Independent Outlook

It’s become fashionable to prize innovation in higher education, not only because university research produces new knowledge that enriches our lives and changes our understanding of the world, but also because new campus programs are themselves markers of institutional vitality. It is less fashionable to celebrate colleges and universities as custodians of the world’s cumulative knowledge and conveyors of it to the next generation.

To demonstrate more accurately the financial worth of college degrees, at least six states in 2012 explored the use of databases to publicly disclose income levels of graduates in specific fields. Virginia’s State Council of Higher Education brought its initiative to fruition in the fall through its Wage Outcomes Report, which provides information about the immediate employment/salary experiences of alumni who remain in Virginia after graduation.

Unintended consequences will frequently result from unique events. Barton College (N.C.) fashioned one of the most dramatic finishes ever played when it won the DII National Men’s Basketball Championship in spring 2007. In the last 45 seconds, a single point guard sank five baskets. The shot that won the game dropped with 0.1 seconds to go. (If you love basketball and have not seen this clip, it’s on YouTube under “Barton College Basketball.”)

It’s been a surprise to see how eager many college trustees, foundation officers, and government officials are now for the same freedom students and faculty members enjoy on campus to try out new ideas. Many have become enamored with the idea of “disruptive innovation,” drawn from Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997). Arguing that incremental change is often inadequate when organizations face altered circumstances, he asserts that disruptive innovation is the best way to re-position an organization. His main examples relate to hard disk drives and excavators.

If young people hope to influence the direction of political and social change, they need to adopt a better strategy. The amorphous protests embodied in the recent Occupy movement and the ambivalent responses by most colleges to them were disappointing. The intermittent camp-ins and other protests failed to attract widespread support, and—as college leaders no doubt predicted—dissipated fairly quickly.

The 20-year-old “bubble era” of rapid expansion and leveraged prosperity in American colleges may have been a novelty; it did not, however, fund or build much that now seems original. Too bad, because there is a difference between movements or institutions (as there is for poets and scientists) that are original, truly springing from fresh inspiration, and those that are merely novel, highly derived forms growing from already familiar soils. The Great Recession continues a residual perplexity like a weather front hovering upon the shoreline.

Everyone in higher education at last understands that important components of “the public”—state and federal officials, nongovernmental accrediting bodies, and prospective students and their parents—expect a college to cite compelling evidence that students learn a great deal at that institution. Officials who are most eager to make evidence available believe students will enroll only in colleges demonstrating that their graduates experience impressive intellectual growth over four years.

As I write this, the markets have tumbled again, the Chronicle notes "renewed jitters" at colleges and universities, and Moody's warns of a mounting backlog of deferred maintenance on campuses, a sign to rating agencies of weakened financial positions.

Recent popular books and articles on the state of higher education today might lead a reader to conclude that no students are prepared for college-level work, nor are they learning or studying as much as they should, especially in their first two years in college. In the March 24 New York Review of Books, Peter Brooks, the distinguished scholar of comparative literature who spent many years at Yale and is now at Princeton, reviews several of the recently published critiques of American higher education.

Renewed efforts will be needed in the days ahead to prepare the next generation of campus leaders. The average age of college and university presidents is about 60; a wave of retirements over the next five to 10 years is inevitable. The ranks of chief academic officers -- the traditional proving ground of candidates for presidencies -- appear to be less promising as a source for the next cohort of presidents because the average age of CAOs is 57.