time, and much of the gain from education comes from that more rapid rate of growth compared to high school graduates , which is perhaps related to another point that you made in the book, which was that political interventions are sometimes harmful when they get involved in the decision-making processes of institutions. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Ian: Absolutely, and maybe for the purposes of this question, I’ll set aside capital “P” politics, ideology, partisanship, the type of climate that we’re living through now, though I’m happy to come back to later. I would offer a few examples of small “p” politics, or even just policy-making interventions that, in most cases, are very well intentioned and driven by people who have all the best values at heart, and that still backfires. So return on investment, as you just mentioned, is one of them, what is the documented value of a college degree? And there’s so many methodological challenges there, from using your incoming major to using the first job that you get out of school. And there are as many counterintuitive stories in that area as there are ones that gratify your preconceived notions. So one that I’ve heard quoted a lot recently is that at the current moment in the job market, the unemployment rate for ethnic studies graduates is lower than the unemployment rate for computer science majors, because, for the time being, the bottom has dropped out of the computer science entry level field because of AI, and the ability to enter a profession where you deal with ethnic diversity is actually at a premium. So it’s really challenging methodologically to measure return on investment, much less to design incentives and mandates that universities have to adopt in order to deliver their education. So another large argument layered across the book is that more often than not, any attempt by well-intentioned state and federal policy makers to dictate how universities respond to their stakeholders, to scan their environment, to seize on opportunities, is likely to produce sub-optimal outcomes. And just very briefly, I can give you a couple of other examples, and we can delve in further. So a lot of states have experimented with performance incentives attached to particular outcomes that they want to incentivize, things like workforce development, things like the diversification of the graduating class, and a lot of times, those produce more bureaucratic compliance infrastructure than they do demonstrable results. In the book, for example, I look at the state where my prior institution was located, the case study for the book that understandably, at the time, wanted to incentivize state universities to graduate more underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, and so they attached a $6,400 performance incentive to each institution to say, “Hey, you’re gonna get more money for serving these students. You can use some of that to stand up more services to help them out.” Well, in that particular case, it made much more sense to go recruit an out-of-state student who would pay much higher tuition. In this case, $9,000 instead of $6,400 because that would be in the financial interest of the institution. So despite the attempt to kind of play with these incentives, to steer and nudge a university in a particular way, it had the effect of not doing much to change the equation. All it did was to add another layer of complexity to the budgeting. A second example that I bring up is the way by which we accredit universities, another thing that’s very much in the news today and the whole mandate that all universities are under to conduct assessments of their general education and other curricula, to attempt to measure that which is arguably not measurable. How much do you learn in a given liberal arts course, or even over two or four years? All well intentioned, designed to document: Are we teaching what we claim to? Are our students learning what they need to? But in the book, this is one of the very few actual diatribes in what I hope is otherwise a fairly even-handed approach, I try to show that a lot of that assessment theater is just that, it doesn’t fulfill the policy or political objectives it aims to, and it only fetters universities even further.
Rebecca: How do we get around that? The idea that you have all these policies in place really because the spirit of what’s there is what’s important, but the outcomes are not there, and we’re just kind of like ticking boxes and not really doing what probably most people actually desire to do.
Ian: A year ago, I would have said it’s a devilish problem that needs to be tackled, like hacking back any other set of weeds, that we should go through with a very calibrated set of gardening tools and prune out the overgrowth. Through factors beyond our control, we’re in the middle of to switch metaphors to category five hurricane that is clearing out a lot of old practices, possibly including accreditation, possibly including the Department of Education, things we would have never wished for and will certainly come to regret in many ways, but that will have the effect of possibly clearing a lot of ground for us to rebuild in a more thoughtful way. And what I would like this book to do is to sort of illustrate why we need to build back better in a different way, and in a way that is much closer to the way we used to do the things before these bureaucracies became so overgrown, before these gardens of weeds became so thick and impenetrable.
John: One of the things you address in your book is the rising cost of tuition, which has long been a major concern of people concerned about the future of higher ed. And you refer to the Baumol disease, which suggests that the relative cost of higher ed is bound to increase. Could you give us a brief summary of the Baumol disease, because unfortunately, not everyone is familiar with that argument?
