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Andrew Delbanco’s insightful new book on the history and future of the American college exposes an institution that has no idea what it should be.
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Delbanco’s survey of the tradition of college education and its basis in Puritan faith, both its provision of a universal liberal education and its focus on building character, is a salutary reminder when today’s colleges and universities brand themselves ‘Comprehensive Knowledge Enterprises’, distance-learning hubs or engines of social mobility. Teaching at Columbia – one of the few colleges still to make two years of the liberal arts compulsory – Delbanco is in a good position to diagnose the slow death of the college model even where it should be healthiest: in the well-endowed and elite institutions of American higher education.
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Yet it was just this democratic approach to tradition that was to be thrown out along with the bathwater of religious faith. Not in the 1960s, but nearly a hundred years before, when the college began to be seen as hopelessly backward, full of dull clergymen boring America’s youth with ancient history, ill-suited to the pressing demands of the modern world and the new industrial nation. The issue came to a head with a famous debate, recounted by Delbanco, between James McCosh, president of Princeton, and Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, who met, like boxers, on neutral ground in New York in 1885 to decide what a college curriculum should be.
"Public and policy discussions of higher education over the course of the twentieth century have focused on one issue in particular: access. "
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"There's a huge incentive set up in the system [for] asking students very little, grading them easily, entertaining them, and your course evaluations will be high," Arum says.
"This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II.
During the Cold War, the U.S. government amply funded basic research in science and medicine. Starting in the 1980s, however, this support began to decline and for-profit corporations became the largest funders of research. Philip Mirowski argues that a powerful neoliberal ideology promoted a radically different view of knowledge and discovery: the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized."
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Despite the impressive efforts of such universities, however, in the rest of higher education distance programmes were often seen as second best to classroom courses. It was the establishment of open universities, dedicated solely to this approach and deploying newer communications media, which brought distance education into the mainstream. Beginning in the 1970s, open universities multiplied and expanded, enrolling millions of students by the end of the 20th century and making a significant contribution to widening access (Daniel, 1996). These institutions delivered their programmes through multi-media forms of distance education based on print, audio, video, stand-alone computers and, often, elements of face-to-face tuition.
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This leads us to an interesting question: will higher education split over the coming years into a public sector focussed on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching? Several trends make this a plausible hypothesis.
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What happened? Well, Business Week rankings coupled with the “Northwestern Innovation.” BW rated schools on: (1) student satisfaction, (2) recruiter assessment, and (3) research ranking. Northwestern, which was not a contender back then, realized that moving (2) or (3) could only happen veeery slooowly. Item (1), on the other hand, well, that could be manipulated almost instantaneously. And thus began the race to the bottom of the toilet. As far as I can tell, anything approaching the education I got has long since been abandoned.
"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."
"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."
"What do scholars offer present politics? Does it depend on the discipline - sociology vs. history vs. chemistry - and, within disciplines, on sub-fields? Amongst historians, does a US historian like Cronon have more to offer than, say, a medievalist? Does it matter *where you live* (Cronon's made much of his place-based identity), or *what you know* (e.g. for the sake of comparison), or *how you think* (pattern recognition, textual analysis, &c.)?
Possibly all of these questions matter. What I want to figure out is (1) what Cronon thinks he has to offer as a "Scholar Citizen" (which is *not* the same as a "Citizen Scholar," the analogue of the "Citizen Scientist"), and (2) how this relates to the relationship between "scholarship" and "citizenship" (or politics)."
"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. "
"No wonder, then that university presidents are enamored with flashy construction projects which are much easier to justify to boards than equitably-paid faculty or low tuition for students (indeed, both of these are at odds with the sort of mentality that Ho observes on Wall Street: employees are always disposable and any university that keeps tuition down must be failing to charge apporpriately for its services).* After a few years at a university, the building-enamored president moves on to bigger and better digs, leaving faculty to struggle to get grants to fill buildings that shouldn't have been built in the first place."
"A career involves fitting oneself into a pre-given narrative. By contrast, being a “kind of person” does not. I want to suggest that we’d do well to conceive of ourselves in terms of “kinds of person,” “modes,” and “activities.” To illustrate this point, it might be easiest for me to refer to my own case. In my life and work, I have sought to see the basic kind of person I am — a philosopher — as manifesting itself in three basic ways — freelance writer, philosophical counselor, and educational consultant — and as unfolding in a set of finite activities."
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