When sustainability fails

Paradise Dormitory, Sterling College, Vermont. Photo by Jeff Titon, 2013.

In 2019 I wrote about Hampshire College (Massachusetts) and Sterling College (Vermont), both experimental, progressive colleges under financial stress. Now I'm sorry to report that both private colleges have announced that they will be closing this year, due to costs exceeding income, with no foreseeable future improvement in their circumstances and not enough donations and grants to enable them to keep going for a while longer. 

Hampshire opened in 1970, formed as an offshoot of the four distinguished Pioneer Valley schools (Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts) where students were encouraged to pursue their intellectual curiosities, without the normal foundation and distribution requirements. Instead of grades, students were given detailed prose evaluations of their work by their professors. Hampshire students worked closely with their professors, far more so than in most colleges and universities. Among their graduates was the film maker Ken Burns. 

Sterling, founded in 1958, offered an education primarily in environmental studies and ecology, not merely in abstract course work but also hands-on fieldwork including a working farm where students were responsible for doing all the work that resulted in their food. It was a very spartan operation but perhaps too specialized to survive at a time when environmental studies, global warming, climate change and science itself are being challenged by an increasingly powerful group of corporate and political operatives, whose opinions, backed by substantial funding, have created skepticism among the general public and put the field of environmental studies itself into some danger. Colleges like Unity College (Maine) have transformed themselves from primarily environmental colleges to something else; colleges like the College of the Atlantic (Maine, also an environmental-emphasizing college) are under pressure; and Sterling, unfortunately, is no longer able to survive. 

Ironically, perhaps, one of the themes of the Sterling curriculum was sustainability. Both Hampshire and Sterling have been blamed for not adjusting to the current challenges and showing more resilience, but sustainability for them would have been impossible without compromising their integrity. They are case studies where sustainability falters.  

 

A progressive, small college that is sustainable--so far

     In a recent entry I wrote about Hampshire College, a small, progressive institution located in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, one that is in deep financial trouble. It’s no secret that many other small colleges face similar problems today; some such as Green Mountain College (Vermont) have already closed, others like Castleton have laid off many employees, and many others are in danger of going into a death spiral. For its part, since I wrote that entry two months ago, Hampshire’s president and some members of its Board have resigned, and the college has dropped its attempt to partner with another institution. It’s now desperately trying to raise enough money to stay afloat.

     Vermont seems to be especially hard hit. Besides Green Mountain and Castleton, Goddard College (another Vermont progressive liberal arts college) was placed on accreditation probation in November for failing to meet requirements on finance and governance, and the College of St. Joseph also is in financial trouble. It’s not only the progressive schools that are in trouble; so are the many liberal arts colleges and the smaller branches of the state universities. For now, the top- tier colleges and universities appear safe, but second-tier schools also are facing higher costs and lower numbers of applicants, reflecting downward college-age population trends coupled with over-expansion in the previous century, while ballooning student loans pressure students (and their parents) into making financial cost-benefit decisions about colleges, majors, and careers. No wonder the liberal arts are suffering. 

     Sterling College in Vermont seems to be an exception to this rule. I’ve blogged about Sterling before. It’s not only got a progressive curriculum, but it specializes in agriculture and environmental studies (including science), and the campus is coupled to a farm raising livestock and produce. Under supervision, students operate this farm and supply food for the college population and others. Although it has a liberal arts curriculum, it has relatively little depth outside of environmental studies, partly because it is so small—only 18 faculty members and 110 students, and compared with other colleges and universities, a much smaller proportion of administrators. Students are required do a lot of the work that staff does at other colleges--like Berea College in Kentucky, it is a work college. Also unlike Hampshire and some of the other small liberal arts colleges, Sterling has been very successful at fund-raising, and relies on tuition for only about 75% of its income, rather than the 90% typical of the others. Also atypical, they maintain almost no long-term debt. And although the food the students eat is fresh, wholesome and plentiful, it is without the upscale attributes of the food at some of the expensive colleges competing for students partly on the basis of the creature comforts they can offer them. And speaking of creature comforts, I can testify on personal experience that dorm living at Sterling is very spartan—bunk beds, small bedrooms, nails in the wall to hand your clothes on, shared bathrooms, and so forth. Their niche appeals to philanthropists and granting agencies. Recently they received a $2.5 million grant to launch the Wendell Berry Farming Program of Sterling College, not in Vermont but in Henry County, Kentucky, where Berry lives. Students spend two years in Henry County and graduate with a degree in sustainable agriculture. 

