After writing
this essay, which I plan to send to the editor of our local paper, I have been thinking a lot more about education and the miserable state of affairs that contemporary higher education has become. In my case, misery does not mean drowning in alcohol, though I wonder if that might help, but is to lose myself in essays that really smart people have authored.
As comforting as this exercise is, well, it is equally depressing that the issues that I worry about now were the same set of issues that were talked and written about even a few years ago. It has been only a rapid worsening of the situation. For instance,
in this essay from twelve years ago--yes, twelve--Jackson Lears writes:
The contemporary academic crisis is not about job security any more than it is about how many classes are online or which departments get the most resources. It is about the attitudes we take to our most important audience, a non-academic audience. Professors are constantly berating themselves and being berated for withdrawing into the insular world of scholarship, for not connecting with the real world. The real world is right in front of us, in the classroom; it is composed of students, 99 percent of whom have no intention of entering the academy themselves. They are a non-academic audience; they require us, however implicitly and imperfectly, to become public intellectuals.
The attitude towards students and their learning is appalling, to put it mildly. Increasingly, colleges see students as nothing more than warm bodies who bring in monies, which they can use to
build Taj Mahals and create more "student-services" administrative positions. Faculty, too, are only happy to be active participants in fashioning revenue-maximizing strategies. For instance, a couple of days ago, I received an all-campus email that described the introduction of yet another undergraduate degree called the "AB," because the existing BA and BS options do not serve a certain market niche!
Even back in 2000, Lears noted that the chief threat to education came from attempts to commodify knowledge and sell it in crazy ways:
Contrary to received opinion, the chief threat to intellectual freedom in the academy is not political correctness–though the tyranny of various ideological fashions (right and left) is real, and can be oppressive. The main menace is market-driven managerial influence: the impulse to subject universities to quantitative standards of efficiency and productivity, to turn knowledge into a commodity, to transform open sites of inquiry into corporate research laboratories and job training centers.
Thus, the higher education industry keeps charging ahead at full speed, consuming the monies students, taxpayers, and philanthropists keep throwing its way. Are we surprised then at all with the following sentences from Jackson Lears?
Prussian productivism melded with American vocationalism and anti-intellectualism–the love of the practical, the demand for cash value now. The result was the accentuation of a fundamental conflict in the university’s mission, between furthering the pursuit of truth and serving the needs of established power. The modern American university was to continue to preserve a place for the free play of ideas, but also to provide technical expertise for government and business elites. The marriage of Prussian productivism and American vocationalism produced a monstrous spawn. James called it “the Ph.D. Octopus.”
What a lovely metaphor "the Ph.D. Octopus" is!
In that same issue of the
Hedgehog Review,
Russell Jacoby writes:
Driven by academic discontent and boredom, professors might want to reinvent themselves as public writers. ...
But, simultaneously recognizes the challenge when we have:
institutional imperatives that reward technical rather than public contributions.Will they be successful? It is not clear.
It is a lot clearer now, twelve years later, that only technical contributions matter, even if they are less than third-rate.
Jacoby worried then about specialization, well before the
introduction of gerontology as a major in a small time public university where I teach! Jacoby wrote:
it should be possible to raise the issue of insular specialization without pledging fealty to progress and industrial society. The incarceration of specialists and a return to bloodletting or phrenology is hardly the goal; nor is the point to foster anti-intellectual populism or half-educated generalists. Specialization inheres in industrial society. We need specialists. No one wants to hear a cheery announcement that today your airline pilot will be a family therapist. Nevertheless this truth does not justify every micro-field or subdiscipline or new jargon. Specialization can also be obscurantism, turf building, careerism, and regression, as well as a simple waste of talent and resources.
So much has been said in the years past by intellectuals that there is very little for this pseudo-intellectual to contribute, it seems like!
