Image of Excellence

Image of Excellence: The Ohio State University School Originally Published by Teachers College Record, Fall 2001 Reproduced here by permission. Copyright 2001, Teachers College Record.

Image of Excellence: The Ohio State University School . Robert W. Butche . New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000. 407 pp.

By Robert V. Bullough, Jr. Brigham Young University, Chairman, Graduate School, University of Utah

The title of Robert Butche's book, Image of Excellence, is a bit misleading.

While Butche has written a study of Ohio State’s remarkable University School, one of the six most experimental schools associated with the Eight-year Study (beginning 1932 or 1933, depending on who one reads) and arguably one of the premier American schools of the last century, it is most especially a study of the politics of American higher education over a forty year period. If one is looking for a study of the curriculum of the school, as Butche suggests, one needs to look elsewhere.

Today, the problem remains, despite the effort of the past decade or more to create professional development schools. But perhaps the best reason for having such a school was made by Luvern Cunningham, who replaced Cottrell as dean after University School was closed and nothing could change the outcome: "The new dean believed University School should have been kept open to assure that the College remained aware that kids were the focus of their work..." (P. 355). Many of the graduate centers of education in this nation probably could use this reminder, as could professors of education who often work hard to distance themselves from teacher education, which remains, inspite of recent gains, low status work within schools of education.

Good places to look include the various editions of Harold Alberty’s Reorganizing the High School Curriculum (1947, 1953, 1962) and, for the early years of the School program, two volumes, the famous fifth volume of the Eight-year Study reports, Thirty Schools Tell Their Story (pp. 718-757) and Were We Guinea Pigs? which was written by the class of 1938. The story Butche chooses to tell is an important one, centering on the closing of the School. For this story to be told and to make sense it is necessary for him to tell other stories, larger and smaller ones: The shift of American educational research and federal education funding that took place in the 1960s that led to rethinking the relationship between schools of education and the public schools; the McCarthy persecutions of liberals and so-called communists in the early 1950s; the waning of American progressivism; and the flood of baby-boomers into higher education that stretched the capacity of virtually every college and university, doubling the size of Ohio State in a single ten-year period. Then there are the smaller stories, small in scale

Ohio State was a divisive place in the years following the war over University School closure and the disruptions of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the faculty was sharply divided along educational, philosophical and political lines. Butche shows convincingly that the form of administrative leadership practiced by President Fawcett and the Trustees, who jointly and unilaterally exercised power without hesitation to what they believed were worthy ends, contributed to the events that led to the shut down of the university. As Dewey reminds us, one cannot separate ends from means, and eventually the administrative means employed by the leadership of Ohio State produced undesirable ends that weakened the University and destroyed the College of Education’s confidence and community, a community that had long been vibrant and unique within higher education. It was this sense of community that led the faculty of the College to vote for salary cuts during the Depression so no one would lose a job. The University School was at the center of the College’s sense of

but still dramatic: A dominating trustee, former United States Senator, one-time presidential candidate, arch conservative and admirer of fellow Senator Joseph McCarthy, John W. Bricker, who saw in the College of Education a breeding ground of liberalism and of dangerous dissenters who needed silencing in order to protect the university he served so long and loved so well. A dean, Donald P. Cottrell, who was punished by his president, Novice Gail Fawcett, for, among other reasons, not encouraging the graduate school to waive residency requirements so he might receive a Ph.D. The president punished the College to punish the dean, whose salary was frozen for a dozen years in the apparent hope he would leave. He did not. A university president (Fawcett) who came to office from the superintendency of the public schools of Columbus, Ohio, and who wanted the University School closed, Butche argues, because he believed it diverted resources and attention away from the public schools.

Two ambitious faculty members representing a new breed of education professors, one hoping to be dean, David Clark, and the other seeking to make his mark in empirical research, Egon Guba, who supported closing of the School and took on the "old guard" at Ohio State, professors who cherished the traditions represented by the University School and who fiercely believed in its mission. Although these two professors were on the winning side when the school closed for good (with the graduating class of 1967), in the process they lost their standing in the college with their peers along with several friendships. And there is the story of Paul R. Klohr, a mild-mannered, principled man, who in the name of academic freedom and of the right of the university faculty to participate in the decisions that most affected their professional lives and the education of their students openly challenged the dean, the president of the university, Senator Bricker and other trustees. For this, he was never forgiven by his administrative superiors, including Dean Cottrell, but his actions stand even today as an example of rare courage in defense of not only academic freedom but of the importance of faculty participation in university governance. His mentor, Harold Alberty, and Alberty's mentor, the distinguished American educational philosopher Boyd H. Bode, would have been proud of Professor Klohr whose defense of the University School before its enemies, both open and secret, including President Fawcett, was grounded in a more fundamental issue, the place of democratic decision making on American campuses. The issues he raised in the middle 1960s foreshadowed elements of the campus confrontation of 1970, when students, who earlier hung and burned Trustee Bricker in effigy, also insisted they be heard. Like other Ohio campuses including Kent State, in the springtime Ohio State was closed for two

community.

