| |
[Society] is a partnership in all science; a
partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the
ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many
generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those
who are living, but between those who are living, those who
are dead and those who are to be born. Each contract of each
particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval
contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the
higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world,
according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable
oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in
their appointed place.
Edmund Burke |
Is it unfair to require those who have no children in
the public schools to pay school taxes?
The libertarian-right apparently believes that it is. In its 2000
platform, the Libertarian Party proclaimed:
We advocate the complete separation of education and
State... We condemn compulsory education laws. We further support
immediate reduction of tax support for schools, and removal of the
burden of school taxes from those not responsible for the education
of children.1
Furthermore, Christian fundamentalists are disinclined
to send their children to public schools, often preferring to send them
to “Christian academies” or to teach them at home. They opt out of
public education in order to protect their children from “corruption”
through and exposure to such secular ideas such as evolution, historical
geology, or even tolerance of contrary religious beliefs. If they choose
to withdraw their children from the public schools, why should the
fundamentalists be required to pay school taxes?
Without a doubt, if, as the libertarians propose, “the burden of school
taxes” is confined to those “responsible for the education of children”
(presumably their own children), the quality of public education will be
severely degraded, while, at the same time the burden of school costs on
families with school-age children will be greatly increased – so much
so, that poor families will be hard-pressed to support the schooling of
their children through High School, and middle-class families will find
it difficult to afford college education for their children. In short,
without broad-based financial support for public education, the
education-level of our next generation will decline precipitously.
So if asked why I should pay for the education of other peoples’
children, I have a simple and straightforward answer: “Because I prefer
to live in the company of educated neighbors, and in a country with
educated citizens.”
If I were a businessman or an entrepreneur, setting out to establish an
innovative and high-tech business enterprise, I would add: “I pay school
taxes so that our country might have an educated work-force, without
which my enterprise could not possibly succeed.”
The nineteenth-century Sociologist, L. T. Hobhouse, put it well when he
wrote:
The organizer of industry who thinks he has 'made'
himself and his business has found a whole social system ready to
his hand in skilled workers, machinery, a market, peace and order --
a vast apparatus and a pervasive atmosphere, the joint creation of
millions of men and scores of generations. Take away the whole
social factor, and we have not Robinson Crusoe with his salvage from
the wreck and his acquired knowledge, but the native savage living
on roots, berries and vermin.2
Thus Ayn Rand’s totally self-made and self directed John
Galt type of entrepreneur is a myth. As even Bill Gates must appreciate,
there is no MicroSoft without the myriad of publicly educated
“micro-serfs” on the payroll.
A libertarian reader of our website,
The Crisis Papers,
disagrees, as he writes:
People would want to be educated even if there were
no public education and would educate themselves, if necessary, as
they did in days past. It is the Ayn Rand hero who would take the
root-eating savages and educate them so that he could build a
factory in their barren land and thus produce a good living for
himself and them.
Once again, the libertarian unwittingly gives us a
powerful self-refutation. For on reflection, this is a truly absurd and
malevolent proposal.
We are asked to imagine Ayn Rand’s "John Galt" or his surrogates
strolling through the village of savages, picking out a few children and
offering to educate them to work in Galt's factories. This would, of
course, require several years of education, and capitalists are not
renowned for their willingness to await long-term returns on their
investments. But let that pass. More serious problems arise. Would these
selected "students" be required to work for Galt to pay off their debt?
What if, during their education, they developed other career
aspirations. Would they nonetheless be indentured servants to Galt? What
kind of "liberty" is this? And if, on the other hand, the chosen
students were accorded the right to take their Galt-supported education
elsewhere, what entrepreneur would take such a risk on his investment in
their education? And what would be the content of that education?
Presumably, only the specific skills needed to enhance Galt's profits?
If so, forget about literature, history, philosophy, or any of the
"liberating" liberal arts. Instead, the selected students would trained
to be skilled workers, “human capital,” and not free citizens of a
democratic society.
Once again, we find in this proposal the libertarian disregard of the
essential "like liberty principle," defended by such great liberals as
John Stuart Mill: the principle that each individual is entitled the
maximum liberty, consistent with the same liberty for others. The above
education scheme exacts a heavy "freedom penalty" and “welfare penalty”
on others, all to the exclusive advantage of the “sponsoring”
entrepreneur.
