Are American Universities Going the Way of General Motors?
Identity politics causes preferential grading, a phenomenon that impacts everyone because students, always psyching out the system, calculate the minimum they need to do to stay ahead of those anchoring the bottom class standard. With tuition costs rising as education quality decreases, students have to work more and more hours outside of school to pay for their educations. Gaming the system is as necessary to academic survival as balancing one’s schedule.
Among the inadvertent boons to gamesmanship has been a well-intentioned and often successful program called “writing across the curriculum,” which encourages the assignment of outside written papers. For students too intellectually challenged to rework material from the Internet, the program often supports a writing laboratory, where volunteers will edit your work to the point where the difference between your work and theirs is lost. To raise the issue of academic integrity is to challenge the entire program. No one does.
The editorial assistance students get is euphemistically called “heavy editing,” and at the graduate level, faculty committees have used the device to promote both their cultural audits and department productivity profiles. In reality, many dissertations are actually rewritten by faculty members to such an extent that it is difficult to attribute the final product to the student, but rest assured, the statistical entry will become part of the department’s successful profile.
With greater demand for statistical outcomes from a pool of students that brings to the educational process lesser intellectual and motivational material and from students who have to work longer hours to meet expenses, education becomes transformed into a bean-counting ritual. We still know how to grant degrees, but in many fields education has become so bureaucratized that we have forgotten what the goal of an education is.
The reason our system of higher education still works in the sciences and engineering is because serious fields draw serious students and because of the importation of a large number of highly motivated foreign students. Go to the buildings where the advanced classes in science and engineering are held and see who is taking them. The number of Asian students so dominated one of the science buildings on my campus that students dubbed it “the Asian bazaar.”
American higher education in the sciences and engineering will continue to thrive as long as we can entice highly motivated foreign students to come here and study in those fields. And, of course, we need to entice them to stay on here and not take their skills back home. More than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups were the results of the creative power of immigrants. Draining the intellectual power of the rest of the world has worked well for us. But when these students find educational and economic opportunities closer to home, there will be a profoundly negative impact on our higher education system. Some of these students might find that having to fulfill a cultural requirement with a class in “the lesser lesbian poets” is a sufficient enough turnoff to think about educational opportunities elsewhere.
Time to bailout Obama’s staunch acolytes, no?
Bailout the Big Academia, then bailout the Big Media.
How are private universities and colleges different than state-supported when it comes to these issues? Is there any public or private (or for-profit) system that puts excellence over interest-group politics?
If you look long and hard you will find some colleges and universities that are more focused on excellence than others. Hillsdale College comes to mind. Rice University and Franklin and Marshall College did a rigorous job of traing two of my kids. The problem is that as tuitions become more and more unaffordable for most normal working families, the colleges need desperately to attrack more and more “rich” full paying students. This not only dumbs down the curriculum,but more importantly forces the colleges to market themselves to these students. Thus lots of scarce resources are spent on fancy cafeterias and plushed up dorms. The curriculum becomes heavily infested with gender studies courses and silly english/political offerrings. It is both easy to take these courses and kind of like having a bull session with your friends. SO rigor goes out the window and tuitions keep going up. The rate of full pay tuitions escalate so quickly because the actual “cost” of the needed tuition is about 2/3rds of the “rack rate” full tuition actually paid. The surplus is used to offer discounts or as they are called in college talk “scholarship grants” to more desired students. Thus you have a pool of rich kids with fairly high SAT scores and a pool of “desired” students who either are “very bright high SAT scorers” needed to keep the averages for the college up, minority to make the “diversity quotient” look good on the US News ranking system, or a special ability athlete needed for a sports team or another type of needed student for some sort of overall college marketing goal. So pandering to those dumb enough or impressed enough to pay 150% of what the “real” tuition should be becomes the main driving force of all college admissions except those at the very peak of “prestige”.
Sorry Nickel, but going after the ‘rich’ for higher tuition would only play into the hands of the already greedy institutions!
How about, instead of the colleges/universities annually raising tuition over and above inflation costs, they instead dip into their endowment funds that they so jealously guard (to the tune of billions of dollars in some cases)?
How about, instead of paying tenured professors 3 and 4 million dollars a year (it’s true in many cases and that is not taking into account the loot they drag in on grant money), and let them receive no more than 90% of what the Governor is making?
Just a couple of thoughts …
I think it is too late for most of these modern monasteries. As with their earlier counterparts, corruption is rampant. As the fees go up, students and parents become consumers and expect a degree for the money. When the degree fails to produce a decent job and the loans take decades to pay back, thinking people question the system and ideologues defend it to the bitter end. Realists will take degrees on-line or at the institutions where value still abides. Those who want a graduate education will apprentice at think tanks. But parking your young adults at what is no more than a finishing school is increasingly seen as a waste of time and money.
You hit on part of the problem:
Students (and parents) believe that they are entitled to a degree (or passing grade) in return for paying the tuition. I know this because I had a very mediocre student argue with me about this once — the student was quite mad that paying for the class didn’t give you at least a “C”…I got plenty of nasty comments on that teacher evaluation that year, caused my department head to threaten me, so the lesson was learned: give them the grades they want, the lectures they want, the assignments they want, or get yourself unemployed (that’s another issue — I don’t remember teacher evaluations or “rate my teacher” back in my day).
Profs believe they are entitled to their tenure — which means they are entitled to grad assistants, trips to colloqiums, readings, what have you (the cocktail circuit of the academic crowd — any humanities person will tell you, if they are honest, that is the de riguer and gold standard of academic life right there — getting to read your paper at one of those little get togethers. So, they can bust their butts researching and teaching and striving for excellence (to quote the university letterhead)…or they can teach fluff stuff, go to the same colloqiums, readings, etc. and have a batch of fawning co-eds of either sex who adores them (because the kids haven’t been really challenged to learn and have also had their little egos stroked…it’s a very symbiotic thing).
The university doesn’t care as long as that sweet, sweet tuition and grant money rolls in.
