Not to belabor this issue, but James V. Schall at First Principles
weighs in with a reflection on what, exactly, it means to be a professor:

The great act of being a student is first simply to listen, to listen to one who knows human and divine things, not all of them, to be sure, but enough to be himself awed by them. The “last professor” implies a world in which the young are never exposed to wonder, a world in which they never experience the fascination of what is because they once encountered an honest man who simply talked to them about what was true.

The last professor may indeed disappear from the universities. In some sense, he already has. My Students’ Guide to Liberal Learning, now that I think of it, was premised on this suspicion. Universities will go on specializing and teaching us how to find a job, how to be practical, something that is not unworthy of us. But we will have to go elsewhere to find out about what is.

As a follow-up to my last post about Fish’s and Donoghue’s predictions for liberal arts, there’s this from Charles M. Haskins’s The Rise of Universities:

By the thirteenth century…[professors of rhetoric] advertised their wares in a way that has been compared to the claims of a modern business course–short and practical, with no time wasted on outgrown classical authors but everything fresh and snappy and up-to-date, ready to be applied the same day if need be! Thus one professor at Bologna … promises to train his students in writing every sort of letter and official document which was demanded of the notaries and secretaries of this day. Since … such teachers specialized in the composition of student letters, chiefly skillful appeals to the parental purse, their practical utility was at once apparent.

Gene Middleton, our senior creative/print project manager since 2001, is a 29-year veteran of the graphic arts and printing business, the last 15 of which have been spent in educational marketing. He manages the creative and production details of print projects for several of our client schools, has extensive client contact, and is also the manager of our client services and production departments. Gene’s knowledge and creativity are in his blood — his parents ran a community newspaper — plus he’s a kind-hearted man with a delightful sense of humor. We wanted to share some of his knowledge and joyful personality …

Q. What are some typical errors that can happen during the production process?

A. Incorrect info — for example typos on a spec sheet where one little incorrect digit can loom large — say 1,000 vs. 10,000 quantity, or PMS 431 vs. PMS 413 — one is a light gray, the other is a dark gray.

Or errors of various types, such as electronic pre-press glitches, for example copy inadvertently getting deleted from a page or re-flowing to another. Or a technical problem with the printing process — maybe a form of smearing that we call offsetting, or a problem with the binding process — maybe inaccurate folding.

Human errors and machinery malfunctions come with the printing territory, but we like to think we’re good at limiting problems at the Stein end of things. We’re “diligent to the point of paranoia” when it comes to checking proofs and writing print specs and shipping instructions.

Q. Can you give a couple of examples of how Stein’s production process improves the quality of a school’s publications?

A. More than once I’ve looked at a school’s publications (not one of ours!) and thought, “if they’d done a better job with photo editing, their pictures would be less muddy, flat, dark, etc., and the school’s campus and people and facilities would look more appealing and inviting.”

A key area of print production for us is photo editing. We have high standards for print quality of images. We’re fortunate to have talented photo editors on staff, and it’s standard operating procedure for them to color correct all of our images for print. Then the designers or project managers review these edits and sometimes we’ll make further color correction or retouching requests. We try to make our schools look “snappy and happy.”

We’re also sticklers for using PMS colors for key theme colors in a campaign and for large solid ink coverage. We prefer not to “build” these colors out of 4-color process screens. This allows the common colors to be more consistent throughout a piece and from piece to piece. It also allows smoother solid coverages of these colors, and prevents “color compromises” in the 4-color process photos on the piece to allow best possible reproduction of the photos. PMS colors cost a little more but are well worth it.

Q. How do we save money for a school in our printing and prepress areas?

A. We get good buys on paper and we try where possible to increase press layout yields to save paper and press time. Sometimes we print several different items on a press sheet if the deadlines for all the pieces allow it and if the quantities and sizes of the pieces lend themselves to it.

We also try to work wisely in design and production art to be efficient with time and keep costs down. But we don’t rush through projects. That’s a good way to make mistakes that we’ll have to go back and fix. Or much worse, it could cause an expensive printing error on our part.

Q. What are some client benefits you especially like that are a result of the Stein creative process?

A. Something I especially like about the way we serve our clients is our commitment to getting specific measurable results for them based on good research and info gathering. I also like our nice knack for creating publications and messaging that attract the kinds of students our schools are looking for. We always love it when we hear apps and accepts are up over the previous year or years a few months after we’ve launched a new campaign.

Q. You are one of the funniest guys I know. Do you use that gift in your work?

A. Levity can be the lubricant for creativity — within reason of course. Sometimes there’s a fine line between constructive and disruptive humor in creative meetings! But a light heart and a light touch really can help people lighten up, and that can help jump-start the idea flow.

Humor can also help us all endure stress and frustration when things get hectic and tense . . . say for example, during the entire month of August!

Q. What do you do better now than you did 10 years ago?

A. I have more experience and because of that I think I have better intuition about how things can go haywire if they get off to the wrong start. I’d like to think over time I’ve gotten better and better at preventing potential problems in quality or schedules. I don’t know if practice makes perfect, but if we’re paying attention it sure does make us get better!

In yesterday’s New York Times, Stanley Fish reviews The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University by Frank Donoghue.  According to Donoghue, the time of the traditional, liberal arts institution is over.

