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Arête (Greek: άρετή; pronounced /ær∂te/ in English), in its basic sense, means goodness, excellence, or virtue of any kind. In its earliest appearance in Greek, this notion of excellence was ultimately bound up with the notion of the fulfillment of purpose or function: the act of living up to one's full potential. …The Ancient Greeks applied the term to anything: for example, the excellence of a chimney, the excellence of a bull to be bred and the excellence of a man. The meaning of the word changes depending on what it describes, since everything has its own peculiar excellence; the arête of a man is different from the arâte of a horse.
In a previous editorial describing the changes that are occurring at Change, I spelled out the professional values that affect my work as an editor. The first of those was that for me, “education needs to evolve to serve (in order of importance), first, the public good; second, students; and third, institutional well-being.”
I was reminded of that statement in reading Barbara Kehm's description of two notions of excellence that drive higher education in Europe and Asia and here in the US. The first is based on institutional prestige, which in turn is driven by research excellence. The second refers to how we address the public purposes of higher education and serve students.
Anyone who watches the behavior of academics and their institutions would have to conclude that we are wedded to the first idea of excellence. The currency of our realm is prestige, and prestige is increasingly measured by the kinds of metrics found in national and international ranking systems: grant dollars, Nobel prizes, the good opinion of our peers, and the like. Meanwhile, it seems that those who fund us (state policymakers, students and parents, the federal government) are focused on the second notion of excellence: they say they want us to ensure that our students learn deeply and well, that we support students and help them overcome obstacles, and that we wave our mortarboards enthusiastically when they graduate.
In an ideal world, both types of excellence would be honored. As the Greeks, knew, the excellence of Penelope is different than the excellence of Achilles, just as “the arête of a man is different from the arête of a horse,” but both are worthy of song. In the world we actually inhabit, however, the first notion trumps the second and determines the behavior and structures of institutions.
So we have institutional isomorphism. And the desire of every institution to look like Harvard means requiring faculty, even those who think of themselves primarily as teachers, to produce research. In order to do that, teaching loads (the term is significant) are reduced, and costs go up as state and student funding is diverted from instruction to research. (As Douglas Webber and Ron Ehrenberg point out, this fact is obscured in an accounting system in which “instructional costs” include salary dollars spent on “departmental”—i.e., not externally funded—research.) The result is untenable: As Dennis Jones and Jane Wellman make clear, cost escalation in higher education now exceeds any of our funders' ability or desire to pay.
It is undoubtedly true that cutting-edge research has determined the direction of our economy and society in fundamental ways and so has made vital contributions to the public good. As Alison Wolf pointed out in the July/August 2009 issue of Change, “The remarkable thing about America is the way in which, over the last twenty years, it has produced new ideas and new products that have changed the world and has reasserted the economic pre-eminence that, in the 1980s, it believed it had lost. …So if you are thinking about education in economic terms, what a country needs above all is to create and protect those universities that are at the cutting edge of research and theory.”
But at the same time, to be prosperous a country also needs to make sure that its citizens have been developed to their fullest extent by first-rate teaching and deep learning. So why is it that the first notion of excellence runs the show? For the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks—that's where the money is. At some level everyone, academics (those who get the money) and funders (those who provide it) both buy into the singular notion of excellence-as-research-prestige; a glowing cloak spreads over everyone associated with the prestigious enterprise.
That's certainly true for faculty. When I was approving degree programs at the coordinating board in Virginia, one argument for doctoral programs was that the self-esteem of faculty would be damaged and the institution's capacity to recruit “star” faculty (i.e., those mobile up-and-comers known for their research reputations, not for their teaching or service to their previous college or university) would be curtailed without programs at that level. For administrators too, institutional prestige is their prestige, and sometimes their paychecks depend on it the way a coach's does on having a winning team.
But even students say that first among the criteria by which they pick a college is its “academic reputation,” however little they may understand on what that reputation rests. And policy-makers who tout the advantages of community colleges use funding for-mulae that favor research universities when they allocate funds, because they want their states to have (and their children to go to) prestigious institutions.
Meanwhile the kinds of initiatives Brit Kirwan is spending his Carnegie grant on have to be separately funded; we are failing to adequately support students who need us, such as the males Marcus Weaver-Hightower talks about; and science faculty who work with K-12 students (see the article by Zhang et al. in this issue) or who provide research opportunities for freshmen and sophomores, such as those working in the program that Bernard Streitwieser and his colleagues describe, operate at the margins.
Perhaps it's time to put our money where our putative values are. There are some goals that we need to share, such as those that Jones and Wellman set out: increased levels of student attainment, for example. That's why it is so encouraging that 17 states are now setting graduation targets and developing plans to improve their graduation rates. I also think that we should agree that the work of faculty should be scholarly, however we may choose to define that term.
But at the same time, I hope we will encourage what Kehm calls “horizontal functional differentiation”—the recognition that at the macro level, the arâte of a comprehensive institution is not the same as the arête of a research-intensive one and that at the micro-level, the arête of a teaching-focused faculty member is not the same as that of a researcher.
There are signs that this may be beginning to happen. Ohio State, for instance, is beginning to entertain the notion of what Gordon Gee calls “multiple ways to salvation” (that would be promotion and tenure). Perhaps that is a sign that we are finally trying to rebalance our priorities by motivating and rewarding excellence of more than one type. For as Plato says in the Meno, “Every age, every condition of life… has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.”
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