On the Uses of Adversity in Higher Education

The Review of Higher Education Fall 1982, Volume 6, No. 1 Pages 19 to 28 Copyright © 1982 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved ON THE USES OF ADVERSITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION Aaron Wildavsky Sweet are the uses of adversity, which like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. -from ‘‘As You Like It’' William Shakespeare You are I, we are not the poor, we are not the insulted, we are not the injured. Society owes us nothing whatsoever. We have no special claim on the sympathies of the public. 1 say this in order to clear the air, lest one thinks, especially faculty members and administrators, that they have some God-given mission to higher education. My purpose is to suggest that risk is opportunity, that just as there have been advantages on the way up, there are, if not equivalent, at least comparable advantages on the way down. If small is beautiful, then we are all going to have an opportunity to pretty ourselves up a bit. Mary Douglas says that there are four decisive arguments in human rela­ tions: there is no time, it is unnatural, God prohibits it, and there is no money. The last one of these is available today for those who wish to be decisive with a purpose. The way to enter the subject is not with itself, but by taking cognizance of larger trends in which all are implicated, so we will understand better how we got where we are. And then I will turn to a number of actual suggestions for handling long-time problems, about which everyone swears nothing can be done, that are now up for resolution and solution. We are not alone. Bureaucrats and experts are on the defensive everywhere. If we would go to the classic work of Max Weber and ask what are the This paper was presented at The University of Arizona, for the National Conference on Higher Education Finance (December 4, 1981); and in Washington, D C. for the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (March 2, 1982). Aaron Wildausky is professor of political science. University of California, Berkeley 19 20 The Review of Higher Education essential characteristics of a bureaucracy, of a hierarchy, there would be two: a monopoly of expertise and permanent tenure. A monopoly of expertise, as we know, is long gone; but as early as 25 years ago, most of the expertise about large institutions resided in them. Most of the experts in higher education were in it. But this is not true anymore. In regard to policy analysis, there are rival teams of analysts who have been in the government, who claim to know as much as anybody who is doing the job now. If you are in highways, if you are in welfare, if you are in health or medicine, you know that the people who used to occupy that position are hiding in universities or think tanks or in state or local government or in special institutes—and that they are ready to challenge anything and every­ thing. On the one hand, society benefits because it has multiple sources of in­ formation. On the other hand, the incumbent does not benefit because there are so many smart people out there, people just like us, ready to take his or her place. Tenure, as you know, is being challenged. After all, tenure inheres in organizations; if they go, it goes. It is not merely that the monopoly of expertise has been lost and that tenure has been weakened, but that the knowledge base on which any hierarchy has to stake its claim has become contested. I want to be clear here. It is not true, 1believe, that you and I are dumber than the people we replaced, or that the people who preceded us were smarter than we are. Once I told somebody in retrospect that the social programs in the 1930s seemed so much better then the ones of the 60s. He put me down right away, and properly, by saying, “ Yes, that’s because we didn’t have evaluation then.” The truth...