The Slow Death of the University
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching.
It is often depressing to read https://www.thefire.org
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least
in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not
letting people speak who a group disagrees with.
STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities
has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator :
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere.
On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture
halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in
the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students,
smell like students. But their student brains have been
replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and
programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem
like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing,
H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five
minutes in their company will know that these students are
far more interested in shutting debate down than opening
it up. [1]
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-s...
Also, doesn't the constant talk of debate and free exchange of ideas rather presuppose a form of antirealism about everything under the sun? After all, we don't talk about a free exchange of ideas on the laws of motion. You can be accurate or incorrect about those.
FIRE is an EXCELLENT group.
I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university? (I'm actually undecided.)
Perhaps don't attend that speech then? Life at a university doesn't involve dodging "pro rape" speeches blasted over the PA system multiple times a day.
The recent article about the "safe spaces" full of coloring books and toys notes that people were fleeing to those rooms simply because _someone was on campus giving a speech that challenged their beliefs / "triggered" them_. If universities are catering to folks that simply can't handle the thought of someone with a conflicting viewpoint talking on campus then the ideals of the university truly are dead.
A "safe space" might have valid medical reasons to exist—in fact, it would likely be a concept quite easily unified with that of a counselling office.
But, for it to have the correct incentive structure, it would probably require you to get a note from a real honest-to-god psychiatrist at the beginning of the year before you could make use of it. Otherwise you end up in the stupid rut of the "ignorant-but-unaware-of-it" people avoiding the very properties of an education designed to bash their narrow views open.
Contrary to the collective opinion of certain Internet communities, I think it quite likely that reports of PTSD in the average person have been greatly exaggerated.
It's great to provide support in the rare case that a person really does have an unmanageable reaction to certain memories. But mitigating this edge case by making that support a default condition in every interaction on a campus stymies the free thinking and free expression that are supposed to flourish in a liberal learned environment.
If you don't like what someone is saying, walk away.
That's an unbelievably dismissive view. What makes you think these areas are merely about exclusion from offense?
If people are afraid or forbidden to speak their minds, then the university won't be able to function as a place to advance our understanding of the world.
PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.
Which, like I said, might mean that they'd have to avoid going to university altogether. It's probably nearly impossible to have an environment that both allows for a free-flowing exchange of ideas, and yet protects people with this sort of permanent mental disability.
But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?
The biggest irony, which you probably can't even see, is that your own comment is an example of the disturbing and vile speech you claim to hate ("sex dungeon", "POW camp", "Salo"). You didn't need to bring those up to make your point, but you did. Somehow disturbing and vile things like burning the flag and condoning drug abuse never seem to upset the left (and I could go on...), but talking about individual rights and respnsibilities does. Funny how that works.
Now, I'm not from the US, haven't been to a university for quite some years, and so am not personally experienced with what these "safe zones" are about in practice, the politics surrounding them, etc.—but I was trying to say that, if they had any justification at all as a theoretical construct, it was in giving people with PTSD a way to get away from "broadcast all over campus" things like graduation speeches, if and when a planned speech is found to have content that might trigger specific kinds of traumatic stress attacks.
Not because it might offend someone. Not with voluntary ability to leave for any reason one might like. Just a medical excuse from attendance, like a person with acrophobia would get from a field trip to the roof of a skyscraper.
And again, even then, it might be better for those people to just leave the university campus, or avoid coming in the first place.
I once worked inside a social program and the first lesson is to heal. Painfully, that often means scar tissue. If you have trama from words, you need to deal with it, not hope the world will.
> PTSD is not Tumblr-fairy disease; it's the thing you get from being interned in a POW camp or locked in someone's sex dungeon for months/years. People do have a right to avoid reliving that sort of experience.
It doesn't even take something that severe, I have a friend who was working at a convenience store at the time when he got PTSD after going through two robberies in two nights, both times from people he knew. My understanding is that PTSD is triggered by episodes of severe, debilitating stress.