And some of us “rich” are beginning to question why we should be taxed by the Universities. I have two kids in top private colleges and out of about $53,000 a year in tuition, fees and costs (each) I estimate that about $12,000 is being used to give someone else financial aid. When one university approached me about a donation I made it clear I viewed that extra $12,000 of tuition as a donation. The development officer noted that she had heard similar comments from other prospective donors.
Sorry, part of what Nickel writes is the truth:
College tuition has gone through the roof — so they had to add more goodies and make for more fluff classes, as they had to court people who could pay the full tuition. There are many hard working, intelligent, successful wealthy people out there whith children just like them…and then there are some of their kids that are lazy, spoiled, dumbarses. I think their parents realize this, and thus send Muffy and Biff to wherever they can have a good time, get a nice degree to hang on the wall, possibly learn a little something, get into the right clubs, and take over Mommy and Daddy’s business later (to be run by some competent person who wasn’t such a vapid dullard during their formative years).
The colleges have to do something to get that sweet, sweet tuition money (operational costs and all that); unfortunately there needed to remain a balance — that has been lost. The colleges got too greedy.
Signed,
Erstwhile Grad Assistant who worked in the Writing Lab, as an asst. prof, and later worked as a research asst. and department coordinator asst. on the project to get the Writing Across the Curriculum Program started (and yeah, that’s when I got my eyes opened to what was really going on in the colleges…that was a long time ago, it’s gotten worse since then)
College Mom, yes, there are two shining examples left of academic excellence, places where parents, as consumers, get bang for their buck. They are MIT & Caltech. Check out, ‘The Price of Admissions’ by Dan Golden where much of the mystique to college admissions is stripped away.
Having paid over $ 320,000 in tuition for both schools, up until June 07, I state with authority, this was money well spent.
Really.
It is no accident that both MIT and CalTech dominate in fields where political correctness has the most trouble making trouble — the hard sciences. Political correctness is destroying the other fields of study in most other institutions.
I don’t know if Adina Kutnicki was praising MIT and Caltech for their science/engineering faculties (that are considered to be the best) or including the humanities. I am familiar with some of their faculty in the humanities and at the time when I looked, were as left-wing or social democratic as the other elite universities. Take a look at their history of science programs, Pajamas readers, and see if they have not relativized science as just another story, which would tend to undermine the science faculties. Or perhaps they have gotten past all that postmodernism. But how could they with the tenure rules? See this among many other essays on my website on the problem with the pseudo-scientists of the Conservative Enlightenment:http://clarespark.com/2009/11/02/a-ride-through-the-culture-wars-in-academe/.
But you are talking about two schools where the real insidious factor does not exist. Admission solely based on non-academic considerations. If you look at the student body, 35-40% are Asian American, Hispanics around 10-15%, Blacks one or two per class. Affirmative Action makes no difference: the pace and level of student competition washes the academic weak sisters out. Approximately one-third of the entering freshmen do NOT graduate – ever.
As far as humanities go, while respected, the unspoken assumption is that they are not as important as that class in advanced mathematical physics. Again, another factor that makes these student bodies different.
Political notions are tolerated, but not embraced…life has more important things to do…
To anonymous, More’s the pity if you are correct. Scientists who lack training in basic economics, political theory, and history will be the patsies of any corporation or government that wants to use their skills, the public be damned. I should add literature to that. At least one or two brilliant scientists of my acquaintance can easily be seduced by very partisan politics, and have no idea that they are following a line. They would be more autonomous if they were aware, say, of rival economic theories, and learned to decode propaganda, whatever the source.
Anonymous, you are so right.
In fact, at Caltech my son was not only one of the token Whites in his class, but also one of the token Jews. At MIT there is a bigger ratio of whites and Jews, but that is only in comparison to Caltech’s tiny class of 250. In either case, they are the ONLY schools where one cannot buy ones admission.Dan Golden’s, Price of Admission, attests to this.
It is also true that the attrition rate at these schools is about 20% of each class. The meek, even among this standout crowd, simply do not survive. It is survival of the (academic) fittest, a true meritocracy.Besides, hard work NEVER killed anybody.
Clare, when I refer to Caltech & MIT I am ONLY speaking about their hard sciences/engineering.
True, my sons had to take humanities too, but they were taken with a grain of salt, almost as a respite from otherwise insane work loads.
While in a perfect world both realize how important the humanities are, they also knew that they would never get the info they needed from any US program. Suffice it to say, they both performed a lot of self study.
Caltech is not infected with the PC virus. MIT’s humanities are a mixed bag.
Again, if one is looking to be an Engineer or a Research Scientist there are NO better programs out there.Period.
It’s a puzzle.
These “intelligentsia” and their “elite” troops who decide how and why? universities are managed are reputedly,the “best and brightest”. But they do not seem to be able to tie their own shoes except as members of some strutting (goose-stepping?) gang, always with badges of gang membership prominently displayed : Ivy League,The Big Ten etc
De haut en bas, their true concern for the “poor” and the “disadvantaged”, whose acquaintance they make only as their often illegal immigrant housemaids, chauffeurs, gardeners and affirmative action “clients”. Even more interesting these best and brightest call themselves “liberals” and “democrats”.
VERY ODD A telling example of group-think.
Payback ? from the “intellectuals / oids” not properly revered/ respected/ acknowledged for their worth by “common people”, who without the leadership of the “intellectuals” managed to make of their country one of the marvels of the modern age, the most desirable prey for those who could not / did not “cut the mustard”.
It’s really all about “RESPECT” isn’t it ? AND which gang is to be Capo !
Thanks to Adina for the intel that her son was not diverted by his humanities classes. The great thing about literature, art history, political history, and psychology, is that a curious person can teach herself or himself these disciplines without benefit of the “clergy.” It takes a while, but it can be done. I was an autodidact in history, and managed to get a degree after a long struggle with the anti-science faculty at my school in California.
Poorly written. What is the thesis of the article? I read it twice and can’t figure it out. NB to Pajama Media management. Where is you editor? Asleep?
Yaak,Yaak,Yaak.Reading & F-,must be an Educator .lol
Let me try to explain it to you.
