At the same time as we heard about this request another friend at a respected small, private college told me that his administration had told the faculty that they all needed to take a 10% reduction in salary next year. The college is tuition-driven and the tuition is high. Faculty often don’t understand budgets. They will teach the same classes from year to year and they will barely recognize that their class size has shrunk from 19 to 16; what they will observe and complain about is that they have seen a rise in mediocre students. For a small institution which needs to bring in 200 students a year to balance the budget, a decline of only 30 students can be a real problem. One way to lessen the problem is to admit 15 students who normally should not be admitted. Nevertheless, a shortfall of 15 students who pay full tuition still presents significant problems.

I bring these two disparate economic tidbits together because they reflect the new normal. Some people can’t afford high tuitions and others don’t think it’s worth the cost. After our friend’s request we thought of others we know who may be in similar straits. Off the top of our heads we thought of six friends. Recent data points out that almost half of the country is one catastrophe away from the kind of situation our friend has. One problem is the horrible shape of the economy; the other is that there is no safety net. The move to the political right signals the message that we are all on our own; the government’s role is not to lend a helping hand. A stark individualism personifies the philosophy of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, the framers of the Republican Tea Party agenda.

My purpose here is not to delve into right-wing economics, but I do think that the thinking that has set the current agenda does not auger well for higher education. People are going to be unable to continue to pay the tuition that they once paid. State legislatures are going to be unable and unwilling to fund higher education in a way they once did.

Unfortunately, if we look at the current cutbacks from state governments and the responses by most public institutions we find one of two responses—resistance or resignation. Resistance is futile; we can say “you shouldn’t cut the budget” but they will—and did. Resignation is what is happening at my friend’s private college. The assumption is that if we hunker down “this too shall pass.”

Actually, resistance does not have to be futile. We would need more organizational capability than the Occupy Wall Street protests have shown, but one possibility could be a movement aimed at defeating the ideas of Rand and Hayek. But that is a long-term strategy that I do not see bearing fruit any day soon.

Resignation is futile. “This too shall pass” is a recipe for disaster. Assume a family comes upon hard times and the parents decide they have to eat less. That’s okay, but if the budget continues to constrict they simply can’t continue eating less or they will starve.

The vast majority of our traditional colleges and universities are in trouble because they have chosen to eat less. The result will be that within a decade we are going to see a great many small local and regional liberal arts colleges go out of business or merge. At our community colleges, state public universities, and elite public institutions we will see a gradual erosion of quality.

The times call for deliberate action which requires courage and a clear sense of where we want to go.

Further, for the sort of allegations that have occurred he should have kept the executive committee of the board briefed and it appears that he did not. There is a well-known assumption that public boards of trustees hate their presidents and private boards of trustees love theirs. Antagonism is not an effective strategy for a board, but a love affair also enables boards to overlook flaws. Penn State’s Board acted more like a private board with President Spanier. He had been a successful and well-liked president for a great many years. Powerful and well-liked presidents, however, can make for administrative laziness that results in the sort of scandal that ultimately brought Spanier down.

There is always a delicate balancing act between what a Board should know and what the President (and the administration) should handle. I have seen intrusive board members who have destroyed campuses by their desire to have their fingers in activities where they had no business. But how is it possible that senior members of the administration and the president were testifying before Grand Juries and the Board did not know? How is it possible that serious allegations against a well-known employee had been made and the President never thought to tell the Board?

We can say that the President should have told the Board, but again, the culture of the university was such that the Board didn’t expect to know. Sure, the President should have been fired. But the Board needs to rethink how it functions and this brings me to my final point.

Our national associations have largely been quiet on this whole scandal when instead what we should have seen was a coordinated action. The AAUP, to their credit, put forth a (predictable) statement that said, in effect, “This is the result of a lack of shared governance.” Okay, fine. But I am troubled that the faculty at Penn State has largely been silent. There’s nothing stopping them from trying to rethink more aggressively the kind of teaching and learning environment that exists at Penn State that enabled these actions. There’s nothing stopping the faculty for demanding better structures and processes. There’s nothing stopping the faculty from saying that big-time sports of this sort have to end.

