Gov. Chris Gregoire recently appointed a Higher Education Task Force. It has many laudable goals, including making higher education funding more reliable and making colleges more affordable.
But what a limited vision she has for our colleges! Of the representatives from outside education, the vast majority are CEOs or leading administrators of businesses. There are few representatives from other spheres of society and life. Is this all that we can imagine for higher education?
What might a more comprehensive task force have looked like? For starters, it might have had more leaders from Washington’s nonprofit institutions. Nonprofits are not only among the most important economic institutions in the state, they offer significant and vital social services, health care, spiritual services, art and education. Are none of these things important?
A vibrant economy is a social good, and those who produce wealth perform a public service. Yet a society is more than just money; money matters only if it permits a society to flourish by producing other goods. But who represents those other goods? There are no artists, no writers and no musicians. There are no labor leaders, no social workers. More striking, other than Everett’s mayor, there are no political leaders. There are no elected representatives, no activists, no civil servants. Americans have long believed that higher education ought to prepare the next generation of civic leaders, but this goal has no place on the governor’s task force.
When the governor refers to “accountability and performance,” it is clear to whom she wants higher education to be accountable. Not to our citizens; not to our society; not to humanity. To the bottom line. She is not interested in ensuring that Washington’s college-educated citizens are prepared to lead meaningful lives, nor that they might help make Washington a better state to live in through their creativity and philanthropy.
Instead, she wants to ensure that businesses get what they need, which implies that students should treat their education as nothing but an investment in their own private self-gain. What a narrow, sad vision for an education. What a narrow, sad vision for a society. How uninspiring, and how dangerous.
What is needed instead is a recognition that each human life and, by extension, society itself needs many things from public higher education. In the wake of Enron, the housing bubble, derivatives and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, big business has demonstrated its moral limitations, its unwillingness to devote minds to improving society when doing so conflicts with self-interest.
A society worth living in, however, would develop its citizens’ diverse capabilities. It would boast artists of all kinds. It would boast entrepreneurs that create new wealth, and scientists who generate new ideas. It would offer citizens multiple ways to develop their talents. It would have citizens who believed, as all good patriots should, that giving back is as important as taking from.
None of these virtues is expressed by the governor’s task force. It is a board of big business, by big business, and will inevitably be for big business. Is this what democracy is about? Is this what education is for? We consistently deny ourselves an opportunity to ask these questions because we assume that they have no place. Perhaps that’s part of our problem.
Johann N. Neem is associate professor of history at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
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