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."