Another reason why I should support public education, at all levels from
Kindergarten through university graduate schools, is that this support
is “payback” to all those who paid for my own public education. This
payback is quite justly assessed and taxed throughout my lifetime, since
I benefit from the advantages of that public education throughout my
life.
But this is a paradoxical sort of “payback,” since I cannot directly
“return the favor” to my patrons. Those individuals who built and
sustained the institutions that I attended, and those teachers whom I
encountered in innumerable classrooms, are either dead or in their
dotage. My debt is payable to abstractions: to society and civilization.
By this I mean, payable to those fragile institutions that secure,
sustain and enrich the lives of us all: our Constitutional government,
our laws, civic peace and tolerance, our common history, our sciences
and arts. I “pay back” those who paid for my education by preserving
those institutions and by enhancing the public good.3
“The public good?” The libertarian will have none of it. For, to
recall once again, as Ayn Rand once wrote, “ there is no such entity as
‘the tribe‘ or ‘the public‘; the tribe (or the public or society) is
only a number of individual men.”4
Accordingly, the libertarian argues, educational institutions exist only
to benefit each individual person who is educated, and thus should be
paid for only by that individual’s family.
This is an absurdity that only a doctrinaire libertarian could believe.
For in fact, the education of each individual benefits the public at
large, and thus should be supported by the public at large. In
particular, as libertarian supporters of the “corporatocracy” so easily
forget, public education supplies the literate and skilled work force
that is the foundation of corporate affluence.
When I entered the University campuses, first as a student and later as
a professor, I found magnificent institutions at my disposal: buildings
and grounds, faculties, libraries, and traditions – all these supported,
refined, added-upon over the decades at great public expense, only a
small fraction of which consisted of student tuition and fees. Yet the
returns of this public investment to the public are incalculably lavish:
scientific advances issuing from university laboratories, the
accumulation and integration of knowledge from the many separate
disciplines, the public service of the scholars, teachers, engineers,
business people, lawyers, doctors, etc. that graduate from these public
institutions.
There is no better evidence of the social and economic benefits of
public education, than the GI Bill of Rights (1944) that offered free
college education to veterans of World War II. This bill, steadfastly
opposed by the Congressional Republicans at the time, was the foundation
of the middle class that emerged from that war, and a springboard to the
unprecedented economic growth that followed. Thus the GI Bill is
regarded by many as the most significant federal legislation of the
twentieth century.
Universal support of public education affirms the principle that We the
People of the United States are a community, and not, as the libertarian
right would have us believe, a mere aggregate of disconnected,
self-interested individuals and families, the sum of whose private
activity is somehow mysteriously, and without need of planning or
management, transformed into the public good. On the contrary, the
fabric of our national community has been woven, to a significant
degree, by the public schools as they took in immigrants from numerous
nations and transformed them, in a single generation, into Americans –
e pluribus unum. They did so by teaching a common language, our
national history, and our founding political principles. Of late, the
teaching of history and civics in the public schools has been
downgraded, and we are now paying a terrible price for this neglect, as
a generation of Americans emerges that is ignorant of their heritage and
of their rights, and thus ill prepared and ill-motivated to protect them
when threatened.
Public education is now under attack as never before. George Bush
promises to “Leave no Child Behind,” and then withdraws funding from the
Act bearing that name. Karl Rove attacks the teachers’ union, The
National Education Association (called by former Bush Administration
Education Secretary, Ron Paige, “a terrorist organization”), because of
the teachers’ traditional support of the Democratic Party. “Voucher
systems” threaten to draw gifted students, and students from affluent
families, out of the public schools, leaving behind the poor and
disadvantaged. And so-called “taxpayers’ revolts” are starving the
schools of essential funding, often despite the wishes of the public.
For example, in my own community, a majority of voters have recently
supported two proposals to increase school funding, only to have those
proposals defeated by a law that requires a two-thirds majority to
increase tax assessments. This law, the so-called Jarvis Initiative of
1979, is believed by many to be the primary cause of the decline of the
once-magnificent California public school system, and the University of
California, once the undisputed leader in public higher education.
Because we are all continuing beneficiaries of our system of public
education, that system deserves universal support - whether or not we
happen to have children currently in school. Our very freedom depends
upon a flourishing educational establishment, for, as Jefferson
correctly observed, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it
expects what never was and never will be."