The NCAA’s response has been laughable. The NCAA are enablers and little more. ACE—the presidents’ association—has had nothing to say, and the trustees group—AGB—also has not found their voice. This is a moment that calls for coordinated action. We do not need more hand-wringing or haranguing. What we need is a more thoughtful, proactive statement about what we value in higher education, the culture we expect on our campuses, and what that requires from everyone.

When such crimes occur on hallowed ground introspection needs to occur, and from that, may come a renewed hope for the high expectations we must have for one another.

We are in a litigious environment and I suspect that one hesitation may have been that hearsay is just that—someone is reporting what he heard. But a crime does not get to be solved by a university administrator. The university has to figure out how to deal with the individual, but it is the local police who have to investigate the crime. It seems that the administrators failed on both fronts. They neither informed the police as quickly as they should have nor did they help the police with their investigation. They also took no action other than telling Sandusky not to bring children to campus.

What might have been done differently? It is stunning that the university did not seem to have procedures in place with regard to how to handle such a situation. I do not think that we should have rules and procedures for every conceivable action, (how could we) but not to have thought through the consequences of actions is a failure of leadership which results in administrators making up what they needed to do as events unfolded. A larger issue is that the culture of the administration seemed to be one of evasion rather than forthright conversation and action.

Let’s assume that immediately after Paterno reported the incident the two administrators called Sandusky into their office, said that they had to report what had been told to them to the police, and had called him because they wanted to speak with him. Let’s also assume that they had heard previous rumors about Sandusky, but Sandusky also said, “I have done nothing wrong. All I did was horseplay. I’m innocent.”

The job of administrators is not to be judge and jury. They also are not to be the police. We also have the stated belief that an individual is innocent until proven guilty. But it is very strange indeed that the administrators did not suggest, and then require, Coach Sandusky to stay away from campus. He was retired and thus no longer an employee. Even a public institution has the right to determine who gets to use the facilities and who does not.

I don’t like the bravado that many have suggested about how they would have treated the coach. But I like even less a cultural framework that dodges hard issues and has no procedures in place about how such issues should be handled. Indeed, the latter enables the former.

Even then, he had that sort of star power and coaches shouldn’t. I am schizophrenic about college sports. Ever since I was a little kid I have rooted for favorite teams and I still love going to games or watching them on TV. But as I’ve mentioned before big-time football does long-term severe physical damage to some of our students; the culture of football and college sports also can be so strong that it corrodes what academic life should be.

Paterno did what he was supposed to do. We all are taught that when someone comes to us and says that he or she saw something on campus we are to report what we heard to our superiors—immediately. Yes, I have my suspicions that Paterno somehow knew what was going on long before the alleged event in the locker room, but I’m not trying to be Sherlock Holmes. I am more concerned where sports, or any individual or unit, for that matter has such power.

We might try to brush off what happened because Joe Paterno was such an outsized personality. I’ve written previously that if a survey were done he would be the most recognized name in all of higher education. It is a sad commentary on the state of higher education that we have so few individuals associated with academe who are known by the public. At one point, individuals such as Robert Hutchins were nationally known. John Dewey was voted one of the 20 most admired men in America.

What does it say that in today’s America we have not Robert Hutchins or John Dewey on the national scene and instead people can only speak of a football coach? The current structure of college sports is not a viable model. The culture of the Penn State athletic office and the manner in which Coach Paterno functioned is a model of how big-time college sports has gone wrong. The problems that occurred were highlighted by a single incident, but it’s the cultural framework that enabled that incident to occur that needs to be acknowledged and changed.

Here are five events from my past that I have been thinking about in relation to this event. I have previously mentioned two of them. (1) When I was an undergraduate at Tufts I worked at a homeless shelter. I was good enough that they put me in charge of the building on Sunday afternoons when no one else was around—a rarity. I had the capacity to resolve conflicts without getting into fistfights and the administration and the homeless residents trusted me. At all other times we had a bunch of staff, but they figured Sunday afternoon was a quiet time and I could handle the 200 men until the evening staff arrived at 5:00 p.m. One afternoon, John Wilson arrived and he had a bottle of whiskey with him. He started drinking. Drinking was not allowed and I told him he had to leave the building. He said he wouldn’t. I told him he had to leave. He pulled a gun on me and pointed it at my chest. I threw him out of the building. (2) A few weeks later another similar event happened with a different (taller and younger) guy. This time he pulled a knife on me. I was less cocky, but I knocked the knife from his hand and threw him out of the building.

