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Friday, April 30, 2004
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HOT OFF THE PRESS...
...here's another statement - nice, concise, and available in this morning's New York Times - of UD's creed: Those who run universities bear considerable responsibility for creating these inequities - and not only in [family wealth based] admissions. These trends are just the most visible sign of how much the market ethic has come to dominate higher education. To be sure, dollars have always greased the wheels of academe. What is new and troubling is the raw power that money exerts over all of higher education, including the emphasis on research that adds less to the storehouse of knowledge than to the institutional coffers, and the shift from liberal arts to the "practical arts." While competition has strengthened some colleges, embedded in the very idea of university are values the market does not honor: the belief in a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers; in the idea of openness and not ownership; and in the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisified. David L. Kirp's reminder that the student ought to be an acolyte, not a pandered-to consumer, reminds me in turn to mention that this year UD decided not to hand out teaching evaluations, although she vaguely recalls having read somewhere that they are "mandatory." Well, what's tenure for? I've studied, observed, read, and experienced these things for decades, and I've concluded that they're corrupt. They corrupt our demeanor, our seriousness, and our grading. They grant factitious wisdom and influence to students, teaching them to regard professors as petitioners. Like so many aspects of the market-driven university, they deprive the student of the one great and good thing only the university can give: the chastening experience of devotion to thought rather than to the self. |