Superior academics must have priority

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Superior academics must have priority				September 17, 2003

As the College of William & Mary enters a critical period of self-analysis in conjunction with its upcoming accreditation procedures, both the administration and the faculty will be examining ad nauseam the mission of the college and the priorities that will take it into the future.

Obviously these are critical times not only for William & Mary, but for all Virginia institutions of higher learning. The economic drought in Richmond, coupled with soaring tuition costs and attendant cutbacks in faculty positions, course offerings and research funding, weigh heavily on our colleges and universities.

At this critical juncture, it behooves the college to come clean in its assessment of itself and to once again set the priorities that will allow it, as President Timothy Sullivan postulated, to become one of the world’s great institutions of higher learning.

Yet, signals being sent by administrators relative to the future of the college are tinged more with sanguineness than stark reality.

For instance, in the Sept. 4 issue of the William & Mary News, Geoffrey Feiss, the newly-appointed provost and former dean of the faculty, argues forcefully that “we must stay true to our core principles and strengths,” and that “the values and character of this place should not be jeopardized by the decisions we make.” Furthermore, says Feiss, “we must be universally recognized as an institution whose core is a great liberal arts college.”

As is usually the case with such linguistically elevated generalities, key words, such as “core” and “core principles,” are not carefully defined. Though it would seem obvious that the core of any great liberal arts institution is found in its instructional excellence, and hence in its faculty, Feiss says very little about the need for professorial expertise in the classroom. Rather he talks about budgetary matters, fiscal shortfalls, graduate programs and future greatness. Apparently minimizing the importance of the classroom, Feiss wonders whether we can “better focus the ingenuity of the faculty to expand our research endeavors and couple these to economic development opportunities.”

The fact is that William & Mary has always been known for the quality of its teaching, and its core focus has always been the classroom. Now, however, we are evidently going to better focus the faculty’s ingenuity, emphasize bottom-line research, and hence make professors an important cog in the economic wheel of fortune.

Whereas other institutions, such as Harvard and New York University, are now reversing gears and will send top professors and researchers back to the classroom to teach even lowly freshmen, cash-strapped William & Mary will reconstruct the dollar-laden ivory research tower.

This is not to say, of course, that faculty members will finally be free of the endless series of teaching evaluations to which they are subject, for they won’t. Nor is it likely that the self study will forswear the use of those amateurishly-constructed and markedly misleading student evaluations that so frequently determine, sometimes by fractional margins, whether faculty members get non-existent salary increases. And this despite the fact that the intrinsic excellence of classroom teaching runs the risk of being severely corrupted by such evaluations, since they drastically increase the potential for soaring grade inflation and dumbed-down subject matter.

Nor, despite Feiss’s insistence that we maintain the “values and character” of the college, is there much concern that programs that used to be at the core of a liberal arts education are disappearing at William & Mary. Does anyone care, for instance, that formerly thriving programs in Italian and German are being allowed to wither on the vine? That a William & Mary student may no longer take a course in which Dante is read in the original?

Does anyone care that, despite its adherence to “core principles and strengths,” the college has colluded with the state to quash academic freedom by requiring that faculty members humbly beg permission from their deans to access Internet sites that are deemed pornographic? That anything from the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley to erotic Greek vase paintings or allegedly racy French poets are off limits to researchers in these areas? Can the college truly seek accreditation in light of this inane repression of the freedom of inquiry and expression?

Does anyone care that, while academic programs and faculty positions are being slashed, intercollegiate athletics is flourishing, having escaped the sword that seems to be falling on just about every other sphere of college activity? Or that the egregious athletic fee now stands at a whopping $916 a year?

Finally, does anyone care that the college, with its warped sense of prestige, still lists Henry Kissinger as its chancellor? Are there no academicians of national or international note who might better encapsulate the mission of the college?

These are all issues that should constitute the core of the college’s ongoing self study. Most important, however, is that the college unswervingly adhere to the idea that its prime objective is instructional excellence, and that its most basic resource in this regard is its faculty.

Let the faculty’s focus and ingenuity be directed toward its students, as opposed to economic opportunism. And let the administration dedicate itself not to comedic amphitheatrical antics, but rather to the maintenance of programs vital to a premier liberal arts institution and to a milieu in which freedom of thought, both in research and in the classroom, thrives.