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"But contrary to conservative rhetoric, studies show that going to college does not make students substantially more liberal. "
"The grand vision that defenders of a purer humanities enunciate, if it has existed at all, existed vigorously before the university systems of today, before the comfortably professional and middle-classness of professorial lives today, and might reasonably be expected to exist in some other form after them, if they should disappear or markedly transform."
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I think we can learn a lot from recognizing that many admirable humanist intellectuals have carried out their work outside of or at a distance from the norms of contemporary disciplines within the humanities. The lesson in that is not that the humanities in the academy are disposable, absolutely not. It might be, on the other hand, a sign that the contemporary disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practice of humanists in the American academy isn’t a necessary condition of vigorous, challenging and desirable humanistic work within contemporary universities and colleges. There are other ways to skin that cat. It might even be that intellectual work by humanists as my more traditionalist friends defend it is best served by much looser structural and organizational practices than in other divisions of academic work, that this would bring the practice of humanistic scholarship inside of the academy more in line with the deeper history of this kind of intellectual work. And maybe, just maybe, that move would also solve much of the much-fretted about “crisis of the humanities” by permitting a reconnection or reacquaintance between wider publics and humanist intellectuals.
"Is the research paper still justifiable as a means of grading a college student's performance?
Critics of the form say it is outdated because the Internet has made sources so readily accessible. In addition, argues an article published recently by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education, research papers promote deference to conventional opinions."
"I was struck by what the curious folks behind the Project Information Literacy project noticed when they gathered and examined research assignment prompts. These documents were well intentioned, but they were all about what the final product should look like: page length, number of sources, width of margins. They were almost entirely silent about how students should proceed, what tools would be particularly useful or even why it was worth doing. Though teachers covered those things in class, the prompts unintentionally enforced the notion that students all too often have: that their task is to produce a certain number of pages citing a required number of sources by a particular date."
"This leads me to wonder (again) why we ask first year students to make their paper look sort of like a JSTOR article instead of sort of like a story in the New York Times Magazine. When we tell them “in order to write about ideas, you need to find good sources and cite them accurately,” finding and citing becomes the task; ideas are contained in the sources cited and only make an appearance through those sources. By making it sound as if the point of the paper is to find and use sources, we’re practically begging them to patchwrite."
"This interchangeability of visions for the future underscores the fact that the precise content of most colleges' strategic plans is pretty much irrelevant. Plans are usually forgotten soon after they are promulgated. My university has presented two systemwide strategic plans and one arts-and-sciences strategic plan in the past 15 years. No one can remember much about any of those plans, but another one is in the works. The plan is not a blueprint for the future. It is, instead, a management tool for the present. The ubiquity of planning at America's colleges and universities is another reflection and reinforcement of the continuing growth of administrative power."
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When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don’t think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student.
The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan’s Island, it wasn’t the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr. Howell, the rich man. That was something of a revelation.
It’s funny, because what a lot of people talk about when they talk about going to Harvard is being really intimidated by the place when they arrive. I wasn’t at all intimidated by the place when I arrived—but I was really intimidated after graduating.
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A thing that’s very nice and very terrible is that those class differences are very rarely talked about at Harvard. So you might have some sort of movie image where the snobs are sort of looking down their noses at the poor kids, but the reality is that once you’re at Harvard, no one’s a poor kid anymore. You’re all, instantly and at that moment, in one of the most privileged positions of the American upper class.
"So what can we academics do if we are not to be deluded into thinking that this kind of ‘initiative’, a caving in to the interests of corporate capitalism, is the way to save the humanities? What can be done? For one thing, it is essential that academics and scholars in the humanities start mounting a serious defence of what they do as a social and public good. In the process, they must challenge the privileging of financial profit as the only measurable and legitimate form of good, and do so far more strenuously than they have done so far. There is also, as Masao Miyoshi once remarked, a certain lack of self-respect within the humanities that has accounted for its ongoing vulnerability to attrition and assault by corporate interests. At best the humanities are seen as harmless, at worst, useless. This must change and the only way to do that is to recover and demonstrate the power of independent and critical thinking. We must stop being complicit in this assault through passivity, silence and what can only be regarded as a form of learned helplessness that likes to call itself pragmatism. "
"Just as in society as a whole, the academic upper middle class needs to rethink its alliances. Its dignity will not survive forever if it doesn’t fight for that of everyone below it in the academic hierarchy. (“First they came for the graduate students, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a graduate student…”) For all its pretensions to public importance (every professor secretly thinks he’s a public intellectual), the professoriate is awfully quiet, essentially nonexistent as a collective voice. If academia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the profession, if higher education is going to be reclaimed as part of the American promise, if teaching and research are going to make the country strong again, then professors need to get off their backsides and organize: department by department, institution to institution, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them."
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I find that students actually have fairly good skills for finding properly authoritative sources and material. As long as they’ve gotten the research framed correctly at the outset, that is.
So what I focus on is processes of discovery that students should use to find out what’s known and knowable, how researchable a particular question is, what the shape or character of information about that question looks like, and how to make smart decisions about where to invest labor and time in developing a research assignment.
"The problem is that faculty at many institutions mandate that students pursue the liberal arts via distributional or general education requirements, but there are no obligations on the faculty themselves to match or embody that vision. Students are expected to make connections between subjects and courses largely on their own, and often find that the connections that they have made are complicatedly inexpressible within any given course or disciplinary major, in conversation with any given professor. "
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I see myself as both a humanist and a generalist. I do not believe that generalism is a privilege which only makes itself available following upon the intensive study of a specialized tradition. Generalism itself has best practices, it has rigor and structure, it has its own kinds of depth, and as a result, can be taught. Moreover, it can be taught in parallel to specialized inquiry from the first day to the last day of an undergraduate education, within and alongside courses. It can be embodied in the work of faculty, expressed in the work of research and publication, legitimated in the small daily gestures that compose collegiality.
I’ve written a lot about generalist inquiry and its limitations at this blog, and how appreciative I’ve been of my colleagues’ invitation to teach and write in that spirit. I’ve gotten the sharp sense this year that the invitation is being withdrawn, and not just here, but for other faculty at other institutions. Generalism is dismissed with new sharpness as “loosey-goosey”, “superficial”, “empty”. I’ve been a smuggler for two decades, but for the first time in my life as a professor I’m now running into active border patrols.
"Since its founding in 2002, Ashesi (Ah-SHESS-ee) University in Ghana has empowered young Africans with the skills, and the motivation, to create a better future for Africa. Ashesi’s groundbreaking curriculum, unique in Africa, fosters critical thinking, problem solving, and a concern for others. "
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