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Friday, October 06, 2006
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Instablogging from the ACTA Roundtable... ...on the future of university education... This is gonna be stream o'consc... There's an undeniable ick aspect to all such public, Ivy-located, well-heeled events -- they all involve some degree of snobbery, self-promotion... They tend to be, like this one, overwhelmingly male, sixtyish, white, wealthy... The Harvard Club, which I've walked by a million times but never til now entered, is your standard well-tended New Orleans house of pleasure, with brooding maroon walls and curtaining so dark you wouldn't know it's a gloriously sunny autumn afternoon out there... Martin Peretz begins things with a rambling autobiographical nothing sort of address full of uhs. Some of what he says draws the insider laughter that's another unpleasant element of this sort of event... Indeed, there's a parochial, Harvardcentric feel to much of the day so far (this is the lunch break, and I'm racing through this to get back by 1:30, so apologies for typos, etc.)... Peretz says he can't even understand Harvard's course descriptions in political science, let alone the course content they designate... he's full of contempt for Rational Choice but doesn't say why... Prefers Irrational Constraint? ... Yet another unpleasant aspect of such parochial gatherings -- Peretz and others make lame jokes at the expense of Princeton and Yale... In the interests of full disclosure, I must say that Mr UD, a Harvard grad, does this on occasion too, and it's... so lame. Peretz mentions the Minuteman dustup at Columbia, and this is indeed fair game, but he doesn't do much with it... or rather he tries to do too much with it, calling the idiots in the audience who shouted down a conservative speaker "ideological thugs." Ends by saying "These have been rambling remarks," which was the only on-point remark he made. After that, genial Harry Lewis is a relief -- he gets right to the point: "I wanna talk about the curriculum." Harvard's, that is. He thinks the latest report from the committee on that gives grounds for hope... But he reiterates the argument of his book (about which I've already blogged) that the consumerist model of student happiness combined with a bunch of highly specialized researchers who don't care much about teaching has killed the general core. Like Stephen Trachtenberg, president of UD's own George Washington University, who will speak later, Lewis dumps on faculty: "Professors are cut off from reality... They only care about the impression they make on the small number of peer faculty in their discipline across the country... No real institutional loyalty..." Young Ross Douthat is next - he has a pleasantly modest demeanor -- he's pale, with a scruffy beard and thinning scraggly hair, so you expect a British accent, but he's one of us. A very well-spoken lad, he offers a list of things that are wrong with elite institutions -- consumerism, again, and a kind of bland corporate attitude on the part of presidents that it's important just to "keep the money flowing" rather than take stands and shake things up. He argues that despite a certain surface diversity, most elite universities continue to be sustainers of existing elites rather than creators of new ones. Stephen Thernstrom's next -- the very model of an academic: comes to the podium clutching crinkly papers; wears a way-tweedy suit, has wispy gray hair... a Daniel Moynihan hat... looks like Carl Sandberg! As he speaks, comes across as a snob and a crank... though I like the way he pronounces ad hoc ODD HOKE. Complains that "female faculty members" constituted the true source of evil against Larry Summers; and the way he says female makes me think he thinks we're animals... which is kind of exciting in a perverse way... In comments and questions, the Summers case dominates, which rather bores me... Old news, parochial story... Things indeed get more and more gossipy, with Peretz inanely starting to name names of people who undid his buddy Larry and then saying "Oh no... I guess I shouldn't name names..." [My tablemate, a profoundly well-connected Harvard person, whispers this to me: "Summers was descended from one too many economists. The genes went haywire!"] Second Session: Who knew? I didn't. Do you think I read conference schedules? It's the president of GW. John Silber was supposed to be here but he slipped and fell and broke his arm. Trachtenberg is smart, funny, has a tres Jewish shtick which I enjoy. ... Ay yay yay... I'm running out of time on this computer, and I wouldn't mind getting a bite to eat... Later... |