This post finishes my look at mission drift affecting our universities, a drift that is transforming hitherto liberal arts and science pedagogy into a pseudo-vocational one. In the three previous posts, I examined (1) the hegemony of human capital theory in educational planning and policy, in spite of the limited validly of that theory, (2) how policy-makers and their advisors perseverate in pushing faulty policies based on that faulty theory, and (3) how a shadow research community participates in this façade, participating in the promotion of a pseudo-vocational mission that threatens to overwhelm and replace the liberal mission. In this posting, I examine how university administrators participate in this feckless attempt to ‘sell’ the liberal education as a form of job training.
Because of the hegemony of human capital theory, and the (il)logic it produces when applied to liberal forms of education, university administrators have increasingly found themselves having to speak the language of governments (and their minion researchers) who believe that all investments in educational systems constitute the types of ‘capital investments’ associated with the production of human capital. At the same time, universities have themselves evolved into corporations where the logic of capital investments prevails.
Meanwhile, those with actual classroom experience in liberal arts programmes have been complaining for years about the inappropriateness of this language and logic for what needs to take place there. We thus have two sets of stakeholders—professors and administrators—speaking in different languages and utilizing different logics, ostensibly in pursuit of the same goals. And, given that administrators are accountable more to government mandarins than professors in the trenches, it is more expedient for them to deny that any problems exist in the classroom or in the mission ostensibly governing what takes place there.
Even if they do take the time to listen, it is easy for administrators to miss the point that front-line teachers are trying to make to them: namely, that the mission has drifted away from providing a rigorous liberal education to producing a watered-down system that attempts, but fails, to emulate a vocational training for the labour force where economic gains are directly tied to investments in specific skills.
I am not trying to offer administrators as scapegoats for the ills of the university system, but rather to explain how those who rose through the ranks of the professoriate to administrative positions could then become so detached from the realities of the contemporary classroom. On the one hand, as noted, they find themselves in a corporate environment where they are accountable to those who think in terms of a (misguided) economic theory. On the other hand, they are now removed from the classroom, and the longer they stay in administration the more remote they become from how it has changed, and how standards and students performance have declined. This is now happening in many secondary schools, as principals—a designation formerly as the ‘principal teacher’—have been assigned by governments to purely administrative positions where no classroom teaching is required and they are no longer members of the teachers’ unions.
With livelihood and loyalties shifted to those above them in the educational forum, it is far easier for administrators to simply deny what their teachers try to tell them needs to be done to keep the system on course, and as time goes on the system drifts further and further off course. Complaints about this mission drift may not be new, but the problems have become increasingly severe, spinning the system and its main actors into a series of crises.