Make my day.

Flash forward to about 10 years ago. (3) We have two grocery stores near our home in Los Angeles; Gelson’s is where the upscale folks shop, and Ralphs is where people on a more limited income go. I go to both stores and over the years I’ve grown comfortable in Ralphs. One day I arrived mid-afternoon and near the juice there was a mother who was slapping the hell out of her young child. The little girl was screaming bloody murder—I would have, too—and people either walked by as if nothing were happening or avoided the aisle. I stood at the end of the aisle and watched. A thin older black woman stood near me and she eventually touched my elbow. “Do something,” she said, “now,” and gave my elbow a shove toward the mother and daughter.

I’ve thought of her command a lot over the last few months. I didn’t really know what I was going to do but I wandered down the aisle and when I got to the orange juice I started babbling at the mother, “Do you know where the OJ with pulp is? I really like pulp in my OJ! How about you?” I kept asking her questions and eventually she pointed to where the juice was. I don’t know how long I stood there but I know it felt like a long time. In acting like a fool (something that comes naturally) I was able to get her to take a breath. She stopped. When I left the store I saw her in the checkout line and her daughter was sucking on a candy. As I drove away I wondered if I should have called child services.

(4) About a year ago I went out to get my double espresso on a bright sunny day. Near the library was a young man who was clearly acting psychotic. Okay, maybe he wasn’t “psychotic.” But he was acting in a way that everyone was giving him a wide berth and he was banging his head against the library wall. I got my coffee and wondered what I should do. I was surprised, just as with the incident at the grocery store, that people seemed to wander by as if everything was normal. I went to my office, called the campus police, and told them to go to the library. The dispatcher said, “Are you sure? No one else has called.” I said in my best “doctor” voice, “I’m a tenured professor at this university and I’m telling you I’ve seen something that is extremely troubling.” She said okay, and a few minutes later a police car arrived and I saw them take the fellow away.

(5) And then last October when I was driving home I pulled up to a red light in the left lane. Two cars were stopped in the right lane and the guys were out of their cars yelling at one another. They turned to get back in their cars but the guy in the second car said something and all of a sudden the guy in the first car came running back and started punching the guy in the chest and head. Both guys were fighting as I sat there in my car. I thought of popping my head out of my sun roof and telling them to knock it off but I didn’t. The light changed and I drove away. I asked a few younger (and bigger) guys than me what they would have done and they all said, “Drive away. Don’t get involved.”

You’re thinking that these events are not equivalent to what the grad student saw in the locker room. Exactly. “Extra-ordinary” events are just that—one of a kind. We never really know what we will do when something happens like any of these events. In our macho environment we all say that we want someone to go ahead and “make my day” but I never felt that way when I’ve stepped into an altercation.

The real test is not what will happen when something unexpected pops up. What we need to do is do a better job in preparing people—students—about what is right and wrong and how we are to treat one another. I’m not a fan of bravado, but neither am I content with the sense that we live in an atomized society where we have little, if any, obligation to one another. The graduate student’s reaction is emblematic of a situation where people seemed to care very little about one another. The failure is not only in a locker room or athletic department; it’s a sense that care and concern for one another is not central in the culture of our institutions.

I still think I should have tried to stop that fight.

My purpose here is not to get into the criminal aspects of this case. Instead, I want to focus on four key parts to this drama. Let me review them here. (1) A graduate student allegedly saw Coach Sandusky raping a young boy in a shower late at night. The graduate student freaked out, talked to his father, and the next day they reported the incident to Joe Paterno. (2) In turn, Coach Paterno reported what he had been told to his two superiors and supposedly did nothing else. (3) The two administrators told Sandusky not to bring children to campus anymore and supposedly engaged in a cover-up and lied to a grand jury. (4) The President said he had complete confidence in his administrators and had not known about the details of the crimes. The Board met and fired Coach Paterno and President Spanier at an emergency meeting late at night. The students rioted. In the subsequent months several more victims have come forward and alleged abuse at the hands of Mr. Sandusky.