1; The Economist asks a rhetorical question about the resemblance between modern U.S. academia and the U.S. auto industry after the bailout. Apparently not realizing that American academia was taken over by the same part of the “enlightened elite’” who now run the U.S. government decades earlier.
2; In modern academia, “political correctness” trumps all. The idea that the system, run by “progressives”, must constantly re-commit itself to stamping out gender or cultural/ethnic “bias” against duly-certified “disadvantaged” groups is the only thing considered important enough to warrant hard-copy notification in an email age. (This means that failure to comply amounts to treason against the system- You Have Been Warned In Writing.)
3; The ability (feigned or otherwise) to achieve (2) will be tested by what amount to “thought police” who have the authority to ruin the careers of anyone deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about same. Other than that, their jobs are little more than sinecures’ (i.e., they don’t actually have to do anything, or indeed even know HOW to do anything).
4; This “philosophy” is prevalent across the spectrum of so-called “liberal arts” on campus. To attain a degree, one merely needs to agree with whatever the (radically-progressive) professor says. To the point that plagiarism, use of “paper mills”, and other unethical techniques of creating publishable papers are authorized, or at least winked at, as long as the professors’ orthodoxy is not challenged in any way whatsoever. And such courses are required for graduation, as much to ensure employment for the professors as to ensure that all students learn to “think the right way” about everything.
5; This lack of scholastic rectitude does not extend to the “hard” sciences (math, engineering, etc.), but only because they are seen as the red-headed b*****d stepchildren on campus. The real power lies in the cloistered halls of the “social sciences”, where all the professors are engaged in turning the place into a “temple of irrelevant logic-chopping”, to quote James Burke (describing the last time this happened in Western academia, just prior to the Catholic/Protestant schism – read “The Day The Universe Changed”, and/or look up “Martin Luther”).
6; As a consequence of the stepchild status of actual sciences, most graduates in same today are not from the U.S.- they are foreign students who come here for the excellence of such education, which is available no where else on Earth at present. The author speculates on what may happen when they go home and start working and/or teaching such subjects there, leaving us with graduate schools full of students who are experts in nothing but being More Politically Correct Than The Person In The Next Office Over. Who designs the bridges and builds the power plants then? (And if they are actually built, who operates them?)
I understood it perfectly. But then, I’m from a one-horse school in Ohio, as opposed to Harvard.
Where the only required courses were the ones pertaining to the degree I was actually after. In applied science.
clear ether
eon
What the author was trying to say, and I admit cryptically, was that universities and colleges have so watered down their curriculum that they are no longer producing graduates who can either think critically or who have become so imbued with leftist dogma that they defeat the purpose of a college education. And that only the hard sciences still offer an real education.
The various “studies” departments are nothing but leftist dogma trash bins, but are forced into being taken seriously by the fringe professors and administrators and the MSM. The “intellectually challenged” is a euphemism for the affirmative action/diversity student. For the white progressive to feel good about themselves they MUST have oppressed and victim students in abundance on the campus. It achieves diversity don’t cha know. And to them diversity is a religion. Why diversity alters the phsyics of the universe according to them.
But sooner or later since college tuition and costs have been rising at 2-3 times the rate of inflation, the public will be called on to save the whole post secondary system.
You’re absolutely right, Blotto, except for one thing. No, the public won’t be called on to save the whole post secondary system because the public is broke. We have reached the tipping point. And besides, the public is going to community college these days because that’s where they can learn real job skills.
Eventually reality trumps everything, which is why that video clip from the German movie about Hitler’s last hours is so much fun to parody. Sooner or later, if they choose to ignore reality, the powers-that-be find themselves in a metaphorical bunker, issuing meaningless orders to non-existent supporters, while some metaphorical Soviet Army blasts them into oblivion. There really are laws of history, it’s just that Mr. Marx got them all wrong.
You know who I think scares the academic elites down to their core? Someone like Sarah Palin. Sarah Palin scares the crap out of the academic elites because she shows how successful you can be without being an “academic elite.” She was the governor of a major state, is an unbelievably successful author and speaker, and her political influence can sway elections. Not bad for a graduate from a university in Idaho.
Contrast that with all of the Harvard-educated elites that now inhabit the Obama administration. All of these “brilliant” academics have now destroyed our economy, have given us almost 10% unemployment for the foreseeable future, are destroying our industrial base, and have loaded so many entitlements into our government that it’s almost impossible to run a profitable new small business anymore in this country. Not bad for some “brilliant” economic elites that were supposed to rescue this country from economic doom.
That’s why academia is petrified of Sarah Palin. She exposes the lie that you have to have a degree from a “prestigious” university to “be” somebody in this world and to be a success. What a load of junk. By the way, Bill Gates never graduated from a college, either. And now that the mask is off at how dangerous it really is to have an administration run by academics, you see that people with actual business experience, people who have actually built a major corporation or created vast wealth on their own, are much more capable administrators than a bunch of Ivy League academics who have never created anything except more paperwork.
And the Ivy League schools know it and are petrified by it. You have to wonder now if a college degree really is worth the cost anymore, especially in an economy like this. And when we hear stories about contractors, electricians, and plumbers making more money than an Ivy League graduate, how much longer do you think people are actually going to pay to keep these diploma factories going?
“Not bad for a graduate from a university in Idaho.”
-Many Americans are acutely aware of Sarah Palin’s intellectual shortcomings. Her popularity goes hand in hand with a growing trend of anti-intellectualism plaguing our nation. It isn’t Palin we fear so much as the degeneration of rational thought processes in America.
A rational thought process being, of course, one that agrees with everything you say. If you can cite some examples of towering intellect, within the political class, that may be helpful. Exhume and reanimate Adlai Stevenson, perhaps?
Funny how, point of view and political orientation, seems to be the main determiner of intellectual fitness within certain quarters of our society. Reading the main point of the article, however, I am not surprised.
Not exhuming Adlai at all. It’s not the necessary of a towering intellect so much as it is knowing that Africa ISN’T a country. I don’t expect my potential leaders to agree with me, just that they have a modicum of gray matter between their ears.
