Shall we talk about quality?

Linda W. Gillison
Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures
UM-Missoula

Recently the Board of Regents of the Montana University System announced formation of a Regents' Workgroup charged with "reinventing and reforming" the Montana University System. No faculty members were initially included in the Workgroup, which, according to its website, will focus on three "challenges": increasing productivity, operating efficiently, and maintaining quality. In their elaboration of these challenges, "quality" is not defined; only "affordability" is added to the idea of quality by the modifying phrase, "at an affordable rate."/1/

Having heard in a Faculty Senate meeting last spring that the regents would like faculty help in understanding this matter of quality in reference to their reinvention and reformation of the state's university system, I immediately thought of The Montana Professor as an appropriate place to provoke an intentional conversation about that topic. Shall we talk about quality then?

As I thought about quality, I found it helpful to turn to a classic work by a former member of the MUS faculty, Robert Pirsig. "Phaedrus," Pirsig's alter-ego in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was quite possibly driven insane by his quest for quality's meaning. This Phaedrus makes a couple of suggestions about the topic: quality, he maintains, might be the answer we're seeking when we ask, "What's best?" rather than, "What's new?" (7) Furthermore, he classifies quality with time and space as an a priori understanding: something without which our human life wouldn't be what it is, without which the rest wouldn't make sense, but the nature of which we cannot discern via our senses (116). We can only ask of such a concept, "What would life be like without it?" or, in specific reference to our present consideration, "What would it be to live in a world where Quality didn't exist?"

It may be that we can't define "quality": Pirsig's Phaedrus, a teacher of rhetoric and composition, claims (184) that "Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a non-thinking process. Because definitions are a product of a rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined" (emphasis supplied). There are, of course, situations in which we can define the quality of a thing: the quality of a measuring instrument resides in its ability to measure tiny variations such as tolerance in a mechanical assembly. Still, our definition of quality in reference to a measuring device cannot even be transferred to another physical object of a markedly different kind. A quality shoe does not measure accurately; it feels good and lasts for a long time and looks good. Moreover, in connection with something which is not a physical object, an objective definition of quality may be, as Phaedrus maintains, impossible. Clearly, the Montana University System is not in the business of producing a material good with a specific function and in reference to which quality can be clearly defined; rather, it works toward the training or education of humans beings, and it typically (though not always) does this at a particular stage in the lives of those human beings. ("The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself,'" Pirsig reminds us.)

But does the elusiveness of an explicit and precise words-and-figures definition of such a human "product" mean that we cannot at all know what its quality is? No. Take art as an example. We can think of art as an intermediate case between a material, functional object and a non-material one whose "function" is harder to pinpoint. And yet the quality of a quality work of art has a marked effect on the viewer and the source of that effect can always be identified as quality. In this connection, a colleague suggested to me the experience of standing in front of a bronze statue of an athlete in a museum and being absolutely stunned by it—awed by its quality, which can be described in aesthetic terms but not defined. There is something excellent about the sculpture, but to say just what in objective terms is a challenge. The case may be similar if we are observing a process or a state: "Where should it be going?" and "What does it look like?" are not necessarily easy questions to answer if we are talking about the development of a person. That does not mean, however, that we can't think about it or talk about it. Indeed, if we agree that quality is an a priori concept, we simply cannot live without qualitatively evaluating the world around us.

Thus, our first conclusion is that quality can't be defined until it is pinned down—like a butterfly—to something specific. We might have inferred this from a little etymology and grammar. "Quality," from Latin qualis, asks "What is it like?" in reference to a specific thing or process or state. If a "quality X" is an "X" with a high degree of the particular characteristic(s) required of it at a particular time and in a particular place, that "X" may be called an "X of high quality" or a "high-quality X." (Asking "What is it like?", quality exists in a different world from considerations of "How much?" or "How many?") We know quality when we see it, perhaps, but if we're just working toward it, what does it look like? What kind of thing or process or state is it? The Regents have requested that we offer them counsel about quality as an attribute of higher education.