When this story broke Barry and I happened to be in Pittsburgh for Barry’s dad’s 95th birthday (a delightful event). As soon as I read the report on Saturday morning, I told Barry that this had national implications and the president could be fired. By Sunday I was pretty sure Paterno and Spanier would not survive. The Keystone Kops manner in which the Board of Trustees acquitted itself during the week could be a case study in flawed communicative strategy, but over the next several days I’ll focus instead on what I think these events suggest for our campuses.

And love the school we did—mostly because the students we met were fabulous. The young people we worked with were not only receptive to playing the games, but serious about offering feedback and sharing their thoughts about applying for college. Playing the card game twice with a lively group of students was informative. Game play on the second day was animated, students readjusted their game play strategy from the previous day, and all wanted to play a third time. Many students passionately assumed the role of the character card they selected (it didn’t hurt that several of the students participated in the school’s performing arts program). Another group of students was immediately engaged when playing the online game. Elizabeth and Sean have since incorporated their feedback into the Facebook game which will be available to play in March.

Of course we enjoyed eating soul food, deciphering thick Texan accents—and Sean even bought a cowboy hat. But by far the highlight of the trip was having the pleasure of playing—and learning from—a group of young people with tremendous heart and soul.

We are grateful to the TG public benefits program for funding this phase of research and to Houston A+ (Betsy Breier in particular!) for facilitating the collaboration.

Please also see this recent article about the project in the Daily Trojan.

One of my favorite quotes from the reality prison show Lockup on MSNBC is from an inmate who said: “We control everything but the gates.”

I thought that was a powerful quote because this inmate really did believe (or at least wanted the viewer to believe) that he had an immense power over his own incarcerated life as an individual and as a gang affiliate. I would agree that he and his associates did influence the culture of the yard.

But what resonates with me now when I think about this quote is that despite how much inside control he had, he was aware that something beyond him was keeping him from moving forward. Though maybe not as dramatic or life altering (we could argue that for days), some low-income and even middle-income students feel that even though they have amazing grades and did a ton of amazing things in high school or community college, that they could be held back “at the gates” because of a lack of financial aid.

While I don’t know as much about the appeals, review, and parole process, I do have a lot more experience with the financial aid application process. I wanted to be sure to kick off the financial aid season with a few important notes and tips:

1. The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is your gatekeeper form to all of the other financial aid processes that you’ll need to complete along the way. So be sure to get this done way before that March 2 deadline. If you haven’t started or completed your FAFSA, get on it ASAP. You need your tax information from 2011. If you don’t have it, you can input your 2010 information and than fix it later during the review process. The sooner you submit it, the sooner it gets reviewed at the federal level and then passed on to the schools that you’ve asked it to be sent too.
2. Who should complete the FAFSA? Any U.S. citizen or resident student who plans on attending an accredited community college, trade school, college, or university next year and would like to be considered for financial aid. By financial aid, I mean grants, loans, work-study, scholarships—all of it.
3. Keep in mind, that if you are not an independent student, you need to include your parents’ tax information. And remember that you CAN still apply if your parents are incarcerated or not documented citizens (though you need to be because you need to have a resident # or social security #).

This is going to be bit of a strange year for financial aid—not just for students and families, but for colleges and universities, too. The shift in aid policies at federal and state levels are going to affect the ways that individual schools make decisions about aid offers. What your brother was offered as a sophomore last year at Cal State LA for example, maybe be different than what you are offered with the same number of class credits this year, even with the same family income and number of students in college.

So, students and their families are really going to have to stay on top of things related to the financial aid process. You have to keep paper or electronic copies of everything that you submit. You have to be active in communicating with the financial aid offices at your schools. You have to be willing to ask questions when something doesn’t seem right or your offer won’t work in allowing you to attend or continue to attend your dream school. It’s not going to be easy or perfect. But it’s important to know that the process starts now.