PTSD sufferers deserve the freedom of not reliving those episodes, and there are treatments available to help them. They don't have to avoid going to university altogether, they don't even have to wait until they're better thanks to the many online education options available these days.
> But making an allowance for rape survivors to leave the room when there's going to be a live screening of Salò isn't all that hard, is it?
Perhaps there was a miscommunication, but I agree with you on that. That's what I meant in my previous comment when I said 'if you don't like what someone is saying, walk away'.
Ah. See, I figured that with something like a graduation speech, 'just walking away' might be a bit fraught:
- First, you won't know what the content is until you're already there and hearing the things that could be PTSD-triggering, and by that point you already might be mentally "gone" and unable to escape; it would be preferrable to catch such things before then, which is what all that "Trigger Warning: pictures of torture" stuff is about;
- And second, things like grad speeches are usually put on loudspeakers and carried along across the internal campus PA and video-channel to PA speakers and TVs in various places, etc. It's hard to get away from such a thing, even when warned that it will contain something that might trigger your condition, especially if your life is effectively isolated to the campus (you live in the dorms, etc.)
It was under those two requirements that I saw the idea of a "safe space" as being possibly useful: it gives such people a place to go where they know the content won't follow them.
Under any other conditions, it's a horrible idea. :)
If we can agree that it's warranted in that case, then it becomes a matter of agreeing exactly when it becomes unwarranted—which is a much more fact-based debate to have than one where one side just shouts "Freedom of Speech!" and the other side just shouts "Freedom from Persecution!" and neither side believes the other's bullshit one iota.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Steel_man
(Also, I think this is the most I've ever been downvoted for speaking in the classical hacker-vulnerability-probing "but what if a tornado of Hitlers hit the school?" style on HN. I'm not even using any inflammatory language or anything, whereas all the replies to me are acting as if I was some social-justice type spouting off about "my right to not hear some white cis male talk about the time he went to Vegas" or somesuch. It's interesting; is this one of those "if you try to take an orthogonal position then you're supporting neither side, so both sides see you as supporting their opponent and hate you" effects?)
The concept got flipped in the chain here -- what is actually happening on these campuses is the establishment of "free speech zones", where a person can say what they like, and the establishment of rules that, on the rest of the campus, punishment will occur for saying things that could trigger or make someone feel unsafe.
So, what's happening is that an entire campus is made to be this "safe" area.
Is the assertion that there are so many people on any given university campus who might have a breakdown that the entire campus must walk on egg shells? Because that is the side of the debate you're arguing from.
The idea of "well, in this one specific extraordinary case it's totally reasonable" is kinda played out among anyone with half a brain, because it's been used to justify so much bullshit.
Also, the entire dichotomy of warranted/unwarranted is suspect, but that's a different rabbit hole altogether.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAmkMndtH24
And check out this article for an ironic inversion of politics in the short span of 12 years:
http://www.alternet.org/story/15982/the_silencing_of_dissent...
So you have people on the right were shocked and triggered, screaming at the speaker and pulling the power on his microphone, and people on the left demanded that hard truths must be spoken so suck it up. But I wonder if today he could do this speech without giving trigger warnings for colonialism and war. I wonder if a university would even give him the freedom up front to do a speech without vetting the topic so it couldn't surprise anyone. Is this a price we're willing to pay?
On the first day, the professor told the class that we would be getting into some pretty extreme material, and if at any point someone needed to leave class or even skip it, to just let him know and schedule some one on one time with the professor. That seems to have worked as a good solution. Far better than banning that class or censoring material.
If scientific facts (so-called "HateFacts", think Evolutionary Psychology) offend you, it's your problem really.
The "interpretation of archeological artefacts" kind of science is a lot less durable than the "reproducible double-blind experiment" kind.
The thing goes in all directions.
That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.