     Sterling's appeal is to a very small and idealistic segment of the student population, one that wants to combine hands-on farm work with environmental studies in a small, intense community of like-minded people. So small and concentrated is this group that the College admits 94% of those who apply. Only about 60% of those who start the program graduate, compared with 75% at Hampshire, 55% at Goddard, and 75% at the University of Vermont. Sterling offers majors in only a few areas: ecology, environmental humanities, outdoor education, sustainable agriculture, and sustainable food systems, along with self-designed majors. Careers that make sense for Sterling graduates often involve work for government, scientific, or non-profit organizations, many with a global footprint; but as major international corporations expand their commitment to environmental stewardship, Sterling graduates are in demand there as well. Unlike Hampshire, which offers a liberal arts curriculum with depth in many subjects, Sterling College serves to prepare a small group for a comparatively few kinds of careers.  

     Many of the smaller universities—regional branches of state universities, mainly—are beginning to shrink their liberal arts offerings in exchange for program development that more directly prepares students for careers in areas where there is strong demand, such as information technology, or nursing. Advocates of the liberal arts are crying foul, charging that these institutions are giving up on education and becoming vocational schools instead. But that is a subject for another blog entry. 

Are Progressive Colleges Unsustainable?

       One of my recurring topics has been the cultural sustainability of the liberal arts at colleges and universities in the US. I’ve written about their transformation over the past 50 years from the collegial to corporate values and governance, how and why this occurred, and the dangers it poses to liberal arts education that nourishes intellectual curiosity and the free play of ideas at the expense, perhaps, of career goals. The head of the Board of Regents at my graduate alma mater, the University of Minnesota, once asked me why education in the humanities was so inefficient. I'd replied that intellectual curiosity requires time to explore and ponder ideas. A curious mind is going to follow them here, and there, into barren ground and back to fertile fields where they can grow. Ideas don't live well when they're gulped down and regurgitated back up, and out, on tests. Now comes news that one of the few colleges that’s retained collegial, horizontal governance and an exploratory atmosphere, Hampshire College, is in serious financial trouble. They’re looking either to close the college or to partner with another, more financially stable institution—although how that partnership would work is uncertain.
       Hampshire is of special interest to me because it’s one of the Five Colleges in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts: Amherst (my undergraduate alma mater), Smith, Mt. Holyoke, and the University of Massachusetts are the other four. Hampshire was founded in the middle of the 1960s, the year I graduated from Amherst; it opened in 1970 as an experimental, progressive college: no tenure for the faculty, an open curriculum, no grades for the students, and decisions made with input from all stakeholders—including students. Students and faculty worked together to design individual curricula for each student, suited to their intellectual interests and the faculty’s capabilities. Instead of grades, students received from their professors detailed evaluations of their demonstrated strengths, weaknesses, and overall performance in each class.
        A college like Hampshire—and there were others, many founded around the same time—appealed to students looking for something more participatory and less authoritarian, more experimental and less prescribed, while they spent four years immersed in a world of ideas and a close intensely social atmosphere. The lack of prescribed structure meant that some students floundered about for a while, looking to find out what truly interested them. Some knew they wanted a broad education that encompassed the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences; most tended to concentrate within only one of those four areas. Having followed where their curiosities led them, along the way developing their abilities to think, write, and converse critically, they were able to gain entrance to the best graduate and professional schools and to become lawyers, doctors, and professors; and they were able to succeed in the business world, if they wanted to, because in the highly participatory college atmosphere they’d developed superior social, communication, and thinking skills.
       In the 21st century Hampshire and similar colleges—one, for example, is in Maine, the College of the Atlantic, and several are in Vermont, Goddard College being the best known—have fallen victim to a dwindling pool of qualified applicants interested in this sort of education. Changes in the US economy, the shrinking of the middle class, the growth of income inequality, and a new instrumentalism that values career preparation at the college level, are some of the most important reasons. Financial mis-calculations by some of these colleges also have contributed to their plight.