We're looking here for a standard, a picture of perfection to which we as a community of higher education can try to fit ourselves with all of our zeal and knowledge and common-sense. Matthew Crawford, in his recent book about motorcycle repair and other activities which combine thinking and doing, suggests that "it may even be the case that what [the] standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through iterated exchanges with others who use the product"; that only through such "social" work is some shared conception of the good "lit up"; that only through such a process the concept "becomes concrete" (187). Notice that Crawford does not by any means maintain that the existence of this standard of perfection—or quality?—depends on our understanding it or agreeing about it. Rather, what the standards are, what perfection consists of merely comes to light, is lit up, becomes concrete when we work as a community to discover those standards or that perfection. It was always there: we need to work together to understand it. That's the kind of social work that I hope we are undertaking in MUS around the question: "What kind of education is a quality education in Montana in the twenty-first century?"

A great deal of quality-focused conversation about education is currently in the air—a situation which reflects some shared understanding of the importance and complexity of education as a common democratic institution even if not a lot of consensus about the specific characteristics or requirements of a quality education. Lately, venues as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Huffington Post have jumped into this conversation. Valuable monograph contributions to the discussion have also appeared, written by authors as diverse as a historian/theoretician of education, a political scientist, and a philosopher of classical bent.

Peter Berkowitz, political scientist and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, contributed an op-ed piece to the Wall Street Journal entitled "Why Liberal Education Matters." To Berkowitz's mind, a "proper education" for democracy culminates in a Liberal education at the post-secondary level, and that post-secondary "liberal education" itself "represents the culmination of a citizen's preparation for freedom."

In the New York Times, Stanley Fish recently wrote about "A Classical Education." He recalls his own secondary school education of a type which, some have recently claimed, prepares a student "to study anything." A quality education, he claims "grows stronger each year." He summarizes the prescription offered by Diane Ravitch in her new monograph (on which, see below): "Get knowledgeable and well-trained teachers, equip them with a carefully calibrated curriculum and a syllabus filled with challenging texts and materials, and put them in a room with students who are told where they are going and how they are going to get there." He closes: "Worked for me." (Fish was the first in his family to finish high school.)

A couple of years ago, the Huffington Post included a piece entitled "What's a Liberal Arts Education Good For?" by Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, who argued that "Post-secondary education should help students to discover what they love to do, to get better at it, and to develop the ability to continue learning so that they become agents of change—not victims of it." "A quality education," he adds, will develop "the capacity for innovation and for judgment."

In a posting just this summer, Roth warned of a very real threat to liberal education—partly from "our results oriented regime"—and lamented what the disappearance of such education in history, literature, and the arts as well as sciences will take away from our lives together. He locates the "deep, contemporary practicality of a liberal education" in such areas as patient and persistent critical inquiry; the ability to think reflectively so as to reexamine continually any chosen direction and the assumptions underlying the choice; the ability to make sense of extraordinary amounts of information; the recognition that responsible action is often required before pertinent inquiry is finished; indeed, the awareness that inquiry is never finished; and habits of mind that thrive on ambiguity and foster combinations of focus and flexibility, criticism, and courage. By learning to learn, Roth maintains, "one makes one's education last a lifetime." Liberal education, he continues, produces intellectual flexibility and should be considered "intellectual cross-training."

Also this summer, Diane Ravitch, historian and theorist of education and Assistant Secretary of Education under George W. H. Bush, published an article adapted from her new monograph, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. She argues for "real reform...which will renew all schools by way of a "strong, coherent, explicit curriculum...grounded in the liberal arts and sciences" that will ensure that students—taught by well-educated and not just well-trained teachers—"are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society" (11).

Martha Nussbaum, in her 2010 monograph, Not For Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, argues for the critical importance of the humanities and arts in an education for democracy. Responsible citizenship, she maintains, "requires...the ability to assess historical evidence, to use and think critically about economic principles, to assess accounts of social justice, to speak a foreign language, to appreciate the complexities of the major world religions" (93).

