Academia is only one step away from a degree in basket-weaving!

A few years ago, when enrollment was beginning to rapidly increase at the university where I work, my fellow faculty got excited enough to begin to offer bizarre courses, and academic majors and minors.  After I realized that the "process" to review proposals was nothing more than "you scratch my back, and I will yours," and more so after learning the hard way that raising questions only made me the enemy, I started disconnecting, as much as possible, from the campus committee processes.

A tragic contrast to such an approach to crazy curriculum?  Way back, when I was still involved in the committee "process," I argued that we needed to offer courses for students to understand Islam and the Middle East.  We had practically nothing on these, even a couple of years after the events of 9/11 and the wars we had launched.  One would think that these topics are far more important than "sports management."  Yet, "sports management" sailed through, while my proposal was severely criticized and shot down even within the Social Science Division!   

If one is willing to overlook the ideological framework of the host-source, then it will be difficult to disagree with the following comments:

Degrees in sports administration and pop culture? Higher education seems to have drifted so far from its fundamental charge that, today, apparently anything can qualify for degree status.

What an injustice this is to students, who innocently believe that if a university thinks a subject important enough to make it into a degree, then they will be well-served by enrolling in it. There are those who blame such students for their bad choices. I am not one of them. I taught in universities for many years and I know the deference paid by most students to the standards articulated by their institution. After all, these are still kids, for the most part; offering them degrees in “pop culture” is perilously close to child abuse. Any academic or administrator who truly believes in both the employability and intellectual respectability of a degree in pop culture is both deceived and deceiving.

There was a time, not that long ago, when universities had a proper reverence for the life of the mind, a reverence that would have made them ashamed to offer such empty-headed degree programs to their students.

Apparently, that time has passed.

Faculty, who are in charge of the curriculum, cook up whatever fancies them, and most administrators do not care to raise tough questions as long as there is enrollment.  Nobody cares whether any of these shenanigans serves the cause of educating students.  For way too long, students have come to be treated as ATMs, and finally the public is beginning to wake up.  The unfortunate part though: as far as I can see from the inside, well, it is business as usual :(

Quote of the day: on inefficiency in universities

In the summer, apparently I didn't win friends when I mentioned in passing, in an op-ed on resource allocation, about inefficiencies in higher education.  I suppose it is safe to blog about the following; for one, I didn't author it (!) and, more importantly, those unhappy with my comments don't read my blog anyway :)

Curricular glut makes programs and institutions operate inefficiently and disadvantages both students and faculty members. Students are crippled because unnecessary requirements decrease the students' likelihood to graduate in a timely manner. And faculty members are challenged because the more curricular commitments a department has, the more difficult it is for professors to find time to pursue other objectives, such as research and creative activities.

In short, the curricular reform that is under way throughout higher education is, first and foremost, about serving our students. It's about streamlining general-education requirements so that they can progress in a timely manner. It's about making sure that a major's requirements don't place unnecessary hurdles in students' way. And it's about trimming underproductive programs so that adequate resources can then be invested in programs with strong enrollment.

We owe it to our students—and the public, in general—to operate as efficiently as possible.

Really?  We owe to our students and taxpayers?  OMG, isn't that heresy to utter such words in academe? (editor: ahem, can you be a tad more sarcastic, please?)

Why don't we teach electronic communication?

It is a shame that we don't teach college freshmen and sophomore how to effectively communicate through the modern channels.

We still cling on to the old world of speech and composition, and are oblivious to the explosive communication possibilities that have opened up via blogging and micro-blogging (like Tweeter), video-broadcasting, .... Most Communications curriculum are nothing but about forensics, critical theory, and voices of the minorities. These are important topics, yes, but communications is way more than that now.

Yes, I truly value the ability to write well--something I am still trying to master. But, I see no reason to expect every incoming freshman to be a Hemingway or Kafka. And not everybody will ever become orators a la Obama.

But, I can see many, many students being a lot more productive--in their jobs, relationships, and as citizens--if they get a good feel for putting some of these emerging (emerged?) technologies to use. If only we could show them some of these from day one .....

Which is why I like trends like this one:

Part of the draw for students still flocking to journalism schools is a new generation of courses retooled for new media. The same rapidly changing technology that is creating headaches for many media executives appeals to a generation of students who grew up playing computer games and texting and now tweeting their friends on the microblog Twitter.

"These students are also very comfortable multitasking, and they like the allure of doing different things every day," says Ms. Hines, who is director of Howard University's graduate program in mass communication and media studies. ...

... "Any technological skill you teach them in 2009 will be obsolete by 2012, but we want them to understand that this is the beginning of a lifelong process they need to be open to."

The University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism also requires incoming graduate students to participate in a multimedia boot camp, which runs from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for five days. Lessons in multimedia storytelling are reinforced in a required class in Web publishing skills that runs parallel to one in basic reporting. Students learn how to use digital video, audio, and photo equipment.

Students were also blogging last month from American University's three-week multimedia boot camp and sharing videos of the speakers on YouTube. ....

...

"There's not a great future in working for mainstream media," says Mr. Harper. "The future is for smart, hard-working students to band together, create their own media, and make a business out of it—and that's what a lot of them are doing."

Christopher Wink hopes to be part of that reinvented future. He graduated from Temple last year and spent three months stringing for daily newspapers in Pennsylvania before heading on a European backpacking trip with a journalism-school friend.

"We returned to an economy in recession and the print industry in free fall and said, 'Hell, let's build something of our own,'" he says. In February the duo began publishing Technically Philly, a news site that covers local technology and innovation.

If only higher education would move at a speed that is at least a tad faster than glacial. Hey, wait a minute, even the glaciers are rapidly melting away :-(