Paul Gaston, Emeritus Trustees Professor and author, will offer a presentation on actions Gaston believes call for society to "confront the existential threat to higher education as we know it posed by politicians who want to remake the academy in their image." His presentation, “Unprecedented: Today, Florida. Tomorrow, Ohio?” is set for Friday, March 10 at 2 p.m. in Satterfield Hall, Room 121.
Ahead of his presentation, Kent State Today asked Gaston to preview his presentation and address what he feels are the practical steps that he feels our leaders need to take.
When I was appointed Trustees Professor in 2007 following eight years of satisfying service as Kent State’s provost, I undertook research focused on issues I had encountered as an administrator. That effort has led to the publication of several articles and monographs and to three books.
The Challenge of Bologna (2010) considers what US higher education should learn from initiatives that have transformed European higher education. Higher Education Accreditation (2013) explains all forms of academic accreditation and argues that while they deserve credit for providing credible quality assurance, they must undertake significant changes. Credentials (2022), coauthored with Michelle Van Noy, director of the Education and Employment Research Center at Rutgers University, challenges administrators, faculty members, and academic advisors to “understand the problems, identify the opportunities, and create the solutions.” All have been published by Stylus Publishing, LLC.
The work now in progress, scheduled for publication in late spring 2024, is titled (tentatively) Rebuilding Support for Higher Education: Ten Practical Steps. It will draw on my preceding books to the extent that it refers to needed reforms, insists on the importance of quality assurance, and addresses issues raised by the current proliferation of credentials, but it will do so from an awareness of the present moment, arguably the most threatening environment for higher education, public and private, since the founding of the nation’s first college (Harvard) in 1636,
The book will begin by considering the principal source of the current dilemma in a catastrophic convergence of two long-developing but closely related trends, political polarization and an increasing public disinclination to invest in what was once considered “the public good.” Without attempting a comprehensive history of the past 50 years, the summary will feature important personalities and events behind accelerating disinvestment in higher education, beginning with California’s Proposition 13 in 1978 but considering also other relevant examples of the so-called “taxpayer’s revolt.”
It will focus even more closely on current challenges to higher education through unprecedented efforts to relocate the authority for curriculum, staffing, and quality assurance from colleges and universities to the state house or some other political entity. While acknowledging that Ohio has not yet taken up the most threatening initiatives now seen in some states, it will observe that a 2007 transfer of power from Ohio’s Board of Regents to a Chancellor appointed by and reporting to the Office of the Governor created a convenient mechanism for the implementation of just such initiatives.
Later chapters will acknowledge that higher education has been in part responsible for the dilemma and suggest priorities for the repair of self-inflicted damage. But it will also argue that higher education must document and celebrate its accomplishments more effectively.
The heart of the book lies in the “practical steps” that higher education leaders should take to reverse a 50-year trend and rebuild public support for the public good. Such steps include a more vigorous and thorough commitment to transparency, a determination to recognize and ameliorate the resentments created by preferential treatment of academic credentials in the marketplace, a judicious approach to recognizing and supporting political leaders who make a priority of the public good, and sustained strategic advocacy for the values of equity and diversity.
Pendulums should swing in two directions. For roughly 50 years, the pendulum in the US has been swinging from a shared commitment to the public good (as seen in the GI Bill, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX legislation) to a focus on private interests. It is high time that the pendulum began to move in the opposite direction toward the reclaiming of a precious American value. This book is meant to provide a nudge.