So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
Its not "by Study Terkel" because he didn't really write this book....I mean, its his book, but he basically ran into all these chaps, and let them do all the talking. And they talk and talk and talk. He prompts them from time to time, but mostly, its a book by these people. And their stories and lives are super compelling. I often used to wonder why people do dead-end jobs like parking cars in a building, or store clerk etc. Here, those people tell you why. There is this hooker who tells you how she got into the business, how she turns tricks, dealing with cops, offering freebies to pimps,the whole thing is simultaneously amazing and sordid and just puts everything into perspective. It taught me that America is a hard country. Its not some first world paradise. America is like, seriously fucked up. I mean, all these people, they were here long before I got here, and they have friends & families & homes & connections, and yet their lives are so hard and messed up and its not all whining & complaining, but I did get the impression things are very hard out here for the blue collar guy. Ofcourse had Turkel gone to Sand Hill road & bumped into a hundred VCs, that would be a very different book. It a definite must-read, especially if you are an immigrant.
We have a strong push towards internships, it seems odd that students aren't taking advantage of this hands-on experience in a field that interests them. Of course, missing out on a paid job for the (most likely unpaid) internship is probably a factor.
On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college.
I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches?
And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
Combined with engineering, there's some very interesting ways to do all those things. For example statistics on such a big scale were very hard until the internet became so widespread.
The folks who brag and tell you they make great money and don't do shit all - it's just ego tripping. Really, I've seen it a thousand times - somebody of moderate intelligence and no desire or ability to do anything creative or interesting, will sweat his/her way through university and then gloat over what an awesome position in company X he/she now has.
Really, it can be frustrating if you are in financial difficulty but rest assured, those who do the real work and are savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, will come out on top. The fella bragging about not doing much is going to continue not doing much and best case scenario - he/she cruises through life with a nice salary, having done the bare minimum.
Meh.
It's up to the employee to find their way to that 20% that's real work. If wanted it's definitely possible to find that 20% and be /truly/ worked to the max. But it doesn't just happen.
For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.
It would be an interesting project to create an artificial court/judge into which you feed a contract and an argument and get a response out.
My sense is that there's probably not a viable business there but it may make an interesting hobby blog-series, if you can get people to participate.
Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them.
(And no, I don't agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)
> Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time
Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier..." is obviously written to be tongue-in-cheek.
A close reading (humanities skill!) of this article might highlight the following passage as the central thesis:
Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.
> Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.
Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:
It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they don't?
I never looked at Oxford people with the same eyes again after reading Giordano Bruno's works and about how the professors in there treated him. From his wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno#England.2C_1583...):
> His views were controversial, notably with John Underhill, Rector of Lincoln College and subsequently bishop of Oxford, and George Abbot, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury. Abbot mocked Bruno for supporting "the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still; whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round, and his brains did not stand still",[23] and reports accusations that Bruno plagiarized Ficino's work.
I've recently read a book by French historian Jacques Le Goff who was saying something along the lines of: "the University as we know it was born around year 1,000 and flourished for the next couple of centuries, only to become more segregated and focused on itself starting with the 14th century, so much so that the Renaissance happened outside of its sphere of influence".
So I will keep my hopes up. This downfall of the University as an institution has happened before but we still managed to create and produce great things outside of it.
Dude, you are going to be bummed when you find out how the rest of humanity has treated everyone
Yes, he want to be nostalgically talking with like-minded people in an open space. That's my fault, I've misread it. A bit of self criticism from his part would certainly lead to the conclusion that such kind of study does never lead to any actionable result.
Anyway, there's no problem inherent in that. The only problems he faces is that he wants to do those things on the taxpayer money, and wants to sell it to students as some incredibly useful skill. People are stopping to accept that.
Ok. Questioning and criticizing on which grounds? Either there's a right thing to do, and anyone informed can point out that the public is ignoring it (in which case, universities are useful for such), or, as the humanities academics tend to say these days, there is no right answer, in which case they really have given up grounds for criticism.
What I'm bloody fed up with their doing is claiming the sole ground to make normative claims, and then asserting no such claims at all!
