In the wake of a series of well-publicized scandals, institutions of all kinds over the past few years have heard calls for better governance and greater accountability. Corporations have had to adapt to the federal Sarbanes-Oxley anti-fraud law. More recently, nonprofits have come under scrutiny from the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.
No college or university can expect to escape this mounting concern. So rather than go on doing business as usual, boards should take the initiative and review their own role in governance.
Judging by certain indicators, our country’s basic approach to higher education seems to have worked quite well. In international surveys, American universities consistently dominate the list of leading institutions. Large majorities of students and alumni look with favor on their undergraduate education; more than 70 percent express satisfaction with their experience in college. A whopping 93 percent of Americans agree that “colleges and universities are among the most valuable resources to the U.S.”
Boards of trustees have done their part to bring about these impressive results. In particular, they have contributed much-needed experience and judgment to aspects of university operations often unfamiliar to the faculty and its academic leaders—budgets, new construction, financial management, and investments. When trustees engage in tasks not squarely within their special expertise, such as choosing a new president, they have almost always been wise enough to consult closely with the faculty and other constituencies.
Of course, defining the scope of board responsibilities is no easy task. Border skirmishes occasionally break out, as when trustees attempt to alter the curriculum or modify the tenure system. Examples also crop up in which a board grants extravagant compensation to a chief executive or threatens to remove a president who tries to rein in a winning football coach. Fortunately, however, incidents of this kind are relatively rare, though the few that do occur often generate a storm of unwelcome publicity.
Despite this largely positive record, closer analysis reveals a deeper problem with boards of trustees and our system of governance. Boards are said to have two principal responsibilities. They must support their university by keeping it solvent, choosing its leaders, and defending it from intrusive outside forces. In addition, however, they are supposed to convey to the faculty and administration the legitimate needs and concerns of important constituencies, such as students, alumni, and the public at large.
By and large, trustees have done a far better job with the first of their responsibilities than they have with the second. In particular, most boards have done very little to represent the learning needs of society or to ensure that faculties achieve the highest attainable quality of education.
Some observers prefer to leave things much as they are. Because trustees rarely know as much about education as the faculty, these folks reason, it is just as well that they refrain from trying to impose their ideas about curriculum and teaching on the institution. To encourage trustees to meddle in such matters is simply to invite misguided attempts to visit unwelcome ideological views, inappropriate teaching methods, and other mischief upon the faculty.
The fears that underlie this argument are not groundless. It is easy to find real-life examples to illustrate each concern. Yet it is equally clear that there is a heavy price to pay for freeing boards of all responsibility for the quality of education. Even a cursory reading of the research on undergraduate education will reveal the widespread use of highly questionable academic practices.
Flawed Pedagogy. Here are some examples of dubious teaching: Lecturing to students is still the method of choice in most college classrooms despite numerous studies showing that problem-based discussion, group study, and other active forms of learning are much more effective. Other studies have documented the prevalence of various habits that impede learning, such as the failure to give prompt and adequate feedback on student work, the use of examinations that test recall rather than critical thinking, and a reliance on teaching methods in certain science courses that allow students to do well by memorizing without truly understanding the underlying scientific concepts.
As a result of these and other problems, undergraduates tend to achieve much less than they might in their college years. To wit:
- Although more than 90 percent of all college professors consider critical thinking the most important aim of a college education, high school seniors who start college with average thinking skills tend to progress over the next four years only from the 50th percentile of entering freshmen to a level that would have placed them at the 69th percentile.
- Only a minority of college seniors believe they have made substantial progress in improving their competence in writing or quantitative methods, and some assessments have found that sizeable numbers of students actually regress in mastering these important skills.
- Although most colleges require students to study a foreign language, fewer than 10 percent of seniors believe they have substantially improved their language skills, and fewer than 15 percent are enrolled in an advanced class of the kind needed to acquire reasonable proficiency. The great majority leave college, as the saying goes, “knowing enough to read a menu but not enough to compliment the chef.”
Most colleges also have neglected basic educational goals of particular concern to the general public. For example, few institutions have made much of an effort to help strengthen their students’ moral character. Although most college curricula now include one or more courses on some form of practical ethics, only a small minority of undergraduates typically enroll.
Colleges are also lax in preparing students to be active, engaged citizens. Granted, there has been a heartening recent growth in the number of undergraduates volunteering for community service. Nevertheless, vast majorities graduate without having taken a basic course in American government. More than a third have not even completed an introductory course in economics. Worst yet, recent research reveals that the more courses students take in such popular subjects as business, science, and engineering, the less likely they are to vote or participate in political and civic life.
What Motivates Professors. Many critics of universities have explained the shortcomings of undergraduate education by charging that faculty members are uninterested in teaching and neglect students to concentrate on their research. I believe such charges are misdirected, except perhaps in a few research-oriented universities.
Overall, college professors are more interested in teaching than research and spend much more time at it than they do writing books and articles. Most of them genuinely care for their students and work conscientiously at preparing their classes. The problem is not that professors neglect their students but that they do too little to explore new and possibly more effective ways of teaching and learning.