Ian: Yeah, and here I want to concede that this is very much not my own argument. It goes back to the late 1960s, but the classic example is a string quartet or a haircut, any good service or function that is performed by human beings that is difficult to automate, difficult to accelerate, difficult to optimize. You could increase your production of string quartets by playing Beethoven at six times the normal speed, but it’s going to sound pretty funny. You could speed up a haircut, deliver more haircuts in an hour, but I don’t think anyone wants those scissors flying at that high speed near their heads. So there’s certain things that you just cannot increase the productivity of, and higher education is one of them. We had an experiment, again, through the 2010s: Can online automate higher education, and again, the results seemingly have come back: “No, they can’t.” So in essence, the idea is that things that are highly labor intensive are going to experience higher rates of inflation than things that can, in fact, be automated, like automotive manufacturing or any number of other manufacturing processes, so that over time, you would only expect the relative cost of higher education to exceed the relative cost of manufactured or otherwise automated goods and services. And I think the point there to emphasize is that Baumol’s cost disease in higher education is as old as the golden age of higher education itself. It’s not only not a new problem, but it first arose and began to be noticed during the very decade that American higher education… call it a golden age, whatever… rose to international prominence. It is a feature and not a bug. It is an inescapable condition, not a disease that admits of an easy cure.
Rebecca: We’ve talked quite a bit about costs, and one of the issues that students certainly face is sometimes leaving college or a university without a degree, but still quite a bit of student loan debt. And this is certainly true for first-gen students, students from low-income households and students from historically minoritized groups. You’ve noted that the origin of these differences occurs [LAUGHTER] before students enter college. But what can colleges do to help reduce these equity gaps in outcomes?
Ian: So first of all, there’s pointing out that at a lot of public flagship institutions, including the case study in the book, the average debt for students who graduate with any debt at all is on the order of $20,000, or it was during the 2010s, which is not chump change, but as a debt to be paid off over a career is far less than most people’s mortgages. So even though debt is real, even though tuition has gone up, even though students and parents can’t afford, through a combination of grants and loans and financial aid and summer jobs, most middle class students can come out with a reasonable package afterwards. It’s also worth noting that some of the tuition increase that we saw in the 2010s, as I said earlier, had to compensate from declines in public state legislature funded expenses, and so was simply back-filling dollars that had been taken away by appropriations cuts, but particularly after the middle of the 2010s, after that gap was filled, some of that tuition money was plowed back into student services to elevate the quality of the experience and the support for everybody, and not just to make up for lost revenue. Now, there were a lot of critiques at the time of lazy rivers and climbing walls, if that rings a bell, that a lot of these extra tuitions and fees were plowed into fancy amenities to make student rec centers or dorms feel more like country clubs, and there were some instances of kind of waste, fraud, and abuse in that area, but in general, these monies were plowed into scholarships, into support services for first-gen, transfers, other underrepresented students, and before the recent restrictions placed on diversity, equity, and inclusion into programs that cater to specific racial and ethnic minorities. I do say in the book that there are distinct limits to the abilities of even the most well-intentioned and well-resourced higher education institutions to fully close those equity gaps, because, as we all know, by the time students arrive in college, they come from very diverse backgrounds, socioeconomically speaking, and in particular, K-12 education is both dramatically underfunded across the board and highly correlated with zip code, because it’s funded by property taxes. And I have a long session in the book, it’s a bit of a digression from higher education, but I felt it needed to be said, that it is our K-12 system, and frankly, our entire society, that underserves people who do not come from a middle class background, who cannot take on $20,000 of debt, give or take, and who come in from profound social, economic, psychological, cultural disadvantages that we cannot in higher education be fully expected to offset. And, if anything, a lot of the populist backlash we see against higher education is driven by that circumstance for reasons beyond our control and that aren’t our fault. There are huge numbers of people, white, black, brown, and otherwise, who are being. radically underserved by our public policies, who look at what they perceive as special treatment for ethnic and racial minorities by universities and wonder, why am I not getting that deal as well? It’s not the university’s fault for doing that. It’s the fact that we have left so many people behind. There’s a sentence in a book where I say, basically, universities and colleges are our welfare state. I’m a European historian. So in Britain, they have the National Health Service. In France, they have free childcare. In Germany, they have labor unions. In Scandinavia, they have a wall-to-wall set of services for everybody. We during the entire century, and in fact, the last two decades, after we began to dismantle the welfare state in the United States, have looked to higher education to counteract all the deficits in education, health care, unemployment, poverty abatement, you name it. And that’s admittedly a very long answer to your question that takes us very far afield, but I wanted to do what I could in the book to put that equity gap question into a really larger political and policy context.