       It's important to me that Hampshire be able to sustain itself. I admire their values and form of governance. I agree with the progressive ideals they embody in their curriculum. I wouldn’t want to teach there, for reasons that have to do with me, not them. Nonetheless I've felt close to Hampshire over the years. For one thing, it's in the town next to Amherst, where I spent my own undergraduate years; and I should add that some of the people I knew at Amherst College helped to found Hampshire and participated in its operation during its first decades. For another, the two children of a couple I've been friends with for more than 30 years went there and had the benefit of a good experimental education. For yet another, one of the students in the Brown doctoral program I led for 27 years has been teaching at Hampshire ever since she got her Brown PhD. And another reason is that when I was a visiting professor at Amherst some 25 years ago, some of the most interesting students in my classes were from Hampshire. The “five college” arrangement encouraged students to take courses at any of the five colleges, especially those that weren’t offered at their home college. Many more students signed up for my classes than Amherst would officially permit, but along with a few from Smith and Holyoke and a majority from Amherst I admitted several from Hampshire officially, and several more unofficially.
       The occasion for this blog entry—I’ve gotten around to it at last—was an article that appeared in the March 4 New York Times, by one of its education reporters, Anemona Hartocolis, whose name suggests a flower. Students, she reported, have been occupying the office of Hampshire’s president for the past five weeks. That is a long time for a student sit-in. They're of a mind that the college administration hasn't done enough to prevent the looming financial disaster. The college doesn't have much of an endowment to carry it through hard times, and it's dependent chiefly on tuition income. Evidently only 75 of their applicants for next year's freshman class were able to meet the admission standards; normal class size is around 300. Given the current turmoil, it's hard to see how they'd be able in good conscience to admit anyone. 
        Hartocolis contextualizes Hampshire’s problems by looking at the difficulties other “alternative” colleges are facing, and offers a few reasons of her own for those problems: high tuition (although many students are on scholarship); a dwindling college-age population; competition among too many progressive colleges for too few interested students; small endowments because the graduates of these colleges tend not to be attracted to high-paying jobs; and so on. Some colleges that were progressive in the 1970s, like Sarah Lawrence in the Bronx, have become conventional today, emphasizing STEM courses, and where once they were like Hampshire in not giving letter grades, today they most certainly do. Not being able to admit a full class to Hampshire would, I think, result in a death spiral unless they can find a partner school—but on what terms? How could they keep their residential arrangements, their faculty, their participatory government, their democratic curricula, and the close, in-person nature of their daily education if they partnered with another school? And how could they find enough money to keep going without changing their nature beyond recognition?
        It seems, in other words, as if this particular progressive model for liberal arts education is unsustainable in the US in the 21st century. And yet what the current moment needs more than anything is a well-educated citizenry to become high-information voters and to choose our leaders and policies rationally based on facts and truths, not propaganda and lies. And this is precisely what liberal arts education encourages, and what experimental colleges like Hampshire, when they succeed, are able to accomplish. Hampshire’s horizontal governance shows what democracy can be like at its best (and also, be it said, at its most demanding, and annoying).

Some students and faculty at Sterling College, Vermont, 2018

        
     Are there other models that might succeed where Hampshire is having such difficulty? I've mentioned the College of the Atlantic, which has a curricular focus and strengths in environmental science and the environmental humanities. On a much smaller scale, the environmental college in Vermont that I wrote about, Sterling College, appears to be succeeding, with a similar focus. Possibly a focus such as the environment, which of course is timely and could be viewed as career preparation for a life as a scientist, or for working in an environmental organization, will enable an experimental college to be resilient. At the same time, though, it's impossible for these colleges to offer the depth in the liberal arts curriculum that Hampshire has offered. Yet for now this may be the only kind of adaptive management that maintains resilience and the sustainability of the progressive educational model among small US colleges.  

