Remarks to the Southern Association of Independent Schools
Atlanta, Georgia
October 8, 2002

Thomas K. Hearn, Jr.
President, Wake Forest University

Private education is, of course, a paradoxical enterprise. You and I charge a great deal of money for a credential that is provided free or at a dramatically less cost in all our neighborhoods. Private higher education, in particular, is in dramatic decline. In the 1960s roughly half of all the students in American higher education were in private colleges, a number that by the late 1990s had shrunk to roughly 15% of college enrollments. This change is largely a reflection, of course, of the huge growth of public institutions, especially junior colleges. That enrollment decline would seem to predict a terrible outlook, and for some private colleges the future is uncertain. On the other hand, the paradigms of excellence in American higher education are the great private institutions. The best private colleges are flourishing and the future could hardly be brighter.

My first task is to thank you. Those of you in the independent school sector establish in the public mind the notion that in education, as in a great many other things, you get what you pay for. Value in education is in part a function of price. You have established that notion so firmly in the K-12 sector that it secures the constituency for private universities like Wake Forest which many of your graduates attend. In independent schools and colleges we are fellow travelers in a common enterprise.

I want to reflect with you about issues affecting education in general and private education in particular. Though I will use higher education as my better known and more familiar illustration, these issues are common to our calling and to all our schools.

Having been in office for a long time, I am sometimes asked about the major changes that I have observed in administration during my tenure. My answer is the growing requirement in schools for institutional effectiveness in a financial, legal, organizational, and administrative sense. In the golden age, not many years ago, schools were universally held to be places where good things were being done for young people. We were scarcely held accountable to the public. We were given resources and permitted to direct them as our best judgment dictated, with minimal oversight or accountability.

Schools now face the entire burden of federal, state, and local regulation, not to mention the academic oversight we receive from accreditors and educational agencies. The consequences of this regulatory burden for academic leadership are profound.

Wake Forest now has a legal staff larger than the entire bar in the small Alabama town where I grew up! We have a university-wide Compliance Office whose responsibility is to monitor changes in the regulatory environment and to see that we are prepared to enforce regulations of every sort across our schools and departments. The office carries out systematic regulatory training for our staff and faculty. Compliance is of such importance that it reports directly to me as well as to what our trustees now call the Audit and Compliance Committee. The impact of this changed regulatory environment on the academic culture has been dramatic.

External regulatory requirements must be met with technical competence. As a result, schools have had to professionalize and expand the administration. Faculty members at Wake Forest sometimes opine—not as a compliment—that we have adopted a “corporate” style of governance. But academic committees cannot address the specialized issues of regulation and regulators. Schools must be represented by technically competent professionals who know the rules, how they apply, and how their impact on our institutions can be managed. We must have professional, technical expertise in every area of regulatory interface. This impact is felt across the entire administration.

This changed environment is influencing executive selection in universities. When I talk to trustees or headhunters about executive searches, they are no longer exclusively interested in a candidate’s intellectual experience and leadership. They are concerned whether a candidate can run the place organizationally and financially. The “executive” requirement is at least on equal footing with academic preparation.

Growing regulation is increasing the requirement of trustee oversight. This places additional burdens on our volunteer boards, and can blur the distinction between the policy jurisdiction of the board and the responsibility of administration. When there is an enhanced oversight requirement, boards will be reviewing larger facets of the institution’s life. Good administrative and trustee communication is ever more essential for the health of our schools.

Current corporate scandals involving accounting and corporate governance will certainly compound this regulatory and reporting burden. Scandal inevitably yields regulation. Be prepared to invest more time, effort, and money on the accounting function. Standards of reporting and accountability will be changing.

As heads of schools, you must enhance your own technical competence and the organizational capacity of your schools. The Southern Association of Independent Schools, and organizations like it, can assist in this endeavor. It is no longer possible for us to be educators only. We must be competent and technically proficient managers to navigate the environment our schools now face.

In recent years, nothing has influenced education, certainly not higher education, as has the consumer movement. Consumerism has overtaken the educational enterprise. The most conspicuous evidence of this influence is the rating and ranking industry, which is both the cause and the effect of the consumer outlook. U.S. News and World Report college guide is quite simply the “consumer report” for higher education.

