Jerry Jinks
Education
Illinois State University
Angela Browne-Miller has squandered an intriguing title on a silly little book. In Shameful Admissions: The Losing Battle To Serve Everyone In Our Universities, Miller maintains that she is "holding this institution (University of California, Berkeley) up to the world to serve as mirror" apparently to reflect higher education in a world of increasing diversity and the contemporary backlash to affirmative action. The author does not seem to recognize that Berkeley no more reflects higher education in the United States than does Princeton, Yale, or MIT. Consequently, what she succeeds in doing is illustrating the myopic parochialism of elitist institutions that insist on prefacing every other self reference with "prestigious" or "world class."
Furthermore, casting these institutions as victims of society's attempts to balance social inequalities through higher education strikes this reviewer as either an effort to ingratiate herself or, at best, a remarkably naive view.
Although Miller indicates that her book is a result of research the format is not outlined beyond the fact that it consisted of an "exploratory(?) questionnaire to 750 students, 200 faculty and 150 administrators" at Berkeley, interviews with an additional "200 students, 35 faculty, and 20 administrators", again at Berkeley, plus "about 50 faculty and administrators at other universities". The reader is told nothing about the specific content of either the questionnaire or the interviews nor are we given information about how the questions were generated nor the instrumentations' validity or reliability. One might assume that there was something systematic going on here but there is even some reason to doubt that. In the Acknowledgments section, Miller tells us that..."In writing Shameful Admissions, I found myself guided through the issues by some invisible hand, a hand that pointed me in directions I had not expected to go at the start. I thank the source of that guidance. I feel it brought me to all of those who granted me interviews for this book: some anonymously and some with their names attached" (xxv). This is not the way this reviewer was taught to do research and I rather doubt that such approaches are typical of research courses at Berkeley, either.
The author's effort with this book might have been more tolerable had she acknowledged that because her "research" was largely limited to one highly selective institution the reader might be somewhat skeptical of generalizing to all of higher education. However neither does she offer that as a factor that should limit interpretation nor does she even acknowledge that the vast majority of higher education in this country is being delivered by state colleges and universities--institutions with very different admissions problems. Indeed she takes the opposite stance when she states that she wrote the book "to help college-bound and college students and their parents make decisions regarding higher education" (xv); not about UC Berkeley specifically, but about "higher education" generally.
Insistence on hyperbole, over generalization and coinage of goofy terms such as "dis-cyclical-psuedo-egalitarianism" (7), "multiposity" (225), or "communiversity" (229), characterizes much of Miller's writing and takes away from a message which actually is worth consideration. The impact of multiculturalism upon the traditions of excellence in higher education is certainly a worthy topic and deserves thoughtful, informed treatment. Instead, Shameful Admissions, reads more like a cross between a personal memoir and a newsstand tabloid complete with a personal story of a respected professor who sexually harassed our author. The fact that she uses this as an illustration of the university's inability to respond to increasing diversity is a bit of a stretch.
In the final chapter "Rethinking Pathways to the American Dream" the reader is finally treated to the long promised solution to all of the troubles of an increasingly impotent higher education--the "communiversity". The solution is to "empty our colleges and universities. Then determine which of these facilities would become think tanks and research schools, which should become trade and professional schools and which should become community education programs" (244). Then Miller proposes a kind of cream-rising-to-the-top process. All students should attend local communiversities which focus on community based education and service. Those graduates demonstrating the appropriate aptitudes and abilities might be directed to the trade schools which include law, medicine, engineering, etc. Perhaps the top 5% of communiversity graduates might be recruited to lives of scholarship at the nation's think tanks and research institutions complete with full support from local and federal sources. (If the reader finds this vaguely reminiscent of Plato then move to the head of the class. Our author, however, does not acknowledge the author of The Republic).
Exactly how the communiversity/trade school/think tank system is going to be any more at home in our multicultural world than is the university is unclear. It does not appear as if it will result from its curriculum. Miller outlines a fourfold curriculum which is "designed to teach science of mind" (232) which she refers to as a "consciousness-technology-curriculum" (233). In reality the science of mind curriculum does not read much differently from any university's general education mission statement. For example the first of its four purposes is "To develop fully the intellectual, creative, and civic potentials of all students" (233). She goes on to suggest a short laundry list of nineteen necessary classroom activities such as "Lessons in reading, understanding, and following instructions" (233) and "Lessons in memorization in which students are taught memorization techniques and are given many, many opportunities to practice" (234). It is not clear if this list of lessons is meant to be definitive or illustrative.
Perhaps the new higher education system will be more responsive to multicultural reality because it will emphasize community service as a part of student life. Miller seems particularly enthralled by this notion and the reader is left with the impression that the author really believes that this is kind of a new idea even though she cites the work of Ann Lieberman, codirector of something called the National Center for Restructuring Education and Teaching. Although learning coupled with practical experience has many advocates it still is not clear to this reviewer exactly how this approach speaks to multiculturalism.
Finally, there is no dialog regarding how such changes in the country's higher education systems might be brought about or who really is going to make the decisions about who goes where or the monumental logistics behind such decisions. Instead we are given sound bites and glittering generalities such as "This is the new social justice" (248) which ignores completely the class distinctions inherent in such recommendations. One might suppose, however, that should such dichotomies come to pass institutions such as UC Berkeley (which, I assume our author would nominate for the research/think tank group) would not have to struggle with a diverse student body. Instead its students would be recruited from the top 5% of communiversity graduates who have demonstrated their capacity for a life of scholarly pursuit.
On the other hand, perhaps Berkeley could find Miller's utopia without the rest of the country "emptying its colleges and universities" (244). Would they not accomplish the same thing by simply closing all of their professional schools and eliminating their athletic programs? In that way they would only receive applications from students who seek a future of scholarship in the liberal arts. Problem solved.