My late friend, Francis Sim of the sociology department, tried to teach me two things. "Never," he told me, "get into a pissing contest with a skunk." To that he added: "Never discuss metaphors with a social scientist."
Sim's first rule needs no comment. His second was based on a sour lesson. We once presented a paper titled, "The Use and Abuse of Metaphors in Social Science." The response was angry, loud and besides the points we tried to make. Defeated, we retreated to a bar nearby. There Frank created the maxim and tried to convince me to keep it.
As anyone knows, I've not followed his advice. Social scientists need metaphors. So they use them, though they suspect them. Everything is like everything else in some sense. Even governments are like frogs in the sense that both need resources for survival. On April 15 we feed the "frog." Since a metaphor is to declare that something is another thing that it is not, every metaphor invites conflict and confusion.
We use metaphors to amuse, persuade, make our viewpoint clear or create knowledge. Metaphors help us focus investigations of unknown things by making them familiar and they focus investigations of seemingly well-known things by making them strange.
The ends of such inquiries are more complex, precise and useful patterns of stored experience. As the philosopher, Max Black once summarized the process, "Science begins with metaphors and ends with algebra."
We abuse metaphors when we assert them as descriptions. When we do that we bully our audience by declaring ours to be the only way to see events in the social world without giving reasons or arguments.
Here is an example. Writes quality entrepreneur, Stanley J. Spanbauer: "While some educators have difficulty referring to students as customers, it's necessary that all who work in schools accept that type of reference." The passive voice tells us that Spanbauer will offer no reasons.
His command leads to copying quality programs without understanding them. Note that even with the enthusiasm for quality improvement in American industry, less than 20 percent of businesses who have tried to carry out Total Quality Management have improved their competitive position. One reason for that dismal record is the urge to copy. As W. Edwards Deming commented, "If people do not understand theory, they will only copy -- and down they will go."
Assertion of the student/customer metaphor aborts attempts to research the real customers of higher education --those that pay for and use its products. Universities have turned to techniques for improving quality under pressure from just those customers. Applying continuous quality improvement to a university polishes the public image. Is that all we can expect from CQI?
Let's take the philosophy of quality seriously. What do our customers think of our products? Not enough to pay more taxes, more tuition or more research grants to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed. They want to pay less and they are squeezing high education, because they don't like our products.
A recent survey of 6,500 households reported in Investor's Business Daily rated college tuition as one of the 10 worst buys on the market. A report by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology released in January states: "Many higher education institutions. . .are turning away from their education mission, particularly from undergraduate education. We believe that many of the complaints by parents and students concerning the quality of undergraduate education are well founded." The council recommended a renewed stress on teaching even at the cost of a cutback in research.
Barry Munitz, chancellor of the California State University System, comments, "There's a notion that academic institutions have to change the way they do business."
I don't think graduates are products. That metaphor doesn't work. It is useful for the knowledge, skills and habits of thought that graduates carry into the world. Those intellectual products determine their feats as citizens, employees and parents.
What kind of intellectual skills does business, government and society need today? Businesses are vocal in stating their needs. Gerald Clemente says, "They need people who cannot only read, write and do some arithmetic, but who can also think independently and work in teams. A productive employee must know how to get information, how to use it, how to develop it and how to share it."
If Penn State doesn't learn how to produce intellectual products which will aid graduates in meeting customer needs --what will happen? Concludes Robert Hayes of the Harvard Business School, "If schools don't respond to the nation's problem in competitiveness, the schools themselves will become irrelevant."
"Research universities can continue shortchanging undergraduate education as long as they value the acquisition of resources and the enhancement of reputation more than they do the educational and personal development of the undergraduate," argues Alexander W. Astin who has spent more than 16 years assessing the educational outcomes of higher education.
With the reduction of state, federal and private funds for tuition and research --resources and reputation no longer follow the shortchanging of undergraduate education.
Faculty members must learn to teach better and demand higher standards of performance if they are to educate students to become the astute citizens and productive employees of the future. They will have to work smart and hard with fewer resources. Students will have to respond with active learning to gain competence.
Better intellectual products will require professors to rethink what they want students to learn and redesign the ways they teach. More sophisticated educational objectives demand profound knowledge. Faculty members can no longer teach by the seat of their pants. Administrators can no longer expect good teaching to occur by chance.
It won't help to get on the floor with students and ask them what they want to learn. If faculty members don't know what students need, they should go listen to the real customers of the University.
