[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Richard E. Walton
Philosophy (Emeritus)
UM-Missoula
The Montana Professor's Fall 2008 issue included an article by Bill Macgregor, Director of the Board of Regents' Transferability Initiative, advocating and attempting to explain the measures the Regents (BOR) and the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education (OCHE) had established to effect that Initiative's intent./1/ Director Macgregor's worthy effort may offer a tempting target for the reader with an especially critical eye, but I shall have little to say about it in this article. The problems requiring our serious consideration as members of the faculties and academic administrations of the units of the Montana University System are not best explicated by an analysis of Director Macgregor's advocacy of the Transferability Initiative (TI); they lie in the Initiative itself, and, more importantly, in the BOR's approach to its duties. We are dealing with the most recent concerted expression of the Board's misunderstanding of its role and its misconception of the institutions it governs.
The Transferability Initiative under discussion derives directly from Board Policy 301.5.5, "Equivalent Course Identification and Numbering," adopted by the Regents at its November 16, 2007, meeting, and formally issued on December 3, 2007./2/ That policy itself constitutes, in part, the Regents' response to a Legislative Auditor's report, the result of an investigation prompted by complaints received by some legislators about one MUS unit or another denying credit for some course or other taken at another MUS unit./3/ How many such complaints there were, and what validity they may have had by competent academic judgment we do not know.
Policy 301.5.5, as its numerical designation indicates, is part of a broader policy concerning credit transfer within the MUS, and, in fact, for units of the MUS presented with applications for credit transfer from other Montana institutions of higher education, including the tribal colleges. Policy 301.5, "Transfer of Credits: MUS and Community Colleges," (2005) stipulates: "All college level courses from regionally accredited institutions of higher education will be received and applied by all campuses of the Montana University System (MUS), and by the community colleges, towards the free elective requirements of the associate and baccalaureate degrees." Thus, presumably, the Board is directing that, for example, a student who transfers to UM from, say, MSU-Northern, where he had successfully completed a course in welding, must be given credit toward his UM degree in mathematics for his skill in metal bonding. Then there is Policy 301.10, "General Education Transfer Policy: Montana University System" (2005, revised 2007). The principal provision of that policy states: "The Montana university system (MUS) is committed to facilitating the ease of undergraduate student transfer to its campuses, particularly in the area of general education. Therefore, all campuses of the MUS will recognize the integrity of general education programs and courses offered by units of the MUS, Montana's three publicly supported community colleges, the seven tribal colleges and regionally accredited independent colleges in the state of Montana. All campuses in the MUS shall also recognize the integrity and transferability of the MUS transferable core." In discussing the Transferability Initiative I shall have occasion to make reference to these companion policies of the Board.
Like most faculty members, I was blissfully unaware of the Board's November 16, 2007, action. I learned of it when I received a call from the Commissioner's Office asking that I chair a faculty committee whose charge was not at all clear to me, but the gist of it was that we were to consider philosophy courses to be designated as equivalent within the MUS. Such committees were then being created for many subject areas within the various MUS units' curricula, I was told. Several of these committees, including mine, gathered in Helena early in 2008 to begin our work./4/ There I learned that the committee I was to chair was called a "Faculty Learning Outcomes Council" (FLOC), of which there were six at this meeting—a flock of FLOCs, so to speak. I learned as well that my committee was designated "Philosophy (ethics)," the significance of the parenthetical unexplained. Surely the OCHE representatives, particularly Director Macgregor, did not consider philosophy and ethics equivalent? Or did they intend that we should also take up ethics courses? The thinking behind this designation emerged in the subsequent process.