The art of power politics is now well understood by many a university faculty member, as it was not during the time Cottrell headed the College of Education at Ohio State. Indeed, a good case can be made that well played power politics has profoundly affected American higher education for both good and ill.

Narrow academic special interest groups and what might be called grievance specialists have learned to play hardball, the politics of threat, intimidation, and media manipulation in the name of one or another cause or fundamentalism. When used by parent leaders in defense of the University School, such tactics troubled university faculty, including Paul Klohr. To be sure, power politics has always been part of democracy and of university life. Yet, the values that underpin politics of this kind endanger the very idea of the university itself. Secrecy, deal cutting, threats and silence are antithetical to the tradition of the university as a marketplace of ideas and a public space where people of good will come together to reason in search of a greater good.

Although at times the book's organization gets in the way of his argument, Robert Butche’s study presents an occasion to consider the wonder of American higher education and the threats to that ideal. One such threat is faculty indifference to the university, its direction and its long-term health. Individualism and privatism are alive and well on American campuses and too few professors seem concerned. Fortunately, some are.

Another threat comes from campus special interest groups that present themselves as morally superior to those who disagree with them and who seek to silence enemies. As those who openly challenged Dean Cottrell and President Fawcett learned, dissent on campus is often dangerous. Yet dissenters ought to be cherished. Butche discusses the role failed leadership played in the closing of the University School, and here also resides a serious threat. As university presidents have become CEOs and fund raisers not scholars and teachers, the embrace between the university and business has tightened into a bear hug, and it is increasingly difficult to tell if there is any separation between bodies. Beholden, the university becomes a silent servant and loses it’s independence and its ability to marshal and direct outrage over injustice.

Image of Excellence caused me to rethink my graduate student experience and consider my own place in university governance. But more significantly it reminded me of the importance of standing for good causes and of protecting the all-too-fragile traditions of

weeks by Governor Rhodes who sent in National Guard troops. The student message was not one either Senator Bricker or President Fawcett wanted to hear, and they did not, with tragic results.

Seeking to explain the intersection of these stories, Butche, a former student and now historian of the School, contrasts power politics with the way in which academics historically have attacked problems. Klohr, a former director of the School, and a few other of its champions, presented logical arguments and evidence to their adversaries in support of keeping University School open while behind the scenes, well out of sight, deals were being cut and decisions made that would lead to closure. The teachers and professors connected to the University School were grounded in a long tradition within the College and School that flowed from Bode through Alberty and to Klohr that centered on a set of democratic values, the exercise of free intelligence in solving human problems, faith in common people’s abilities to reason and in the ultimate triumph of the better argument. From the beginning, the School program, including administrative procedures, was built upon these values in the attempt to operationalize the philosophy of Bode and his colleagues. While the debate raged over the School’s future, some faculty members placed their trust in the college leadership only later to feel betrayed. William Jennings, acting principal of the school, actually encouraged the School faculty to keep out of the debate apparently believing that to become involved was inappropriate for teachers and professors. Butche shows he was wrong.

At the time of the School’s closure, other universities were also shutting down their lab schools, which seemed to some to justify the decision. But the University School was in many respects singular, for it was genuinely involved in educational experimentation and linked to schools and school districts throughout the state of Ohio. Despite falling on closed ears, the case for a school of this kind was well made by Professor Klohr before a trustee subcommittee chaired by the Senator: "I insist," he said, "that we...need a wellspring on the university campus where individuals giving their professional life to the study of education can join with scholars from many other disciplines to design imaginative proposals to be tested out in a limited, controlled way before they are offered for wide adaptation in large numbers of public schools" (p. 331).

higher education that sustain open and honest debate and respectful disagreement without fear of reprisal. I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s argument, that "The remedy for unpredictability, for chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the [ability] to make and keep promises."1 Perhaps above all else, those who serve our nation’s colleges and universities need to make and keep promises. Had this standard been met by those in leadership positions at Ohio State and had faculty members been willing to take a stand early in favor of the University School, I suspect the School would be operating today and provoking, as it always did, lively debate about the aims and means of democratic education, a debate that has gone much awry and which too few citizens now take seriously.

Many of those involved in and hurt by the closing of University School went on to distinguished careers in education. Many were influential in ASCD. Quietly Paul Klohr did the work behind the scenes that legitimately makes him the father of the reconceptualist movement in curriculum studies in this country. He is the "P.K." to whom William Pinar dedicated Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists.2 David Clark became Dean at Indiana University. Egon Guba helped revolutionize educational evaluation. John Corbally became President of the University of Illinois.

And what of Dean Cottrell and President Fawcett?

Happily, the Dean finally received a salary increase a couple of years before retiring. The President got a brown brick conference center named after him, "the Fawcett Center for Tomorrow." Built at the edge of campus, the Center for Tomorrow still stands, looming across the Olentangy River from the site where plans had been made and money set aside to build an expanded University School campus that was never to be. Closing the University School, as Butche shows, was not a money issue at all as was claimed by School enemies.

References

Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 237.

William Pinar. Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (San Francisco: McCutchan Publishing

Corporation, 1975).

From: Teachers College Record Volume 104 Number 1, 2002, p. http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 10733. Copyright 2001, Teachers College Record. Reprinted by permission.