Or as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote in his Aims of
Education:
In the conditions of modern life the rule is
absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is
doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all
your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back
the finger of fate. Today we maintain ourselves. Tomorrow science
will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no
appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the
uneducated.5
The Assault Upon Trained Intelligence
As anyone with an active and informed interest in the
state of our nation is aware, George Bush's "compassionate conservatism"
has impacted heavily and cruelly upon today's generation of college
students.
It is one thing to know this as an abstract fact, and quite another to
face the particular and personal manifestations of these policies. I was
recently vividly reminded of the personal dimensions of the educational
crisis when I received a message from a young college student in my
neighborhood, hard-pressed to continue his education amidst the public
squalor brought on by Bushenomics. He found himself drawn to the
distasteful “solution” of joining the military, in expectation of a
promised post-service support of his education.
The source of the financial emergency facing this student, and millions
of others like him, is no mystery. Federal tax cuts and unfunded
mandates have put financial burdens on the states which have, in turn,
led to budget cutbacks and tuition increases in the public colleges and
universities. Compounding these hardships, the sagging job market has
deprived many poor students of the opportunity to put themselves through
college. And so, throughout the nation, hordes of qualified and
motivated students are being forced to postpone, or perhaps even
abandon, their professional aspirations.
The Partridges, professors both, have witnessed this tragedy first-hand,
as talented and promising students have had to drop out, as part-time
and adjunct faculty at the thresholds of their careers have been "let
go," and as course offerings have been withdrawn due to shortages of
faculty.
These conditions are being replicated in thousands of public colleges
and universities throughout the land.
It is bad enough that millions of our young people are thus being
deprived of the opportunity to realize their potentials and achieve
their aspirations in life. Far worse are the implications of this fiscal
starvation of public higher education for the future of our country. It
is indisputable that no nation can compete and survive in this
technological age without a trained work force. Nor can an advanced and
free civilization endure without a cadre of educated public servants --
lawyers, doctors, professors, entrepreneurs, administrators -- and a
public liberally educated in the history and political laws and
traditions of the state, and instilled with critical skills, moral
insight and civic responsibility.
In sum: Public education is not, as the right wing regressives would
have it, merely an avenue of opportunity for those individuals who can
afford it. The education of each individual is an essential investment
in the future of the entire society.
The city of New York recognized this a century ago, when it established
its system of tuition-free City Colleges (now the City University of New
York). In the City College system, students were accepted on academic
merit alone, and the competition was fierce. Living at home and
commuting by subway, children of immigrants had a "ladder" of
opportunity that led them from poverty to the professions -- an avenue
that was taken by thousands of outstanding and productive scientists,
engineers, doctors, lawyers and teachers. These were exemplars of Thomas
Jefferson's "natural aristocracy of talent and virtue."
The City University system was replicated in California, as it
established what was to become the world's finest public university
system -- until, that is, Ronald Reagan became the Governor of
California, and until, in 1979, the infamous "Proposition 13" slashed
California tax revenues.
Today, as tuition costs rise at the City University of New York, in the
California public universities, and in public colleges and universities
throughout the land, the door to higher education is closing to the
talented and motivated young people who have the misfortune of also
being poor.
“Why Should I Pay for Someone Else’s Research?”
This complaint by the public, and in particular the
parents of college students, is all too familiar to college and
university administrators and faculty. “I pay taxes and tuition so that
my child can get an education. Moreover, the professors are paid their
salaries to teach, not to be distracted by research and surely not to
hand-off their teaching responsibilities to unqualified graduate
students.”
CBS correspondent Leslie Stahl echoed this complaint in a 1995 report on
“Sixty Minutes.” In that feature, titled "Get Real!", Stahl
visited" the University of Arizona, and used that occasion to dredge up
the usual criticisms of large public universities: i.e., that they
promote research at the expense of education, that this research results
in cryptic papers published in obscure journals that nobody ever reads,
and that undergraduates generally encounter graduate teaching assistants
rather than professors in their classes.”
When that program was broadcast, I was on the faculty Northland College,
a small, private teaching-oriented college in northern Wisconsin. As
such, my institution was not a target of the 60 Minutes critique.
