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Sunday, November 01, 2009
Oh Woe Is Us
1. The New York Times: top tier public universities becoming increasingly privatized, not good.
2. Louis Menand (Harvard Magazine): One more time: the Ph.D. Problem:*
If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this exercise, it might be that the academic system is a deeply internalized one. The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently.
*hat-tip, Bruce Jackson.
[EDIT] 3. 23 million dollar presidents at private universities (NYTimes):
Why is university presidents’ pay going up so much?
“I think the answer you’d get from the governing boards that set these salaries is that it’s a market and it’s increasingly hard to find these people,” said Jeffrey Selingo, editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which has published its compensation survey annually since 1993. “That said, almost every year, presidential salaries have gone up faster than inflation, and faster than tuition, which rankles some people on campus.”