A NY Times blog by Stanley Fish: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/?em
And this comment by a guest: 6. January 19, 2009 12:12 am The problem with the university system is that it's full of pseudo-self-critical, highfalutin drivel that comes with an obscene price tag — not unlike the professor who wrote this piece. Save your parents' money, kids. Learn a trade. — Robert French --------------------------------------------------snip How has this happened? According to Donoghue, it's been happening for a long time, at least since 1891, when Andrew Carnegie congratulated the graduates of the Pierce College of Business for being " fully occupied in obtaining a knowledge of shorthand and typewriting" rather than wasting time "upon dead languages." Industrialist Richard Teller Crane was even more pointed in his 1911 dismissal of what humanists call the "life of the mind." No one who has "a taste for literature has the right to be happy" because "the only men entitled to happiness . . . are those who are useful." The opposition between this view and the view held by the heirs of Matthew Arnold's conviction that poetry will save us could not be more stark. But Donoghue counsels us not to think that the two visions are locked in a struggle whose outcome is uncertain. One vision, rooted in an "ethic of productivity" and efficiency, has, he tells us, already won the day; and the proof is that in the very colleges and universities where the life of the mind is routinely celebrated, the material conditions of the workplace are configured by the business model that scorns it. The best evidence for this is the shrinking number of tenured and tenure-track faculty and the corresponding rise of adjuncts, part-timers more akin to itinerant workers than to embedded professionals. Humanities professors like to think that this is a temporary imbalance and talk about ways of redressing it, but Donoghue insists that this development, planned by no one but now well under way, cannot be reversed. Universities under increasing financial pressure, he explains, do not "hire the most experienced teachers, but rather the cheapest teachers." Tenured and tenure-track teachers now make up only 35 percent of the pedagogical workforce and "this number is steadily falling." Once adjuncts are hired to deal with an expanding student body (and the student body is always expanding), budgetary planners find it difficult to dispense with the savings they have come to rely on; and "as a result, an adjunct workforce, however imperceptible its origins . . . has now mushroomed into a significant fact of academic life." What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the "higher learning." John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: "Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that 'expand their minds'" nonsense. -raghu. -- Did you hear about the dyslexic Satanist? He sold his soul to Santa. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
