Beyond the One-Dimensional University: A Marcusean Critique of Outcomes Assessment

Abstract

In August 2013, US president Barack Obama announced a plan to link federal financial aid to college performance. This plan, it is argued, will allow students, parents, and federal lenders to avoid paying tuition for an ultimately meaningless credential. It identifies relevant educational outcomes as rates of graduation, the earnings of graduates, and the attainment of advanced degrees after graduation. The president’s plan is part of a much larger trend toward “accountability” and “transparency” in education, an important feature of which is the proliferation of the language and programs related to assessment of student learning outcomes. In this essay, I show that outcomes assessment is a form of “one-dimensional thought” as this concept is developed in One-Dimensional Man and that it suffers from the defects identified by Marcuse there. Outcomes assessment, therefore, codifies ways of thinking about education that undermine its role in the development of liberated forms of consciousness and emancipatory praxis.

Notes

¹ See Michael D. Shear, “On Bus Tour, Obama Seeks to Shame Colleges Into Easing Cost,” New York Times (New York, NY), August 22, 2013. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/us/politics/obama-vows-to-shame-colleges-into-keeping-costs-down.html. One may also now search for colleges by their rankings on the national scorecard: available online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/college-score-card.

² Derek Bok offers a useful but limited account of the history of the most recent round of “reform” in higher education. Bok prefers to see himself as “neutral” and criticizes those he sees as “biased” Left critics. His history is therefore limited inasmuch as he conceals the material and political conditions driving the “reform.” See Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

³ Margaret Spellings, A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of US Higher Education. (US Department of Education, 2006).

⁴ For detailed account and critique of this history see John Ambrosio, “Changing the Subject: Neoliberalism and Accountability in Public Education,” Educational Studies 49:4 (2013), pp. 316–333.

⁵ Spellings, A Test of Leadership, p. 24.

⁶ Ibid., 29. According to Martha Nussbaum, the report presupposes that the goal of education is economic growth and profit, rather than flourishing and inclusive democracy. See Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 4.

⁷ Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Hereafter cited in-text as ODM.

⁸ Ibid., p. 1.

⁹ Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoads, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 2004).

¹⁰ See José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

¹¹ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. xli.

¹² Ibid., p. 104.

¹³ For the original discussion of “Unhappy Consciousness” upon which Marcuse bases his analysis of the “Happy Consciousness,” see G. W. F. Hegel, A. V. Miller (trans), Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 126 ff. For Hegel, the Unhappy Consciousness is unable to reconcile the universal and unchangeable with the particular and changeable. It, therefore, views itself, in its individuality, as cut off from what is essential. The Happy Consciousness, by contrast, views the universal and the particular, the unchangeable and the changeable as immediately coincident. Its individuality is immediately subsumed into the essential—that is, the prevailing social order.

¹⁴ Clayton Pierce, “Democratizing Science and Technology with Marcuse and Latour,” in Douglass Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (eds), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009), pp. 131–157, emphasizes the role of mimesis in this process. A person lives out one-dimensional thinking as mimetic conformity to objectively given conditions and the internalization of social demands, leaving little or no room for the elaboration of higher ideals or authentic individuality. As Pierce writes, “Technological society, through the subjectification of objective reality (mimesis), dispenses with metaphysics, the realm of contemplative and reflective thought, which can potentially stand in contradistinction to reality” (p. 136). Mimesis certainly plays a deep and important role in the production of Happy Consciousness—particularly in the creation of false needs. But, as I read Marcuse, immediate identification with the social order is predicated on perpetual gratification which reduces the potential for sublimation, dis-identification, and rebellion.

¹⁵ See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 35 ff.

¹⁶ See Sigmund Freud, in James Strachey (trans. and ed.), Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961).

¹⁷ See, for example, Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 96–97.

¹⁸ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man., p. 110.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 110.

²⁰ Ibid., pp. 115–120.

²¹ Ibid., p. 117.

²² Michael Forman, “One-Dimensional Man and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism: Revisiting Marcuse in the Occupation,” Radical Philosophy Review 16:2 (2013), p. 509.

²³ See, for example, Jen Wieczner, “Most Millennials Think They’ll Be Worse Off Than Their Parents,” Fortune Magazine, 1 March 2016, available online at: http://fortune.com/2016/03/01/millennials-worse-parents-retirement/.

²⁴ Forman, “One-Dimensional Man and the Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism,” p. 516.

²⁵ For a fuller discussion of the relevance of Marcuse in the contemporary setting see, Arnold L. Farr, Douglas Kellner, Andrew T. Lamas, and Charles Reitz, “Herbert Marcuse's Critical Refusals,” Radical Philosophy Review 16:1 (2013), pp. 1–15.