Director Macgregor conducted the meeting. Early in his explanation of our function I asked him for what purpose these "equivalent" courses were to be transferred, noting that they might be accepted as electives, or, more stringently, as meeting general institutional requirements for a degree, or, more stringently still, as meeting requirements for a particular degree established by the faculty of a particular department or program. "All purposes," was his answer. Macgregor had begun the meeting by introducing himself, jokingly revealing to us that some of his former colleagues on the faculty of Montana Tech had accused him of "going over to the dark side" in accepting an administrative assignment with the OCHE. Bill Macgregor impressed me as an amiable, entirely decent and diligent professional, but in the nearly two years since then I have come to believe that there was some merit in his erstwhile colleagues' charges. We FLOC members were being co-opted by the Regents and the OCHE in another step by the Regents toward controlling the curriculum of the units of the MUS, undermining the curriculum development procedures of our own campuses. The Transferability Initiative (TI) should have been opposed strenuously and effectively by the chief academic officers of all the units of the MUS, and, most of all, by the various faculties. It is a major step toward mediocrity in the name of the Regents' favorite academic standard, "efficiency."
I turn now to the particular faults of the TI. There are two sorts of problems: (a) there are practical problems, or problems of fact; (b) there are problems of principle. The second sort of problem of course outweighs the first in importance, but I shall treat with the practical problems first. The two kinds of problems necessarily overlap and intertwine somewhat.
I was an active member of the faculty of The University of Montana-Missoula for 39 years and have served one year in post-retirement. During that 40-year period I encountered thousands of students and served as advisor to hundreds, both philosophy majors and general, or undeclared, majors. Not once did I hear of any problem transferring credits from another unit of the MUS. I do not believe my experience to be extraordinary: considerable weight must be given, in my opinion, to the oft heard complaint about this Regents' initiative that it is an elaborate, cumbersome solution to a non-problem. But we are told that the Regents and the OCHE are merely responding to a Legislative investigation which found, by their lights, substantive problems! Indeed, the Regents are responding to the Legislature. Their initial statement to the Auditor's report is nothing less than a mea culpa and a pledge to go and sin no more, and they gladly accepted the Legislature's appropriation (c. $1.5 million, I believe), to establish measures to achieve compliance with the Legislature's demands./5/
There is the small matter of the Montana Constitution's charge to the Regents, however. Article X, Section 9, 2(a) of that document reads: "The government and control of the Montana university system is vested in a board of regents of higher education which shall have full power, responsibility, and authority to supervise, coordinate, manage and control the Montana university system and shall supervise and coordinate other public educational institutions assigned by law." Any student of Montana history knows that the purpose of that language was to prevent the Legislature and Governor from interfering illegitimately in the operation of the state's public institutions of higher education, something they had regularly done, and attempted to continue to do even after the 1972 Constitution was adopted. In fact, one such characteristic attempt had been made by the then Governor in the years immediately before the Constitutional Convention convened. Responding to an address given by a member of the UM history faculty to a convention in another state, Tim Babcock announced in full minatory mien that there was not room enough in Montana for him and the offending professor. For precisely such interference the institution now known as The University of Montana-Missoula long occupied a prominent position on the AAUP's censure list./6/ Hence, the Regents ought to have asserted their constitutional independence in responding to the Auditor's report. That would have meant, at least, taking an attitude of healthy, respectful skepticism toward the Legislature's allegations.
But let us set aside all doubts and legal fastidiousness and grant that hundreds of students are arbitrarily impeded in their progress toward a justly earned college degree through the fault of the faculties and administrations of the MUS. The principal failing has apparently been, according to Director Macgregor, parochialism; he speaks of "proprietary feelings," and faculty members behaving like "members of a medieval guild." How then, other than by a substantial attitude adjustment on the part of recalcitrant faculty members, might this mighty dragon of illegitimate refusal of credit transfer be slain? The sword chosen by the Regents is described in Policy 301.5.5, which reads, in large part:
The purpose of this policy is to facilitate the transfer of credits among units of the Montana university system (MUS) by implementing a process by which courses found to be equivalent throughout the system are identified with a common number and title.
- The board adopts the following process for identifying equivalent courses within the MUS:
- The commissioner of higher education will oversee a process by which undergraduate courses in the MUS will undergo a discipline-based faculty review to determine, and periodically review, equivalency under this policy.
