This link has been bookmarked by 63 people . It was first bookmarked on 29 Jul 2010, by Ed Webb.
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Perry Vs WorldSchools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.
Interviewer:But those star faculty members do attract students to the campuses you named. So there's a reason universities keep hiring them.
Well, there are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.
// duh? -
16 Aug 10
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15 Aug 10
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Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.
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Well, there are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.
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The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education. We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges. Have you ever heard of Linfield College? It's in a little town called McMinnville, Oregon. We were very impressed with the campus. The professors care. They spend time with the students. The same is true in a place called Hendrix College in Arkansas, or Earlham College in Indiana. They provide a good education because they don't expect professors to do research.
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But what about lifesaving research—for example, finding a cure for cancer?
How much really valuable research is being done on cancer? When I was at Cornell, Congress announced that they were going to pour a lot of money into cancer research. So a memo went out to the Cornell professors—not just in the sciences, mind you—saying, "Can you take your current research and cancerize it?" There's a lot of that going on. So sociology professors decided to research cancer communications, and so on. -
A lot of the pressure to publish is tied in with the pressure to earn tenure. You argue that tenure actually doesn't do what it's supposed to do—it doesn't preserve academic freedom.
Here's what happens. Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can't be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We've seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don't change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they've been trained to follow. -
Some of the things you're talking about are deeply entrenched in our culture. You and Claudia spend the book envisioning an alternative academic universe. But how do you propose actually getting there?
That's a fair question. We're idealistic of course. But in our closing chapter, we point out that there are places that are already doing this. For instance, Evergreen College, a sweet little state school in Olympia, Washington. We spent three days there and it was fantastic. They don't give grades, and they don't have academic departments. There are no faculty rankings. Almost all the classes we saw were taught by two professors—say, one from philosophy and one from psychology, teaching jointly on Henry and William James. Even though they don't give grades, the professors write out long evaluations for students. And the students have no problem getting into graduate schools.
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14 Aug 10
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11 Aug 10
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But when the young superstar sat down with the department chair, he seemed to have only one goal: to land a tenure-track position that involved as many sabbaticals and as little teaching as possible
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Hacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education."
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They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.
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Tenure, they argue, does anything but protect intellectual freedom
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Schools get status by bringing on professors who are star researchers, star scholars. That's all we really know about Caltech or MIT or Stanford. We don't really know about the quality of undergraduate teaching at any of these places. And it's the students who suffer.
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Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.
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So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom.
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Good teaching can't be quantified at the college level.
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or instance, Evergreen College, a sweet little state school in Olympia, Washington. We spent three days there and it was fantastic. They don't give grades, and they don't have academic departments. There are no faculty rankings. Almost all the classes we saw were taught by two professors—say, one from philosophy and one from psychology, teaching jointly on Henry and William James. Even though they don't give grades, the professors write out long evaluations for students. And the students have no problem getting into graduate schools.
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I like Missouri Western State. It's a third-tier university, but the faculty realize they're going to stay there, they're not going to get hired away by other colleges, so they pitch in and take teaching seriously. At a school like that, you have a decent chance of finding a mentor who will write you a strong recommendation, better than you would at Harvard.
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We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated.
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Professor X. He argued that some students just aren't ready for college. What's your view on that?
Our view is that the primary obligation belongs to the teacher. Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. We saw it at Evergreen and other places that have this emphasis. -
This is the hand I was dealt this semester. This is my job." Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college. I know some people have had difficult high school educations. But if you have good teachers who really care, it's remarkable how you can make up the difference.
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09 Aug 10
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Kim YarisResearch or teach? Calls into question a problem plaguing our university systems. What will we produce if the people teaching college students aren't invested in doing so?
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02 Aug 10
trod13One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts. You're not fans of majors like engineering or business that try to set a student up for a career right after college.
There are two ways to look at it. Fir -
01 Aug 10
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over-professionalization of the academic world
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over-professionalization of the academic world
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over-professionalization of the academic world
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over-professionalization of the academic world
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Professors are identifying with their arcane disciplines, the minutiae, the esoteric research.
