As state universities are partially financed with taxpayer money, one would hope that they have higher requirements for transparency than corporations. However, that is not the case at all.
Could corporations get away with having policies that require employees to hide any wrongdoing from their customers? I think not, but it seems that state universities can and do so when they want to. Could corporations get away with allowing their managers to tell employees that they cannot complain to senior management about manager misbehavior or inform other employees about such misbehavior? I hope not, but state universities do. Sometimes, universities are not even afraid to do this in writing, which provides clear evidence of such behavior.
Problems at state universities are common and are becoming worse, as the Prussian education system—the current education system in the United States—rewards bad behavior. (For a more detailed description of this education system, see my other articles: “Why Are American Taxpayers Forced to Subsidize and Support the Prussian Education System?”, “The Inherent Flaws of the Prussian Education System”, and “What Has Happened to Our Great Universities?”)
Some transparency problems at Illinois State University (ISU)—where I am a tenured professor—are especially easy to see. Thus, they provide good examples to help understand these issues.
First, a few years ago, I got an e-mail from our new department head saying that I should not e-mail the dean. This was a response to my polite e-mail to the dean—copying the department head—asking if he could help mitigate the consequences of poor class scheduling, considering our department head had very little administrative experience at the time. One of my classes was scheduled in such a way as to maximize the probability of it being cancelled. (For more details about this experience, see my earlier article: “Is American Education a Fraud?”)
I viewed the e-mail from the department head to be just as inappropriate as his scheduling of classes, and forwarded the e-mail to the dean. Given the clear evidence of inappropriate behavior, I expected such behavior to stop, but I was wrong. Forwarding any complaints to the provost’s office also did not lead to any positive results.
Later, as the problems in our department continued, I e-mailed the whole department about them. I wanted to inform the people working in the department and to give them a chance to respond in case I missed something important before I published articles about these problems at ISU. In addition to “Is American Education a Fraud?”, I also published “How Some Universities Are Destroying Education: Increasing Opportunities for Students to Take Classes in Any Order” and “Incentives for Choosing Faculty in State Universities: How Some State Universities Are Destroying Themselves,” which discussed problems at ISU.
The response to emailing the department was in my annual evaluations. The department head described informing faculty as not being collegial behavior. He claimed that I should discuss this with the Ombudsperson Council of Illinois State University instead. Before this suggestion, I had already talked with members of this council and found the conversation useful. However, they also explained to me that they had no power to implement or require any changes in the department. Thus, the department head wanted me to discuss these problems only with people who could not do anything about them.
One semester, I e-mailed the link to my article “Is American Education a Fraud?” to my students to help them understand that they needed to study if they wanted to pass my class. Simply telling students that they need to study does not work with a large percent of students. I did not expect the article to convince all students but, if it would convince a few, I thought it was worth trying. Moreover, I taught finance classes, and the article provided a good example of what happens when institutions (e.g., state universities) are not subject to the discipline of free financial markets.
I was told by the ISU administration—starting with the department head—that I violated university rules by e-mailing the link to students and that I could not do that again. The university has a rule that professors should not criticize their colleagues in front of students.
I think this is a strange rule. Science often advances by criticizing one’s colleagues. However, universities can write their own rules and adopt them by having the whole faculty or faculty committees “under the guidance” of administrators vote for those rules. My repeated requests for clarification about what exactly they did not like about my article were not answered.
As I recently learned, administrators have significant power to cause problems for faculty, and they use that power when they want to. There were problems with scheduling my classes every semester since the semester described in “Is American Education a Fraud?” Thus, when it comes to committee voting, “under the guidance” sometimes means under pressure from administrators. Moreover, the administration has significant control over hiring and retaining the faculty—thus, to some extent, they choose who votes. Given such freedom for abuse, it is not surprising that state universities adopt rules that reduce transparency and create even more opportunities for abuse.
At first, I was surprised that such things could happen in the United States. However, if I would have known the history of the current education system, which I learned only recently, I would not have been surprised. The current education system in the United States is not the same as the system from the country’s founding. The old system was much closer to the free-market system.
Unfortunately, the United States (like other countries) adopted the Prussian education system and created legal restrictions for the older U.S. system. Most communists, fascists, and other intellectual descendants of the new Prussians who created this education system were never punished for the crimes they committed, and many of them immigrated to the United States. Some of them came as university professors and administrators. As university degrees could be granted only by those who already had those degrees, the United States imported professors from abroad, giving them control over education here.
Transparency and other problems in state universities are not just problems for those who work or study there. These problems affect everybody, as universities prepare teachers and government experts who keep increasing their interference in our lives. Moreover, even so-called private universities currently have similar problems, as they are not fully private institutions. Rather, they are a part of the same Prussian education system, receive direct or indirect financing from government, and function in the same legal and regulatory system that distorts incentives.
It should not be surprising that spending more taxpayer money on education is not working. That money is just entrenching the Prussian system and making it harder for the private sector to develop and compete. Neither transparency nor other problems with the Prussian education system can be solved by government support of this system. Government does not need to get more involved with education. It needs to leave this industry to the truly private sector and the full discipline of free markets.
Dr. Dalia Marciukaityte is an associate professor of finance at Illinois State University. She is also a policy advisor for the Heartland Institute.