Academicians rightly complain that placing schools in a rank order of merit without knowing what “good” means for which students, or in which disciplines, is a dubious undertaking. Those complaints, however, fall on deaf ears. The college issue of U.S. News and World Report is the largest selling issue of any weekly news magazine year in and year out. Someone remarked that this college issue changed the position of U.S. News and World Report in the newsmagazine industry. It was this single idea—to rank schools—that brought U.S. News and World Report to the journalistic level of Time and Newsweek. The U.S. News and World Report college issue is sold out on an advertising basis for the indefinite future, and it spins off books and other materials. It is a profitable venture.

Other college guides, too, are part of a major business for the publishing industry. Next time you visit a bookstore, see how many such manuals there are. This industry reflects and enforces the consumer mentality and attitude. Academic criticism will not blunt the impact of so established a public attitude.

There are significant values in the consumer movement. It provides useful and important information to potential students. Your college counselors want their advisees to make informed decisions on the basis of reliable information about the colleges that they visit and consider, and doubtless your offices make use of these materials.

From the college side, guidebooks help get our message out. Students visiting Wake Forest now routinely know that we have a 10:1 faculty-student ratio, that we do not use teaching assistants to offer undergraduate courses, and volumes of other facts gleaned from the college guides and counselors.

U.S. News and World Report, of course, practices a certain deceit. The ratings and rankings generally follow and reflect the reputation of a university’s graduate and doctoral programs. The college issue, however, is marketed to prospective undergraduate students. What the reputational surveys reflect will seldom influence the quality of the undergraduate experience.

A few years ago, some survey reported that Princeton had the fifth best law school in the country. Princeton, of course, does not have a law school! Opinion surveys are just that: opinions—good and bad, informed and otherwise.

Most importantly, the consumerist outlook distorts and misrepresents the academic enterprise. Education is an opportunity and not a commodity. It is not like a car or a dishwasher. Education cannot be “bought,” but many consumers do not accept this distinction. You have heard the sentence that begins “I am not paying you all this money for….” You can finish the sentence from your own experience. The general assumption is those who are paying the tuition are buying something schools must provide for their payment.

Consumerism empowers the customer rather than the provider, making the parent rather than the teacher or the school the expert in the educational transaction. I am buying this; therefore, I know what it is I want. A parent’s vision for a child’s education is often not the school’s or even the child’s.

A parent friend called me in dire distress to say that his child had decided to major in theatre. “What can you do about it?” my friend asked. I had the daughter come in, and, as you might expect, she had the best of reasons for doing what she, and not her father, wanted. I phoned my friend to remind him, as gently as possible, the issue was her education and her life—even if he was paying the bills. This good and devoted father was a typical consumer. He knew what he wanted to buy and thought that my school was to provide it.

In addition, consumerism biases the educational process against risk, exploration, and especially against the lessons of failure. This instinct against taking risks influences what our schools advise students to do. We do not urge students to climb too high, lest they fall. Browning’s line that one’s “reach should exceed his grasp” is fundamental to education, but we become reluctant to advise students to take risks, preferring to measure a student’s tasks to give the best opportunity for success.

When you buy a dishwasher, you know exactly what you want. But education is a journey whose destination cannot be known in advance. We will never know what a student’s potential is until the outer limits are tested. Students must leave their safety zones to try things that necessarily present the risk of failure. There is no teacher like trial and error. But consumers do not buy failure, even the risk of failure, and in turn, we are prone to tailor educational advice to what children can safely accomplish.

Parents know, in their own cases, the irreplaceable lessons of failure. In an intellectual and academic sense, parents understand failure and its benefits. Yet, they have no such tolerance for failure in the education of their children. Failure and its lessons are not what they are buying.

Education is a cultural process whereby the skills and requirements for social achievement are transmitted from each generation to the next. There are always, of course, generational conflicts in culture, especially in a culture that prizes personal and political freedom as a basic value.

I want to describe how this cultural and generational conflict expresses itself in contemporary America, and what this conflict means for the purposes of our schools.

In post-World War II America there has emerged a distinctive youth culture—a distinctive subculture having its own fashions and mores, its own distinctive styles, and its particular speech. We do not now perhaps appreciate that this is a quite recent development. Prior to World War II, the word “teenager” did not exist. The word in its present meaning appeared in Webster’s in 1961. More importantly, not only did the word not exist, from my own personal experience I can testify that the thing—the animals—did not exist. I was a child of the 50s, and we were not “teenagers.” We were apprentice adults. We were in training for the roles that our parents had set for us. No part of childhood permitted us latitude in our ways of thinking and living, and there were no records in our collection that were for “the children.”