Why universities are unsustainable

      I’ve written about the unsustainability of the contemporary college and university system on this blog before. What prompts another entry is the publicity attending the recent announcement that a vice-chancellor of the University of Maine received a $40K pay increase last year while simultaneously prescribing a cut of $36 million for the University of Maine systems. Needless to say, those protesting the cuts (chiefly to academic programs and academic faculty) suddenly had a cause célebre. This revelation dramatically highlights the root problem, as I see it: American colleges and universities are academic institutions no longer. They've become corporations.
    The administrator's boss defended the pay raise. The chancellor--top banana of the university--explained that other state universities paid these people 1/3 again as much as her $205,000 salary. (Does any faculty member at UMaine earn that much? I doubt it. Even at my instiution, Brown University, where faculty salaries are higher, very few do--and if so, then for the same reason: they'd command higher salaries elsewhere.) The University of Maine was in danger of losing her to another institution, he said. She was doing a good job; better pay her what she’s worth—so runs the argument, if by good job we mean balancing the budget on the backs of academics because  university administrators had failed miserably to convince the state legislature to make up the difference. The chancellor's argument assumes a corporate model. In such a model, the administrators who run the corporation are the executives, the faculty are labor, and the students are both consumers and product. Is the corporate model the best way to conceive of education?
    Certainly it has some advantages. As a corporation, a university is likely to run more efficiently. The focus is on turning out a successful product. Proliferation of administrators on the financial end of things means that universities are now run as businesses, with the goal of increasing income: from investments, from consumers (student tuition), from donors (wealthy alumni), from government (agency grants for research; legislative funding), etc. (Never mind that UMaine's lobbyists and fundraisers weren't persuasive enough; they need hire better ones. Of course they'll have to pay them more; which means even less money for academics, unless these fundraisers can do what all their predecessors failed at.) No doubt university income has increased overall, yet somehow the cost of getting it, keeping it, spending it and growing it is outpacing the income itself. For in order to get more science grants, schools have to spend money on high profile scientists who require state-of-the-art laboratories—which are enormously expensive and getting more so exponentially, like the cost of high-tech medical care. In order to get more money from donors, the students mustn’t only be educated; they must be kept happy, which means expensive support services including counseling, pleasant accommodations, excellent food and plenty of food choices, high grades, and positioning for a successful career. Colleges and universities have become like Lake Wobegon in that regard, where grade inflation—now the majority of grades are A’s, in case you don’t know—means all students now are “above average.” In order to get more money from investments, universities compete to hire the best financial managers, those who might otherwise be running hedge-funds for the super-rich, and whose salaries make the $205,000 of this vice-chancellor look like spare change.
    The business model becomes self-perpetuating in the sense that other schools are now regarded chiefly as competitors and only secondarily as cooperating allies in a larger educational ecosystem. And the schools themselves are run on competitive models. Granted, students had always competed for better grades, and now that competition is less keen. This is because students are now regarded both as consumers and product. Don't upset them with bad grades, don't flunk them out unless they're beyond saving. The competition now takes place in the labor market—that is, among faculty. Whereas until about 1970 the supply of and demand for full-time, tenured faculty was about equal, after 1970 in an effort to save money--this was when they began to be run like corporations--universities began hiring cheap labor (adjunct, part-time professors) and paying them by the course, thereby increasing productivity. An adjunct professor typically receives no fringe benefits such as retirement savings, subsidized medical care, decent office space (or any at all), and earns about 1/3 of the amount per course taught on average compared with a tenured professor. No wonder the percentage of adjunct professors in higher education has increased to the point where they now comprise more than half of the total faculty. In 1970 adjuncts made up only one-quarter, and that included many who wanted to work part-time. At today’s salaries, an adjunct faculty member who moonlights by teaching part-time at more than one institution and winds up with a full load of courses (equivalent to what a full-time professor teaches) earns about the same amount as a person who repairs bicycles, about $23,000 annually. Tenured professors cost their institutions at least three times that, and typically their productivity is lower in the sense that they teach fewer students. Never mind research productivity, or teaching effectiveness; it's all about per-unit cost.
