Antiquitopia

In the NYTimes " Room for Debate ," there is a discussion on the worth of a master's degree in the current economic crisis. Again, my department chair has joined the discussion, offering his currently characteristically pessimistic perspective. He is right, however, that the M.A. is often a cash cow for a university and that its importance and worth will vary on a case by case basis on what you are getting it for, etc. Anyway, take a look, especially if you are going back to school because of the difficulties of current job market.

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...

David Bell has a rejoinder to Mark Taylor's NYTimes Op-Ed article : Defending Academe Is America's system of graduate education really the Detroit of higher learning? David A. Bell, The New Republic Published: April 28, 2009 Mark C. Taylor's yawp of pain about academia in The New York Times yesterday is a handy compendium of virtually every complaint currently circulating about the American university system. We are, he claims, overspecialized, obsolescent, irrelevant, and rigid. We learn more and more about less and less, while mercilessly exploiting successive generations of graduate students whom we then cast out into unemployment or the wilderness of adjuncting. In short, we stand with the auto manufacturers and (one might add) newspapers in the ranks of ill-adapted social dinosaurs awaiting extinction. "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning," writes Taylor, who is a professor of religion at Columbia University. And to deal with this crisis, T...

The chair of my department, Mark Taylor, just contributed the following article for the NYTimes about the state of graduate education and the university as a whole and his suggestions for the future (some are radical, others are more easily implemented): April 27, 2009 OP-CONTRIBUTOR End the University as We Know It By MARK C. TAYLOR GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans). Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the forma...

Professor poaching is something that is quite widespread throughout academe. I see it all the time at Columbia (usually from the perspective of the poacher). From the side of the poached, however, large public universities are being forced to create special funds in order to keep highly productive, high profile professors who are getting outside offers, and this in a down economy. And they seem to be doing a good job. According to an article in the Chronicle, many of the major public universities are retaining about 75% of the faculty whom they give a counteroffer. They don't give counteroffers to everyone (sometimes the offer from the other institution is just too good to match or beat, and they don't bother with institutions they perceive as less prestigious). But money is only part of the strategy. They are matching some of the poachers' benefits--things like reduction of course load, increased graduate students, increased teaching or research assistance, and simpl...

In the Chronicle , there was an article detailing some of the financial difficulties that many Catholic Universities are currently facing across the US. Most of the colleges and universities were founded by orders like the Jesuits or the Sisters of Notre Dame, etc. They relied upon these orders or the church for funding and oftentimes for the physical land and buildings as well! The faculty have traditionally been filled by priests, nuns, and monks who taught for free! Boards also drew upon such pools rather than people skilled in raising money (as at other institutions). But such unpaid faculty members are in shrinking supply. In fact, there have been increasingly fewer Catholics going into these religious orders since the 60s (correlating with Vatican II). Faculty positions, therefore, are being filled by lay people, who require payment and benefits comparable to their counterparts in other universities. And the boards are not very adept at raising money, meaning that their end...

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...

In the previous post, I noted procedures now in place at Penn State and Temple for students to report liberal bias in the classroom. If, in fact, there is discrimination based upon someone's point of view--one that they can present in the class, be challenged on, but be evaluated on how they present it rather than the view itself--then there is, indeed, a problem. For a long time, the university in America has been regarded as one of the last bastions of liberalism or progressive thought (from one point of view) or as a hold-out of liberalism left over from the 60s but really having no connection with the rest of society (from another point of view). Although, I should note that the structure or organization of the university is amazingly conservative--a hold-out from the middle ages! Divisions in to the current form of departments is a hold-over from the nineteenth-century, and, in fact, may need to be revised. Yet, the NYTimes and the Chronicle this past month have issued arti...