Tory
On Apr 29, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:some contextEducation, especially higher education used to be considered a "calling"(not unlike a religious calling) and the objective was wisdom and the advancement of human knowledge. Access to the academy was closely guarded and elitist. K-12 education started moving away from this model in the 1800s in response to an idealist notion of "universal education" and a market notion of needing an educated (to a certain vocation driven extent) workforce. Today, the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake is vestigial at best, and knowledge for a job dominates the philosophy, structure, and process of that segment of our educational system. College and graduate education was slowly succumbing but reasonablyresistant to those same influences until the end of WWII. At that pointthe universal education and vocational training forces were compounded by the need for a factory, assembly line, high volume educationalprocess and a severe need to use education as a means for regulating theworkforce. (You had to get all those women out of the workforce and find something for the unemployable - because of lack of demand - ex-soldiers to do.) Over time "higher ed" succumbed to these forces just as K-12 did. In parallel, there was a change in management philosophy, away fromconsidering educational institutions as something akin to a "church" ledby wise elders (faculty) to considering them as a business led and governed by MBAs with curricula as commodity and students as customers. The result is an educational system that is substantially bankrupt and that substantially should be abandoned as the op-ed piece suggests. Tenure evolved from being an acknowledgement of accomplishment andscholarship plus protection from political and ideological harassment toa labor relations negotiating chip as the threat to faculty primarily became (and is) grounded in budget decisions. Today the issue with tenure is not who has it and why but the proportion of expensivetenured/tenure track versus adjunct and non-tenure track in the faculty.This ratio is effectively more important in accreditation criteria for an institution than the quality of education it delivers. (The second most important accreditation criteria - not surprisingly - is outcomes assessment, skewed to how much money your graduates earn in the workforce and how pleased their employers are with the education you provided.) Yes, I know I am painting in broad strokes, and that there are exceptions. davew On Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:58 -0600, "Owen Densmore" <o...@backspaces.net> wrote:Well, not to go on, but: - Wouldn't most of the problems tenure solves be solved by variations on the 20% theme: You have 20% of your time to be exploring "research" that is not on your main "deliverable" path? Google does this. Xerox too. Ditto SunLabs. And any savvy engineer/researcher does it on thesly. Sabbaticals are on a different time scale, but similar in nature.And as far as jobs -- I don't recall even thinking about jobs until well after getting out of schools. I just assumed, due to all the money flying around for tech/sci/math after Sputnik, that learn Math and Physics .. mainly 'cause they are deeply philosophic and you *do* need somehow to figure our how the world works. But it wasn't related to work, only getting aligned with the world somehow. But I certainly also hear a lot about folks studying X for job Y. Isn't that a pretty new thing, tho? Most folks go to college to go through that last phase of life before "growing up". Man, I'm old. -- Owen On Apr 29, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never have worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took both intellectual and missionary work over more than a decade before it even began to pay off. As a young untenured assistant professor, he could never have done this--he'd be out after his sixth year. I could write an essay on where the liberal arts went wrong (an old English major here) but I'll spare you except to say as disciplines, they went from irrelevant to downright scandalous, the result of one part science-envy, one part who the hell knows. I'm speaking here of literary studies, not anthropologists or psychologists, who have an honest claim to be scientists, in that they study phenomena to try and understand them, illuminate those phenomena for others. Merle and others have smacked our wrists for thinking about employability, but it's a fact of life for most people. I don't think it needs to be THE central issue in higher education, but it needs to be considered. However, I like her idea that the university is a complex adaptive system waiting to happen, and would love to take that discussion on further. Pamela On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world. Although I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal arts". In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally become part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study our organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise spanning everything from psychology to brain studies) help us figure out how to integrate computers into human activities. I've never had Tenure. Does it really help? -- OwenFrom: "David P. Reed" <dpr...@reed.com> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT To: d...@farber.net Cc: ip <i...@v2.listbox.com>Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as WeKnow It - NYTimes.com I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation: what hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL graduate programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever? Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have never allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree with that attitude towards the craft of learning... Flunk him out. David Farber wrote:Begin forwarded message: From: Benjamin Kuipers <kuip...@umich.edu> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT To: d...@farber.net Cc: "ip" <i...@v2.listbox.com>, Benjamin Kuipers <kuip...@umich.edu>Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We KnowIt - NYTimes.com Dave, A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my reply: With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay, comprehensively. First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", Americangraduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of theworld. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa restrictions that have made it more difficult for American universities to get the very best students from around the world, so graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.) Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically- oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for thehumanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face verydifferent intellectual issues from the STEM fields.) Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequatepreparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you givean undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then preparedfor?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary workmust be first-class work within the standards of each discipline involved. Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial positions (though this may be more of an issue in other disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created by a selected community of scholars. Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuingintellectual questions they consider important, an institution mustprovide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories, centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the institution support creative thinkers. Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and intellectual risk-taking in our major universities. Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty, impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in hisfield or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of thatin the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career, the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if theinstitutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting andcultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, inone way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problemwith unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume responsibilities like administration and student advising", then perhaps his department needs new leadership. Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay aresuperficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Someof his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter- disciplinary work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the framework we have. Cheers, Ben============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable." John Kenneth Galbraith ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
