In praise of public higher education

Sometimes the best school isn’t the “elite” college at the top of the national rankings. It’s the public university just down the road.

NASHVILLE — News of the recent college-bribery scandal broke the same week the University of Tennessee announced it would be offering free tuition to Tennessee families earning less than $50,000 a year. The announcement came the day my two younger sons were finishing up their U.T. midterms and packing to come back to Nashville for spring break, where home-cooked meals and fair amount of yardwork awaited them...

The idea of a college search would have been foreign to me as a high-school senior. Of the two flagship state universities, I picked my mother’s alma mater and was admitted simply by having my ACT scores sent there. When I got to Auburn University in the fall of 1980, Pell Grants, work-study assignments and low-interest federal loans were still plentiful enough that students like me — people not impoverished enough or brilliant enough to earn a full ride — could nevertheless get a good education, even if their parents couldn’t afford to pay a dime. It never crossed my mind that I was “settling” for something less than an elite education. I was grateful beyond belief to be going to college at all.

How I wish I had the words, even now, to explain what a gift those years were. I took an overload almost every quarter because extra courses didn’t cost anything extra, and it was impossible to choose from among all the offerings. I wanted to learn everything, read everything, think about everything. And everything seemed to be right there for the taking on that rural campus in the piedmont of Alabama...

Yes, state universities have their problems, and those problems can be profound. Cash-strapped legislatures too often balance their budgets by cutting funds to higher education, resulting in catastrophic tuition hikes. Provincial yahoos too often serve as university trustees or administrators, energetically erecting barriers to the kind of wide-ranging curiosity that a university education is supposed to foster. Tenured professors retire and are too often replaced by adjuncts so underpaid and so shamefully overburdened that their work amounts to exploitation. And that’s just for starters.

Nevertheless, against all odds, the real heart of a college education — the bond borne of shared intellectual exploration between teachers and curious students, between curious students and each other — remains intact, if only in pockets of campus life, at every state university I know. My brother and sister-in-law are professors at a state university, and I have friends who work at other state universities and community colleges across the region. To a person, their commitment to their students and to their own research and creative work is an inspiration. I would entrust my children’s education to them without a moment’s hesitation... Margaret Renkl