Donoghue begins by challenging the oft-repeated declaration that liberal arts education in general and the humanities in particular face a crisis, a word that suggests an interruption of a normal state of affairs and the possibility of restoring the natural order of things.

“Such a vision of restored stability,” says Donoghue, “is a delusion” because the conditions to which many seek a return – healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. Except in a few private wealthy universities (functioning almost as museums), the splendid and supported irrelevance of humanist inquiry for its own sake is already a thing of the past. In “ two or three generations,” Donoghue predicts, “humanists . . . will become an insignificant percentage of the country’s university instructional workforce.”

The “ethic of productivity” has overtaken the ethic of contemplation. We already see this in the operations of liberal arts institutions: “in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it.”  These schools market themselves as bastions of thoughtful examination, but internal discussions are about customer service, maximizing efficiencies, and minimizing costs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the for-profit university, which explicitly rejects talk about the life of the mind, is gaining influence and redefining the liberal arts model as a luxury.  (Just look at Kaplan’s new ad.)  Learning should be a means to an end, and teaching about imparting instrumental knowledge, not inspiring appreciation.  Consequently, according to Donoghue, “ ‘all fields deemed impractical, such as philosophy, art history, and literature, will henceforth face a constant danger of being deemed unnecessary.’ And as a corollary ‘professors will come to be seen by everyone (not just those outside the academy) as unaffordable anomalies.’ ”

The current recession, assuming it’s as long and as deep as some economists predict, will exacerbate these tensions and accelerate these trends.  Students–adult learners and traditional undergraduates–will demand more concrete, practical, and immediate payoffs for their investment.  (And, as we’ve seen with Kaplan and the University of Phoenix recently, those corporations recognize that their moment has come.)  This means traditional liberal arts institutions will face even harder choices in the future, and passivity today will only further weaken their perceptions in the market.  For institutions that talk about the virtues of self-examination, now is the time to put those reflective abilities into practice.

A recent article in the Chronicle’s blog highlights a missed opportunity in college recruiting.

The piece focuses on a study by a Stanford economist who found that high-achieving, low-income high school students are less likely to apply to selective colleges, despite having the qualifications to be accepted. These students do attend college, but usually at institutions that are below their abilities.

Ms. [Caroline M.] Hoxby and Christopher N. Avery, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, obtained a huge cache of data from the College Board, which allowed them to analyze the entire population of students who took the SAT in five recent years. The data included test scores, high-school grades, and the names of the colleges where the students asked the College Board to send their scores (which is a close proxy for where the students actually applied).

The two scholars used a variety of methods, including block-level census data, to estimate each student’s household income. In their paper they define a family as “low income” if its income is below the 30th percentile, which is around $28,000. They define a student as high-achieving if the student had combined SAT scores above 1200, a high-school grade point average of B-plus or better, and at least one Advanced Placement score of 4 or 5 (or an equivalently high score on an SAT subject-area test).

In one typical recent year, Ms. Hoxby said, there were roughly 21,000 high-achieving students from low-income families. But more than 60 percent of those students did not make any “ambitious applications,” the study found.

Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery regarded an application as ambitious if the college’s median combined SAT score was no more than five percentiles below the student’s own score. “Notice that that’s a very broad definition,” Ms. Hoxby said. “I’m not saying that you’re applying to a school where you would be below the median.”

But even under that generous definition, Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery found that a large majority of those students did not make any ambitious applications. Instead, they typically applied to nonselective (or only slightly selective) public institutions close to their homes.

One of the crucial factors the study found was geography: low-income students from rural areas are less likely to apply to ambitious schools. Students in these areas lack guidance from teachers, counselors, and parents in determining what schools to consider.

This isn’t an audience that’s plugged in to traditional college marketing–they require a targeted and sustained communication effort that educates them (and their families) about financial aid and about the possibilities that are out there.  But it’s a sizable group of smart, highly motivated, hard working students who just need someone to help them recognize their options.

Carol Phillips at Millenial Marketing observes that

“Gen Y says their biggest challenge is ‘busy-ness’, the sheer volume of things they want and need to do. There simply isn’t enough time to do it all. As a result, they see their lives as ‘hectic’, ‘exciting’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘fun’. However, busy-ness also is the main barrier to achieving things that are really important to them, like staying in touch with old friends, making new friends and finding time to lead a ‘balanced’ life.”

When marketing universities and colleges to high school students, there’s a tendency to hype up the high-energy, never-stand-still aspects of life on campus.  (At least, I know I’m guilty of it.)  Think of how many “24/7″ or timeline-themed viewbook concepts you’ve seen.  The point, of course, is to convey a sense of how and to what degree prospects will be engaged once they’re on campus.  “Come to our school!  Bored is the only thing that’s hard to be!”

It’s all meant to appeal to an audience that expects continual activity.  But it’s very easy to forget that this busy-ness is also a stressor.  And it’s taking a toll: anecdotal evidence and hard data indicate that the use of on-campus mental health and counseling services is climbing; we’re also seeing the growing practice of a gap year as students declare that they just need a break.

As Phillips reminds us, what students crave and what’s in short supply is balance.  Emphasizing the ways your students step off the busy-ness treadmill, how they find balance between competing demands, also has its appeal.