The university is dying. But, I need to serve the students who are alive!

Yesterday, I read this article, a wonderful essay, on "The slow death of the university" in which the author, Terry Eagleton, makes a number of observations including this:

There has thus been less incentive for academics to devote themselves to their teaching, and plenty of reason for them to produce for production’s sake, churning out supremely pointless articles, starting up superfluous journals online, dutifully applying for outside research grants regardless of whether they really need them, and passing the odd pleasant hour padding their CVs.

You, dear reader, can relate to this, right?  After all, my posts have covered these very issues.  More than once.

And there was more:

As professors are transformed into managers, so students are converted into consumers. Universities fall over one another in an undignified scramble to secure their fees. Once such customers are safely within the gates, there is pressure on their professors not to fail them, and thus risk losing their fees. The general idea is that if the student fails, it is the professor’s fault, rather like a hospital in which every death is laid at the door of the medical staff. One result of this hot pursuit of the student purse is the growth of courses tailored to whatever is currently in fashion among 20-year-olds. In my own discipline of English, that means vampires rather than Victorians, sexuality rather than Shelley, fanzines rather than Foucault, the contemporary world rather than the medieval one. It is thus that deep-seated political and economic forces come to shape syllabuses. 

So, of course, I tweeted about this essay.

And then a new day dawned.

I was reading assignments that students had submitted, in response to a video that I required them to watch.  One began with the following sentences:

After watching the video I had many things run through my mind, so I watched the video a second time with my husband. After watching it we both sat and talked about what we saw and how we felt about the video.

The idea of the university is dying a painful death.  Meanwhile, I have an awesome job of interacting with a few students, though not all the time, who manage to get involved despite all that background noise.  They even talk about class work with their significant others!

Eagleton wraps up his essay with this:

There are, after all, more things in life than money. 

You, dear reader, can relate to this, right?  After all, my posts have covered these very issues.  More than once.