Antiquitopia

The NYTimes reports that Reed College, a rigorous small liberal arts university, has had to weed out many of its students who would otherwise have been admitted but needed too much financial assistance and have replaced those students with those who can pay. Reed College, of course, is not alone in this, but is an example of a larger trend in response to the dwindling endowments of universities. This, in fact, has most affected smaller private universities, although no institution has been completely untouched. June 10, 2009 A Small College Struggles With Economics By JONATHAN D. GLATER PORTLAND, Ore. — The admissions team at Reed College, known for its free-spirited students, learned in March that the prospective freshman class it had so carefully composed after weeks of reviewing essays, scores and recommendations was unworkable. Money was the problem. Too many of the students needed financial aid, and the school did not have enough. So the director of financial aid gave the team a...

There are more responses to Mark Taylor, but these are actually interesting...at Gawker : Mark C. Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's Religion department, started some shit. So much we need two posts to flush-it down properly. First up: Kate Perkins and Dan Kois. God can't save you now, Mark! So Professor Taylor's main thesis: If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps And he outlines his manifesto for reform in six points. All of it raises central questions about the purpose of education in our new information age. I got some peeps to discuss: When an article starts off like this, who wouldn't want to keep reading? Here was my favorite response from a "peep": The ivory tower, traditionally, has stood as a haven fo...

The University world is often viewed as a meritocracy on all levels, whether faculty advancement or student marks. And while some realize that (in the past) it has been really the wealthiest who tend to go to the most prestigious institutions (just due to the price tag), the trend will become more pronounced with next year's incoming class at universities around the country. Indeed, the cost of university education has been increasing at an alarming rate for a long time now, but the economic crisis will now exacerbate the divide between the haves and have nots in terms of university admissions policies. As the NYTimes reports , universities with shrinking endowments are taking the ability of a student to pay fully in cash into admissions considerations, turning the meritocracy increasingly into a plutocracy. Socio-economic diversity will be reduced, and, since unfortunately so often socio-economic diversity is linked with ethnicity, ethnic diversity is likely to decrease in pri...

Back in August , I discussed the book, The Last Professors, by Frank Donoghue. Now Stanley Fish discusses it in the NYTimes . He ultimately shares Donoghue's basic pessimistic outlook for the humanities and the future of the liberal arts and the university as a whole. Donoghue, by the way, is a former student of Fish's.

I am fascinated by what brings people to this website. Most people visit antiquitopia from google searches of particular issues, although I am very happy to see regulars visit and comment on particular posts. The most popular posts are quite diverse, and perhaps reflect the breadth of my own interests--although all relate in some way (sometimes tangential) to religion, antiquity, or the state of the university. Topping the list at the moment is the posting on the US News & World Report college rankings . For those attracted to this post, I highly recommend reading my book note on Frank Donoghue's The Last Professors . Secondly, the most consistently read page is the series of quotations regarding religion and liminality in Chuck Palahniuk's Rant . Lots of Palahniuk fans out there, I can see. Thirdly, people have been interested in the Revelation of Gabriel . I would recommend following the links on this subject posted by April Deconick at Forbidden Gospels and Jim Davi...

US News & World Report has done it again--the new college rankings are out. It always begs the question: can someone really quantify quality? No, not really. But the magazine tries to every year. Frank Donoghue, in his book, The Last Professors , has criticized the process (and even idea) of the whole ranking process. See my post on this book here . For full article (or at least links) for rankings, go here or, better yet, here . Nonetheless, I'll give some highlights: Harvard ranks number 1 by itself for the first time since 1996. It usually shares this distinction with Princeton. My own Columbia ranks 8, tied with Duke and U Chicago. So, here's the top ten (and some other schools for comparison): 1. Harvard 2. Princeton 3. Yale 4. MIT 5. Stanford 6. California Institute of Technology / U Penn 8. Columbia / Duke / University of Chicago Some interesting comparisons of note: Wash U in St. Louis (my old stomping grounds) comes in 12, being tied with Northwestern....

I just finished reading The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donoghue, who is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State University. I read this because the chair of my department has asked the entire department to read it, but I would recommend it to all humanities professors or professors to be. And while it focuses on the humanities, many of the observations affect the future of the university world as a whole. Unlike similar books, Donoghue takes a long perspective. Most books speak of a crisis in higher education beginning in the 80s, perhaps the 70s in the clash between corporate business values and the values of the university. He claims, instead, that this tension has been around for over a century, at least since the rise of monopolistic capitalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this is not just a book about corporate values of competition and the bottom line versus the last bastion of pro...