Who thought Africa was a country? Certainly not Sarah Palin. Maybe it was Obama who thinks we have 57 states?
David W. Walters: No, Africa is not a country. But nor is Austrian a language. And the U.S. has only 50 states, not 57 as some would lead you to believe.
BTW ,Adlai flunked out of Harvard Law. The fact was concealed by Law Dean Pound locking Adlai’s transcript in his safe until the coast was clear. The sad truth came out later when Robert Caro – Lyndon Johnson’s biographer – Looked for it for his bio of LNJ
Such intellectual honesty does take the breath away…
“Ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh — it’s got to be all about job creation too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing, but 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.”-Sarah Palin
-This woman is simply inept/incompetent. You complain of ineptness in the White house; why’d we want to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire?
While pontificating about the ‘degeneration of intellectual thought processes’ maybe you should do a little more research on the ‘facts’ before you draw conclusions. The link below explains the source of the ‘Africa hoax’ or as you call it, one of ‘Sarah Palin’s intellectual shortcomings’.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/arts/television/13hoax.html?_r=3&hp&oref=slogin
We have meet the ‘degeneration of intellectual thought processes’ and it is you.
Your inability to see past ‘the things you know’, is what is wrong with the loony left. From the constitutional professor, who does not know the Constitution from the Declaration of Independence, to the Hollyweird types who believe that Chavez is creating a paradise, not a bit of wisdom in the lot.
Dear David Walters: You need not fear the rise of anti-intellectualism in America. Richard Hoftstatler is long dead and so is his thesis. The burden of intellect today is to demonstrate it has a foundation based on reality, not fantasy and fear.
Sarah Palin is obviously not Ph.D. material. But a lot of the Ph.D. types in the Obama Adminstration and elsewhere lack any acquaintance with reality or no link to common sense.
Isolation is not a value for those who want to influence the world or the wave of the future. History demonstrates the wrecks who spent too much time in the library and not enough time understanding people: Marx is one who comes to mind. His ideas still carry weight but the wreckage and loss of life as a result of his hypothesis is clearly evident.
Thank you for your contribution to the discussion.
James,
It’s not so much “fear” of anti-intellectualism as a lament that ignorance is so freely accepted in some quarters of our nation. The fantasy that prevails in these quarters is that the influence of America is gained through military dominance and intimidation and not through leadership by example.
As you say, it started years /decades ago. The people managing universities and schools who then went on, ACCEPTED, with isolated and ineffective demur, to vilification of “common folk” e.g.Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagon and now Sarah Palin. Aided/ abetted by establishment Media shills for the “Elite” universities of the “Blue States” in eastern and western coastal regions. In those days, Seattle was a where dat city.
“Institutionally limited” / oppressed” included BY THE UNIVERSITIES, who insist on their “academic freedom”, Vietnam Veterans, other white males who actually “cut the mustard” on the “universities” own entry standards, ANYONE innocent at interview who said what they thought was the purpose of university education and not having been coached prate the Party Line. Not sophisticated enough to understand that to lie where lies are the social currency is the way to gain entry to the club.
You also do not point up that the common folk, the taxpayers of the US, even those (especially?)of the “Red States”, via their “elite” members of the government: Congress, Court and Executive bureaucracy ALREADY SUBSIDISE and have done so for years/decades all these “elite!” universities. DIRECTLY. And indirectly : student grants and loans which particularly if provided to offspring of Beltway occupants: lawyers and bureaucrats, often not repaid, either by default or amnesty. ANOTHER LITTLE SECRET the vaunted “investigative reporters” of establishment print and TV media decline to publicise.
You can bet when it’s time to “bailout” the universities. the “elites” will be at the front of the queue. It’s only their Right, AS ELITES. Right?
Were I ever in a position to bring our colleges and universities into the real world, I would begin with a few simple, mundane changes – before I got on to the really important ones:
1. I would make each school (annually) disclose their financial standings, to include endowments, state/federal/private grants and investments; the same for the yearly budget. Make each subject to a vigorous independent audit, and only then permit them to establish their tuition rates (subject to oversight).
2. Do away with tenure!
2.a. Do away with free on-campus housing for college/university staff.
2.b. Do away with any other on-campus freebie or subsidized items (meals) for staff.
3. Require that all professors, asst. professors, etc. work a minimum of xx.xx hours (I would suggest 30), per week in the classroom.
3.a. Limit ALL professors school income to 10% less then the Governor of their state earns.
3.b. Vigorously restrict ALL grant projects work being done AFTER normal school hours.
4. Do away with grad students teaching in the classroom altogether. Let them earn their money tutoring, etc.
5. To those of you that have been to college/university … or have struggled to put one or more of your children through, you know all about the textbook scam – end it immediately!
These a just a few of my ‘issues’ – I could go on for hours.
I am a conservative, chrtistian, veteran, teaching in the fine arts. Tenure is the only reason why I have not been “purged” by my more enlightened colleagues. Working twice as hard and acheiving twice as much is the only reason I was granted tenure.
I am not sure where some of these posters are getting their ideas about academics from. I am an academic and have been for many years, not in the US but in Australia. For us tenure is dead and has been for a while. Most of my colleagues work incredibly long hours – essentially no-one works just the 1750 or so hours per year we are supposed to. Rather the figure is more like at least 50% more and often double or more – at no extra salary. Our performance is constantly being measured: quality of teaching, research output, impact, research funding, service to the discipline . Over the last 15 years academic salaries in Australia have declined in real terms, and the number of students per academic has seen an even more dramatic rise – 50% or more – so that the direct costs of teaching have declined significantly. The increasing cost of tuition in Australia goes to pay for a burgeoning, bloated, and inefficient administrative structure that does little to serve the needs of students or academics. In many instances their avowed role is deliberately not to help academics. The non-teaching loads of academics have been dramatically increased by the bureaucratic demands of this new university elite. My fairly frequent visits to the US would suggest that something similar is happening there. I commend this youtube video by Eva von Dassow:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsIZAFOd-c
Another reason that Engineering and related disciplines are still thriving relates to the need for graduates to obtain certification from outside professional bodies. Professional certification, except for fields like Social Work and Education, is required for work that may cause injury and death, incompetent work for which the employer/contractor can be sued. As with all such matters, an outside reference point is necessary for objective standards to prevail and drive course material and exams.