John: There’s a lot more we can do at all levels to address those issues that we haven’t been. But let’s go back to an earlier topic, where you mentioned online education a couple of times. Was that really a very effective test of online education when we went online during COVID? Or was that a test of what happens when you have a lot of people who were unprepared to either take online courses or unprepared to teach online courses, who were suddenly thrust into an environment at a fairly challenging time, and it was a failure pretty much every way in which we could measure it. But there have been some studies that have found that prior to that point, online education did result in outcomes that were consistent with, or in the case of hybrid instruction, superior to those in terms of some assessments of learning, at least. Perhaps is the criticism of online instruction a bit overdone in general in society as a result of the experience of the pandemic?
Ian: The short answer is yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think that, if anything, the pandemic soured a lot of faculty and students on what had been and still could be a very promising set of pedagogies. I think the long and short of it was that, yes, we did learn that we preferred to be back in person, that probably would remain true even had we had time to prepare the best online pedagogy as possible. But the fact that we all rushed into it meant that we all did some version of a bad job, and I speak of myself and probably everyone else who had to learn these things very quickly. What surprised and disappointed me was that the reaction against online was so severe coming out. And I know that different institutions have had different trajectories, but at my prior institution, and also at UNC Chapel Hill, the moment that the pandemic was over, it was like, “Thank God, now we can go back to butts in seats,” [LAUGHTER] and we know that’s not the answer either. So I’m hoping that a couple years out, we were thrown in the deep end, into a very cold pool of water, and naturally we wanted to get right back out again. The silver lining is we’d learned that we could sort of swim, we could dog paddle, or at least keep our heads above water. Maybe now let’s go back and learn the butterfly stroke. Maybe let’s invest in online and particularly hybrid or HyFlex modalities that I think have enormous benefits. Some students learn better online. A lot of students would for reasons of convenience. They have jobs, they have other things to schedule. At UNC Chapel Hill, we’re growing the size of the undergraduate population, but we’re constricted by a very antiquated campus. Can we move some of those classes online so that we don’t have to build more classrooms? Any number of reasons to, I think, reopen the experiment on online education. I would say, in general, this is something I wish I’d developed more in the book, but I’ve been thinking about ever since, there are a lot of experiments in teaching that we were really excited about in the 2010s that came to a crashing halt during the pandemic, and it’s high time to sort of dust those off and make another run at the ones that at least were most promising.
Rebecca: So higher education institutions today are facing all kinds of new challenges related to, I think, what you would call, maybe the capital “P” of politics on higher education institutions and expertise more generally. We’ve got the enrollment cliff and a decline in the perceived value of higher education by a large share of the population. What advice would you provide to higher education administrators in addressing these and all these other new challenges.
Ian: Great question, and maybe I’ll disaggregate what I think are the real threats from the ones that are serious but not existential. So the enrollment cliff, for example, that’s real, We know that and different institutions are experiencing that differently. Flagships generally have the first pick of students, so even in states where the demographics are softening, they can still make their classes. Other institutions may have difficulty filling their classes in the first place, or at least filling them with qualified students. One lesson, and I don’t mean to be glib here, is that those challenges are a known unknown. They’re of the same kind, even if not the same degree, as we experienced in the 2010s in other circumstances. So I have a lot of faith in institutions to ride out that type of change. It won’t be easy, it will certainly be painful. It will cause layoffs and gnashing of teeth, but institutions are resilient, and one of the lessons of the book is like we can take a lot of blows of that nature. I’d also push back on the narrative that higher education has experienced a decline in perceived value. I think there have been political attacks that are very ideologically motivated, but if you ask the average parent or student whether college is worthwhile, not only as an investment, but as a life experience, most of them will say yes. To me, there’s a huge disconnect. I never run into students or parents who say, “I’m not coming to university because it’s full of woke crusaders.” I mean, they may believe that to be the case, but it doesn’t cause them not to sign up. [LAUGHTER] And in fact, I would argue it’s just not the case to begin with. So we’re experiencing a political crisis, rather than a crisis in public opinion. There are some good stories that are concerning that the value of a college degree in purely economic terms is softening, but that may be because the value of college type of skills, you know, being a welder or a plumber is experiencing a renaissance, or at least a rediscovery. That’s a good thing if we don’t have to require every student to go to college for four years, because it’s not for everybody. We should really help people, whatever their skills are. So that leaves the last bit, which is political attacks, and that’s where I’ve begun to feel that we really are at a different universe from the