Nonetheless, I found the segment to be offensive, unfair, and worst of
all, dangerous – “dangerous,” because it attacked and undermined the
essential contributions of public universities to science, to
scholarship, to our national culture and economy, and to world
civilization.
Because the caricature of higher education presented in that program is
believed by a large and influential segment of our population, it
deserves a measured response.
It happens that I am the product of a large state University (the
University of Utah), and for the larger part of my career, I taught at
such institutions in Utah, Colorado and California. But much more to the
point, small private colleges such as Northland proudly sends many of
their graduates to research universities -- if, that is, these students
have proven themselves capable of meeting the high standards they will
face. And as any professor knows, whether that professor serves a large
university or a small college, the most significant content of the
courses that he or she teaches is the output of scholarly researchers,
either now or recently at work. Moreover, today scholarly research
remains active, alive, and in progress. Any scholar knows this who has
waited too long to complete a paper and then sent it out for publication
while the "cutting edge" moved on, leaving his work behind.
Foremost among the taxpayers’ and parents’ complaints is that students
who go to college to gain an education are cheated when they find that
the primary interest of the professors is research, and that the
despised task of teaching is left to the untenured and even to graduate
students. Stahl called this "consumer fraud."
Soon after the 60 Minutes program was broadcast, I had a conversation
with a University of Arizona philosopher, Keith Lehrer, who was
interviewed by Stahl in that program. Lehrer pointed out to me those
same university faculties, including the inexperienced teaching
assistants, routinely accomplish a small miracle. As we know all too
well, the reading, writing and computational skills of our high school
graduates are a national disgrace. Yet in four years these
research-distracted institutions somehow manage to raise the knowledge
and skills of these students to a level sufficient for them to qualify
for graduate schools, where they successfully compete with the same
foreign students that so thoroughly outclassed them just four years
earlier. And why are so many foreign students at our graduate schools?
Because they recognize these institutions to be the finest in the world.
"Consumer fraud?" 60 Minutes provided eloquent refutation of its own
accusation, which the critically alert viewer might have noticed. Early
on it was pointed out that the University of Arizona takes in $250
million for funded research. Not mentioned was the fact that more than
forty percent of that amount (perhaps $100 million) is directed to
"overhead," which is to say, the general operating expenses of the
University. Yet near the close of the program, Stahl suggested that
someday, some parent may sue a university for "consumer fraud," since
the tuition intended for their child's education was being used instead
for research. It seems that Stahl had the matter entirely reversed. As
any University Bursar can readily demonstrate, in a large graduate
university, the teachers do not support research; research supports
teaching -- from those aforementioned "overhead charges." Far more
justified would be a "consumer fraud" suit against the university from a
funding organization, on the grounds that the cash which they had
intended for research, was being "misappropriated" to support teaching.
Graduate students teaching undergraduates? Shocking! Presumably, no one
should ever be allowed to teach for the first time, just as no one
should ever practice law or medicine for the first time. Are we expected
to believe that outstanding professors like Keith Lehrer never taught
for the first time: that they simply walked down, fully formed, from
Mount Olympus? And should senior professors teach such entry classes as
beginning Calculus or Freshman English? Wouldn't it make as much sense
for a senior surgeon to walk the wards, take temperatures and blood
pressures and dispense medications, or for a judge to act as his own
clerk? This is not a question of caste or privilege; just a question of
the optimum use of resources and talent.
And when professors do teach, just what is the content of their
teaching? Quite simply, it is the results of research. Moreover, this
will be research done recently, and most likely at a university -- the
more advanced the course, the more recent the research. End the
research, and soon there will be nothing to teach but aging content and
stale ideas, accumulated up to that dreadful moment when the research,
and thus all progress, was halted.
It is equally true, of course, that research to the exclusion of
teaching would also bring progress to a stop. Surely, there must be a
balance.
To be fair, much public criticism is not of "research"
per se,
but of frivolous and pointless research – what one cynic characterized
as “digging up old bones, putting them in a new box, and reburying
them.” There is some merit to this complaint. I would guess that if half
of the scholarly journals were abolished, the reduction of significant
thought and information would be about five-percent as quality material
was rerouted to the remaining publications. Even so, I dare say that the
complaint is ill-founded, for it falsely assumes that one can assess, as
research is proposed and begun, the value of that research when it is
completed.
