Honors of Inequality: How Colleges Work for Some

Clark Kerr once observed that "the essential conservatism of faculty members about their own affairs" dominates the governance of American college campuses. Key facets of that conservatism are evident in higher education scholarship and policy analysis. By definition, the musings of an academician on academia is not academic. Tenured faculty have a political and economic stake in the ideas that their scholarship advances about how colleges work. Faculty's financial well-being, institutional control, academic freedom, and influence on state policies are inextricably connected to how much American families, students, citizens, politicians, and policymakers support higher education. Conversely, Americans' understanding of higher education unavoidably depends on the faculty who study and publish academic works on student learning and university administration. In short, faculty has a vested interest in the areas of investigation and conclusions drawn from their own academic research on the nature of higher education.This critical history of higher education as a field of study exposes its origins in the tradition of anti-intellectualism and business enterprise in America life. Higher education scholars adopted concepts and ideological tools from the anti-New Deal and anti-centralization bent of conservative thinkers that raised impediments to the scientific study of higher learning and frustrated the accumulation of knowledge about what works for college student success. In a backlash to student protests, they redefined academic freedom as a corporate right of the faculty that betrayed the principles of higher learning for college students and characterized college administration as an organized anarchy that tended to support the status quo.Honors of Inequality demonstrates how colleges work for some, and not for others, by design. As a defense of private institutions and the elite functions of universities that prepare "the ruling class," as one scholar acknowledged, higher education scholars advocated for the transformation of the American college student loan system into a form of public subsidy to private institutions and for the elite programs on public campuses. Today, the national system of higher education financing functions as a regressive system of taxation in which many American are burdened with student loans to subsidize free college for the few.

• | Author: Joseph H Wycoff
• | Publisher: Historia|Research Press
• | Publication Date: January 17, 2020
• | Number of Pages: 279 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0999678884
• | ISBN-13: 9780999678886