Educating the Educators…
Where are the next generation of professors coming from?
These very institutions, which means that the copy machine effect on steroids is soon to occur.
If you cannot hold the students to genuinly high standards you will have a flawed product to pass on to “teach” the next generation. These students with extensive editing done for them will not have the capacity to assist anyone younger when it comes to written expression as they did not learn it themselves.
Statistics are a wonderful tool to monitor a flow, but one drives by viewing the scene through the windshield and glances at the speedometer, if you focus soley on the speedometer you will find a disaster in the waiting.
Eminent British academics cheating the public by omission and misdirection, now that’s news.
When I read the words, the University of —, professor so and so, or academics agree that—-, my bull $hit antenna grow like Pinocchio’s nose. The academic world, in my view, has lost a lot of its credibility because of these myopic one issue global warming shysters. I must give this group credit for one thing though, they have certainly raised the level of awareness in the general public to the ramblings of an ingrown, narrow minded and self absorbed academia. No longer will they be able to goose step their views without being questioned.
I found this on another post and the part that struck me the most was the sentence, when I read the words —. It’s a shame but the academic world has a huge credibility hole to dig itself out of because a few unscrupulous academic light weights and those academics that left them unchallenged for so long.
Actually, whatever Yaacov thought, I think this is a pointed and well-written article. I’m glad if the science, math and engineering departments and courses of studies are still both valid and thriving, but, given that I and my two children are decidedly non-math/science types, but rather interested in languages and literature and history courses, the situation Prof. Miller describes is all too devastatingly awful, from my point of view.
Years ago–thanks, 1968!–the rigor started to disappear from humanitites courses. It’s kind of like the generalized funk affecting Western society–one has become too embarrassed to say that, yes, this particular author, or language, or period in history, is so fundamental that everyone (everyone, that is, who wants to be seriously engaged in a particular branch of a discipline) needs to have studied and mastered it. One had to pretend that all sorts of things one might read were just as valid, just as important. Thus we have come to, as Prof. Miller put it, the requirements involving ‘the lesser lesbian poets’. It would be hilariously funny if it weren’t so sad.
The most disgraceful thing is, to reflect that, at some point in the distant past (oh, was it around 1980, maybe?), the humanities professoriate, those entrusted with the responsibility to pass on the tradition of what was mastered in their respective fields, plus whatever little bits of something new they themselves had managed to contribute to it, simply decided to cast all that aside, and regale the students with word games and tricky cleverness all gussied up as the latest approach to these subjects from Paris. I’m not sure why anyone willingly undertook to learn that claptrap instead of apprenticing himself to the real stuff; it’s not that it’s all that easy to do (but it does reward the most brazen BSers, and they are a self-selecting bunch).
But there’s a generation there that willfully broke the transmission of knowledge, such as it was, in their fields. Bridges don’t fall down, thank goodness, when you fail to teach English or French or classics properly. But notice how the talented students disappear. How ‘relevant’ are those subjects now, with no students at all? The younger sort who set up to teach them now barely know their subjects. So, they can just show movies and call them ‘films.’ And those courses in college start to look a lot more like what’s taught (or used to be) at the high school level. No wonder the undergraduates are partying all the time!
It used to be that education had cultural, philosophical, and instrumental purposes.
The cultural purpose was to transmit to future generations the best of the heritage that produced our values and institutions. As you point out, sometime in the 60′s this became a wicked, Euro-centric, “bigoted” enterprise. HEY HEY HO HO…WESTERN CIV HAS GOT TO GO! Diversity!
The philosophical purpose was to pursue Truth, Goodness, and Beauty for their own sakes; to seek to understand and appreciate reality. This purpose fell victim to post-modernism (Truth?You must be joking!) and neo-Marxist categories of class, race, and gender. So the philosophical enterprise, in which Westerners had been engaged for millenia, was discredited as a hegemonic superstructure of the oppressors.
This leaves only the instrumental purpose, i.e., education for the purpose of action, whether that action be brain surgery, banking, or “community organizing.” This doesn’t mean much change for the hard and practical sciences, but in the humanities it means a change from philosophy, wisdom as an end in itself, to ideology. As Marx points out, “truth,” “knowledge,” and “facts” have no absolute or objective value. They are of value ONLY in so far as they actively advance the Movement. This imposition of instrumentalism on the humanities, needless to say, renders them at best worthless.
(Thanks for letting me vent! Your post really set me thinking.)
Thanks for your illuminating response!
What’s going to happen, to an already bad situation, if the current president gets his way and lots more students are stuffed into “colleges” to further their “education”?
There are already so many who resent being made to go to classes (and, when it’s a case of having to swallow silly indoctrination, as opposed to learning something, then who can blame them).
Talk to some of the professors who teach something challenging–or, that could be taught in the challenging way, if you still teach it the way your long-ago professors taught you–and hear their stories of how difficult it is to get kids these days to learn stuff (relative pronoun forms in Latin, the rules for accentuation in Greek, just to mention what we were talking about in my house this weekend) that’s rather hard. We’re not talking rocket science, though. And bridges won’t collapse without this stuff having been learnt. Alas, that seems to mean that these subjects can’t be taught with rigor, or no one will take them.
They’re not being taught with rigor in a lot of places; but still people aren’t taking them … Some of us are still trying to impart some rigor; not sure how long we will last, or with what effect. It’s some personal satisfaction to help at least a few students learn what I also learned at their age.
Oh booohoooo, booooohoooooo, things aren’t the way they used to be.
This is getting very old. I am a registered Republican, Southern Baptist, Army reservist teaching American Literature and Classics in Southern California, and I have a great job. Students are great, my colleagues have treated me well, and my book is coming out this fall.
I hate to be such a pest, but really, if you don’t like the trends in university life, buck them. Stick it out in a PhD program, take your knocks, deal with Leftist madness, and get your ass into the classroom and teach what you have to teach.