Why faculties exhibit such reluctance is not altogether clear. In part, their behavior may reflect the fact that doctoral programs rarely include any material on pedagogy or educational research. In part, professors may resist efforts to consider innovative methods of instruction for fear that introducing the new ways will simply add much time on top of already busy schedules and ultimately fail to bring about improvements.
An even more telling explanation is the lack of any compelling reason for faculty members to search for more effective teaching methods. It is true that colleges are in sharp and continuous competition to attract students. Unfortunately, this rivalry does not produce the same pressure to create a better product than one finds in ordinary commercial markets.
Students do not shop around for a better education in the way that consumers search for a better automobile. Few college applicants care whether an institution offers strong programs in moral education or makes serious efforts to prepare active, enlightened citizens. Nor do applicants have any way of knowing which of the colleges they are considering will help them learn the most.
Under these conditions, colleges suffer no penalty if they neglect subjects of importance to the public or continue to use ineffective methods of teaching and learning. So long as they do not charge excessive tuition and keep abreast of their competitors in providing financial aid, popular degree programs (mainly vocational), and impressive facilities, they can continue to attract applicants and graduate satisfied students.
Aware of the resulting vacuum, many state governments have begun to press for educational improvements by establishing “objective” standards of performance and adjusting appropriations to reward their most successful public universities. Unfortunately, the measures being used are much too crude to be effective. Some ask what percentage of students graduate; others look to the percentage of alumni who are employed one year after their graduation; still others record the scores seniors receive on standardized tests to enter graduate and professional school.
None of these measures reflects the true quality of a college’s educational programs. By and large, the results are either beyond the power of a college to affect or are chiefly a reflection of how smart students were when they entered college, not how much they learned after they enrolled.
What Boards Can Do. If neither state governments nor market pressures can induce colleges and universities to work systematically to improve the quality of education, is there a useful role for boards of trustees? This question raises a dilemma. On the one hand, trustees rarely are equipped by training and experience to render sound judgments on educational questions. On the other hand, who will intervene on behalf of better quality if trustees refuse to act?
One way out of this dilemma is for trustees to simply raise questions and demand reports without undertaking to impose answers. Specifically, the board could ask the president to report on the following:
- Does the college participate in the National Survey of Student Engagement? (It determines the prevalence of practices of active teaching and learning that have been shown to be effective in helping students learn.) If so, what steps have college officials taken to act on the results?
- What efforts does the college make to assess student progress toward generally accepted goals such as critical thinking, quantitative skills, writing, and proficiency in a foreign language, and are the results of such assessments shared with faculty?
- What is done to use such evaluations to identify weaknesses and discuss potential remedies? What changes have been made in light of these assessments?
- Are funds available to enable instructors to experiment with new teaching methods, and are the results evaluated and publicized within the faculty?
- What training in classroom teaching is given to graduate teaching fellows and/or new members of the faculty? Does such training include exposure to research findings on teaching and learning?
- What use does the college make of teaching evaluations, and how well are these surveys constructed? (For example, do they ask students to comment not only on the teacher but on what they think they have learned?)
- In proceedings for faculty appointment or promotion, what evidence of a candidate’s teaching is collected, how reliable is the evidence, and how much weight does it receive?
Fortunately, the risks of unwise intervention are fairly low, so long as boards do not attempt to dictate what courses should be taught and what instructional methods should be practiced or employed. Trustees should merely ask for reports on the procedures used to evaluate academic programs and encourage innovation. They should ask the president and deans to comment on the findings and suggest needed improvements. Surely it is within the prerogatives of the board to take an interest in these subjects and to urge the president to work with the faculty to develop a process designed to ensure continuing improvement in the quality of education.
To perform this function well while retaining the confidence of the faculty, boards might suggest that their membership include experienced educators or, failing that, that a team of educators from other universities could be recruited to conduct an independent review. The potential gains from such intervention are considerable. While faculties can preserve the status quo by quietly ignoring new possibilities for reform, they cannot continue to do so once the issue has been raised by the board and information is made available about the neglect of particular subjects and potential improvements in teaching effectiveness.
Involvement by the board would ensure that presidents assign high priority to instructional evaluation and reform. This in turn would give deans a powerful mandate to press ahead with programs of assessment and innovation against the silent forces of inertia and indifference that so often stifle efforts of this kind. In this way, prospects for reform no longer would rest entirely on the shoulders of presidents and deans and be at risk of being forever put aside in favor of less controversial ventures.
Without more encouragement than they currently receive, presidents are likely to go on following the conventional path of seeking distinction through better SAT scores, higher rankings in U.S. News & World Report, and aggressive campus building campaigns. Such efforts will offend no one. They emphasize the goals most often cited to document the success of a college and its leaders. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that such accomplishments do anything significant to enhance student learning or to rouse the faculty to consider the issues that are most essential to bringing about improvement.
If priorities ever do change and colleges and universities place greater emphasis on the quality of education, someone will have to alter the incentives and rewards that currently influence campus leaders. The board alone is capable of accomplishing this result. If trustees seize the initiative, they may become the catalyst to lift the quality of undergraduate education to new and higher levels.
What greater task could trustees hope to accomplish?