Various influences were at work in creating a youth culture. Post-World War II affluence meant that young people became an autonomous consumer group with discretionary income. Madison Avenue had then an immediate and direct interest in creating this market niche because there were distinctive products to be sold to this group of people who, for the first time, had money in their pockets and could choose how to spend it.

Most important was the development of mass media, which spawned an entertainment industry of television, movies, and music, specifically and particularly aimed at the young.

These media were powerful agents of cultural change. Nothing like television, not even the Internet, has happened in my lifetime in terms of transforming the way society organizes itself and how it understands itself. There came to be programs for young people, and a music industry sending the powerful messages of independence which music conveys. If you listen to rock music, you know that the youth culture values indulgence and spontaneity. It does not value the deferred gratification that previous generations were taught so carefully at their mothers’ knees. Experimentation with drugs and alcohol and sex, is encouraged. Gratification and gratification “now” are central norms of the youth culture.

I do not recommend that you go to a rock concert, but if you should, think of these events as liturgical celebrations of the youth culture—the ecstatic atmosphere, the music, the lyrics, the dress and, of course, substance abuse. As a rock concert illustrates, we can understand how basic are the cultural conflicts our young people must negotiate as they face adulthood. We have a youth culture of indulgence, but the adult legal system imposes a drinking age of 21! The legal requirement is often ignored, but it represents graphically the cultural divide we have created and the differing norms young people confront when they live among their peers on the one hand and among their parents and teachers on the other.

What I will call the “prevailing adult culture” is in conflict with the hedonism and indulgence of the youth culture at almost every point—alcohol and drugs being just cases in point. You and I—our schools—have the unhappy privilege of mediating or arbitrating these disputes since education is the primary vehicle whereby the prevailing norms of the adult culture are imposed on the rising generation. Schools are agents of adulthood being imposed on children. Parents are sometimes with the youth culture and sometimes allies of the schools.

This process of enculturation starts young and takes one of its earliest forms in the parental demand for academic achievement. Parents believe, and the prevailing culture believes, that in an information age, education is the prerequisite for economic success. The cultural assumption is that the exclusive positions in the economic order are at a premium. The elite places are competitively awarded on the basis of academic achievement. School is the essential institution for entry into the adult world.

This belief in the essential need for academic preparation and the primary reason why schools like yours and mine flourish. Good academic preparation opens golden doors, and parents have no higher priority for their children, or for your school and mine, than to see that their children are given the keys to those doors. That requirement carries with it the full weight of adult expectation. So schools and colleges are cultural mediators.

Many parents establish the academic achievements of their children as the single most important measure of their success as parents. Children have daily planners just like the one that you and I live with, and the elementary years are spent under the watchful supervision of adults from dawn to dusk. Tens of millions of these planners are sold to children. A ten-year-old recently told a Time reporter that she had no time to be a kid. The days of innocent play and imaginary exploration are at a premium for many children.

Several years ago, I had a serious, intense, and detailed discussion with an alumna about college admission. She was concerned about the most particular details of the process. At some point, I asked her how old her child was. “Four,” she replied. This parent is not atypical of her generation. She has extraordinary academic ambitions for her child because she believes such achievement is essential to her child’s success. None of this surprises you. You have your own anecdotes at least as telling.

We must see ourselves as mediators in this basic cultural transaction. It is fraught with conflict. The norms of the youth culture are in stark contrast with the assumption that academic success yields an economic reward. Children and schools are caught betwixt and between.

Given this conflict between what the norms of the teenage culture and what they are expected to do in school as an introduction to the adult culture, we should not be surprised that adolescents are suffering from stress-related disorders in startling numbers. Suicide is the second leading cause of death among teenagers. Many students are seeking help for anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. These are significant problems on every American college campus as I am sure they are on yours.

Should we be surprised that pills are being dispensed for so any disorder thought to impair learning? An elementary school teacher told me that she thought she was a pharmacist, not a teacher, because parents are trying to resolve medically any academic handicap their children face. It is not just in Lake Wobegon that “all the children are above average.”

This cultural tension is a genuinely new thing. In my Alabama hometown it never occurred to me, or to anyone else, that some high school or junior high school failure might permanently mark my future. (I did have the misfortune to have a brilliant older sister who set an academic standard that my parents supposed I should match!) But childhood was a time of freedom and innocence. By contrast, think of all the items on our worry list we are now compelled to warn children about. No wonder they are stressed and distressed. We tell them their world is full of danger.

