Some months back the New Jersey Promise Council of the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities (ASCU) invited the wisdom of the higher education community into one room so that they might share their wisdom and apply it to a list of issues afflicting New Jersey colleges and universities. The meeting convened one morning at the College of New Jersey campus and ran for several hours which, according to the syllabus distributed weeks prior, were to be spent searching for a novel approach to the basic problems of productivity, accessibility and the affordability of higher education. The list of topics went something like this:

The goals of the effort include helping the state colleges/universities gain greater control over cost to keep tuition affordable; increasing their ability to serve more New Jerseyans; and strengthening accountability and public trust. We hope the project will result in a renewed public agenda for state college higher education. The New Jersey College Promise will reflect that New Jersey’s state colleges and universities are dedicated to serving our citizens and willing to hold themselves accountable to the citizens they serve. Elements of this effort include the following:

1. Engaging independent expert consultants to examine rigorously state college/university cost structures for the purpose of gaining greater efficiency to help keep college affordable, citizens’ biggest concerns.

2. Convening a group of national experts on higher education and individuals from outside of higher education to examine the benefits and means of improving nonpartisan, lay citizen trustee-governed institutions; to protect public colleges from political intrusion; to identify policy that will increase college affordability and access; and to promote innovation, change and public accountability.

3. Consulting experts from New Jersey state government, business, labor and higher education to study and recommend where state policy and regulation needs to be changed to assist the colleges and universities in being more efficient and effective in serving their missions and the state.

4. Commissioning scientific opinion polls to learn what New Jerseyans think and to test public support for solutions to college affordability that can be implemented.

5. Hosting forums on higher education to make New Jersey the national leader in college access, affordability and accountability in the 21st century.

6. Making specific annual policy recommendations to the governor, legislature and others to achieve the Promise; and keeping all parties informed regarding succeeding on this agenda.

7. Building effective communication strategies, including using internet technology to inform a broader constituency for public higher education, to bridge the gap between opinion and policy action to achieve the “Promise” agenda.

Following this list there was a series of facts about higher education such as the state’s graduation rate, funding levels, the rate of out-migration and cost of tuition. (I’ve pulled all of this from the NJ College Promise website. It looked more or less like the information from the previous statement.)

The attendees, drawn from various parts of the community, business leaders, and grinning local college presidents, were mailed briefing packets which contained a clear articulation of the goals of the meeting. For this reason, some attendees from New Jersey think tanks even brought along their own detailed proposals for the systemic reorganization of higher education. Soon those grins would fade and those proposals, to the chagrin of their authors, would depreciate in purpose and relevance.

At the outset, the forum was amiable and ready to share their ideas, they offered suggestions for all the basic points detailed in their briefings. The council members, however, seemed unwilling to provide a tangible statement of purpose or some so what to let their attendees know how the stated mission of the dialog was progressing or if they were on the right track. Rather than an answer, Executive Director Darryl Greer would rest and reassure, dispel the suggestions of the forum as too specific 0r something and refuse to spill the beans as if he had something special planned, as if he were addressing a room of giggling expectants waiting for a traffic cop in a thong to jump out of a birthday cake. It would turn out that he had other motives.

Standing at the base of a mess of bound white butcher paper, he insisted that all would be salient once every topic had been addressed, though, not convinced by the wizard’s palliatives, the attendees continued to pick at the edges of the suspicious curtain until the great plan was discovered, or better, denuded. Near the end of the discussion, in more words: they want more money dedicated to higher education and more public trust for their institutions.