Be conservative in the classroom. Even if it scares you to think of the tenure review one day. One thing I can say for the Left — they don’t give a [hoot]. They irritate people and just keep on saying what they want to say. I wish conservatives would enter the Humanities with the same attitude. Instead they cower and act like bootlickers, write dissertations on Simone De Beauvoir or feminist interpretations of Euripides, then seethe with rage over the fact that their true political convictions would be dangerous to express. Nothing improves if people fear danger.
Now is the best time to take over the Humanities again. Quit crying over the 1970s and the pettiness of the Vietnam War generation. They’re old and about to retire. Get PhDs and teach, damn it!
I think the tone of my comments was misunderstood–I applaud anyone who is in the universities teaching classics and any other humanities courses in a genuinely rigorous way. I am trying to teach Latin in a public high school that way, basically in the way it was taught to me in the 1970s, mutatis mutandis.
For one thing, Latin textbook publishers have accepted that Latin 1 no longer comprises the passive voice. It’s one of the first things I teach in Latin 2 (using a textbook from the 1990s). We still get to the subjunctive in Latin 2; but it’s not till the second half of Latin 3 that my students are ready for the leap into Latin authors (Catullus and Caesar). The incumbent at my school 20 years ago, who left behind her tests, gave a final in Latin 2 then that would be appropriate for my Latin 3 students today. When I was in Latin 3, in the 1970s, that was the year we read the Aeneid; it wasn’t going by the name of AP Latin then, either (that existed for sure, but not at my school), but we read tons more Latin than is assigned in the AP syllabus today–which AP thinks is way too rigorous, by the way, so the curriculum is in the process of getting simplified (or improved, depending on how you take it).
If anyone thinks that expectations (in the humanities) haven’t plummeted since the 1970s–when it was obvious to anyone who looked at older textbooks, that they had plummeted since the 1950s–they aren’t informing themselves adequately about what has been lost.
Look at the length of the reading list in an honors English course today, as well as at what books it contains. Fewer and fewer serious demands are placed on kids. The younger teachers don’t even know it, probably.
… when the UC system jacked up the tuition last spring (I admit that this hit more than a few), at UCLA there was a rally agains this -
And, as LA Times merrily reported at the time, the leading group, teacher included, marched out from the class -
The class in cause was, as LA Times reported: “multiracial marriages in Brasil” -
Who in his minds would pay money for a class with this object of study?
It looks like there is a correlation between this type of “education”, the population that willingly attends it, their ulterior employment, and the further success of the society that nurtures these arrangements -
This author is spot on… I returned to college as an older student and was flatly appalled at the pandering going on to special interest groups, never mind the intellectually lazy in the class. I left and am completing my advanced degree (the second one I might add) at a distance learning institution. There the only pandering I have to endure is in the texts, and I find fellow older students applauding my calling it out in discussion forums… From what I saw at the bricks-and-mortar schools at present I’d say Parents should be very wary about wasting their hard-earned monies on elite BS and bias cloaked as liberal education these days…
As one who has worked in the academy for quite a few years, the complaints of intellectual disintegration are true and relevant. However, not all of it is due to the faculty’s turning the curriculum into politics. The faculty used to carry MOST of the responsibility for the university’s administration. Deans and even chancellors were professors with a teaching schedule. Professors juggled teaching and research with administrative tasks such as student recruitment, advising, and discipline.
However, the faculty abdicated that responsibility to the administrative class. The result? Universities with administrator numbers and facility amenities costing in the billions, while the numbers of full-time faculty are slashed every year. The administrators, having been educated by Alinskyite faculty, have put their power-grabbing PC philosophies into practice. So now we have universities being run by hordes of administrators with NO ties to the classroom, and who hold all the power. Full-time faculty have been replaced with temp workers (aka adjunct faculty). Administrators know where their bread is buttered, so of course they put students’ wants and “feelings” ahead of anything else.
When a student tells me he’s “paid to get an A in this class,” that attitude is not entirely due to changes in curricula over the past 50 years….
This article is on point. The allowing of students who should never be in college has been going on for 40+ years.
A personal college experience:
When I went to undergraduate school “every” freshman was “pre-med”. 90% couldn’t handle the math and science, so they switched to engineering. 90% of them couldn’t handle the math and science so they swithched to business. The college of business required statistics, Calc I and Calc II before a student could enroll and take business courses, so 80% of them swithced to “liberal arts”. These “liberal arts” majors, upon graduation, discovered they were unemployable so they go on to law school, where they were still unemployable, but now have significant debt from school.
When I started college I shared a dorm with three other people and out of the four I was the only one to graduate, the other three didn’t.
Sadly gone are the rigorous studies where schools were not afraid to flunk out students. They have become money machines, who would rather pass a tuition paying student, who does not belong in college, along and have them graduate with a uselss diploma, then flunk them and tell them they should not be in college. Law school is just as bad as are liberal arts graduate schools.
The policy of “retention” is not retention, but a policy of keeping the tuiton money flowing from students who should not be there in the first place.
Also do parents know what colleges and universities are teaching their children? What are the core curriculum required of all students? A good web site that rates colleges on whether they are teaching students to succeed in the real world is whatwilltheylearn.com. Not surpirsing the majority of brand name, elitist or private colleges, i.e. Harvard, Berkley, Virginia, Wellesley etc… get a “D” or “F”, whereas schools such as Texas A&M, University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, Air Force, West Point, University of Texas, University of Oklahoma, University of Florida get an “A” or “B”.
Even in college reading, writing and arithmatic should be required and all the liberal arts fluff garbage should be removed.
Its not just politics, though this is a lot of the problem, its a fundamental lack of balance and goal-orientation in their guidance of undergrads.
An undergrad gets a wild hair to take a class by a prof they like in the intro course, but this course has no benefit to their goal of getting a degree in 4 years that will help them get ahead in life. The advising system says “OK”. No direction back to the goal is given.
