Links
Archives
Saturday, August 07, 2004
|
WASSAMATTA U
The same anti-elitist typesetting machine seems to have pounded out two recent opinion pieces in two different newspapers. Both respond to the Homeland Security Secretary's reported plan to quit his job because he needs a private sector salary to pay for his childrens' university educations. The same headline (IF RIDGE CAN'T AFFORD...)leads to very similar screeds in the Bennington Banner and the Grand Forks Herald (the latter picks up the piece from the Philadelphia Daily News); the same mad-as-hell cliches blast "well-paid suit" Ridge for complaining that he (a privileged federal bureaucrat), is hurting, when "Joe Average" (as one of the opinion writers calls him), is "screwed." The country's gone "elitist," requiring college degrees for receptionists, and making college more and more expensive. Joe's credit cards are maxed out, the economy's slowing, and now he's got to pay for college... Ignore the populist pandering, and these guys have a point. Ridge owns a house worth $873,000 (in Bethesda, UD's home town), and he has a lot of other sources of wealth. He's quite able to pay for college. He's using the college thing as an excuse to get out of his job. Ridge thinks the college thing is a plausible excuse because he knows that we know that travel, tuition, and room and board are incredibly expensive. NPR recently interviewed two professors, each the author of a book on the matter (again, with remarkably similar titles, come to think of it: Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much; and Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much), and they pointed out that the main reason it's so insanely expensive is that things calling themselves "colleges" and "universities" are actually very little about teaching and overwhelmingly about "dormitories, food, entertainment...intercollegiate athletics," and so forth --"Universities are not about teaching ... students; they're about other, [noninstructional] things." We need to "cut down on [the] vast administrative bureaucracy...administrative staffs have soared at universities." All of this is one reason why Timothy Burke's proposal for a new sort of college stresses that ...the college would build no athletic facilities, health care facilities, dining facilities or anything similar, and would instead encourage students to buy these services just as they would (or would not) if they were not attending the college...the college would also not offer some of the administrative services available at traditional liberal arts colleges - no extensive counseling to students, or support for student groups, and so on. The college would take no official or administrative interest in the private lives of its students (or for that matter its faculty or administration)... Burke proposes, in other words, that we think hard about what a college is really about, and focus sharply upon that... and UD has of course been saying much the same thing in University Diaries, though not so well as Burke... Anyway, this sort of idea has rather a long way to go in the United States. So many colleges and universities here are sports facilities with a few classrooms. UD doesn't know how you go from being a sports facility to being a university. Two recent articles about two such places - the University of North Carolina and the University of Georgia - point out that the coaching staff and players that dominate these institutions are dragging them down further every day, draining huge amounts of money [UNC Outprices Itself], forcing the administration to sell the place to the highest corporate bidder, and (in the case of Georgia) "embarrassing" the institution by being guilty of so many major NCAA infractions that they've now been given a whole new category: "repeat violator." A lot of sports programs at a lot of universities are well-established semi-criminal operations of this sort. UD doesn't think this is what John Henry Newman had in mind by "the idea of a university." But see - and I'm just guessing here, based on their style and content - I doubt the two guys I quote at the start of this post want their kids to go to serious actual universities. If you said to them it'll cost one tenth the price but there won't be tvs, a football team, or a campus psychiatrist, they'd say huh? And you call yourself a university??? |