×

Suspicion complicates North Dakota’s feelings about higher ed

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the support North Dakotans have displayed for their colleges and universities. It’s been strong and consistent, and I believe it persists, despite the silence that has greeted this year’s sharp budget cuts.

But there is another strain in the state’s political tradition, and this one is deeply suspicious of the colleges. This came home to me in several ways last week, which I spent mostly at the state Capitol, listening to testimony about higher education.

Legislators displayed a kind of crankiness toward the colleges. Several have pet peeves that they raised with almost all of the presidents. This is no surprise.

But I was surprised by a conversation with a young conservative legislator whose judgment and insight I have come to value. I had imagined he would give the kind of managerial analysis that one finds, for example, in Rob Port’s criticism of the university system.

That is not the direction that the conversation took. Instead my legislative friend gave a one-word answer: Subversive. Pressed, he said he regarded colleges and universities as among the great institutions of western civilization, and he is troubled that higher education seems intent on demeaning that civilization.

This criticism isn’t unfamiliar. My own mother-in-law raised it on almost every Thanksgiving Day. UND, she thought, had undermined the values she’d tried to teach her daughter, my wife.

My own parents were passionately committed to my own education. They sacrificed to make it happen. Nevertheless, my father often questioned me closely about what I was studying, and he expressed some doubt that any of it would ever be worthwhile.

My mother’s father, my grandfather, was enormously supportive, too. He told me I could do anything if I had an education, even become president, he told me. But I knew he was praying that I would become a priest.

Suspicion of higher education, its methods and its motives, has crept into the state’s politics. It was a factor in Robert McCarney’s failed effort to deny funding to UND during the 1970s, and Bill Langer’s attack on the agricultural college, now North Dakota State University, had something to do with its teaching methods as well as the political outlet of several of its professors.

He failed, too; his interference on campus led to the formation of the Board of Higher Education.

Last week, I realized again how entrenched this criticism has been. I’ve been reading about Langer and William Lemke in preparation for a talk about their relationship at the Grand Forks County Historical Society on March 19. Agnes Geelan, discussing Langer’s time on UND’s campus in her biography, “Dakota Maverick,” offers this quotation: “There are men on the faculty who are more interested in teaching socialism than the curriculum.”

The speaker was James Twamley, a member of the first board of trustees. Webster Merrifield defended the school. “The charge very commonly brought at Bismarck last winter that the institution was a hotbed of anarchy. The charge is absolutely without foundation,” Merrifield said. Merrifield was UND’s president from 1891 to 1909. Merrifield Hall is his namesake on campus.

In our time, universities are criticized for emphasis on “political correctness,” which is the prevailing orthodoxy on the left. It’s hardly as pervasive as critics suggest, just as socialism wasn’t so pervasive in Twamley’s time nor “anarchy” in Merrifield’s.

Recent criticism of the management of the system is justified, given the proliferation of programs and the spread of duplication across the 11-member system. Just the same, examination of success on the metrics — graduation rates, teaching loads, classroom utilization and the like — is essential to the system’s success.

It’s nibbling at the margins, though. The system needs a thorough review aimed at administrative efficiencies and stronger academic programs. Those haven’t been part of the discussion in Bismarck this legislative session.

Mostly there has been silence.

Even Kathleen Neset, who chairs the Board of Higher Education, said she’d accept the draft budget presented to the House Appropriations Committee last week. A single citizen — president of an engineering company — stood up to suggest that proper budgeting means finding revenue as well as reducing expenses. He was shot down.

The orthodoxy in Bismarck is that North Dakota is broke, and that higher education will have to bear the brunt of cuts, because public schools and services are sacrosanct.

This is not the way to maintain a strong system of higher education.

UND’s current president, Mark Kennedy, told lawmakers that UND should be “the opportunity engine” for the state. That’s an idea that ought to be applied system wide.

Opportunity is what higher education offered me. And even in their uncertainty, my family recognized that.

It seems to me that our current responsibility is to build on the higher education system in ways that ensure it will create opportunity by opening the world for generations that come after us.

As today’s phrasing would put it, we should “re-gift” knowledge to the future.

Mike Jacobs writes for the Forum News Service.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *
   

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today