I’m troubled by Rosen’s caricatures of traditional colleges and universities. The book is about 200 pages and the first 100 pages is an attack on what currently exists. Any reader of this blog knows that I have my own problems with traditional higher ed’s inability to change. But Rosen paints virtually all of our colleges and universities as “trying to live like the Jones’s” where the Jones are Harvard.

His description of higher education, especially in chapter two, is of sun-drenched campuses with cool cafes, state-of-the-art fitness centers, dining options that range from sushi to fois gras, and living arrangements that sound lacking in everything but personal valets. Actually, that’s USC. Sometimes when I walk over to our new student activities center I feel as if I’m in an upscale mall in Beverly Hills. Beautiful coeds are lounging in trendy wicker chairs snacking on a goat and brie pita pocket and downing it with a mochachino. The gym, thank god, has been refurbished.

But if I go a few miles in one direction I’ll be at Cal State LA and a few miles in another direction Cal State Dominguez Hills. It’s laughable to think that those campuses are as fancy-schmancy as Rosen alleges. And if I head over to LA Trade Tech then Cal State LA looks absolutely like the Ritz. What I object to is a characterization of all of higher ed based on what some of us do. And what’s particularly objectionable is what some of us do is to respond to consumer demand. We have a clientele who is not going to live in a dump. Yes, there’s a lot to be said about that, but we live in a capitalist society and what USC, Harvard, Stanford and about 200 other of the 5,000 higher education institutions do is focus on a niche that requires these sorts of amenities. But to suggest that everyone else does brings into question how much the author actually knows about traditional higher education.

And that’s too bad because the last 100 pages of the book is a workable layman’s apology for for-profit higher education. Granted, the text is not a scholarly work, but he lays out a very good case for why there’s a place in higher education for for-profits. Because the book is a quick read, the reader at least gets a plausible defense of the fastest growing market in higher education.

What Rosen misses in his critique is not that some students have fancy dining options, but that the culture of institutions is often framed in a manner that needs to be reconfigured. The point is less that we get workout towels when we go into the gym and more that we train the professoriate to do research and then they arrive at a community college. They want to teach Derrida when they should be teaching subject-verb agreement. The economic downturn may have slowed the fancy buildings that Rosen doesn’t like to see at public institutions like Berkeley or UCLA, but it also has slowed the hiring of tenure-track faculty and replaced them with contingent labor. That’s not a good solution. We need to rethink the structure and culture of academe and that requires more from us than what Rosen’s book suggests. Don’t focus on the buildings of a few hundred institutions; focus on the structure and culture of the academic enterprise. Don’t only make a case why for-profits are good for the country; acknowledge that ethical and structural problems exist in the for-profit world and suggest ways to overcome them.

I’d write more, but I’ve got an appointment with my masseuse over at the Trojan Spa.

In a previous blog, I discussed the relationship between funding and the achievement gap. Scholars and politicians used to frame spending debates around the relationship between money and achievement. The conclusion was that spending does not always equal gains. The results illustrated the need to focus on processes, along with inputs (money) and outputs (achievement). The entire argument, however, presupposed that governments would provide enough money for districts and schools to operate.

Governor Brown’s proposed cuts highlight an alarming trend in education—the unwillingness to fund education even after all agree that it is essential to the present and future success of the nation. Even taking into consideration spending during the “new normal,” these cuts are shocking. Education in California is already under-funded, and many districts are in fiscal disrepair. The possibility of more cuts places districts in a precarious position. As Superintendent John Deasy points out, Los Angeles Unified has to plan for money that does not exist and decide whether or not to cut a number of programs.

Skeptics point to over a century of unsuccessful reforms as evidence of the futility of government spending on education. Why put money into a system that perpetually underachieves? This perspective, however, ignores important contextual factors like urban poverty and access to social services. Of all industrialized countries, the United States has the highest percentage of children in poverty and provides the fewest social supports, e.g. housing, health-care, and child-care assistance. Similarly, arguments against government spending ignore the recent successes of countries across the globe. A recent article in The Atlantic describes the successes of Finland as educators focus on equity, not test scores. In The Flat World and Education, Linda Darling-Hammond chronicles the turnarounds of Finland, South Korea, and Singapore. What is the common denominator? All three countries’ governments committed to spending money to improve education.

When will education become a priority in California?