In the hard sciences, there is a constant drum beat for these students to take more humanities courses to be “well rounded”, but yet there are no art majors in Calculus. There are premed chemistry majors taking upper division history courses, but not the other way around. I guess well-roundedness is only good for science majors.
Lastly, what most kids need is repetitive exposures to a Dutch Uncle. They need someone to sit down with them and ask the hard question: “How are you going to make a living in the world?”, and then follow-up with that. We don’t see that much from advisors or from parents. We see lots of parents bitching about college. We see lots of students taking pointless classes. The Dutch Uncle is a relative. Its gut check and face in the mirror time for parents and students.
If College X is full of pandering, and grade inflation, you have to be willing to face the uncle and own up to the point that unless you want to get a degree in french fries, you had better step up.
I agree with the article in general. My only quibble is the assertion that:
“The reason our system of higher education still works in the sciences and engineering is because serious fields draw serious students and because of the importation of a large number of highly motivated foreign students.”
I think it more a result of the fact that science and engineering have hard and fast right and wrong answers and natural law wins every argument. When you make a calculation, there is no way to adjust the outcome for the political identity group of the student. Professors in these fields, while not immune to political bias and grade inflation, seem to be less susceptible to it. In addition, the presence of foreign students can be used to stave off the diversity bean counters. (Although I did hear an administrator assert that a physics department didn’t have enough diversity because black students from Africa weren’t “African-American” and thus didn’t “count” as “black”!)
Science can be politicized too: Global warming.
Well — with the exception of hard science and hard engineering, the following is true:
(1) You can pay a TOTAL of $25K and get a 4 year degree from a fully accredited and reputable on line university.
(2) Corporate HR departments just want that 4 year degree check box checked, they don’t give a rats behind where you get it from.
Therefore — for the 90% of people who want a 4 year degree merely so that they can crack their way into the corporate world and make some $$$ — why the heck would you do anything else?
Of course the universities will continue to prey upon the ignorant, saddling students with $100K in debt for a degree in “-studies”, where they spend their college years drinking and and enjoying “friends with benefits”. Play now and pay later — and pay they do.
The kids graduating with $100K in debt are the exceptions, yet are reported ad nauseam to achieve the desired effect of scare-mongering. According to the College Board, the median student debt from a public college was $17,700. (http://www.collegeboard.com/press/releases/206122.html) That’s still a bargain. When I graduated in 1984, my student debt from a public college was today’s equivalent of $26,000. Because of the horrible economy, it took me 4 years to find a job in my profession, but in the meantime I worked at whatever job I could find so I could make that loan payment. It wasn’t easy, and many sacrifices were made, but I paid those loans off, on time.
Taking out a loan for anything–a house, business, or college–NEVER guarantees a profitable outcome. Yet all the complaining otherwise is evidence of the entitlement mentality. “I paid for that degree, therefore I’m entitled to a job in my field as soon as graduation is over!”
You might be right about the mean student debt. It merely means that their parents picked up the tab. And if you fill out the financial aid calculators, it is quite possible for the parents to eat $80K for 4 years for their first kid, and $50K for the 2nd (amount goes down if you have 2 kids in college). And that is for those public colleges. The amount paid goes way up from there.
In middle age, I went to an online college. Had 2 years of work to complete for a degree, got it in 1.5 years. Studied computer programming, so not too much BS to cope with. Cost: $10K, paid by semester, so the $25K estimate above is about right.
Was not slowed down by the illiterates and temperamental jerks that make brick & mortar programming classes a nightmare, at least the freshman and sophomore classes. Could work as hard as I wished and go as fast as I was able. I would recommend it to anyone who does not need to be driven by a teacher, or the social life thing. I learned what I went there for.
It might be different in other areas of expertise, in programming there is a bottom line – at some point the code has to work.
The whole college system is totally screwed up and it has been for a long time. Once upon a time college was reserved for the truly talented. Now its just post-graduate elementary school with a high sticker price that “everyone” should go to. And in order to make sure that the mediocre people can pass much of it has been dumbed down to the point where it means nothing except debt to a lot of the poor fools who can’t really gain anything more from the experience than the Scarecrow did in the Wizard of Oz when he got his diploma from the charlatan wizard.
If anything we need people to be able to get “certification degrees” that don’t need four years to get. If someone wants to get a degree in Computer Science let them just take the courses in Computer Science. Don’t make them waste their time and money by requiring that they take so many hours in English Lit and Oppression Studies in order to get the degree they want. And don’t make the English Lit people burn up their time with “Math for Dummies” classes.
And it might be a good idea for the potential employers in a given field to come together and just come out with yearly aptitude tests that truly do test just how knowledgeable and/or talented people are in a given field. Screw the degrees. How well do you do on the test? It would be great feedback for people who are looking around for a college. If say only 2% of the graduates of college X can pass the Computer Science test it may well be that not many people will wish to enroll there if that is their career path.
Its time to adapt our educational system to the present. The past is past.
“In reality, many dissertations are actually rewritten by faculty members to such an extent that it is difficult to attribute the final product to the student…”
This doesn’t appear to happen at Princeton. I slogged my way all through Michelle’s ghastly thesis and I didn’t see a single professor’s name attached to that racist, self-pitying mess. She was on her own. Princeton’s professors may have been willing to let their institution look an idiot for allowing Michelle to publish that disgrace of a thesis – but they obviously had no intention of letting themselves look stupid as well.
If you want to keep up with the academy, become a member of the National Association of Scholars. I do and learn much.
I spoke with a music teacher in a small West Texas university yesterday. The university offers tuition scholarship to Mexican students who have not studied music ever. No performance credentials but many of the students want to major in perforance: conducting, for example.
Some want to “learn” vocal music, but with no musical background, climbing Mt. Everest might be within reach.
Encouraging students to fail is hardly a worthy academic goal.
The “great” universities of the East and West and elsewhere are living on borrowed time. The fraud and his cost will expose them for what they are not: not institutions worthy of the name university.
On line education and technology schools will lead the way as a new generation of students do not want to invest in high academic and faculty salaries and receive nothing of value from the investment.