one we were in as recently as I would say, 2023. I was finalizing the conclusion of this chapter. I believe it was… well, early 2024 when we had the first round of congressional hearings into the war in Gaza and some of the flickers of McCarthyism that have since blossomed into a full on conflagration. And that’s not to take a stance on the war or on the prevalence of anti- semitism, but just to say that already, before the current administration came into power, there were indications that we are entering a new phase of McCarthyism, and I’m not a scholar of McCarthyism, but I feel like we are certainly well beyond that now, in the same sense that the wider scandals and crises engulfing our federal political system exceed Watergate by an order of magnitude. So I have to sort of live in this tension, as I’m sure all of you who are listening do as well. In my day-to-day life, I feel like I’m living in truth. Life goes on. Universities are wondrous things. They’re factories of goodness. And then I read in the papers outlandish attacks on things that are either being blown all out of proportion or are simply false. And all I can say from kind of my position in the trenches is that I’m going to try to save as much as I can for as long as I can, and try to let go where I can’t affect the wider discourse. For example, this is public, so I’m not divulging anything, and certainly not concealing anything either. There are a lot of state and federal mandates in the past year to eliminate DEI from the curriculum with no definition of what DEI even means. And so in a lot of meetings I have been in, and that’s true of many others, you’re trying to interpret a mandate that literally makes no sense. You know what’s behind it, but you don’t know how to respond to it. What does an executive order signed by the President of the United States really compel us to do and it’s unclear what direction we’re headed in. I don’t want to be pollyannish. I do think the lesson of the book was certainly the 2010s were a crisis, and we survived that crisis well. History never repeats itself exactly. So we could look back on the 2020s and say, “Well, we survived that too. We were steeled for what came after us by what already had come after us before. We had our muscles worked up.” Or this could be the end. [LAUGHTER] This could be the end of American civilization as we know it, or anything on the spectrum in between. It’s really impossible for me to say at this moment.
Rebecca: Well, we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?
Ian: Yeah, so what I want to do is continue in two veins. One, I would love to do more advocacy and public communication of the sort we’re doing right now on this podcast. I hope people read the book, obviously, but I would love for it to become a platform for me to continue sort of speaking from the perspective of a faculty administrator working in the trenches and about all the good things that are going on in higher ed, despite the headlines we see. And so the second piece of it is to continue doing the work. I mentioned at the very beginning II did admin for a decade, I took a sabbatical, I wrote the book, then I moved to UNC Chapel Hill, doing a very similar version of the job I’d done before, because I just love this stuff, and if anything, I want more faculty to discover the pleasures of serving students, serving the research mission, doing the work in the trenches. It’s not always glamorous, but I will say, it’s the first time I’ve ever used my liberal arts degree as a liberal arts degree. I majored in history, and I got a vocational degree in history because I became a history professor, and it was only in doing administration that I realized that I have transferable skills that I learned from that that apply to whatever I wake up in the morning, and it’s a new problem I’ve never seen before, and I have to figure out. So when I sell the liberal arts to students and to parents, I say like “I discovered this late in life, when I was in my 40s, you shouldn’t have to wait that long.” But I guess the short answer to “what’s next?” is I’m going to keep on keeping on, and I hope that whether you’re a faculty member or a staff member or administrator in higher ed listening to this, you’ll do the same and discover more opportunities to network. And if you’re not in our world and you’re a little bit concerned about what’s going on, rise to our defense, advocate for us, or at least don’t leap to conclusions about what’s happening based on what you read in the papers. 99.8% of what’s happening in any public or private college or university in the United States is a good thing, full stop, and the more of it we can offer to more people, the better.
John: And I very much appreciated reading your book at a time when I was somewhat dismayed about the prospects for higher ed, the fact that we’ve come through some very significant challenges and actually made some substantial improvements in the role that higher ed plays in serving the public good, was very encouraging as a message.
Ian: Thank you. I have to read my own book for the same reason, because [LAUGHTER] it could get kind of challenging sometimes.
Rebecca: Sounds like an important one to have on the shelf, then, right? [LAUGHTER]
Ian: Well, the irony is, I couldn’t have planned this better. As you may have noticed, the University Unfettered is published by Columbia University Press, and I’ve been joking that this is the most outrageous publicity stunt in the history of publishing, because the whole thing around Columbia has just been manufactured to make my book look good. If only that were the case. [LAUGHTER]
John: If it sells well enough, maybe it can pay off the bribe they had to make in order to continue their existence.
Ian: I’m expecting at least $200 million in royalties from this. [LAUGHTER]
Rebecca: Well, thanks for joining us. It was a pleasure to chat with you.
Ian: Yeah, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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