- Courses determined to be equivalent shall be accepted as if the courses had been taken at the receiving campus.
- The commissioner, after appropriate consultation within the system, shall assign each equivalent course a common course prefix, number and name.
- Courses will be presumed to have the same number of credits, with exceptions granted by the councils or the commissioner, as appropriate.
- The commissioner of higher education will provide direction and assistance, establish progress measures, and report to the board of regents on the implementation of a system of applying common course numbers to equivalent courses.
Hence, the course prefixes, numbers (and perhaps titles) in use on the various campuses for courses deemed to be equivalent are to be scrapped, and designations and numbers, at least, chosen by the OCHE are to be substituted. In actual fact this has become a larger enterprise than the policy would seem to require: now the demand has been asserted that an entirely new set of course designations, created under the direction of the OCHE, be accepted by the units of the MUS. Thus, the current proposal for my own discipline of philosophy calls for the prefix in use on the UM-Missoula campus since philosophy was established as a separate program, a prefix commonly in use across the country, "PHIL," shall now be "PHL." Moreover, that proposal calls for many of our course numbers to be changed, ostensibly all for the sake of facilitating transfer of credits for but two or three courses, at most, that our FLOC determined to be candidates for equivalence. Clearly, the Regents' purpose might have been attained much more easily and less disruptively by simply identifying "equivalent" courses, giving those a common designation independent of the campuses' local designations, and having the various campus catalogs note that such courses were "Regents course LLLL nnn." Why, then, the radical measure they chose?
If the result of the TI as planned is allowed to stand, a substantial part of the catalog, and therefore of the curriculum, of each MUS unit will fall under the control of the Regents through the OCHE. What shall become of the campus processes for curricular control? Shall UM's Academic Standards and Curriculum Review Committee and all its various divisional subcommittees be disbanded and its Faculty Senate no longer consider curricular issues? Surely not: rather, these bodies must henceforth apparently obtain the permission of the Regents before making even so minute a curricular change as an alteration in course number. Heaven help the program faculty which seeks to change the content of a course deemed "equivalent" to others in the MUS in order to bring it into line with recent research or evolving ideas of good practice. We have not only homogenization, but ossification, both virulent sources of educational mediocrity.
Finally, under the heading of practical problems we note the urgency with which this initiative has been prosecuted, an urgency reminiscent of that with which the U.S. Congress approached legislative attempts to ameliorate the current economic crisis. Members of the faculty have spent countless hours working under a severe deadline to identify course "equivalences," meeting and corresponding with colleagues from other MUS units, and with administrators. All of this time necessarily detracted from attention to other duties. No consideration seems to have been given to the burden upon faculty of the additional responsibilities the Regents' policy imposed. Do the Regents believe that we have surplus time, and endless quantities of it?
Just as the people of Montana responded to a history of political meddling in their institutions of higher education with Article X, Section 9, 2(a) of a new Constitution, so leaders of American higher education responded to such meddling early in the last century with the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which drafted and promulgated guidelines for the governance of institutions of higher learning. Those guidelines gave basic shape to the mature, modern system of higher education in the U.S., now the envy of the world. All U.S. institutions of repute have striven to adhere to them. It has been a basic principle of those guidelines that governing boards, on the one hand, whatever form they may take and whatever name they may carry, and faculties, on the other, have separate, co-ordinate responsibilities determined by respective expertise. The relevant language from the current version of the most directly pertinent document reads: "The governing board of an institution of higher education, while maintaining a general overview, entrusts the conduct of administration to the administrative officers—the president and the deans—and the conduct of teaching and research to the faculty. The board should undertake appropriate self-limitation."/7/ In short, the faculty should control the curriculum while the governing board has primary fiscal responsibility and also establishes broad policy, in close consultation with the faculty./8/ Of course, these functions are not utterly distinct.