²⁶ Despite Nussbaum referring to it as a “silent crisis,” the crisis in the humanities is relatively widely reported and has been an important aspect of the broader discussion of higher education for decades. For recent data and discussion of the contemporary “crisis in the humanities” see Jennifer Levitz and Douglas Belkin, “Humanities Fall from Favor: Far Fewer Harvard Students Express Interest in Field with Weak Job Prospects,” Wall Street Journal (New York, NY) June 6, 2013, available online at: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324069104578527642373232184?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2 and Tamar Lewin, “As Interest Fades in the Humanities, Colleges Worry,” New York Times (New York, NY) October 30, 2013. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/education/as-interest-fades-in-the-humanities-colleges-worry.html?pagewanted=all. Marcuse himself offered a prescient analysis of this trend as far back as 1975 in his “Lecture on Education and Politics, Berkeley, 1975,” in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (eds), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), pp. 39–44.

²⁷ David Armitage, Homi Bhaba, Emma Dench, J. Hamburger, J. Hamilton, S. Kelly, C. Lambert-Beatty, C. McDonald, A. Shreffler, and J. Simpson, “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future,” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2013), available online at: http://artsandhumanities.fas.harvard.edu/files/humanities/files/mapping_the_future_31_may_2013.pdf.

²⁸ Nussbaum, Not for Profit, pp. 24–26.

²⁹ For an impressive and comprehensive account of the development of these themes throughout Marcuse’s oeuvre, see Charles Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000).

³⁰ Charles Reitz, “Herbert Marcuse and the Humanities: Emancipatory Education vs. Predatory Capitalism” in Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (eds), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), p. 230.

³¹ Presidential hopeful US Senator Marco Rubio made headlines in November 2015 when he made the claim in a primary debate that “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.” The claim and its fallout were indicative of the Happy Consciousness criticized by Marcuse and the contemporary relevance of his critical theory of one-dimensional society. Many attacked Rubio’s claim that welders make more money than philosophers marshaling income data from a variety of sources. Others argued for the worth of philosophy based on the important job skills it provides. Some few others, rightly, emphasized that the value of philosophy ought not to be confused with the price it commands on the market. However, it was not publicly common to see philosophy defended as intrinsically valuable or to hear the economy that pays philosophers poorly or leaves them precariously employed or unemployed criticized for this reason. Likewise, very few called into question the underlying causes of the division between intellectual and manual labor or its class basis. Moreover, little attempt was made to provide critical analysis of the income data—concealing important class, race, and gender inequalities that structure not only the broader economy but the disciplinary practice of philosophy as well, thereby determining the “value” of a philosophy degree (or any other degree for that matter). For more, see Alan Rapport, “Philosophers (and Welders) React to Marco Rubio’s Debate Comments,” New York Times (New York, NY), 11 November 2015. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/11/11/philosophers-and-welders-react-to-marco-rubios-debate-comments/.

³² See David Graeber, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” Strike! Magazine Summer Issue (2013), pp. 10–11. Available online at: http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/.

³³ Linda Suskie identifies W. Edward Deming’s theory of “Total Quality Management” with its emphasis on “continuous improvement” or kaizen as the historical source of the methods and aims of outcomes assessment. See Linda Suskie, “Accountability and Quality Improvement” in Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and Candy Schwartz (eds), Revisiting Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006), pp. 13–38. The language of “Total Quality Management” is eerily similar to the Marcuse’s caustic references to the “Research of Total Administration,” the discussion of which is the source of the examples discussed earlier. See One-Dimensional Man, p. 104 ff.

³⁴ Robert E. Dugan and Peter Hernon, “Institutional Mission-Centered Student Learning” in Peter Hernon, Robert E. Dugan, and Candy Schwartz (eds), Revisiting Outcomes Assessment in Higher Education (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006), p. 2.

³⁵ For a short, comprehensive introduction to the restructuring of higher education in accordance with the neoliberal economy, see Sanford F. Schram, “The Future of Higher Education and American Democracy: Introduction,” New Political Science 36:4 (2014), pp. 425–437. See also, Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) and Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, provides the most detailed historical and policy analysis, tracing how market-like behaviors were introduced into higher education beginning in the 1980s through various legal “reforms.”

³⁶ David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 2.

³⁷ Slaughter and Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, 28–30.

³⁸ Sarah Richardson and Hamish Coates, “Essential Foundations for Establishing Equivalence in Cross-National Higher Education Assessment,” Higher Education 68:6, pp. 826–827.

