Re: Townhall.com – 12/02/2008 – “Freedom and the Left” – Thomas Sowell

Sowell says of educational institutions that require community service as a curricular requirement “The arrogance of commandeering young people's time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.” Doesn’t Sowell realize that it is the job of educators to define what educational experiences are required of their students, and if educators are to be considered arrogant for doing their job, so be it. And doesn’t Sowell realize that a university’s choice of the service it may require of its students reflects primarily the value of that service to the student’s academic/intellectual development and to other intra-university issues and not to the value of that service to the community outside the university.

The relationship of the university with its students (and/or the parents of its students) is a contractual one. The university provides an educational program that the student (or parent) buys into with tuition. If the student fails to meet his/her obligations under the contract, the university can hold the student in breach and expel him/her without a degree. If the university fails its obligation to provide the educational opportunities it has promised or if the student decides he/she no longer wants to participate in the opportunities offered in the educational program, the student is free to walk away from the program. Regardless of the reason for pre-graduation departure, the student keeps all the academic credits he/she has earned under the contract. If the student completes the academic program requirements, the university is obligated to award the promised degree. Tuition and degree progress are benchmarked by academic time periods (usually semesters, trimesters, or quarters) and/or specific courses taken. Nobody is forced to do anything --- everything is by agreement.

I object to Sowell’s model of a university degree where the students (or the students’ parents) dictate the content of academic programs --- this may be a reasonable model for pay-on-demand tutoring but not for a university degree program. Universities are pretty good at providing educational degree programs and doing basic research and not that good at anything else. What Sowell wants universities to provide is some sort of training that would make students and parents happy. Rather than change the universities, students and parents who don’t want a university education should go elsewhere, leaving universities to provide the service that they are good at providing to those who want and/or need that service.

It may be that parents, working independently from one another, could somehow run a university better than teams of professional academic administrators and educators, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If parents feel that way, let them establish their own schools administered under that model.

It may be that commerce based on a consensus of customers that excludes the opinions of suppliers could work better than free market transactions between customers and suppliers, but I know of no evidence supporting that conclusion. If Sowell is really a believer in the free market system, he should drop his Communistic-like “dictatorship of the customers” model of commerce and adopt one where both buyers and sellers participate in determining what goods or services get put on the market. There is plenty of demand for university education as it is and there is plenty of room to establish alternative schools following a model that Sowell and those who agree with him might desire.

I take strong issue with Sowell’s views of on-campus ROTC educational programs. Academics other than anti-war types have problems with ROTC programs on campus. At Seattle U (where I was on faculty) I participated in an academic review of the ROTC program. The greatest problem I had with our ROTC program was that it was ultimately controlled by non-university military personnel who determine curricula and staffing, a situation that is allowed in no other program, and that the ROTC program was loaded up with non-academic “training”. While I supported the ROTC program in its academic review, I would have much preferred a purely academic program in military science (history, strategy, tactics, logistics, etc) under the control of university administrators and university employed academics (presumably mostly retired military) meeting standard academic requirements such as PhD degrees in Military Science or related subjects. The program I would have preferred probably would not meet ROTC’s military training goals, but I think universities are designed to educate, not train, and the training the military has inserted into ROTC (in my opinion) does not really belong in a university program.