The ride continued as Greer and company seemed to be attempting to obfuscate their meaning, possibly to lend their words more credibility and novelty, timeshare-salesman-like. On the issue of trust, Greer and friends noted that the recent host of UMDNJ scandals has created an infamous association between the latter and all New Jersey institutions. This association was not formed casually and is largely the result of the The New Jersey State Commission of Investigation (NJSCI) report released in October of last year (2007). “Higher Education: Vulnerable to Abuse,” found the UMDNJ incidents to be more symptomatic of a prevailing systemic susceptibility in all New Jersey’s state colleges and universities, a conclusion deemed unfair by colleges like TCNJ who have recently anticipated pressure from the state regarding school expansion and construction. The NJSCI report found:

“an entire system vulnerable to problematic governance, serious shortcomings in oversight, accountability and transparency and outright violations of the public trust. While the expansive panorama of corruption at UMDNJ clearly is an aberration in the extreme, it nonetheless signifies what can happen within a system structured to render its constituent parts susceptible to a host of questionable and patently abusive practices. The findings of this investigation demonstrate that piecemeal change would be a grossly inadequate strategy in the face of complex problems whose scope and cause extend well beyond the narrow confines of a single institution. Unless the state is willing to tolerate the risk of history scandalously repeating itself somewhere within this troubled system, wholesale reform is the only sensible and responsible course of action.”

Indeed, when discussing accountability, productivity and access earlier in the meeting it was very difficult for the forum to veer away from examples drawn from Rutgers University. It was only natural that Greer et al. be adamant about dispelling these exported solutions, though I would argue that it was only natural for the forum to make them. This perhaps might have materialized as obfuscation on Greer’s part as his aim might have been more to prove the discrete characteristics of each state college in order to dispel the idea that there is some uniform vulnerability to corruption as coined by the NJSCI.

Taken in whole, the mission of NJ College Promise is murky and can be paraphrased thus: New Jersey Colleges need freedom from state control because that control will be essential to navigating the new terrain of higher education. That is the meaning of their emphasis on out-migration, that is the meaning of the “emergent populations.”the most important message in their statement, it seems, is: “state colleges/universities gain greater control over cost to keep tuition affordable; increasing their ability to serve more New Jerseyans.” More state money or less financial control, fewer mandates, etc, seems to be what they mean when they float facts like “Higher education’s share of total state budget has declined by almost one-half since FY 1983 to 5.4% from 9.8%” and the like.

The argument is not far removed from the argument made by the majority of K-12 edvocates when they call for an end to unfunded mandates under the tyrannical No Child Left Behind. This argument carries weight in a discussion of K-12 education though I still don’t see how it creates a compelling argument for less state control or how it undermines the findings of the NJSCI—not that there aren’t compelling reasons to think that all New Jersey schools are systemically unique and discrete in regard to their susceptibility to abuse or corruption. In fact, during the meeting, Gregg Edwards of the Center for Policy Research urged the council members to leave their “K-12 mindset.” Constructing some tenuous bridge between state control and out-migration can only undermine their larger plans, which seem to have something to do with hiring private contractors to undertake school construction/expansion projects. People have and always will leave the state. Famously, Benjamin Franklin called attention to this phenomenon when he described New Jersey as “a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit” or more illustrative, “a keg tapped at both ends.” In fact, Franklin actually left his home in Boston at an early age to live on one of those very “mountains,” Pennsylvania. He thereby gave New Jersey a complete miss.

In short, the NJ College Promise people ought to clearly state that they would like to have more or total control over their finances and construction projects by offering a concise solution to some of the perils they’ve listed. They ought to insist on positive strategies that include the lowest degree of state participation and perhaps offering to cut costs on the college level. They might pursue the old notion of shared services and equipment or perhaps manipulating the schedule. Hall Institute trustee Bob Haney has suggested that colleges run year-round programs in order to cut costs and make better use of expensive facilities and resources that aren’t utilized during the summer months. They might investigate some of these things rather than holding more confusing press conferences and baffling more reporters with their esoteric calls for solutions from the community. NJ College Promise might actually investigate some of those solutions. Otherwise, the second coming of the State Department of Higher Education or its like may be on its way. Perhaps these institutions have had their training wheels removed too soon. If a Department of Higher Education presided over our state colleges, it might be more difficult to justify an appropriation for a vacant position, or to pay a football coach $1.5 million. A DOHE might do more to politicize the way money arrives at colleges, though sometimes partisan bickering is preferable to unchecked unscrupulousness. Let’s buy college educations for more kids and fewer yachts for administrators and coaches.