In what now seems to be at least an annual ritual, the call is being raised to end tenure as an ideological relic which has stifled innovation, induced the double digit percentage increases in tuition, and caused tooth decay.
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Could we require people who call for the end of tenure actually work in the higher education industry? Good to see Christopher Shea does not let things like logic and facts get in the way of a good vacuous argument.
ReplyDeleteAndrew Hacker simply does not know what he is talking about. The American model of higher education comes directly from the German model of higher education by way of the British. In Germany, universities were expected to be warehouses of knowledge. America adopted a similar stance toward its universities. Too bad Hacker display a complete ignorance of its subject when he says that universities should get out of the knowledge business.
Claudia C. Dreifus displays a draw dropping lack of critical thinking skills. She should be fired by the New York Times because there are better writers out there. Writers who can actually develop a non-contradictory argument supported by actual facts and not grounded in utter fantasy land.
Taken together, Tweedledum and Tweedledee should enjoy many appearances on Fox and Friends for years to come.
If you read it closely there are two good ideas: trim adminstration and cut back on athletics. The rest of it is clueless hyperbole.
ReplyDeleteI've written it before and I'll write it again: the first book that I know of that explicitly wanted tenure to end was Charles Sykes 1988 tome "ProfScam." That book was a right-wing hit piece written by a journalism prof who is now a syndicated AM radio ranter. Skyes felt that tenure was an excuse for professors to avoid teaching (shifting this weight onto the TAs, VAPs, Adjuncts) and go into the esoteric research they needed to publish unreadable articles in academic journals (which Sykes also wanted to eliminate.) He wanted everybody on "fixed-term renweable contracts", he wanted to force all college professors to teach, he wanted an end to academic associations like the MLA, and above all else he wanted to kill postmodernism, academic Marxism, etc., and replace those with the Great Books, which every student would have to know even if they were in the hard sciences.
the Great Books, which every student would have to know even if they were in the hard sciences.
ReplyDeleteYou say that like it's a bad thing.
Lovely. Helicopter parents write books now: "Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It."
ReplyDeleteCan any journalist write an article about education costs that avoids the following:
ReplyDelete1. cite the MOST expensive tuition
2. cite the LOWEST pay for instructors
3. provide space for a crank to complain about the system
4. partially rebut the crank's craziest arguments by saying "things are not quite that bad"
5. complain that tuition costs during the recession is hurting students and taxpayers
Items 1 through 4 are obviously used to avoid the requirement for the writer to actually make an argument. #5 is absolutely true, but guess what? Everything sucks during a recession inside and outside of academia. This is what passes for journalism at the NYT? Pathetic.
@ introvert.prof
ReplyDeleteI'm not against studying the Great Books, it's just who considers what to be a "Great Book?" Reading "ProfScam" you get the idea that students would be slogging through Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley along with Aristotle, "Beowulf", and quadratic equations. If not that, then what do you do with the engineering and science students, if everybody has to know the Western canon? Do they take watered-down humanites courses, or do they spend a year or two with John Donne, St. Thomas Aquinas, fill in the blank? I'm being very serious; if we want to follow his directions we are going to have to restructure the university to do this, or demand that tech students do this work at a nearby CC.
BTW, I don't think you get how bad it would be at Charles Sykes U.; he wants parents to come in on office hours to complain about how little Timmy Flake is doing, he wants the Dean and the Board of Trustees to micromanage the classrooms. Pretty much all he wants professors to be pedagogues with few free-speech rights, if any.
I think the best book about the education system that I have read is one called "Beer and Circus." It seems that the author's idea about separating the research and teaching sides of universities would be worth a try. Let the professors who are better at teaching, teach, and those who are better at researching, research. Cut the number of universities in the U.S. and let more trade schools "come into the business." After all, many students see their degree as just a portal to a job. With a trade school, this is pretty much true!
ReplyDeleteMathsquatch out.
I agree with M'squatch on Beer and Circus: How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education
ReplyDeleteTenure is the reason for underpaid adjuncts? Really? Not bloated administrative salaries, Division I athletics, and lab and equipment costs for scientists that at least at my U., are in bed with big corporations?
ReplyDeleteWhat a load of crap.
I'm not against studying the Great Books, it's just who considers what to be a "Great Book?" Reading "ProfScam" you get the idea that students would be slogging through Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley along with Aristotle, "Beowulf", and quadratic equations. If not that, then what do you do with the engineering and science students, if everybody has to know the Western canon? Do they take watered-down humanites courses, or do they spend a year or two with John Donne, St. Thomas Aquinas, fill in the blank? I'm being very serious; if we want to follow his directions we are going to have to restructure the university to do this, or demand that tech students do this work at a nearby CC.
ReplyDeleteThere’s never enough time for everything. To take an example near and dear to my heart, organic chemistry pedagogy, in the past few decades, has largely been an exercise in what to leave out.
The great books schools, such as St. Thomas Aquinas or St. John’s Colleges, don’t pretend to have majors at all. The curriculum doesn’t include minor figures like Kirk and Buckley; we’re talking Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Homer, Dickens, Nietsche, Thomas Aquinas, Pascal, Lavoisier, Darwin, Hegel, Einstein … They also have lab sciences; like any gen-ed science course, a review of how we know what we know. But unlike most gen-ed science, they’re wrestling with the real history of the fields.
What most schools – like mine – try to do is try to strike a middle way between British science education – which is a straight-out, no-apologies vocational program – and the Great Books curriculum, which doesn’t try to be vocational at all, for anybody.
I taught an Honors seminar some years back on Snow’s “Two Cultures,” and ever since have been haunted by a quotation from T.H. Huxley’s address to the entering class at what is now the University of Birmingham, but which began as a College of Science. The College was founded by Sir Josiah Mason and banned “mere literary instruction and education.”
A point Huxley made quite explicitly in his address was that this, too, is the wrong approach: "An exclusively scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. The value of the cargo does not compensate for a ship's being out of trim; and I should be very sorry to think that the Scientific College would turn out none but lopsided men."
Lopsided men such as one successful scientist I could name, who was baffled when I dropped the word “Bolshevik” into a conversation about family history.
the Great Books, which every student would have to know even if they were in the hard sciences.
ReplyDeleteYou say that like it's a bad thing.
Tell you what. You make my students read and write about Aristotle, Aquinas, and Gibbon—what the hell, in their original languages—and I'll make your students actually solve differential equations. Deal?
Once we get that done, we can both converge on the football team.
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ReplyDeleteOh, here's another quotation, ca. 1955:
ReplyDeleteThe Johns Hopkins University certifies that John Wentworth Doe does not know anything but biochemistry. Please pay no attention to any pronouncement he may make on any other subject, particularly when he joins with others of his kind to save the world from something or other. However, he worked hard for this degree and is potentially a most valuable citizen. Please treat him kindly.
Quoted by Jay Labinger in Daedelus, in his article, "The Science Wars and the Future of the American Academic Profession."
You make my students read and write about Aristotle, Aquinas, and Gibbon—what the hell, in their original languages—and I'll make your students actually solve differential equations. Deal?
ReplyDeleteIn a Great Books curriculum, that's exactly what they do. That is, they read (a limited amount of) material in the original languages, and they solve differential equations, among other things.
Not for every student. We'll never get away with that sort of thing so long as everybody thinks they need a piece of paper that says "Bachelor of ___."