    I’ve experienced this transition myself, having entered college in 1961 and begun full-time university teaching in a tenure-track position in 1971. By then the academic job market was beginning to contract. When I was evaluated for tenure six years later, the profession had already contracted so much that only 10% of those at my university were then receiving tenure; the rest were fired and had to look for jobs elsewhere. I was one of the lucky 10%. Among my friends in my graduating class holding the doctorate, about half were able eventually to get tenure and maintain the kinds of teaching careers that were common through the 1960s; the others were not. Later classes fared more poorly. Certainly, ebbs and flows in the economy and trends within academia have occasionally advantaged certain disciplines—ethnomusicology is one—but in general opportunities for university faculty have gotten gradually worse since 1970 and the profession is still contracting.
    Some dreamers hold up the old model of a collegial university, run largely by faculty on temporary leave from their academic positions, to return to them after serving time in administration, as an ideal to strive for once again. In that model, students were educated, not trained. Learning meant preparing to take one's place as a critical thinker and active citizen. Of course, that also prepared one for a career, not a McJob. A return to this educational model isn't likely, except at small institutions with targeted special-interest populations, such as Sterling College, which I wrote about here earlier. There are a few others like it. Instead, productivity will accelerate until even administrators price themselves out of the game. Distance learning via Internet courses is more efficient and costs far, far less than maintaining college and university campuses.
    The structure of higher education will change to accommodate this shift as soon as the consumers (students) are proved to be just as successful, if not happy, in their careers as a result of these MOOCs (massive on-line open courses), except that they won’t be open any more. Students still will have to pay for them. But many fewer professors and administrators will be needed. The professorial industry—and it will become one—will function in a way similar to the textbook industry, with a few widely-used market leader courses earning money for their institutions and authors, and several competitors attempting to break into the market. Students will remain in their homes, or perhaps in special buildings set aside for the purpose in their home communities, where they will sit at computer workstations or their equivalent in the next generation of distance-learning technology, which will include access to all kinds of resources to supplement course work—digital libraries, or whatever the next technology brings about. Of course, maintaining the technological network where all this will take place is immensely expensive, but the cost will be borne—as it is now—by government, the military, corporations, and ordinary citizens. Imagine how much money is being spent even now just so that most everyone can connect to the Internet: trillions of dollars. (Look at your own bill for Internet service, smartphone, tablet, cable, dsl, and so forth, and multiply that by the millions of population using them throughout the world.)
    That will be the new shape of higher education worldwide, for the trajectory of the corporate model, once in control, moves inexorably to increase productivity and decrease per-unit cost, while real costs (such as climate change, growing income inequality, and so on) are meant to be hidden. And they stay in hiding until exposed by ecological economics. Ironically, when this tranformation in higher education occurs, vice-chancellors such as the one at the University of Maine whose salary was raised significantly while her actions resulted in fired faculty and eliminated degree programs (and a few riffed administrators, be it said), will find themselves looking for a job somewhere else. Some will survive, but most won't.
    The old collegial model of the university was a participatory community, not a top-down corporate hierarchy. Musical communities will continue to provide participatory models, and ultimately these are more sustainable. Again, and perhaps ironically, it is the Internet that is helping to level the playing field. More on that in a later post.