This brings us back to that language of Article X, Section 9, 2(a): "...[the] board of regents shall have full power, responsibility, and authority to supervise, coordinate, manage and control the Montana university system...." Can the Board then award a student a grade of 'A' in a course in which he had been awarded a 'B' by a faculty member the student believed ungenerous?/9/ Can the Board require that certain subjects, or treatments of subjects, be excluded from, or included in the MUS curricula? Can the Board require that one institution of the MUS accept as credit toward a degree a course taught at an institution elsewhere in the state? The answer to these questions is, "Yes, as a matter of the Board's raw power." Should the Board take such actions? The answer to that question is unequivocally, "No." The redundant language of the Constitution quoted above includes one key term, "authority." In this case the term means nothing more than power. In other instances the term means something quite different. An authority is a person who possesses a high degree of knowledge or expertise, and whose judgment must therefore carry weight with rational persons considering the matters in which the authority's expertise lies. Such is the authority of expert witnesses at trial, for example. The argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam) is an important, widely used form of inductive reasoning. Elementary logic courses cover the standards for evaluation of such arguments./10/ We may suppose that in an ideal world power and expertise would closely coincide, such that there would be no power without expertise, at least. Then the ambiguity of "authority" might lose its sting.
Have the Regents authority in the sense of expertise? Surely the several members of the Board have expertise in some areas, but clearly not in matters of curriculum and related issues, like the requirements for degrees. Over the past 12 or 15 years we have suffered repeated failures of the Regents to "undertake appropriate self-limitation," i.e., to confine their actions to those matters appropriate for a governing board and rely on faculties' and academic administrators' judgments in academic matters, all in their effort to restructure and reform the MUS to achieve, most of all, greater efficiency. Consider Policy 301.10 on general education requirements, as quoted above. In simple terms, this means that a student who has completed the general education requirements at any institution in Montana, and then transfers to an MUS unit, must be deemed to have completed the general education requirements at that unit. We must suppose that the Board regards general education as a relatively unimportant part of the curriculum, and historic differences between institutions of the polytechnic type and those of the liberal arts type outmoded. It is impossible to understand the Board's thinking under any other hypothesis than that they see the purpose of higher education to be occupational training, rather than genuine education./11/
A year after the adoption and imposition of Policy 301.10 the Board adopted Policy 301.11, imposing a limit on the number of credits the MUS units could require for a degree, and directing that:
The campuses of the MUS are encouraged to develop outcomes-based programs as alternatives to the awarding of undergraduate degrees based upon the earning of credit hours. Degree requirements for these programs will be based upon what the student must know and be able to do to earn a baccalaureate degree in a specific major. The campus will award the degree to a student who demonstrates the appropriate knowledge and abilities without regard for the earning of credit hours or the amount of time spent working toward the degree.
How do the members of the Board know that no more than 120 credit hours need be earned to qualify for a legitimate bachelor's degree? They do not. How do they know that all the knowledge and skills a student acquires which qualifies him, or her, for such a degree can be made explicit, stated clearly, and measured?/12/ They do not, because it is not true. That notion is simply naïve./13/
The "Transferability Initiative" is but the most recent example of the Board's overreaching, of its failure to "undertake appropriate self-limitation." The present state of the philosophy FLOC's efforts illustrate well that overreaching. My successor as FLOC Chair informs me that the OCHE is pressing to have all ethics courses in the MUS designated as philosophy (PHL). Most such courses are not philosophical treatments of ethical issues, unless you assume, perhaps, that what is philosophical and what is ethical are both mere matters of opinion, as the term 'philosophy' is often used in ordinary discourse. It is in that desiccated sense of the term that pecuniary enterprises speak of their business philosophy, and football coaches of their defensive philosophy. If that were what philosophy courses teach, then philosophy should be banished from the curriculum entirely.
