of them.
George Kuh, the founder and former director of NSSE, found that at college after college around the country, the culture war was only brought under control by an informal détente or peace treaty, engineered by college administrators to restore order. Kuh has dubbed this “the disengagement compact.” Students and professors compromised by adopting an attitude of “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” The compact wasn’t a formal, written agreement but a kind of cease-fire in the culture war. If professors relax their standards and inflate their grades so that most students can pass, then the students will not complain to administrators or take up valuable office time and will write positive comments on teaching evaluations. In other words, it’s exactly what we saw taking place in Brian Strow’s class at the beginning of this chapter.
“The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades—Bs and sometimes better,” Kuh said. “There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning—on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.” 76
NSSE’s surveys found that only 10 percent of American college students were the old-fashioned kind who came to college to learn something. NSSE calls these students “fully engaged.” At the other end of the scale they found that 20 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” An analysis of NSSE data by two sociology professors, however, found that 40 to 45 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” These are the anti-intellectual party school students who chose to spend their time at what Forbes magazine dubbed “country club campuses.” The remaining 40 to 50 percent of students were in the middle, sometimes engaged and sometimes disengaged. They didn’t party all the time but maintained only a minimal interest in their educations. 77 A study conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found similar results: 40 percent of freshmen are disengaged from academic pursuits or alienated from the educational process. 78
Other experts on higher education use different terms for the same phenomenon. Author and former Indiana University professor Murray Sperber calls it the “nonaggression pact” between faculty and students, where each side agrees not to impinge on the interests of the other. A faculty member who dares to give a student a C, he said, is breaking the pact and can expect a violent reaction from students and complaints from administrators. The teacher will have “to spend a fair amount of time justifying the grade with detailed written comments on the test or exam and a meeting with the upset student.” Not surprisingly, most faculty choose not to violate the pact and join the ranks of those who grade more generously. 79
The resulting decline of academic standards, Sperber said, would be quickly exposed if there were outcome tests for students just before graduation to show how little they have learned in college, but such tests are very rare in academia. “Quality undergraduate education is alive and well in the United States,” he said, “it just does not exist for most students at public universities.”
The disengagement compact is now nearly universal on party school and subprime college campuses where students are allowed to choose whether they want to learn anything or not. Professors have found from experience or from advice from other professors that fighting the system is a time-consuming and losing battle that can lead to poor job evaluations or denial of tenure. Keeping the students happy at any cost, on the other hand, is encouraged by administrators because it reduces the problems they have to deal with from students and keeps the tuition
George Kuh, the founder and former director of NSSE, found that at college after college around the country, the culture war was only brought under control by an informal détente or peace treaty, engineered by college administrators to restore order. Kuh has dubbed this “the disengagement compact.” Students and professors compromised by adopting an attitude of “I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.” The compact wasn’t a formal, written agreement but a kind of cease-fire in the culture war. If professors relax their standards and inflate their grades so that most students can pass, then the students will not complain to administrators or take up valuable office time and will write positive comments on teaching evaluations. In other words, it’s exactly what we saw taking place in Brian Strow’s class at the beginning of this chapter.
“The existence of this bargain is suggested by the fact that at a relatively low level of effort, many students get decent grades—Bs and sometimes better,” Kuh said. “There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning—on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximal effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide.” 76
NSSE’s surveys found that only 10 percent of American college students were the old-fashioned kind who came to college to learn something. NSSE calls these students “fully engaged.” At the other end of the scale they found that 20 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” An analysis of NSSE data by two sociology professors, however, found that 40 to 45 percent of students were “fully disengaged.” These are the anti-intellectual party school students who chose to spend their time at what Forbes magazine dubbed “country club campuses.” The remaining 40 to 50 percent of students were in the middle, sometimes engaged and sometimes disengaged. They didn’t party all the time but maintained only a minimal interest in their educations. 77 A study conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found similar results: 40 percent of freshmen are disengaged from academic pursuits or alienated from the educational process. 78
Other experts on higher education use different terms for the same phenomenon. Author and former Indiana University professor Murray Sperber calls it the “nonaggression pact” between faculty and students, where each side agrees not to impinge on the interests of the other. A faculty member who dares to give a student a C, he said, is breaking the pact and can expect a violent reaction from students and complaints from administrators. The teacher will have “to spend a fair amount of time justifying the grade with detailed written comments on the test or exam and a meeting with the upset student.” Not surprisingly, most faculty choose not to violate the pact and join the ranks of those who grade more generously. 79
The resulting decline of academic standards, Sperber said, would be quickly exposed if there were outcome tests for students just before graduation to show how little they have learned in college, but such tests are very rare in academia. “Quality undergraduate education is alive and well in the United States,” he said, “it just does not exist for most students at public universities.”
The disengagement compact is now nearly universal on party school and subprime college campuses where students are allowed to choose whether they want to learn anything or not. Professors have found from experience or from advice from other professors that fighting the system is a time-consuming and losing battle that can lead to poor job evaluations or denial of tenure. Keeping the students happy at any cost, on the other hand, is encouraged by administrators because it reduces the problems they have to deal with from students and keeps the tuition
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