Ordinary Winners

We want students to succeed. How much counts?

More reflections on what we’re doing in universities. In this case, it’s a question of what we should view as the right level of success for institutions and their graduates.

Many years ago, I was in a meeting with a generous friend of the university. This person was a good-hearted donor and otherwise supported the university, so even though this story will make them sound a little elitist they really weren’t.

We were talking about our goals and ambitions for our students. I teach at a good university, but it is not elite—the New York Times does not care about our campus politics (although The Wall Street Journal has written about our housing market). The generous friend said he wanted us to raise our students’ ambitions—to have them get involved. I mentioned that one of my recent graduates was planning to run for the state legislature. “No, no,” he said. “Higher. They should think bigger. That’s too small.”

State legislators are not an elevated class of public servant, to be sure. But as a state employee myself, and as someone who studies all of (gestures) this for a living, I can assure you that we want to have good (dare I say better) state legislators in office. I think that what my colleagues and I teach is useful in helping people understand the social world, and even in serving in different parts of public life.

Yet the generous friend was right about one thing: if, as an institution, you state that your goal is to produce better state legislators—or better town councilors, or better local bureaucrats—then paradoxically that is a mark against you. Much better, by far, to talk about how you want people to be in Congress—or, really, just the Senate.

No matter that this is unrealistic. I don’t mean that graduates of my university will be unable to be elected to high office, although offhand I don’t know how often that happens. Rather, it is simply that there’s so very few folks who can attain those heights that it’s an irrelevant metric of success. (There’s also the fact that in my particular case I happen to know that being a congressional staffer is the best route to becoming a member of Congress—and Democratic campaigns and offices are remarkably biased against public universities.)

How do we define what’s a good, much less a great, outcome for our institutions? Even Harvard will look like a failure if the goal is every student a senator—or Nobelist, or even New York Times correspondent. Positional goods are inherently scarce and can’t be made less so—the whole business of tournament rankings is hoarding status so that only a few can succeed and most will fail. If success comes to mean that we only care about producing some who gather all the glittering prizes and devil take the rest, then alumni magazines will be full of impressive news—but I do not think that would really be a satisfactory outcome.

Alternative, implicit measures of success produce different tensions. In a similar discussion recently, a colleague reported frustration with students’ attitudes toward a class. “How can they ever become scholars if they don’t learn how to do this properly?” Well, the answer, of course, is that most of our students won’t become scholars, even if I hope some larger share of them become pro-intellectuals.

Success, I think, has to be measured in absolute, not relative, terms. We should recognize that for many of our students that means having the tools and credentials that lead to a good, solid career with material rewards. Some will cavil at this definition: shouldn’t we be pushing the life of the mind? Well, yes: I say recognize their definition, but not be limited by it. If someone goes through four years of college and isn’t challenged in such a way to make them re-evaluate their values and beliefs, then the whole thing has been transactional in a fairly dispiriting way. (I can think of some varieties of schools on campuses where this transactional approach would be applauded, but that’s dispiriting in itself.)

Of course, this strategy will hardly satisfy everyone. It may not even satisfy anyone. For one, these successes are invisible. The inward transfiguration of moral virtues is hard to show on donor materials. Cultivating a rich inner life may not be captured readily in student satisfaction surveys. And instilling an ethos of service and reciprocity—of, say, viewing honorable service in the state legislature as meaningful in its own right, rather than just a stepping-stone to some ill-defined real success—doesn’t speak to parents and other tuition-payers who are already nervous enough about their children studying anything other than Jobs 101: How To Career Professionally. (Ironically, this includes many state legislators who believe all higher education is vocational training.)

For another, pursuing a definition of “success” radically out of tune with the world’s view is noble but likely to crimp recruitment. It hurts that the hollowing out of the middle in every sphere of human endeavor has made the success/failure distinction a harsh binary. If you’re a journalism student, for instance, the sorts of middle-class jobs that once existed simply don’t anymore because the field has imploded, leaving behind prestige outlets, national dailies, and trade journals. What sorts of successes can we offer to train people to enjoy beyond competing for ever-rarer golden tickets?

These are not easy questions, but they are ones that are hard to push out of your mind when you’re in a role where folks expect you to have answers. Yet what if the answers aren’t there?