In the Friday, Sept. 22 issue of The Observer, two articles addressed problems in the quality of Case Western Reserve University’s education. One addressed the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings and student life quality relative to tuition cost, and the other addressed the tortuous confusion of CWRU’s enrollment systems and website inconsistencies. I am sympathetic to both concerns, of course.
But the issue of college tuition did not go into detail about administrative bloat and the lack of public financial support for universal K through professional degree/PhD education in this nation. The size of college administrations has grown massively over the last few decades, whereas traditionally it was the faculty who were responsible for the main governance of universities. This has costs in terms of salaries and benefits. Senior administrators also make a great deal more money than faculty, who often struggle to make ends meet. At the same time, the U.S. does not support universal K through highest degree education, an investment through taxation that would bring down tuition costs everywhere, introduce further accountability measures and be a good investment in future generations and future economies.
Still, given things such as they are, the main thing that struck me as missing from the editorials was a focus on the educational culture of CWRU. This is a university where classrooms are commonly filled with cheap chairs and threadbare environments, where there are not enough truly inviting study spaces and beautiful places of intellectual and social gathering and where the public declarations of the university are less than intellectually rigorous. For instance, senior administrators refer to students as “clients” in important addresses, rather than grasping the historical tradition of what it is to be a scholar and researcher: not someone buying services but someone learning a new way of life as a form of mentoring for the future.
One way to improve CWRU is to make it more economical, provided that the quality of education does not lag. Another way is to make the educational environment of a higher quality. We should work on both.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy