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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

First, I want to thank my niece for helping me set up this blog. She's remarkable. I hope she'll post here occasionally about her current experiences in a university honors program. It's my good fortune that her major is...computer science.

“The problem with universities,” James Redfield, a professor at the University of Chicago, recently remarked, “is that universities are not operations which are constructed for making money. They are operations which are chartered to spend money. Of course, in order to acquire money to spend, they do have to acquire it. But their job is to pursue non-economic purposes. Or, to put it another way, their job is to pursue and, in fact, to develop and shape purposes within the society in some specific way. They are value-makers. They are not supposed to be pursuing the values of the society by responding to demand; they are supposed to shape demand, which is, in fact, what education is all about.”

It’s interesting that Redfield calls the essential and distinctive nature, even the glory, of the university - its value-making activity, its independent self-creation - a “problem.” But what he has in mind is that most elements of American culture today - hypercareerism, tv-addiction, attention deficit, mass entertainment, mercenary greed, narcissism - conspire against the expression of self-generated intellectual and moral value that the university has always represented. And the university has been unable to resist that conspiracy.

More and more of the people who attend, administer, and teach at American universities lack mental clarity and ethical automony, certainly; but, much more horribly, they also lack the desire for these goods. Instead of inspiring students to want things like lucidity, historical awareness, passion, and courage, university leaders, having confused their institutions with operations which are constructed for making money, consult consumer preferences. Desperate to attract and hold students, they have long since forgotten what they might once, as sites of learning, have wanted those students for. Many faculty are similarly at sea, having lost sight of any self-generated research agenda, for instance, in pursuit of government and corporate funds, and having, in their teaching, abandoned the difficult business of understanding complexity for the simple joys of sermonizing.

Only students are blameless in this matter of drifting vaguely about waiting to be told what to do - it is not their fault that no one ever told them what being educated means.

Even Redfield’s university, famed for its Great Books curriculum and intellectual seriousness, is assuming the passive-receptive character of other American campuses. True, Chicago does not yet, as some universities do, offer a Masters degree in catering, but it is on its way toward becoming another master of academic catering generally - to the confused alarums of students, to the imperatives of industry, to emotivists who hate intellectuals... to almost everybody, really. Redfied knows that Chicago may someday be a model of fully functional market-driven passive-receptivity.