April 27th, 2009
NYT OP-ED: End the University as we know it
This Op-Ed was published in today’s New York Times edition. As the article starts, it sounds like just another “transform academia into University.INC” scheme with more applied and commodity-oriented scholarship … but the author offers some valid critiques of the current academic system. He even risks some proposals, but I’m not sure how his “problem”-centered structure is any different from the “disciplinary” structure. And as I said, it sounds too narrowly focused on problem-solving rather than on reflecting. For a more rounded reflection on things, there should be a more holistic approach to learning from the beginning … where beyond any specialization, students learn how to think through a large horizon of knowledge.
Here is an excerpt:
Our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”
Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.