Seed saving and cultural sustainability

    An educational and cultural project involving home garden seed saving was the centerpiece of Rosann Kent’s presentation at the cultural sustainability symposium last month at Sterling College. Hers was one of the talks that engaged with my own work, for I’ve been an organic gardener and seed saver myself now for some thirty-plus years. After all, a university’s academic year calendar permits faculty time in the summer to do research, write, and in my case, also to tend an organic garden and orchard. Hand-work is complementary to head-work, and the easy pace of gardening frees me for creative daydreaming. If I had to make a living as a farmer, I’m sure that my mind would be full of worry about the year’s crops, the weather, and market prices; but growing for home use (with surplus for friends) involves a different kind of accounting.
    Rosann Kent’s school, re-named the University of North Georgia earlier this year, resulted from the merger of the North Georgia College & University, and Gainesville State College. Its website proclaims it “The Military College of Georgia,” and Kent was quick to state that one would not normally associate seed saving with a military college. Nonetheless, the university’s Georgia Appalachian Studies Center, where Kent serves as a faculty member and the director, recently completed a project entitled “Saving Appalachian Gardens and Stories,” which not only gained a good deal of local attention in this fastest-growing region of the state, but also was featured in a forum on local food systems and sustainable agriculture last year, sponsored by the Appalachian Regional Commission.
    Seed saving brings together culture and agriculture, a unity famously inscribed into the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s by Wendell Berry, whose words were prophetic then and whose voice remains essential today. Kent’s project was designed not just to inventory varieties of home garden seeds that had for years been saved and shared by local families, but also to collect and then present the stories that went along with the seeds. Stories connected with seeds may seem a little strange to anyone who either hasn’t either grown up in a family that keeps heirloom seeds, or hasn’t encountered the practice of storytelling surrounding the intersection of generations on the land through such things as names of places. Even the name of an old fiddle tune, when played in a circle of friends, if it names a place or person (or even if it doesn’t), often will draw forth a short story, or a reference to a known story, of the place or person named, or the fiddler from whom the player learned it, or an occasion on which it was played and something unusual occurred.
    In 1990 when I taught for the spring semester as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, in Kentucky, I spent most weekends in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky; and one of the things I did was ask the people I got to know, the ones who had home gardens, whether they saved seed. Among other things, as a seed saver myself, I was interested in trying new-to-me varieties of heirloom non-hybrid seeds, and swapping some I’d saved with theirs.

My garden bean field, 2013. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon

This is one of the things seed-savers do; we swap seeds. Every seed variety has a name; they are not just “bean seeds.” Otherwise we couldn’t keep track of their differences very well. When I asked them what they called these bean seeds, or those tomato seeds, the answer often was something like, “Oh, those are Joe beans.” “Joe beans?” I would reply. “No, I mean what variety of beans are they?” “Well,” the answer would come, “these are greasy beans, if that’s what you’re getting at. Lots of folks around here grow greasy beans. These are ones that go back to old Joe Caudill, whose home place used to be up here (points up higher on the creek bed) where he grew them, must have been one hundred years ago.” And then the lady would go on to tell a little story that revealed old Joe’s character, or maybe something about one of his descendants, or she might say she went to school with so-and-so who was old Joe’s nephew’s cousin’s niece, or something like that. In this way, the seeds, the land, and the families all were put into meaningful relation. Their “use-value,” so to speak, was cultural as well as agricultural. Saving seeds also meant saving culture.
    Kent’s presentation added another cultural layer. This part of north Georgia was being inundated by people “from away,” as we would say in Maine, contrasting them with “natives.” In Kent’s country, the same distinction was between “came heres” and “been heres.” As in Maine, each group had its own notions of what it wanted. The “came heres” wanted Starbucks and services they were used to in the big cities; they thought that the “been heres” were culturally deprived and they wanted to “help.” The “been heres,” of course, had a culture of their own; and seed saving was an unimaginable (to the came heres) part of it. Kent had her students go out into the community and talk to the been heres who had home gardens about the seeds they saved, and of course just as had happened to me nearly a quarter century earlier and in a different part of Appalachia, they not only got seeds but also stories. So the seed saving project, along with the oral histories and stories, was presented in the community, and the came heres began to understand something about the been heres, while the been heres were reassured about their own culture.
    In our cultural sustainability symposium, Kent not only talked about this project, but she got us all into a workshop where we told each other family stories, something that might have gone on all afternoon—but there were other presentations to hear, and besides, all this talk about food made us hungry for the farm supper that was only a couple of hours away.