Kevin Carey writes about the dilemmas of regional state universities that used to be teachers colleges. There are real dilemmas of upward institutional trajectories/ambitions, and in many cases, there are institutions that have moved in the way he has, such as Illinois State University, where the city of Normal, Illinois reveals its origins as Illinois Normal School. Or, to take a politically interesting case, Southwest Texas State Normal School, which was Southwest Texas State Teachers College when Lyndon Johnson graduated in 1930 and is now Texas State-San Marcos. I just wish he wouldn't have described the mission of these institutions as historically or currently dominated by teacher education. As Chris Ogren (among others) has detailed in The American State Normal School, normal schools (and later teachers colleges) began sites of general education that often looked similar to contemporary colleges because they were often the only local educational opportunities available to young men and women in the area who were beyond a primary and grammar-school curriculum.
That was true even for institutions that were private and prestigious, not public. Peabody College for Teachers was a private institution for most of the twentieth century before it merged with Vanderbilt in the late 1970s, but despite its name it had considerable undergraduate enrollment drawn from the Nashville area as a general liberal-arts education. Yes, all undergraduates had to either major or minor in education, but it was the alternative to Vanderbilt for many wealthy or middle-class Tennessee families. Peabody quickly died as a viable entity when its last president decided to jettison undergraduate education in hopes (or delusions) of becoming a graduate-only institution.
There's a personal story in this, or a story of a personal failing. When I was a postdoc at Vanderbilt, the dean at the time paid me to write a brief institutional history. There's one big story I missed in writing it, and that was the structure of the revived Peabody after the merger — in the 1980s and 1990s, Peabody College relied heavily on a non-licensure undergraduate program called Human and Organizational Development, staffed primarily by contingent (full-time, non-tenure-track) faculty. That dwarfed all of the other programs and provided a good chunk of cash for boutique specializations and graduate programs at a time when Vanderbilt ran on an everyone-on-their-own-bottom system. I missed that and will forever regret not catching it in writing that brief manuscript.
OK, I agree he lacks several clues. Since he singled out Winona State, and I have zero connection or reason to defend it, I’ll follow up on that.
1) What, exactly, is wrong with developing colleges with departments in a university with more than 8500 students. Eight THOUSAND Students. On three campuses! Now, granted, my CC has more students than that, but then my CC also has departments. Lots of them. And think twice before slandering them as “non cooperating” just because you think unsupported insults constitute a logical argument.
2) It is in Minnesota. They get SNOW in Minnesota, where a warm day in winter would cause the media in NYC to freak out. Intramural activities need to be indoors, and they need to attract students to a small town that is adjacent to nowhere.
3) Ooooo, they have a doctoral program. In Nursing, where a doctorate is the new Masters and needed for several specialties. That is a workforce program, not some highfalutin nonsense like, oh, history of education. 😉
4) The facilities are being built by a University with a Nursing College, not a teacher’s college. He might as well be complaining about Harvard, which is just a seminary with pretensions, right?
5) Ever think that Winona might be the low cost alternative?
This is David Labaree territory, especially chapter 2 of “The Trouble with Ed Schools” (2004) is devoted to Normal Schools, which he describes as the Peoples’ College. The title of the chapter says is all” “Teacher Ed in the Past: The Roots of Its Lowly Status.”