Higher Education? Muahahaha :(

So, a little more than a week ago, I blogged about the hysterical humor from my campus, all because of an opinion piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Well, the authors of that piece, which was based on their book, Higher Education? How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids and what we can do about it, have more to say in this interview:

 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, orEarlham College in Indiana. They provide a good education because they don't expect professors to do research. 

Hey, our campus is only a few miles south of Linfield College.  But, guess what?  We expect our professors to do a whole lot of pretentious research that nobody ever hears about!  And, despite that, when they do list my university as one of the best buys for the money, ahem, faculty protested ... :)
Why do I say "pretentious research?"  Again, back to Professor Hacker:

The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. 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.   

And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. 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? But 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. 

Yep.

Particularly at taxpayer institutions like mine, that millionth "research" publication on Woolf is nothing but a huge attempt to fool taxpayers into believing that there is some earth-shaking research going on.

Oh, yeah, I have blogged about the reality that these contribute to the avalanche of low quality research.

So, Professor Hacker, if all these are supposedly the factors that will determine tenure and promotion, anything to say about tenure? :)

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.  

What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That's a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There's hardly any turnover in the senior ranks—not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in Kentucky, everywhere. You go to a campus and over two thirds of the faculty have been there at least 25 years. They begin to stagnate. In many ways, they become infantilized, embroiled in ideological issues like faculty parking.

Finally, here is the interview question and Hacker's response:

Some academics have been famous for their ability to speak to the general public—people like Carl Sagan and Margaret Mead. 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. 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. 

Now, I suppose I have to wait for the new academic year for more campus humor on this subject.  Can't wait :)