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We argue that you can get a better education at second or third tier colleges
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The professors care. They spend time with the students.
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They provide a good education because they don't expect professors to do research.
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too many publications and too many people publishing
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If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.
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Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this?
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Can you take your current research and cancerize it?"
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Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can't be controversial and all the rest.
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So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom.
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Good teaching can't be quantified at the college level. There are excellent teachers on campuses, but they don't have national reputations. So if there's a great chemistry teacher at UC Berkeley, there's no way the University of Chicago is going to hire that person away.
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The University of Chicago only cares what that person has published. I'm not even sure how many reputable scholars are really known for being good teachers. Many don't want to teach; they don't have the personality for it.
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Do you think it would be better for campus culture if more professors were encouraged to connect with the outside world?
Definitely, yes. Those people were teachers, in the true sense of the word. -
The more you rely on lingo—"regressive discourses," "performativity"—the less you have to really think. You can just throw terms around and say, "Look, Ma, I'm a theorist!"
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One of your more controversial points is the idea that every student should major in liberal arts. You're not fans of majors like engineering or business that try to set a student up for a career right after college.
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liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years.
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But not all college graduates have the luxury of working at Costco for a year, especially during a recession. They feel a pressure to get their careers started right away so they can be eligible for promotions and raises.
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a major culprit here is the heavy debts most students are graduating with. Even undergraduates are racking up loans as high as six figures. This is very distressing—and this is new. Tuitions now are twice what they were 25 years ago, even though the typical family income hasn't gone up nearly that much.
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greg hardinPondering: "What's Wrong With the American University System" via @TheAtlantic http://bit.ly/alJypV #education #universities #academic
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31 Jul 10
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Jerrell WhiteheadHacker and his coauthor, New York Times writer Claudia Dreifus, use this cautionary tale to launch their new book, a fierce critique of modern academia called Higher Education? "The question mark in our title," they write, "is the key to this book." To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education." They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts. Tenure, they argue, does anything but protect intellectual freedom. And they'd like to see graduates worrying less about their careers, even if it means spending a year behind the cash register at Old Navy.
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Matthew TedderIn case you haven't already seen this. While don't deny higher education needs attention, I personal wish there'd be far more attention paid to lower education and regressive education (my own term for, redressing and improving the education of all U.S. citizens). We are in the process of destroying our country and our world. Education as at the very heart of any solution.
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Gaurav Vaidyahttp://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/ #gradschool /via @slashdot
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Jimmy BaikoviciusTo their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education." They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts. Tenure, they argue, does anything but
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30 Jul 10
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29 Jul 10
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it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done.
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Those people were teachers, in the true sense of the word. They were just as knowledgeable about their fields as anyone, but they had playful, imaginative minds. They could go on TV—Carl Sagan could talk about science, John Kenneth Galbraith could talk about economics. They weren't dumbing down their subjects. In fact, they were actually using their brains. The more you rely on lingo—"regressive discourses," "performativity"—the less you have to really think. You can just throw terms around and say, "Look, Ma, I'm a theorist!"
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We believe the current criteria for admissions—particularly the SAT—are just so out of whack. It's like No Child Left Behind. It really is. It's one of the biggest crimes that's ever been perpetrated. I mean, you took the SAT! It's multiple choice, a minute and quarter per question. What does it really test? It tests how good you are at taking tests! At a big university like Berkeley, where there are going to be 30,000 applications, here's what they do. On top of each folder, without even reading through it, they write your SAT score. That's the first winnowing. So the 1600s get looked at first, and then down from there.
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One of the things that I find scariest at the moment is that so many bright people have no conception at all of life for any people but those in the upper middle class and above. They live a sheltered suburban life, go to college with other sheltered suburban kids, and assume that everyone's life has been like theirs. Some years ago a relative of mine graduated from Cambridge. I asked what his classmates would be doing after graduation and he said "management consulting." These were very bright people with zero experience in the business world who had spent the last three years barely able to manage their binge drinking, let alone manage any business. I'd trust the high school grad who rose through the ranks way more than these bright young things.
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www.highereducationquestionmark.com
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