The late Wisconsin Senator, Bill Proxmire, used to give "Golden Fleece
Awards" to what he regarded as useless government-supported research. As
I recall, he took special pleasure at pointing out studies of "the sex
lives of insects" as paradigms of federal boondoggling. However, this
research has led to a very effective, and at the same time ecologically
benign, method of controlling insect pests. But one need not be an
agronomist or an entomologist to figure out a connection between sex and
reproduction, though apparently this evaded Proxmire's notice.
To support her complaint about the alleged frivolity of scholarly
research, Stahl took special delight at grabbing a (presumably) random
journal off the shelf of the UA library, and reading a cryptic title
therein. It was, of course, totally meaningless to anyone outside of the
discipline in question.
So too, the following:
"Regarding the Development and Alteration of Light from a Heuristic
Perspective."
"The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies."
"On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and
Related Systems."
Which of these academic publications is worthy of anyone's attention,
far less the subsidy of the taxpayers? “Who,” to repeat Stahl’s
question, “would read this stuff?”
Fortunately, someone did. The first (published in 1905) earned Einstein
the Nobel Prize, and the second (also 1905) was his first statement of
the special theory of relativity. The third, by Kurt Gödel (1931) is
arguably one the most important mathematical papers of the twentieth
century.
Grab a random journal off the shelf of a university library, and the
chance that any of it’s content will be of comparable worth is
vanishingly remote. And yet, scattered throughout that same library is a
record of scientific and scholarly achievement, and the unrealized and
undeveloped resources for further advancement. I am quite incapable of
judging the quality of all but a few scholarly publications outside of
my academic specialty of moral philosophy and environmental ethics,
although presumably the editors and referees of such publications are so
qualified. An active and ongoing cadre of scholars and researchers is
required to assess the value of such publications and to build on them.
How are these researchers to be supported, if not by our universities?
Today the US economy imports energy, consumer electronics and
automobiles, all of which we once produced domestically. What do we
export in return? Municipal garbage, unprocessed National Forest
products (i.e., our remaining wilderness), and Midwestern grain. Among
our imports are foreign professionals who come to our shores to gain, in
those universities that 60 Minutes disparaged, a quality of higher
education that until recently was unsurpassed anywhere in the world. In
many fields it still is. Many of those foreign students, drawn to our
universities, remain to become the scholars, scientists and engineers
that enrich our intellectual, technical and cultural life, not to
mention our economy.
But now these research universities, our national treasures, are under
attack by opportunistic politicians, by taxpayers alliances, by the
religious right, and by sensation-seeking popular media. The research
therein, we are told, is "an extravagance that we can't afford."
American industry and the mainstream media, which has had no qualms
about utilizing and prospering from the talents of our university
graduates or from the results of their research, finds it all too easy
to attack those institutions which have rewarded them so lavishly. The
American economy, which has flourished on golden eggs, is now looking
hungrily at the goose.
In this blessed land, our cities and infrastructure are in decay, our
governments are collapsing under mountains of debt, our foreign rivals
out-compete us with technologies first developed in our universities,
and now civility has left our politics. But there remain a few things at
which we still excel, and foremost among them is scientific, technical
and scholarly research, and the higher education which supports and
produces this research.
Our commercial media serves us poorly when it recklessly attacks one of
our most successful, productive and internationally acclaimed
institutions.
{Much more to be added to this chapter}
10/14/07
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Libertarian Party:
Libertarian Party on Education, On the Issues.
2. Via Paul
Samuelson, Newsweek, December 30, 1974.
3. I argue this
point at length in my "Posthumous Interest and Posthumous Respect,"
Ethics, 91:2, (January, 1981).
http://gadfly.igc.org/papers/pipr.htm .
4. “What is Capitalism?”, 1965.
5. Alfred North Whitehead,
The
Aims of Education, Mentor, 1954. p. 26.
6. That 60 Minutes program
elicited the following two letters, the first from a Professor of English at
the University of Arizona: Thomas Miller:
"TAs serve valuable roles, faculty teach undergrads,"
Letter to The
Arizona Daily Wildcat (AU Student Newspaper), March 2, 1995.
Thomas Devlin:
"'Top' Universities Do Teach,"
The Particle Adventure (particleadventure.org).
(An edited version of this article appeared on the Editorial pages of the New York Times on June 13, 1995.) Devlin is a professor
Physics at Rutgers University.
