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Public higher education, so it would seem, has just discovered, or is just about to have forced upon it, cost containment. The image of public colleges and universities as conveyed in recent articles and stories, is of institutions that have grown fat and complacent on hefty public appropriations and tuitions, and that have resisted the tough measures of cost containment so familiar to private industry.

The reasons for this image, which I will argue to be overwhelmingly wrong, are several. People seem to be angry at high tuitions and high per-student costs in our high-priced private colleges and universities -- even though parents have been eagerly lining up to pay the heavy freight -- and some of this anger, whipped up by former Education Secretary William Bennett and his followers, has been extended to the public sector, as well, even though its per-student costs, faculty-student ratios, and other measures of "productivity" tend to be far leaner, at least on the average, than those of the pricey private sector. There is also an unflattering and misleading, but unfortunately common, image of professors with minuscule teaching loads ignoring their undergraduate students and spending their time in silly research or self-serving consultancies, even though the possibility of such abuse, assuming a corrupt professoriate and incompetent administration, emerges only in those research universities wealthy enough to afford such attractive conditions of employment to begin with. Finally, recent press attention given to much ballyhooed cost containment reports at the University of Michigan, Stanford, Colombia, and elsewhere have conveyed to some a sense that other universities and colleges not so in the news must have not yet heard of, or recognized the need for, cost containment or not yet found the will to begin it.

Our critics, like the good debaters that many of them are, often attempt to cut off any defense by including in their attacks the charge that we can be expected to be "defensive," and that the listener or reader, forewarned, should be prepared to dismiss our protests and rest assured that we are, indeed, guilty of profligacy, complacency, and cost-plus pricing, all the more so if we rise to our defense.

Fiddlesticks! Some of us are defensive because we believe much of the criticism to be simplistic, mainly wrong, unproductive, and conducive to bad public policy. Consider the following admittedly defensive points:

1. The recent criticism of higher education has conveyed almost no sense of history. To ignore the wrenching retrenchments and downsizing that took place in New York State, New York City, Michigan, Minnesota, Washington, and so many other states in the 1970s and early 1980s and to treat "cost containment" as a concept new to the experience of public higher education is to jeopardize all credibility. These experiences of the past do not in themselves, of course, prove that today's institutions are as productive as they can be or may need to be. But they do suggest that "cost containment" is, in fact, a depressingly familiar experience, whose time has come and gone and may well come again. Its old wounds may account for some of the anger and even incredulity with which many public sector presidents and deans and faculty have greeted those who would purport to introduce them to the "new" imperative of cost containment.
2. Much recent criticism also treats all of higher education as though it resembled either Williams or Stanford, with very low student faculty ratios, high (and recently augmented) student and faculty physical amenities, and low teaching loads, especially in the most prestigious research universities where a sought-after faculty member may succeed in lowering his or her teaching load from two courses to one. Most undergraduate students, however, are in public two-year and four-year colleges, where student faculty ratios often exceed 20:1 and teaching loads range from a low three courses, where scholarly expectations are highest, to five and more in the community colleges.
3. Most public (and private) universities have reallocated an enormous proportion of their resources and faculty positions over the past decade or two. True, most has been accomplished incrementally, through the annual reallocation of positions becoming available by retirement, resignation, and mortality rather than through sudden and wrenching layoffs and massive shifts. But changed they have, and the notion that reallocation and self-funding are part of some new mandate for cost containment can be expected to be met with bitter bemusement by faculty who have, in the past decade or two, lost half or more of their departmental colleagues by the steady erosion of attrition.
4. Many public campuses have not only reallocated, but downsized, over the past decade and one-half. The State University of New York, for example, has, overall, about 10 percent fewer faculty and staff than it had in the mid-seventies (and teaches more students), with the reductions having been spread unequally and purposefully among campuses (e.g., research universities, four-year colleges, specialized schools) and on each campus among faculty, professionals, clerical, and maintenance staff. Again, the fact of substantial downsizing in the recent past does not in itself prove that costs have been contained as much as they conceivably could be or might even have to be. It does prove, though, that very substantial cost containment has already taken place at many public colleges and universities and that these campuses are almost certainly more productive than they were in the recent past. (This point, too, is equally true of the majority of the nation's private colleges that are neither well-endowed nor blessed with deep and affluent applicant pools.)
5. The origin of the "complacency" charge is not clear. But colleges and universities are arguably among the least complacent or self-satisfied institutions in our society. No other institution, in fact, may be so perpetually self-critical and so continuously engaged in reexamination, experimentation, and reform. True, the resulting changes often seem minor, when all is said and done, and not infrequently circular or cyclical. But this does not belie the fact that colleges and universities are constantly trying to increase their market shares, retention rates, community acceptability, and academic prestige. Sometimes we are ineffective; rarely are we complacent.
6. Where there has been real growth in the public higher education sector (and there has been some growth, particularly in the latter half of the 1980s), it has occurred, almost by definition, with the concurrence, if not at the instigation, of those elected officials charged with spending the public's tax dollars. In short, growth, where it has occurred, has been purposeful and selective -- e.g., covering expanded enrollments, building economic development assistance capacity, building and opening new facilities, adding auditors and other kinds of management control staff, enhancing services to students with special needs, and the like. This does not mean that all of this growth must continue, or that it may not have to be covered, soon, by cuts elsewhere. But the implication, contained in some of the cost containment criticism, that the limited recent growth in the public sector has been self-serving or unpurposeful or the result of some sort of "bureaucratic creep," or that it has come about as a surprise to, or against the wishes of, governors and legislators, is simply untrue. Public colleges and universities do not levy their own taxes or appropriate their own funds, and even those that set their own tuitions cannot, in the long run, prevent compensating cuts in state tax dollar appropriations. Public colleges and universities will be about as large or as small, or as lean or as well-funded, as legislators and governors want them to be. Again, the 1990s may be an austere decade. But the possibility that cuts may be called for because the tax revenues will not be there, or because new public needs may move to a higher priority, should not be confused with a sense that our public higher educational institutions have been profligate or will be incapable of downsizing when they need to.

There may be a public out there that believes all of higher education to be fat, overpriced, and arrogant. This does not mean it is correct. It certainly is a wrong and mean caricature of most of higher education, public or private. Let's not be ashamed or reluctant to defend ourselves.

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