The Meltdown of the University
In the nineteen-sixties it was all the rage to charge the University with being "irrelevant". Students protested then that courses of study should be, above all, "relevant". But such "Relevance" actually meant only one thing: the overt introduction of politics into pratically all subjects. Sadly, the American University, perhaps sensing that its historic mission of passing on 'culture' or 'science' in an era of cynicism and state crime was already a thing of the distant past, then acquiesced to some of the student's demands. Perhaps this was inevitable since American Universities already knew, by the sixties, that they had grown 'irrelevant' to the rest of society. But I think few of the sixties' radicals, many of whose ideas, did afterall, spawn useful educational alternatives, such as "free universities", would not have believed that the ivory towers they found so conservative back then actually required only the slightest shove to become far-worse monstrosities of pandering and realpolitick. If any of those radicals took a tour of those same American Universities today they would see things, I think, that would make them pray for the return of the moldiest professor they could remember, the one who would not concede a single jot to "relevance".
The transformation of Universities from places of aloof contemplation to engaged, prejudicial, and power-hungry corporations is surely complete with the report this week, in the New York Times, that the era of deference to professors is over. The student is now ipso facto a consumer, and only a consumer, and we all know that in late Capitalism there is only one person who runs all corporations, and that is the consumer. A professor cited in this article testifies that students actually contact her to ask what sort of paper should they buy on which to do their homework. This leads the author of the article to ask a Professor of Education at Harvard to comment why students would be willing to be so disrespectful of people who clearly give over their entire lives to the passionate study of some subject. Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard School of Education, who, notably, has, according to the Times, studied the role of technology in education says that students no longer defer to their professors "because they realize that professor's expertise could rapidly become outdated. The old deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge, and that notion has weakened," he adds.
In the nineteen-sixties it was all the rage to charge the University with being "irrelevant". Students protested then that courses of study should be, above all, "relevant". But such "Relevance" actually meant only one thing: the overt introduction of politics into pratically all subjects. Sadly, the American University, perhaps sensing that its historic mission of passing on 'culture' or 'science' in an era of cynicism and state crime was already a thing of the distant past, then acquiesced to some of the student's demands. Perhaps this was inevitable since American Universities already knew, by the sixties, that they had grown 'irrelevant' to the rest of society. But I think few of the sixties' radicals, many of whose ideas, did afterall, spawn useful educational alternatives, such as "free universities", would not have believed that the ivory towers they found so conservative back then actually required only the slightest shove to become far-worse monstrosities of pandering and realpolitick. If any of those radicals took a tour of those same American Universities today they would see things, I think, that would make them pray for the return of the moldiest professor they could remember, the one who would not concede a single jot to "relevance".
The transformation of Universities from places of aloof contemplation to engaged, prejudicial, and power-hungry corporations is surely complete with the report this week, in the New York Times, that the era of deference to professors is over. The student is now ipso facto a consumer, and only a consumer, and we all know that in late Capitalism there is only one person who runs all corporations, and that is the consumer. A professor cited in this article testifies that students actually contact her to ask what sort of paper should they buy on which to do their homework. This leads the author of the article to ask a Professor of Education at Harvard to comment why students would be willing to be so disrespectful of people who clearly give over their entire lives to the passionate study of some subject. Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard School of Education, who, notably, has, according to the Times, studied the role of technology in education says that students no longer defer to their professors "because they realize that professor's expertise could rapidly become outdated. The old deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge, and that notion has weakened," he adds.
Having been a college teacher myself I think the professor is right. But it is more than professors today who are "out-dated" after only a few years, it is the very notion that there exists any deep knowledge at all. So it is with interest that I note that the professor quoted above is a professor of technology. Technology occupies the same place in Universities today that Aristotle or Aquinas did in the year 1200 A.D. For today technology is taken as the supreme paragon of a universal truth. Not only is it replicable, it is predictably replicable. Since technology is both replicable and obsolete every few years this might led Universities to consider just what knowledge does not become obsolete. But this, in turn, this would require them to believe in the existence of a deep knowledge to start with. But so focused are Universities today on money and prestige, that they are unable even to consider this question. As technology draws to itself all wordly power and influence, technology becomes the beneificary, just as the early Catholic Church was the major beneificary of the Scholasticism praticed for centuries in medieval universities. Seen in this light we can understand that the real meaning of the "outdating of expertise" is the really nothing more than the 'updating of money'. What we think of as 'culture' or 'science' has really not changed much since the Renaissance, only the breath of knowledge has increased. Thomas Jefferson knew everything worth knowing by reading three-hundred books; we moderns are still amateurs even if we read three-thousand books. If we read those books in one field we are likely to be professors; if we read them in different fields we are likely to be considered idiots. For in our culture, knowledge that dosen't pay, make us more powerful, or help take us away from the planet we have despoiled---is simply not important knowledge.
A culture which has our view of knowlege is bound, sooner or later, to meltdown the entire "idea" of a University. This is why when you go on American Campuses today the first thing you see is the grand screens of the Television sets blaring away in the student unions; the students ordering their double Lattes in the middle of Libraries, whole courses being devoted to silly fads, entirely serious meetings and discussions being held over the lastest inanities of the mass media or the manical bogey-men of political correctness ---(like the Muslim Cartoon issue) and a host of similar froth which makes pure folly of any notion of that that is happening on campuses is the encouragement of serious reflection and the development of the intellectus spiritus.
Who is to blame? Not the students really, for they simply reflect what is around them, even if what is around them is only cowshit. I think their parents are to blame, for in failing to educate their own children, for being so distracted by the money-making neccessary to pay for fancy universities, they have sacrificed what could be conveyed by them for free to their children, thus damning themselves and their chidren to the support of an anarchronistic machine that was corrupt and broken even when they were students. As for the administrators of the Universities, you may not like like a quack doctor, but when the wealthy or the foolish keep on buying his soiled wares you have to expect that 'expertise' (read knowledge itself) will eventually be outdated, and presumably with it, perhaps even neccessarily, the University too.
Will Morgan
A culture which has our view of knowlege is bound, sooner or later, to meltdown the entire "idea" of a University. This is why when you go on American Campuses today the first thing you see is the grand screens of the Television sets blaring away in the student unions; the students ordering their double Lattes in the middle of Libraries, whole courses being devoted to silly fads, entirely serious meetings and discussions being held over the lastest inanities of the mass media or the manical bogey-men of political correctness ---(like the Muslim Cartoon issue) and a host of similar froth which makes pure folly of any notion of that that is happening on campuses is the encouragement of serious reflection and the development of the intellectus spiritus.
Who is to blame? Not the students really, for they simply reflect what is around them, even if what is around them is only cowshit. I think their parents are to blame, for in failing to educate their own children, for being so distracted by the money-making neccessary to pay for fancy universities, they have sacrificed what could be conveyed by them for free to their children, thus damning themselves and their chidren to the support of an anarchronistic machine that was corrupt and broken even when they were students. As for the administrators of the Universities, you may not like like a quack doctor, but when the wealthy or the foolish keep on buying his soiled wares you have to expect that 'expertise' (read knowledge itself) will eventually be outdated, and presumably with it, perhaps even neccessarily, the University too.
Will Morgan
February 21, 2006
posted by Will Morgan @ 6:21 PM
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