³⁹ Arne Duncan, Improving Human Capital in a Competitive World—Education Reform in the US. Remarks of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, World Bank, Human Development Forum, 2 March 2011, available online at: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/improving-human-capital-competitive-world-education-reform-us. Originally cited in Clayton Pierce, “Educational Life and Death: Reassessing Marcuse’s Critical Theory of Education in the Neoliberal Age,” Radical Philosophy Review 16:2 (2013), p. 614. Pierce draws Marcuse’s critical theory of education into fruitful dialogue with Foucault and W. E. B. DuBois to show how contemporary education functions as a form of “biopolitics.”

⁴⁰ See Michel Foucault, in François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Michel Senellart (eds) and Graham Burchell (trans), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 226–233.

⁴¹ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 107.

⁴² For a recent explanation of the process see, Blaine T. Garfolo and Barbara L’Huillier, “Demystifying Assessment: The Road to Accreditation,” Journal of College Teaching and Learning 12:4 (2015), pp. 151–170.

⁴³ Plato presents such a program in his Republic. See also Joseph Cunningham, “Praxis Exiled: Herbert Marcuse and the one-dimensional University,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 47:4 (2013), pp. 537–547, According to Cunningham, “Education as critical theory would serve as a comprehensive reimagining of the ontological and epistemological basis of society as well as reunification of theory and practice toward the actualization of that vision” (543).

⁴⁴ See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 47–53. According to Lyotard, the demand that higher education justify itself in the terms of social “performativity” stems from the broader crisis in the legitimation of knowledge characteristic of postmodernity.

⁴⁵ “Demystifying Assessment,” p. 155.

⁴⁶ David Noble, “Technology and the Commodification of Higher Education,” Monthly Review 53:10 (2002), available online at: http://monthlyreview.org/2002/03/01/technology-and-the-commodification-of-higher-education/.

⁴⁷ G. W. F. Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly,” available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/se/abstract.htm.

⁴⁸ Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 211.

⁴⁹ See also Casey Miller and Keivan Stassun, “A Test That Fails,” Nature 510 (2014), available online at: http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/articles/10.1038/nj7504-303a. Miller and Stassun criticize the use of the GRE in graduate school admissions. As they write, “[W]omen score 80 points lower on average in the physical sciences than do men, and African Americans score 200 points below white people. In simple terms, the GRE is a better indicator of sex and skin color than of ability and ultimate success.” Similar criticisms of outcomes metrics can be applied across the board. Graduation rates, job placement, salary advanced degrees, and other outcomes are all more closely predictive of class and social status than they are of ability or “merit.”

⁵⁰ I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this as a possible counter-argument to my position.

⁵¹ Although outcomes assessment is designed to give the impression of empirical scientific validity, this impression is largely misleading. In general, assessment of student learning outcomes constructs generalizations on the basis of very limited evidence collected without regard to research methodology. For this reason, Linda Suskie has referred to outcomes assessment as “action research.” As she writes, “Traditional empirical research is conducted to test theories, while assessment is a form of action research, a distinct types of research whose purpose is to improve one’s practice rather than make broad generalizations.” See Linda Suskie, Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide, 2^nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), p. 13. Whether or not “action research” in general is methodologically viable, outcomes assessment seems largely designed to give the veneer of scientific legitimacy to practices and ways of thinking that are fundamentally unscientific.

⁵² Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 53.

⁵³ Arnold Farr, “An Essay on Repressive Education: Marcuse, Marx, Adorno, and the Future of Emancipatory Learning” in Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse, Marx, McLaren (New York: Lexington Books, 2013), pp. 119–135. See also Joseph Cunningham, “Praxis Exiled.” As he writes, “Like much of his theory, Marcuse’s educational thought is decidedly two-dimensional. Education has the potential to act as a vehicle towards liberation as well as one of oppression” (542).

⁵⁴ See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” available online at: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.

⁵⁵ Herbert Marcuse, “Lecture on Education, Brooklyn College, 1968” in Douglass Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (eds), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009), p. 34.

⁵⁶ Herbert, Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972), p. 56.

⁵⁷ For the touchstone work in this literature see, Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

⁵⁸ Medina, Epistemologies of Resistance, p. 107.

⁵⁹ See W. E. B. DuBois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (eds), The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1997), p. 38ff.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 200.

⁶¹ “An Essay on Repressive Education,” p. 131.

⁶² “Lecture on Education, Brooklyn College, 1968,” p. 35.

⁶³ See Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 55.

⁶⁴ Herbert Marcuse, “Lecture on Higher Education and Politics, Berkeley, 1975,” in Douglass Kellner, Tyson Lewis, Clayton Pierce, and K. Daniel Cho (eds), Marcuse’s Challenge to Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009), p. 39.