There are colleges in cities and colleges in cornfields, but a college on a hill is an especially pleasing thing. Serious students deserve a space that is elevated, that is dedicated to learning for its own sake, free from the corruption of the “real world.” The modern idea that equates a college degree with employability is both cynical and false.
We think it’s deplorable that human resources departments scoff at resumés from liberal-arts graduates, while the captains of capitalism grouse that there aren’t enough applicants with broad minds. But we never believed one should get a diploma in order to get a job. It is an insidious line of marketing designed primarily to separate students from their money.
Schools have taken their cues from government, which for the past twenty-five years has been corrupted by the strange idea that the public good can be measured only on a financial ledger. The people making decisions have somehow persuaded themselves that civil services from mail to mass transit are failures if they do not generate a cash profit. “Return on Investment” is the gospel, and fiscal doubletalk has overwhelmed the civic conversation about what is best for one and all.
Look to the administration of any college or university today, and count the degrees in finance and the certificates in business. There was a time when the deans who ran these institutions were as broadly educated in the humanities and the sciences as they now expect their own graduates to be. Today, most institutions of higher learning are more worried about the bottom line than about educating a new generation. They are investing in real estate, and they are building their endowments. They call it survival. We wonder at what point they stopped using the traditional measurement of their actions: how many students graduated with enlarged hearts and enlightened minds.
Graduates of one Minnesota hilltop college are upset about the sale of their alma mater’s beloved radio station. WCAL is, as they say, the “original listener-supported public radio station” in the nation. St. Olaf College has been the material owner and operator of the station, although the station has not had much to do with St. Olaf, other than to occupy one of its lovely little ivy-bedecked buildings off the quad. (Students tinker with their own low-band FM station, KSTO.) It is a sign that WCAL was doing something extraordinarily right that the buyer is the nation’s best public-radio operation, Minnesota Public Radio.
MPR has been bemused by WCAL’s continuing operations—both the size of its signal and the unorthodox nature of its programming—and one gets the sense that the idea to purchase the precocious little station in Northfield became the best way for the lion to dispatch the fly. It is certainly a relief that the other potential buyer, a lunatic evangelical Christian broadcaster, was apparently not welcome at the table at any price. And it can only be a good thing that MPR will have a new station in its stable. Perhaps it will inspire some refreshing innovation in public radio.
The sale of WCAL is a disappointment, but it is not the end of the world. That colleges and universities are raising tuition at three hundred percent the rate of inflation; that they are increasingly maudlin in their hat-in-hand attempts to pad their endowments; that they are relying on underpaid, overworked, un-benefited adjuncts while building state-of-the-art whirlpools and short-order grills and climbing walls—these things are the end of the world. The one we would prefer to inhabit, anyway.
What graduates find most irritating about the sale is that their alma mater is divesting itself of an eighty-year-old landmark for an instant financial high. St. Olaf hopes to realize $10 million to add to its estimated $235 million nest egg. Alumni, who are well-acquainted with the beggar in the varsity sweater, are now trying to find a way to stop the sale. They know better than anyone that there are greater truths than short-term gain. A college on a hill should command a much better view of the future than that.
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