End the University as We Know It

[groovedaddy]

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?th&emc=th

[UndertheOcean]

1. Bunch of Hooey

we need specialization , the all encompassing Renaissance man is a thing of the past . The body of knowledge is just so vast right now.

[groovedaddy]

4. I find it interesting that so many ceos have liberal arts degrees. It really depends on the

objectives of the person going to school. Unfortunately, that's not always so clear for most.
Specialized education is important in particular fields. But I can't count the times I've heard people in various careers say that their college education really didn't relate to what they ended up doing in their jobs.

[izquierdista]

6. Bunch of religion

If the writer comes from the religion department, I can see why it appears to be a bunch of hooey -- it is. Now science, that does demand a high level of specialization.

[sui generis]

2. I'm all for it economically speaking

But totally against it academically speaking.

If the economy was the only driver of educational strategy, one would eventually just justify getting back to the three R's readin', writin' and 'rithmetic.

Who is going to decide what is "too narrow"? What checks and balances on these arbiters of academic propriety?

:shrug:

[Iris]

12. I don't think it makes sense economically. My sister is 10 years younger than me

and none of her friends can think outside of the boxes of their specialized degrees. How that helps them in an economy like this, I don't know. Even when things are good, constant change means constantly reinventing oneself, which is easier when one isn't pigeonholed.

[sui generis]

13. yes but who are we as Americans to choose

for other people.

Let's play free market economics with education - the existence of people in pigeonholes deters the next generation from following them. Why make a rule to eliminate when it will happen on its own. The flip side of a rule to limit specialization is that it enforces homogeneity; better to let those specialties evolve and reproduce or evolve and die.

The article only talks about what the author perceives as useless or less useful. We are not a utilitarian society and we shouldn't strive to be. Without somebody studying cellular automata we wouldn't have the ability to write neural networks for advanced computation, and without those specializations we would not be able to predict and pinpoint earthquakes, weather, tides, and the impact of solar storms.

Mandelbrot gave us an interesting iterative mathematical model that when processed in a linear progression still yields perturbations - describing both market fluctuations and encryption methods, among other real world uses.

Without educational specialization, we would be like humans without evolution - just clones of each other making it criminal to be different.

Some will fail in their choices, as in all things and any thing. We shouldn't focus on failure.

[Iris]

14. I agree that specialization is important in some areas.

But most students I deal with are just in college to get "a job" - nothing specific. They'd be far better of learning to analyze, think, see the big picture than taking generic business classes.

[mike_c]

3. I can't speak for the humanities...

...but in the biological sciences at least, my personal experience has been just the opposite. I got multiple job offers while working a short postdoctoral research position, have been able to change jobs (i.e. got more offers a few years later) and have risen through the academic ranks to full prof-- all since receiving my PhD in 1995. My department has hired twenty or so faculty since then, including me.

Ironically, we STILL need five or six positions filled-- the impediment isn't crusty old profs occupying seats needed by newly minted doctorates. Rather, it's state budget cuts and hiring freezes. There still seems to be plenty of demand for higher education-- we're turning qualified students away. What's missing is the social commitment to invest in education.

[jody]

5. The author of the article says "In my own religion department" but fails to show how his opinions

are in any way applicable to other fields like science, mathematics, engineering.

IMO the author is simply expressing frustration because there is little or no demand for his particular specialty in religion.

[happyslug]

8. He is the Chairmen of his Religious Department, thus most familiar with it.

His comments have been done by others in the "Hard Sciences", but more so in the Social Sciences (Which Includes religion). As he stated in his letter:

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

Simply he is saying you should NOT make to many specialists (i.e. expert in only one area), what is needed is that such experts ALSO know other areas, Religion experts should know international relations for example (and vica versa), but he has seen to many people concentrating NOT on how they area of expertise affects other areas, but how to make themselves even more an aspect in that area as opposed to how it interacts with other areas.

Maybe it is do to his area of expertise, but others have made similar comments, to many people with to narrow an education, where a broader sense of where your expertise relates to other area are of equal or greater importance. His solutions may NOT be the best solutions, but it is an effort to get people, especially in the Social Sciences, to work together and at least try to understand each other.

[jody]

9. My experience with university profs is primarily in science, math, engineering. I don't see

specialization as a problem at all at the masters level nor a major problem at the PhD level.

For faculty in those areas, one must specialize to hope to obtain grants and contracts and that is required in most major universities.

I doubt that there are many grants and few contracts available for faculty in theology and if so those are probably for a few thousand dollars.

That last statement is my opinion and you may have facts that cause me to revise it.

[sinkingfeeling]

7. I agree with the author. We've become highly 'over-specialized' in a great many fields.

[jobycom]

10. These highly focused specialties are the heart of science and learning.

Some scholars and scientists are big-picture folk, but they rely on the specialized research of others to form and support their theories. Without an expert on medieval coinage in central France in the seventh century, for instance, you couldn't form an accurate theory on the development of commerce through the Middle Ages, and that would hamper an understanding of modern economic theory as economists developed theories of monetary systems without crucial data.

Scientists build on small studies to prove their grand theories. If you start ranking knowledge and learning on whether it has immediate monetary advantages or broad popular appeal, you will lose the base upon which knowledge is built, and will put science and scholarship only in the hands of corporations who will only do, say, medical studies if they can make a profitable drug out of it. There's too much of that as it is.

Universities are one of the last bastions of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They have flaws, they may not produce a profit, and much of what happens in them may have little relevance anywhere other than within a specialized, arcane field, but they are still critical to an advanced society, IMHO.

As for the author's suggestions, most of them are already done or doable. His suggestion really boils down to two things: do away with tenure, and put beauracrats more in charge of learning. Both are simply ways to give authority (whether governments or religious organizations or private foundations) control over what a scholar or scientist studies, and that's exactly what universities are structured to prevent.

Just my thoughts.

[jody]

11. Precisely, the value of universities to society is in basic research, to follow a dream without fear

of failure but in toto those dreams are behind every advance in science, math, engineering and probably all fields.

"Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation, growing in the mind of some lone individual - an individual whose dreams waken him in the night while others lie contentedly asleep." - Crawford H. Greenewal