In his most recent pertinent piece, a lively and insightful review essay, Michael Roth focuses on Ravitch's Death and Life, Martha Nussbaum's Not for Profit, and Berkowitz's WSJ opinion piece. He locates the commonality among Ravitch, Berkowitz, and Nussbaum in their assertion that "such [a liberal] education is crucial for a polity of citizens rather than of subjects"(emphasis added). Roth himself opines that "education should prepare students to become citizens capable of civil disagreement" and allows that that "common sense" purpose "these days also seems utopian, given what passes for discourse in our decidedly uncivil public sphere."

Finally, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AACU) has recently identified, in consultation with a broad range of stakeholders—"educational, business, community, and policy leaders advocating for educational excellence and change in higher education"—a set of "Essential Learning Outcomes" from what it is calling "liberal education."/2/ These ELOs can be found in many publications of AACU and are usefully summarized in College Learning for the New Global Century (4-5): "an education that intentionally fosters, across multiple fields of study, wide-ranging knowledge of science, cultures, and society; high-level intellectual and practical skills; an active commitment to personal and social responsibility; and the demonstrated ability to apply learning to complex problems and challenges."/3/

Let's join into this kind of "social" work which Matthew Crawford recommends as the best route for recognition of quality. If we really can't understand quality without seeing it attached to something specific, let's try attaching our unqualified "quality" to the topic around which we are all (I hope) gathered: higher education in Montana in the twenty-first century. What would a "quality higher education for the twenty-first century in Montana" look like? What kind of thing (or process or state) would be "best"?

In this essay, I want to focus on outcome: what characteristics would we want in a person educated in the Montana University System? The following list is not originally mine but based on lively national conversations about desired "student learning outcomes." Not all of my colleagues will agree with this list, but I propose it for consideration and discussion. What should a student who graduates from an institution which is part of the MUS be prepared to do?

The Montana University System, of course, must not and cannot assume the entire responsibility for producing persons with these characteristics. The family, the K-12 schools, and other societal institutions will need to do their respective parts if students are to come to the campuses of MUS with such development well underway and prepared for a "higher" education toward the formation of that citizen prepared for freedom to whom Berkowitz referred.

We might approach this matter of outcome in another way. If we go back to the idea of quality as an a priori concept like time or space, we might ask about it the same question as we might ask about those two concepts. Focusing on higher education, we might ask, "What is it that we would miss in education or in an educated person, if Quality didn't come into the education or wasn't embodied in the educated person?" What might we expect from a Montana University System which produced lots of graduates and at a cost which made higher education "accessible" and at a pace which made completion of the educational experience not seem too time-consuming—too much of a delay in getting on with what is "really important"—and yet didn't take cognizance of educational quality? This may be an overly negative-seeming approach, but it may disorient our search for Quality just enough to be helpful. With this list as with the previous one, I don't speak for anyone else on my campus or in the Montana University System. I merely mention qualities which, to my mind, would be seen more and more often in the graduates of a system which paid insufficient attention to real quality in higher education. (Again, this approach is not original with me. Like many of the best ideas, it has a long genealogy, including a contribution in the fourth century B.C.E by a character in one of Plato's dialogues. Confronted with the task of understanding "justice," Glaucon decides (Republic II 361D) to present word pictures of the just and the unjust man, all "polished up" for clear viewing, "as if they were a couple of statues.")

A graduate of such a system, then—our polished up graduate of a system which paid insufficient attention to the question of quality—might:

If we were to assemble a composite of the lively current conversation about educational quality and our musing on a quality-less or quality-short system of higher education, what would seem to be the desired outcome from a "quality higher education in Montana in the twenty-first century"? All of these statements foresee a student prepared to position himself or herself wisely as listener, as questioner, and as contributor in the changing world of our century. Upon graduation, such an individual will be prepared with a body of knowledge and set of skills which can support a living and make possible a conscious life in the human and natural world around us. The graduate will at least have begun the journey to self-knowledge; will be on the way to development of a whole mind capable both of thinking and of acting; will have learned how to learn and be eager to continue doing so; and will have at least an inkling of the limits placed upon human actions by our own mortality and the nature of the world of which we are a part.