The same thing that is with everyone else. If you look around our societies today it seems almost a matter of course that the first argument deployed in any debate is a dismissal of the opposing view holder's ability to think critically. Not to put too fine a point on it... but you can see that argument employed a lot here on HN. It's not really a matter of STEM people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - or even Humanities people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - as much as it is a matter of ALL people being dismissive of others.
It's, kind of, the nature of discourse in our society these days.
I also think people are confused what critical thinking means. It's much more about how you discuss something rather than what you are discussing or what position you take.
Of course, "humanities people" are in the business of programming human beings, which is pretty useful for getting things done.
I suspect it might be ego, after a fashion. Having observed that those educated in other fields have more marketable skills, a need to claim one's own education has produced a uniquely valuable skill arises.
Part of the problem is the marketable skill that the humanities used to impart, that of the ability to write well, just isn't in as much demand any more.
PS: With this mindset listening to a news broadcast can become almost painful as you see layers of deception. Study a little marketing and suddenly a lot of 'toys' seem more like 'junk'.
In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing.
Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates.
Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day.
"Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head.
It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen".
It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.
For example just the other day I (a programmer) was trying to explain to a friend of mine the concept of "Cargo cult programmers" and about how an initially good idea (agile programming) had been taken over and perverted by outside consultants and "professional managers". Said friend works in sales and I think she once mentioned to me the "sell me this pen" thingie.
And about people and institutions still living in the 19th century, I'm now reading a book on the 1830s Saint-Simon movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Simonianism) written by an academia darling, French philosopher Jacques Rancière. I don't know how to put it in words, but to me it seems like Rancière would have preferred for the world to have stopped right then and there, i.e. in the 19th century, when bourgeois people had just taken over from the aristocracy and they could look from above at the peasants and workers that stood below them. He (Rancière) is of course trying to be sympathetic to the workers he writes about in his book, but one feels that he's being sympathetic from outside their world, worse yet, from above their world. More than that, there's this feeling of him mocking their (the workers') belief in an better future and improved social relations, especially when talking about Fourierism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourierism). It reminded me of people who not so long ago were still mocking open source.
And last but not least, and it pains me to say it, but I'm afraid that open data (the idea, the concept) is dead. Somehow the forces that be managed to kill it (I'm thinking Google post-2007 or so, FB since its inception, Twitter in the last couple of years, just to name the biggest). It's strange about how no-one wants to bring this subject up for discussion anymore, it's like a foregone conclusion by now.
No, they don't.
Let's not forget that our so-called great universities:
- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.
- Were the providence of only the technocratic elite.
- Did very little research before the 20th century.
And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial?
Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.
Not entirely. Take a look at Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...). Universities grew enormously from 1945 – 1975. During that time, too, a disproportionately large number of students majored in English in particular, as well as other humanities disciplines. During that 30-year period, universities expanded and especially grad programs expanded—by 900%.
Most of those grad programs are still pumping out PhDs, even though the market for PhDs is weak. ABDs are a huge economic win for universities. So we have a situation in which supply has far outpaced demand for decades.
At the same time, I'd argue that there's a huge amount of bogosity in humanities departments, and that bogosity has mostly gone unaddressed (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-d...).
I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?
Most cost increases appear to come from technology, ancillary services (gyms are popular punching bags in this regard) and administrative staff (everything from diversity deans to grant writers).
I hear you on the bogosity factor. I wonder why this persists. Perhaps because by the time someone realizes it's all BS, their career it too invested in exposing it?
I think this is precisely the issue: the system selects for people who become very, very invested in the system.
Another important change involves the elimination of mandatory retirement: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/silver_lining/2011/04/ple.... Until the early 1990s, tenure care with an expiration date around age 65. Someone who got tenure would be on the books for 25 – 35 years. Today tenure doesn't have an expiration date—someone can be on the books for 50 years or longer. That makes tenure much more onerous.
I'd like to see universities shift from a tenure-based system to a long-term-contract-based system. This has downsides but its downsides seem better than the current tenure-based downsides.
