Starving the Beast — Playing at the Rialto Theatre in Raleigh through Thursday, Oct. 6.

By Eric Johnson
Contributing Editor

Many of the scenes in Starving the Beast will be familiar to North Carolinians.

There’s footage of former University of North Carolina President Tom Ross, seated awkwardly next to the Board of Governors chairman who just ousted him. There’s Gene Nichol, UNC law professor and prominent political commentator, describing the backlash to his stinging criticism of state lawmakers. And there’s Jay Schalin of the Raleigh-based Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, arguing for a market-based approach to higher education.

In a 95-minute documentary that leans heavily on interviews, news clips and lovely footage of campus architecture, Starving the Beast links these Tar Heel controversies to a broader movement to defund and disrupt public higher education. With vignettes that focus on flagship institutions in Louisiana, Texas, Wisconsin, Virginia and North Carolina, the filmmakers aim a spotlight on “one of the most important and least understood issues in the country.”

James Carville’s 2015 commencement address at Louisiana State University opens the argument and sets the tone for the whole film. “They say that education is a commodity,” Carville fumes, speaking of reformist critics of higher education. “You can charge for it, you can raise tuition, it’s just another thing out there. It’s a barrel of oil, it’s an ounce of gold, it’s a stock — it’s anything.”

That question — whether education is a market good like any other, or a public trust deserving deep taxpayer support — drives all the policy battles outlined in Starving the Beast. The scene of the drama changes, but the core division between market reformers and public-sector advocates is consistent.

The film is at its best savaging the unthinking rhetoric of disruption, the belief that major research universities are lumbering dinosaurs in need of fundamental restructuring. Over and over, Starving the Beast makes the case that America’s world-class state universities are not broken, and are in fact leading the globe when it comes to innovation and economic competitiveness. Urgent calls for “disruptive innovation” and “breakthrough solutions” are just jargon – remedies in search of a nonexistent problem.

That case is compelling. Big research universities lack the agility, speed, and “fail fast” culture of business not because they are inept, but because they are not businesses. They are not looking to the next quarter, the next product cycle, the next consumer trend. They are looking to the next generation, the next century and beyond.

“It only took a hundred years,” one professor says of building the University of Texas into a world-class institution. “But that’s not so very long in this world.”

Indeed, it’s not. The University of North Carolina was founded about the time the US Constitution was ratified. The University of Virginia dates to 1825. Against that backdrop, hearing UVa’s Board of Visitors explain their firing of President Teresa Sullivan for a lack of “strategic dynamism” sounds outright silly.  These institutions are not built to pivot with the whims of a frenetic marketplace; they’re built to sustain civilization, come what may.

But in forcefully batting back the disrupters’ attack on flagship institutions, the film sidesteps the lower-profile debate over the rest of public higher education. The regional public campuses — the workhorses of higher education, where admissions standards are lower and resources are thinner — have a genuine challenge with escalating costs and lagging graduation rates.

Declining public support is certainly part of the issue, but less-selective colleges have long struggled with academic performance and poor completion. Figuring out how to both enroll students and graduate them is a major concern that often unites reformers on the left and right, and it’s crucial if higher education is to reach more people.

In North Carolina, the state’s two largest public research universities — UNC Chapel Hill and NC State — enroll more than 42,000 undergraduates combined.  That’s still less than a quarter of the students who attend the state’s public universities.

Fights over the powerhouse schools draw much of the attention, but it’s the incremental work of improving regional institutions that will define the future of higher education for most students. On that front, Starving the Beast is totally silent.

Still, it serves as a needed corrective to the idea that public higher education is outmoded or outclassed in a competitive marketplace. Public universities remain incredibly valuable assets for students and taxpayers, bastions of timeless learning and long-range invention in a world grown twitchy and distractible.

In that light, disruption is more disease than cure.  Institutions that take centuries to build can be undone in far less time, and Starving the Beast is a stark warning about the cost of being in a hurry.