The preceding part of this essay implicitly broaches a subject which ought now to be made explicit, since it involves all of us in the world of higher education and our duties to and expectations of each other: intentionality. This matter tends to surface often in discussions of quality in higher education, in which context it usually means that we at the university guide students to be intentional about their work at the university—we help them learn to think of themselves as learners with conscious educational goals and conscious methods of reaching them. It also and importantly means, though, that we require something of ourselves as faculty and administrators in the world of higher education: namely, that we have similarly clear intentions about what we understand as our educational goals and how we intend to reach them and that we communicate our intentions and goals clearly to the students. Nor is there anything wrong with being able to state to other interested parties what our goals and methods are. Perhaps "what the standards are, what perfection consists of" can "come to light" through such exchange./4/

No doubt there are other modes of identifying "high quality education" in Montana in the twenty-first century, but I believe it crucial that we do try to get a good, clear picture of it. Robert Pirsig's Phaedrus claims that "Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit" (225). I think his point was this: when we perceive a thing or idea which has real "quality," the perception causes us to want to alter our surroundings in a way which accommodates and nurtures that "quality." This point richly deserves our consideration. It means that a good, clear idea of what quality higher education in Montana looks like can tell us what we should do next.

In this essay, I have tried to consider what just such a picture of "quality" higher education in Montana might look like. In the process, I have used the product of a quality system of higher education to stand in for the system itself. If we want a graduate of the MUS to exert comparable effects on people whom he or she encounters as the bronze athlete exerts on his viewers—if, that is, we want our graduates to be well-prepared for life, focused, eager to undertake the challenges of a world which makes ever-new demands and to be evaluated as such by those who encounter them—we will need to be as careful about our system of higher education, as nurturing and protective of it in its best qualities, as the viewer is of the bronze athlete. We will not want it to be thrown out simply on the grounds of its age or traditional elements or sold out or altered just for the sake of "newness" or narrowly defined utility.

We—students, faculty and staff, administrators, parents, regents—are all on the track of "high quality education" for the Montana University System in the twenty-first century—the kind of education which may well cause us to want to alter our world in its furtherance. I hope and trust that this quality-focused conversation, which is our "social work," will be a lively one. Only after we have achieved a clear understanding of "high quality" in education can we usefully approach the matter of "affordability." Only then can we recur to the Regents' qualifying phrase, "at an affordable rate."

Really, whatever our definition of "quality higher education," can we afford not to make a wholehearted and whole minded attempt to make it available to Montanans today? In my mind's ear, I keep hearing a friend who, through the years, has always maintained that he is "just too poor to buy cheap merchandise." Shall we talk about quality?

Berkowitz, Peter, "Why Liberal Education Matters." Wall Street Journal 15 May 2010: A15. http://global.factiva.com/hp/printsavers. [subscription only] 10 Aug. 2010.

Board of Regents of the Montana University System, Regents' Workgroup. http://www.mus.edu/board/meetings/RegentsWorkgroup.asp. 6 Sept. 2010.

Crawford, Michael. Shop Class as Soul Craft. An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Fish, Stanley. "A Classical Education: Back to the Future." New York Times 7 June 2010. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/a-classical-education-back-to-the-future/. 11 June 2010.

Nussbaum, Martha. Not For Profit. Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam New Age, 1981.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1984.

Ravitch, Diane. "In Need of a Renaissance." American Educator (Summer 2010): 10-22.

Roth, Michael. "Coming to the Defense of Liberal Education." Huffington Post 9 June 2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/coming-to-the-defense-of. 1 July 2010.

---. "Good and Risky: the Promise of a Liberal Education." Chronicle of Higher Education 11 July 2010. http://www.chronicle.com/article/GoodRisky-the-Promise-of. 12 Aug. 2010.

---. "What's a Liberal Arts Education Good For?" Huffington Post 1 December 2008. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-roth/whats-a-liberal-arts-educ. 12 Aug. 2010.