I agree on tenure costs. It seems like they're really bloating the system in the name of academic freedom. I get it at the large research universities where the professors bring in lots of research money, but is it really worth it elsewhere? People say it's a bulwark against poor administrators making short term decisions, but that's what the rest of the world has to deal with too.
Perhaps just timeboxing the tenure part would work. "The department has X tenured slots. After 65, you can stay on as an untenured professor emeritus at a lower salary."
For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.
No, instructor-time is moot. Maybe instructor training is important; maybe a quality syllabus helps; a good book is key. But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.
-Prepare lessons
-Answer student questions (during and) after class
-Grade homework
-Prepare, proctor, and grade examinations
I'd estimate that 1/4 to 1/2 of students will stay after for question time, or show up to office hours. Those few minutes are wildly different for a class of 10 vs a class of 100.
If you have a 50-minute class, and you choose to have a 45-minute lecture and 5 minutes of question time, you can spend 1 minute each with the 1/2 of your 10 students. With a class of 100, you can have a crowd of 50 where maybe 10% of them can get your attention.
Additionally, many lecturers have office hours - time specifically allotted to meet with students. If you kept 2 hours a week, you could give an additional 12 minutes to each of your 10 students a week. With a class of 100, you can hope that only 1/4 of your students show up.
Furthermore, in a lecture of 10, it's very easy to ask an incidental question and go onto a short educational tangent. In classes exceeding 25, it's very difficult to retain control of such a large body of people, and so the instructors work very hard to ignore such tangents and keep everyone on track.
Not to mention the order of magnitude difference in grading 100 assignments vs grading 10.
I'm less-convinced that instructor-time is a myth. But maybe I'm biased by experience.
The test questions were just mixtures of questions from previous years.
So three hours of class, plus two (mandated) office hours. I'm assuming there was some time spent coordinating the grad students, but still... that doesn't seem like much work.
Much like anywhere in life.
Depends on the class. I once had a colleague say that he'd teach the intro class to 5000 students in the basketball arena. For that class, at that university, it would probably work.
I'm teaching a senior-level econometrics class to 10 students right now. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, typing into RStudio throughout the class. I help students when they can't get things to run properly. We have plenty of other interaction. They each do unique homework sets and their own project. There's no way that class would work with 100 students, or for that matter, more than 15 students.
Is the number of people with degrees in medieval literature actually decreasing, or just not increasing as much as the number of engineers?
Seems more likely that there are just a lot more students who can attend university now, and the sustainable way for this to happen is for most of them to be encouraged to go into particularly employable fields. This would fit with the observation that there's currently a huge oversupply of humanities Ph.D.'s with no academic positions waiting for them.
We can still be nostalgic for the loss of things that weren't yet perfect.
There's little misty-eyed nostalgia for 18th century universities, there is for the 1970s.
The issue for me isn't that 10k tuition fees is so bad (once you add non-teaching staff, or teaching-supporting staff, rent for facilities, administration, equipment, licensing access to libraries etc it'll be at least 15k). It's the fact that studying is supposed to be a full-time occupation. We don't ask of 12 year olds to work a 40 hour week, but we do of 20 year olds despite the fact they have as many classes but a higher study load outside of class.
Now if we consider that studying ought to be a full-time occupation, there's obviously an opportunity cost to studying or lack thereof. It's not just having to pay 15k per year for tuition, it's also forgoing the opportunity to work a job and make money to pay every expense a non-studying adult human normally needs to pay, rent, food, insurance etc. Another $15k per year is on the low-end.
So you end up with 30k over 4 years, at an average of 5% interest rates you easily graduate with 150k debt.
This is unworkable. So we require of students to work extra jobs next to their studies, knowing juggling a 70h work week for years on end while still living under crappy circumstances negatively affects studies, health etc. We require students to choose jobs that are most financially rewarding (knowing all too well that pursuing remuneration over everything else leads not to happiness, and that at the higher end the correlation between salary and benefit to society is weak). We see students accessing higher education with funds from family, something reserved for the (upper) middle class, and even for these kids it's very normal to have to not view studying as a full-time occupation despite being enrolled in a full-time program, and even so average debt in many countries sits around 30-50k.