Educators are agents, powerful agents, in this cultural interface. What is it that we should be doing? First, we should be passionate advocates for education understood not as a commodity, but as a process of personal growth and intellectual development. We must advocate for education. We must advocate for children. We must advocate for childhood.

We should address all our constituencies, all of the time, about the purposes of education rightly understood. We must be aggressive in the interpretation and explanation of the academic program in every forum at our disposal.

Wake Forest sends to each entering family a document that we call a “Relationship Covenant” with the request that the family study it together. This covenant describes what Wake Forest offers and provides, and what we require across the domains of campus life and the academic program. We find it helpful to inform our community in advance about our practices and policies.

If these remarks have a cautionary tone, my opinion is that most things in your schools are going very well. You are doing a fine job. This is a most appealing student generation. As a whole, this generation works hard and they are morally purposeful. You hear complaints about the effort at résumé building in high school—the need to appear “well rounded”—but service learning and other activities are having a dramatic and constructive impact on the way students understand themselves, their world, and their public duties.

The capital markets have collapsed, but this group of students had already moved away from the 1990s preoccupation with Wall Street and wealth. Programs like Teach For America and the Peace Corps are booming. Many students are doing socially constructive things with their lives after graduation. Idealism is not dead among them.

The global outlook is taken seriously by this generation. Wake Forest is one of the schools that has retained a foreign language requirement. We once heard complaints about this supposed “outdated” degree requirement. No more. More than half of last year’s Wake Forest graduating class earned academic credit abroad. There is a serious, thoughtful purpose to master languages so that they can be better prepared to live as citizens of the world. There are a great many things about this generation to commend.

We must continue to alleviate the impact of substance abuse, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and the other health and safety risks to which young people are exposed. These must remain priority items on our common agenda. We must solicit the thoughtful involvement of parents. Parents are often ambivalent about drug or alcohol use. They accept substance experimentation as a kind of rite of passage, sometimes without adequate appreciation of the risks involved. None of us fear alcohol as a drug—as we should.

Parents often do not know how much more dangerous marijuana has become in the quarter century or so since they may have experimented in college. It is now a more dangerous drug with long-term psychological and emotional consequences.

Parents often favor strict regulation of illegal substances until their own children are involved. Suddenly, they prefer mercy to justice. Much needs to be done to facilitate substantial discussion with parents, teachers, and children regarding these matters. Children receive mixed messages.

Alcohol abuse by students is first and foremost a concern about well-being and safety. The alcohol culture is entrenched on America’s college campuses and has been treated with benign neglect for decades. As you know, however, alcohol use is steadily moving down in image. Neglect of alcohol use is no longer legally or morally acceptable.

Remarkably, the phrase in loco parentis is being heard again on America’s campuses. In loco parentis must involve not just the issues of drug and alcohol abuse, but must reflect a larger regard for the moral and spiritual developmental well being of young people. One advantage of private colleges is that we can be intentional and purposeful in the larger issues of moral and spiritual development which are directly connected to behavioral and psychological concerns.

My greatest concern for the best of this generation, the best of your graduates and mine, is that these students are so sophisticated, accomplished, worldly, traveled—perhaps I should say “programmed”—that they have education mastered. They have school figured out. They know where they are going and what it takes to get there. School is a game, and they are the winners. Their parents’ dreams are coming true.

What is missing in this outlook is any sense of discovery, adventure, wonder, possibility, or any thought that they might find around some corner of their minds an unknown passion leading in some new direction. Aristotle said that all knowing begins in wonder, and these most successful of our students lack wonder. They are on the fast track—destinations chosen.

Each year at our convocation for entering students, I recite Shel Silverstein’s marvelous little homily, “Magic Carpet.” I hope you know it. I trust you will join me in spreading its enduring lesson.

You have a magic carpet
That will whiz you through the air,
To Spain or Maine or Africa
If you just tell it where.

So will you let it take you
Where you’ve never been before,
Or will you buy some drapes to match
And use it
On your
Floor?

Too many of our best and brightest students are buying drapes. They have fixed their destination. No matter how much they accomplish or how much they achieve, they may miss the joy and wonder of education and discovery. That experience is “the ride of their lives.”

We must see that the joy and discovery of some domain yet to be explored continues to surprise and delight young minds, for upon such uncharted explorations our future, their future—indeed the future of the world—depends.