The current situation has come about because of the uneasy marriage of two related but ultimately distinct missions: the traditional mission of the university to transmit knowledge and mold character and the mission of the academy to discover, produce, and test that knowledge. The issue isn’t merely that the present arrangement allows ideologues and recalcitrant administrators to use research projects as human shields, howling miserably when failures to comply with federal regulations and their underlying values result in the withholding of federal funds. It is that the current arrangement is bad for both the education of students in the university and the pursuit of knowledge through research in the academy.
An issue brief published this past summer by the Manhattan Institute describes “the frustrating reality that,” as authors Frederick Hess and Richard Keck write, “at far too many of the nation’s 2,000 four-year colleges, the work of teaching and mentoring is only a secondary concern.” Per Hess and Keck, “University of Pennsylvania education professor Jonathan Zimmerman notes that faculty tend to characterize ‘research as their “work” and teaching as their “load,”’ a habit that, as Zimmerman dryly observes, says ‘volumes about academic priorities.’” What it says, of course, is that college and university administrators are far more concerned with maintaining a stable of widely published, grant-winning faculty celebrated for their research and writing than they are with the quality of teaching on campus. And this can come only at the expense of student learning and real education.