Friday, January 31, 1997
RANKINGS:
Universities’ main priority should be education, not research,
claims groupBy J. Sharon Yee
Daily Bruin Contributor
After paying registration fees, waiting in long lines to buy
books, trying to track down inaccessible professors, and dodging a
variety of construction sites on the way to class, some UCLA
students wonder: "What does this university really have to offer
me?"
A group of students from colleges across the United States have
made this question the target of their latest campaign, titled
"Universities For Students" (UFS). Led by Stanford senior Nick
Thompson, an environmental studies and political science student,
this effort involves about 35 schools, including Harvard, Cornell
and the University of Rochester.
The campaign, initiated by a small group of Truman Scholars,
began in response to students’ growing discontent with the goals
and policies of universities nationwide. UFS is based on a set of
principles maintaining that since universities were created for
students, higher education should provide both an individual and
societal benefit.
"The function of universities is to benefit students, not
manipulate them into making the university look better," said
Thompson, a Truman Scholar who is Stanford’s student body vice
president.
Other UFS participants, such as Jed Purdy, a Harvard senior
studying social sciences, offered similar explanations for their
involvement in the campaign.
"Personally, I think it’s absolutely critical that the
university stop behaving like a money-making organization, and
(instead) educate students to be engaged citizens and a source of
independent thought and courageous criticism of what society is
doing," said Purdy.
In the eyes of these students, the primary goal of most
universities is high rankings in magazines and high alumni donation
rates. They say universities overemphasize the need to build a good
reputation by encouraging professors to focus on research instead
of teaching.
Thompson spoke of the common scenario in which, given a choice
between two qualified professors seeking tenure, a school chooses
the person who has done more researching than teaching simply
because he has helped boost the school’s reputation. He said that
because of this emphasis on researching, students lose out when
their professors spend less time and effort preparing lectures and
office hours.
Phillip Carter, a fourth-year political science student at UCLA,
said he disagreed that education should be professors’ only
priority.
"The UC system was founded on research, teaching and public
service, but teaching is only a part of it," Carter said. "Students
at UCLA, Berkeley and MIT probably get a better education because
of the research than if they went to a smaller liberal arts
school.
"They want to put students first, but I don’t think that
students are the only important players in a university," he
continued, referring to the campaign as "pure fantasy."
While the campaign has a general nationwide theme of redirecting
universities’ attention toward student needs, independent campaigns
have been organized on a smaller scale at individual schools. These
campaigns can then focus on issues that are pertinent to the
particular school.
Students at Harvard said they hope to reform university labor
regulations and policies regarding the tenure of female professors
while organizers at Cornell say they plan to focus their efforts on
financial aid reform. The University of Rochester campaign seeks to
attack the administration for policies that students say favor
corporations’ interests over student needs.
UCLA, though not a part of the UFS campaign, is in the process
of creating its own pro-students’ needs campaign, titled "Our
Millenium." Organized in conjunction with the other UC schools, the
campaign will focus on issues directly affecting students, such as
affordability, educational equity and a greater say for students in
how the university is run.
John Du, the Undergraduate Students Association Council (USAC)
president, said he hopes the campaign will address the issue of
privatization of the UC system, which he said has occurred through
the encouragement of private donations and increased fees.
"When you put only 4 percent of the university’s money into
education and the rest into research, you start to question where
the priorities are," Du said. "Undergraduate and graduate education
is important, and you can’t lose sight of that."
Prior to the UFS campaign, the Stanford student body government
initiated a campaign against the U.S. News and World Report’s
college rankings system, alleging that the rankings provide a
disservice to students and American education in general, since
many high school students use the magazine as a source for choosing
which colleges to attend. The 1996 campaign, which became known as
the Forget U.S. News Campaign (FUNC), generated much publicity and
controversy, eventually causing the magazine to reconsider its
method of rating colleges.
Despite the success of FUNC, Carter said he is skeptical that
the new campaign will effect any real change.
"Changing the path of universities would be like changing the
path of the Nile River (because) you can never do anything in
policy without consulting the history of what you’re doing …
policies develop over a long history," Carter said.
Purdy said that although the campaign’s goals may seem
idealistic, it is important that students defend their
interests.
"Absolutely, it’s idealistic. If we thought we could bring the
university in line with all those principles, we’d be naive," Purdy
said. "What those principles are doing is reminding us of why we
are carrying out smaller projects that will be partial successes
and partial failures … we will always have those principles to
guide us," he said.
Responding to Carter’s statement, Thomas Lane, a senior studying
history at the University of Rochester, said he refuses to succumb
to negative thinking.
"Such statements are excuses to avoid the personal sacrifices
involved in social change. Every moment in history has faced
similar effusions from those who would rather watch from the
sidelines … We all need to jump in," he said.
UFS organizers said the primary goal of their efforts is to make
universities more accountable to their students and, ideally, to
transform them into models of critical thought and social
responsibility that society can look to and admire. Although
individual campaigns have their own agendas, they collectively seek
to publicize the question of what a university ought to be versus
what it actually is.
Expanding on the campaign’s goals, Lane said he hopes that
through their nationwide efforts, they will "alter the priorities
that govern the operation of universities away from private power
toward humanistic, egalitarian and student-oriented values."
Thompson stressed the importance of UFS, saying that although
some progress has been made, most college campuses are not as
attentive to student needs as they should be.
"Right now, every school is somewhere in the middle, and
Stanford is moving in the wrong direction … clearly, a balance
needs to be found," he said.
Students involved in the campaign said they are motivated by a
desire to promote the overall well-being of university students
everywhere by forcing schools to make student learning the highest
priority.
"I hate to see universities as places where only rich people go,
where people care most about prestige and not about the quality of
learning and teaching that goes on," said Cory Carter, a graduate
student in atmospheric sciences at Cornell, who became involved
through e-mail discussions.
Lane best summarized feelings expressed by the Universities for
Students organizers, saying, "If you think there’s an instinct for
justice in all of us, then all it takes is collective action to
realize it."