In addition to having misunderstood their constitutional charge, the Regents have succumbed to the ideology of managerialism, an ideology I have discussed elsewhere in this journal./14/ There I said, citing Alasdaire MacIntyre as authority, that those who subscribe to this ideology are unable to distinguish manipulative from non-manipulative behavior; i.e., they persistently, and as a matter of principle, violate Kant's Categorical Imperative in its second form./15/ I also argued that the managerialists regard the organizations or institutions under their control as machines in the classic sense; they accept some kind of "inputs" and produce some kind of "outputs." The assembly line factory, as created by that archetypical managerialist, Henry Ford, is such a machine. It is a merely incidental fact that some of the elements of Ford's machines were human beings. Sad to say, our Regents regard the MUS as a machine./16/ For this they are not entirely blameworthy. The machine model has long been an essential element of the modern approach to rational thought. We modern citizens of the Western world, striving always to approach life rationally, take this model for granted. But not every activity of life can be squeezed into this mould. Genuine educational programs cannot.
What the inputs of the MUS machine are in the Regents' minds is not clear, but their communications and policies make it plain that they suppose the output to be "degrees." Like managerialists in other areas, they worry greatly about efficiency of the machine under their control; they wish to produce greater output at less cost. Hence, "barriers to graduation" must be removed (we faculty members, working under medieval misconceptions, call these "requirements"), and credit requirements limited, or lowered outright. Moreover, the system must behave as a system, a single, unified machine. According to the latest fashionable thought in higher education, the system's function must not be inhibited by location or particular institutional identity and tradition: ideally, it will be the university which is anywhere and nowhere./17/
Space does not permit me to develop an adequate description of the alternative to the Regents' vision of the Montana University System and the nature of higher education. Let it suffice to say for present purposes, that from Plato's establishment of the Academy at Athens about 388 B.C. until the very recent advent of modern managerialism in higher education, a college or university has been understood to be, first and foremost, an organized community of scholars devoted to the advancement of human knowledge in its full, rich sense, and to the development of human beings as human beings, not as practitioners of certain pecuniary occupations. At the risk of being declared outmoded, antiquated, or even medieval in my thinking, I confess that it seems to me that that venerable conception is quite correct. Such institutions cannot be adequately described in material terms. The essential results of their labors, the genuine education of real human beings, cannot be exhaustively specified, measured or quantified. So it is with human life in general.
For these 12 or 15 years now the Board of Regents, aided and abetted by the Office of the Commissioner of Higher Education, has, step by step, increased the extent of its control over the units of the MUS, behaving ever more like the board of directors and management of a business corporation than a governing board and administration of institutions of higher education. There is a remarkable paradox in this. The Board is an arm of the State government, but as it has tightened its grip on the MUS the Legislature has tightened its grip on the State purse strings. The State now provides but a minority of the cost of the education of a state resident in the MUS, and a much smaller portion of the overall cost of operating the institutions./18/ At the same time, the degree of direct control exerted by the Regents is now much greater than it was 25 years ago.
As interesting as this irony may be, its significance pales in comparison to the faults in the character of the Regents' efforts at control of the MUS. Yet, if the report in my local newspaper of the Regents' most recent meeting may be trusted much worse is yet to come. The Regents have appointed a "task force" to do nothing less than "reinvent" the Montana University System, according to the AP. The task force will seek to determine why "only" half of Montana's high school graduates go on to higher education, and will consider such efficiency measures as reducing the number of credits required for a degree, and funding the units according to graduation increases./19/
The idea of reinventing an organization may sound familiar. General Motors has been flooding the airwaves in recent weeks with advertisements asserting that it is engaged in reinventing itself, all to the benefit of consumers of its poorly received products. And some of us will even remember a corporate reinvention closer to home, that of the late Montana Power Company. The Regents' changes in the Montana University System long ago passed the point where they might accurately be deemed improvements, or even reforms. Should the Board and OCHE persist in its regimen of transmogrification, failing to restrict themselves to their proper role, in the not too distant future we shall surely see the educational equivalent of the Montana Power Company's fate inflicted on the institutions to which so many have given devotion and affection.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 20.1, Fall 2009 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]