I visited my daughter over the weekend, with a parent-volunteers meeting at her college as a convenient excuse to pop up to the Northeast and give her an easy ride off campus between the end of classes and finals. We spent a good part of three days walking outside, enjoying spring weather and several gardens–something good for the mental health of a student who spent too many nighttime hours studying in the last month and her parent who lives in already-hot Florida. <\/p>\n
One of the joys of this time of year for those living in the Northeast is the tulip. Also the bearded iris, azalea, cherry tree, dogwood, and magnolia. But the tulip is remarkable for the breadth of colors, and for all my middle-aged cynicism, they still look like candy flowers to me. I've missed them living in Florida. But tulips shall always be with us as metaphor if not as flower: Malcolm Harris is trucking out the "higher ed bubble" metaphor<\/a> without shame or serious examination, and many others are biting, even the wise ones such as Timothy Burke<\/a>. Burke talked about the potential defensiveness of humanistic scholars in the face of the tuition\/market squeeze, and I think his argument would have been stronger had he not tried on the asset-bubble argument. Here's my comment on his blog:<\/p>\n Many of the issues with the value of education and the dilemmas are real. I'm troubled by Harris's choice of language (though he's certainly not the only one to use it): "asset bubble" is a mediocre analogy for concerns about higher education, because your education is not something with speculative value. In the "use\/exchange" model you can exchange the existence of a credential with something (often more education or job entry), but you can't sell your credential in the same way you can resell tulip bulbs, houses, and CDOs… at least not until people sell future income slices to lenders to pay for tuition, and then those promissory income slices become resold on the open market (which could happen — I think it's either Richard Vedder or one of his associates who has talked about that type of lending market).<\/p>\n Part of the reason that the muddy metaphor irks me is that I don't think you need to assert an asset bubble to talk about those dynamics. Being squeezed is a much broader phenomenon than just the asset-bubble crash, and it fits very neatly within institutional life — no tulips required. For example, I'd be very curious to see what happened to turf issues inside Brown during and after the transition to the no-distribution-requirements policy. And there are plenty of examples when people fight — or don't fight or lose and have to figure out what to do after — the ending of certain requirements for internal institutional reasons. I'm facing a version of that inside my college, and I have seen both<\/em> the standard territorial response and also a view that if there is to be an internal marketplace, by gosh we can attract students through our sheer brilliance and interesting course titles\/descriptions. After all, several hundred years after the tulip bubble, you can still find a tulip market. It's just not superheated. And sometimes, especially in April or early May, you can even find them blooming in southeast Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The last is a bit of a cheap gimmick: Burke lives in southeast Pennsylvania, and I'd bet there are tulips blooming at Swarthmore today (and certainly within a mile or two of the campus). But I wish we'd heed Howard Becker's advice and stop resorting to bad metaphors for higher education: colleges and universities are interesting, complex systems with interesting, complex problems. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I visited my daughter over the weekend, with a parent-volunteers meeting at her college as a convenient excuse to pop up to the Northeast and give her an easy ride off campus between the end of classes and finals. We spent a good part of three days walking outside, enjoying spring weather and several gardens–something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-SP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3399"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3402,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3399\/revisions\/3402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n