Meanwhile, a country like Germany is offering free tuition, without having invented a magic money machine.
The "commoners" of today want to learn engineering and practical things so they can improve their standard of living, which is unfortunate for the overall percentage of educators in social sciences.
And now, instead, they exclude Asians. Progress!
There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 "lost" years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training.
Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning's sake, which few could afford.
I do think we're approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don't think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that's not today or the next ten years.
It's sad, but I'm hoping it's a transitional phase, not a final one.
What we need is to break out of this idea that everyone must attend university "or else you'll be a garbageman" or whatever they were telling us in school growing up.
... Yes, they have, and from what I've heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that
> the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.
(Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)
"It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, ... [today] that figure has risen to around 50 percent..."
In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school.
If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.
College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime.
Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.
In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they're actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees.
And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class.
But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they'll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they'd much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.
While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.
I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.
I dunno.
But why shouldn't vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old "classical" works are telling the exact same stories as modern "trash novel" works, except the modern "trash novel" works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today's audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like "there is no place like home" instead of "lost is my homecoming", "...and then they had sex and fell in love..." instead of "... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...", etc.
And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today's web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It's just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that's gone away.
The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I'll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that's a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today's flexible scale era, it's entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.
>free of misunderstandings
>less obfuscated
>clever literally mental contortions
>intentionally confusing
I imagine you would be seeking to understand the difference, and seeking to understand why some things that may appear obfuscated and confusing to a modern person are thought of by many to be better. I hope I can help the understanding via this comment.
Pretty much all poetry for example is full of misunderstandings, obfuscated, with clever literally devices and it is intentionally so. Consider poetry then! Think about why many people value poetry over a clear concise newspaper article. Why do humans like art, why do people like these confusing things? Do they actually enjoy the confusion, or is it something else that they enjoy?
Your example is Jane Austin vs 50 shades of grey. Perhaps other comparisons would help. How about Dan Brown vs Shakespeare? How about Beethoven vs Bananarama? How about Turner vs Bob Ross? Do these comparisons help in understanding what defines a quality piece of work? Do you think that a university that for two years examines Dan Brown in it's literature department will continue doing so when Dan Brown no longer becomes popular and Game of Thrones becomes popular? What does that say about the educational and artistic value of an author when they are forgotten a few years later?
Should the subjects of universities be decided by the consumers, the young students? Or should they be decided by the academic establishment? What difference would that make to education, to critical thinking? This is some of what the article was about.
More precisely, I don't know if the hierarchy is finite or not, or if there is a termination problem in the process. Sometimes penny checking finishes, sometimes not.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...
- “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
- “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
For example, people buying into the internet-crazy think that everything can be replaced by the Internet. Media companies (music, cinema, book publishing) were supposed to be dead at least a decade ago. It turns out that in reality they are bigger than before. What people forget is that the Internet doesn't create things by itself. Good movies will continue to be produced by specialized companies, good books will continue to be published by specialized publishers, and so on. Only the technology changes, but human needs continue the same.
Similarly, universities will be just fine in a century or more. They will adapt to the new technologies and continue to produce knowledge as they have done before.
"the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique."
What? What the hell is humane critique?
"Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism."
Wow... You know what allows you to reflect? Having enough time while being an active part of society. Time to reflect, being active to have proper perspective. If all you're doing is reading books and talking, all you can reflect on is books and hearsay, combined with some intuition.
The last thing an English major can do is reflect on anything that requires understanding mathematics or statistics or... you know, the stuff that people who do science have to know?
Just because you read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, doesn't mean you can critique anything that actually matters, that people who haven't read Dostoevsky can't...
There's scientific knowledge, and then there's entertainment such as fiction and television shows etc. Guess which category this guy belongs to?
The all-over-the-place sloppy writing this guy produces is telling. I guess when you're surrounded by a bunch of folks who don't create anything but words, you start thinking you know a thing or two beyond entertaining people with words.