At one community college where I teach remedial English, the writing lab assistants never touch a student’s paper. The student holds it and reads it to the tutor while the tutor raises questions or makes suggestions regarding things like thesis, organization, and focus. It’s up to the student to make notes on the paper (if they want) and consider the tutor’s suggestions (if they want).
Of course, if the student doesn’t need help with organization but grammar, spelling, or punctuation, then the tutor needs to be a bit more hands-on. Even then, they teach them a short lesson using their paper, rather than simply marking it all up for them.
Passing that class is (in part) contingent upon an essay produced in class, supervised by the professor, with no input, peer workshops, or writing labs.
That’s an example of doing it the right way.
At the other community college where I teach basically the same course, the writing lab will not help a student with any paper that has not already received a grade (to avoid the “heavy editing” described above). I really don’t know what kind of method they use, since once students receive a grade they no longer want to put any work into it (we’re on the next assignment anyway, and their time is limited) – so I’ve never had a student actually go to that lab…
I do find the first school’s lab to be highly effective.
When you think about the cost of a University education, keep this factoid in the back of your mind.
Here in Florida, you can earn an Airline Transport Pilot certification, qualifying you to fly for the airlines/Private industry, in about a year for around $50,000.
That includes a tremendous amount of one on one instruction in a variety of aircraft in the air burning copious amounts of expensive fuel. At the end, if you pass (and there is no social promotion, gravity is an equal enforcer)you are qualified to start working in aviation flying large passenger airplanes.
Now considering the above, why does getting a degree in Eng. Lit. from a major university cost so much?
I have never seen such a memorandum in many years in academia (maybe it’s a humanities thing?). The reason that lesser schools import foreign students is that there aren’t enough domestic students interested in science and engineering … foreign students usually come with their own brand of cultural brainwashing (Marxist studies, Mao Zedong philosophy, …). Smart domestic students often go to more lucrative professions, such as medicine or law.
The reason that science and engineering is less prone to the humanities’ self-inflation is that mother nature is a harsh mistress. If you build a bridge badly, it doesn’t care how important you are … the bridge will fail.
I do not believe so, as many universities rely on bolstering their reputation for research – granted such institutions tend to primarily engage in tangible, productive endeavors (engineering, et al); rather, the over-priced, inferior service of the American K-12 system is a seemingly better fit for the GM analogy.
Like #23, I have never seen a memorandum like the one this author describes, and I’ve been teaching college for 12 years.
I am sorry to be negative but this “end of the university” thing is getting extremely old. Conservatives are in short supply in the Humanities world — I know, because I’m the only registered Republican in a department of 160 literature professors. I used to love reading the David Horowitz-esque complaints about liberals having ruined the Humanities, because it answered to my own frustrations in my field.
But I’m tired of listening to this. There are conservative scholars all across America who are isolated and can’t get support from the conservative thinktanks that always put out these plaintive manifestoes against the academic Left. I direct an Intelligence Studies center in California and when we had our symposium, protesters in black showed up from Code Pink and tried to shut the function down. Do you know who came to my aid? Not a conservative — no, the conservatives I had contacted didn’t even show up at the damned conference. No, the radical lesbian and gay deans and department chairs stood up for freedom of speech and rallied to my defense, even though I was at that time a traditionalist and serving in the US Army Reserves, and a conspicuous supporter of Sarah Palin.
Who cares if you get a memorandum? Just do the work you find important. Express your opinions and back them up, even if you are in the Humanities as I am. If that means you don’t get tenure, go somewhere else. I left 2 earlier positions because I refused to kowtow to other people’s dogmas.
Conservatives need to stop complaining about the problems in the academy and find their voice within the academic discourse. Otherwise this crappy line of complaint is going to go nowhere!
Oh, and by my book, which is coming out this year: It’s a conservative reading of American letters. And if you buy it, you’re supporting a conservative in the academy who’s fighting to improve the situation! My website is http://colorfulconservative.blogspot.com and I’ll be posting the link to where you can buy it soon.
One problem with the technical fields (graduate level) is that much of the funding for state and private schools is now from the EPA. In the past much of it came from the DoD; that research required much more rigorous analysis and study. You needed strong math to build theoretical models that might match the observed phenomena. Now the EPA funded research tends to be just observational with little math rigor. That support helped generate the environmentalist bunk that fed global warming hysteria in the past few decades. Remember East Anglia University and its Climate Research Unit. As an aside, the most important person of the last decade is the hacker who posted the CRU data and emails on a public server. And did it a few weeks before the Copenhagen Climate Summit. With that deed, a single person stopped the global warming stampede and changed the world for the better.
Harvard reminds me of those clown cars you see at the circus. You think there are no more clowns coming out, but then ten more emerge.
Our so called higher education system is the most inept and at the same time corrupted that exists on the planet. Everything they do is aimed at convincing anxious moms and dads that they should be separated from more of their money on behalf of their children. It is so sickening that many of our best educated people no longer even come from academia.
eon, correctomundo
I am my college professor’s favorite pupil. He calls himself a “philosophical progressive” (whatever that means) and he tells wonderful stories about Mao Zedong and how deeply spirtual it is to become a Progressive. He told us not to pay any attention to those horrible rumors that the Conservatives preach to us about Brother Mao’s murder of 60 million. I know it’s a lie, that’s what a girl on Facebook said. After all, President Obama had a Mao ornamate hanging fron the White House Christmas tree, right on cool. After learning all of these new political ideas, I went out and got the latest Che Guevara t-shirt. It is so rad. My professor went to Harvard like Obama did so I know he loves Che too. My professor said Hollywood helped to revive another leftist martyr but my uncle (who was in the Army) said Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean and that I should read to try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer. What ever that means, later dude.
Ah, the constant call for equal opportunity for specialist groups. Monash University constantly pushes “Equal Opportunity for Women” – I’m not sure that they appreciate the irony in this policy of restricting equal opportunity to certain groups.
My favorite indicator of the problems universities face is a memorandum that circulates in many universities near finals time. In the day of email, it is an actual hard copy on real stationery, complete with the signature of some high-ranking administrator.