Arrogance: I would suggest that Arrogance is partially responsible for the failure to learn from the past. This arrogance is particularly found in the rigid, judgmental posture of the accrediting agencies. Often retaining old principles of effective education, the review panels are typically composed primarily of representatives of small prestigious colleges and major universities. Members of the panel, as a result, are inclined toward reinforcing old models of education. I remember meeting with one member of a review panel who declared that he “loved the smell of books” and believed that a collegiate institution should always have a large physical library. While I personally also love “the smell of books,” there is no reason that all collegiate institutions must have large, expensive libraries.
Ignorance: Ignorance to be found in postsecondary education is also a notable culprit. This ignorance relates to the absence of knowledge about educational research results by administrators or faculty members. Very few members of the postsecondary community during the late 20th Century read the works of Alexander Astin and other notable researchers. Few ever heard of “value-added.” Faculty members are expected to be knowledgeable about their discipline; however, they are unlikely to read much about postsecondary education. Administrators rarely have received any advanced training or education in postsecondary management or leadership (the exception being Catholic nuns). The dysfunction grew even worse with the invasion of COVID-19 and the inability of collegiate institutions to rely on traditional in-person education.
Even at the institutional level, there is often a remarkable ignorance of faculty members and administrators about educational innovations that were engaged during the past in their own institution. For instance, I was consulting at the University of the Pacific about twenty years ago and found that members of this university knew nothing about one of the major educational innovations that occurred on their own campus during the 1970s. This innovation was the Cluster Colleges which were led by faculty members who often became major figures in American postsecondary education, after learning a great deal from their work in these cluster colleges (Gaff and Associates, 1970). Jerry Gaff, Gene Rice, and Dick Martin went on to play a major role in American higher education during the last years of the 20th Century and first decades of the 21st Century yet were not remembered at their own university. I would suggest that where there is no memory in any system, there is an abundance of nothingness.
Arrogance and Ignorance in American Healthcare
As in the case of American postsecondary education, American healthcare yields a negative utility, when compared to healthcare being offered in many other countries. We are paying more for healthcare than citizens of virtually all other countries. Yet we Americans are receiving poorer quality of health, as determined by many experts in the field. Evidence of the dysfunction in contemporary American health care is abundant. For instance, Ezekiel Emanuel (2020, p. 50) rates the United States as quite low on many dimensions:
“The US health care system underperforms in many ways. It is very complex, more so than that of any other country in the world. And it has a strange combination of being lean—with fewer physicians, hospital admissions and other services than almost any country—while having bloated costs.”
As those who are purchasing healthcare services (or paying for the insurance that covers the healthcare costs), we are willing (or required) to pay more and receive less. We Americans are choosing to pay for the broccoli stem (high cost/poor quality healthcare services).
