-
Chapter 1: Trapped in an Exxlesiastes Moment
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Trapped in an Ecclesiastes Moment 1 In the late 1980s I briefly shared the stage with Robert Reich—not yet a member of a president’s cabinet but already a major commentator on securing America’s economic future. In those days the big accounting firms regularly brought cadres of university officers to Florida or some other sunny location to network with each other and their partners who were responsible for the firm’s higher education practice. Golf, of course, was also on the agenda, along with a smattering of talking heads who were expected to lend an air of intellectual respectability to what otherwise amounted to a perk for being among the handful of university and college officers who decided which firms got the contracts to conduct their institution ’s financial audits. That Saturday morning Reich and I were expected to supply the necessary veneer of respectability. I had never met him before so did not know, as he noted when introducing himself, that he was “height challenged.” It was something we all quickly forgot as Reich launched into a mesmerizing tale of a Monday morning in October 1987 when he had appeared on the Today Show. “I was asked,” he said, “whether the stock market was due for a major correction. I clapped my hands and said ‘Of course—it could happen any time now; indeed I wouldn’t be surprised if it dropped 500 points today’ [500 points being the equivalent of 2,800 points or 23 percent in terms of today’s stock market]! And that,” he continued with a second thunderous clap of his hands, 1 “is precisely what happened—a more than 500-point drop in a single day. Well, for the next six months my phone didn’t stop ringing— everybody wanted to know what was going to happen next, and they were more than happy to pay me to make my next big prediction under their auspices. But do you want to know the question nobody asked me?” The ballroom in which we had congregated was beyond silent as we all leaned forward to get the word. “No one ever asked me if I had made such a prediction before. And had they asked I would have had to tell them. ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I had been predicting every Monday morning for the last three years that the market was due for a 500-point correction.’” What followed was near pandemonium—a startling mixture of guffaws , delighted shouts, and thunderous applause. Neither I remember nor, I suspect, anyone else remembers what I said that Saturday morning when I followed Reich at the podium. But I vividly recall the lesson Reich taught us that morning: in this world, interesting predictions come in all sorts of sizes and flavors; the most interesting are those that try to track how institutions and industries, often buffeted by conflicting forces, change and do not change. At the heart of Reich’s parable is what everyone in Las Vegas knows as the “money bet”: yes, you can imagine big changes and hence big winnings, but the safest course is to continually bet with the house, which means essentially betting there will be no change at all. The alternative is to bet the house will lose, with the full understanding that you could go three years or longer before being proved right. If you can afford the losses such a strategy promises, then the gains in increased notoriety, not to mention booking fees, can more than offset the intermediate loss of credibility. For three decades now, higher education’s truth tellers and prognosticators , including me, have been predicting that American higher education is about to change because it has to change. Every Monday morning or so, it seems, we lay out all the pressures—rising costs, unequal access, confusing curricula—that, like the signs of an impending earthquake and accompanying tsunami, are but announcements that all the wrongs of American higher education are about to be swept away. For all these decades, however, the money bet has remained the same: higher education will change little if at all. Prices and, more important, costs will continue to increase faster than inflation. The participation and attainment gaps separating the experiences of majority and minority citizens will not be closed; rather, they will continue to 2 CHECKLIST FOR CHANGE [54.86.180.90] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:10 GMT) resemble parallel railroad tracks across the graphs charting the...