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rfmcdonaldEarlier I said I'd talk about my dialogue with Dr. MacLaine on problems facing the university in our post-modern era. Let's see how much I get right:
To an extent, the university is facing problems because it wasn't designed to be what it is now. Universities in the Western tradition can trace their origins to medieval times, as places where ambitious young men (sons of the aristocracy, sons of the proto-bourgeoisie, occasionally talented students from every walk of life) could go to learn about God and Christian theology, in the tradition of Western humanism represented by Abelard. (Incidentally, compare this to the madrassahs of the Islamic world.) The university was not intended, as they are now, to be a place of unhindered intellectual discourse where sizable fractions of the general population could be educated in the liberal arts and the physical science and the theories of business (among other subjects); it was intended to be a place of indoctrination.
The heyday of the university as it was supposed to function may have been in the 1960s and 1970s, when despite the strains forced by the rapid expansion of university to the general population rapid economic growth easily produced enough wealth to sustain a student population in relative comfort and to ensure them a decent likelihood of eventual tenure. Dr. MacLaine recalled how, when he was a graduate student, some of his colleagues said that if worst came to worst, one could drop the role of full-time student and take a job. That isn't an option nowadays. Indeed, the intellectual premises of the modern university are increasingly coming under threat because of financial constraints facing both students and universities.
Currently, graduate programs are producing far more graduate students than there are positions for graduate students, ensuring a whole host of problems for the students in the process, like, "Can you find a job?" I myself am increasingly certain that I won't go on for a doctorate after I get my master's degree, barring some event that makes me want to risk the abominable job market and heavy debt loads for doctoral students in academia. I doubt that anything can resolve this problem, not even mass resignations on the part of baby-boomer professors and their migration to Borneo or the Kalahari. The question of oversupply means, of course, that universities can never be for more than a minority of students a way to become permanent, professional students.
Mind, this won't necessarily make a difference to universities since increasing class sizes and cutbacks to the academic infrastructure ensure that it will be impossible for students to receive the sort of individualized attention needed to allow a flourishing of independent thought. Dr. MacLaine mentioned a seminar in Vancouver given by a professor who regularly taught classes with hundreds of students, walking around with a microphone headset, gesturing broadly, ensuring mass participation through hand-raising, and generally acting more like a pop-music star in concert or an evangelical preacher on Vision TV than a professor. This sort of orgiastic performance works very well if you want to communicate an intellectual orthodoxy; perhaps the operators of madrassahs and Christian-indoctrination universities might want to look into this.
And on top of this, the university is increasingly being seen as a place to learn valuable skills not as a place to be a permanent student; as a sort of vocational school, not as a place to remain a student.
What is to be done? Well, that's for the next post.
To an extent, the university is facing problems because it wasn't designed to be what it is now. Universities in the Western tradition can trace their origins to medieval times, as places where ambitious young men (sons of the aristocracy, sons of the proto-bourgeoisie, occasionally talented students from every walk of life) could go to learn about God and Christian theology, in the tradition of Western humanism represented by Abelard. (Incidentally, compare this to the madrassahs of the Islamic world.) The university was not intended, as they are now, to be a place of unhindered intellectual discourse where sizable fractions of the general population could be educated in the liberal arts and the physical science and the theories of business (among other subjects); it was intended to be a place of indoctrination.
The heyday of the university as it was supposed to function may have been in the 1960s and 1970s, when despite the strains forced by the rapid expansion of university to the general population rapid economic growth easily produced enough wealth to sustain a student population in relative comfort and to ensure them a decent likelihood of eventual tenure. Dr. MacLaine recalled how, when he was a graduate student, some of his colleagues said that if worst came to worst, one could drop the role of full-time student and take a job. That isn't an option nowadays. Indeed, the intellectual premises of the modern university are increasingly coming under threat because of financial constraints facing both students and universities.
Currently, graduate programs are producing far more graduate students than there are positions for graduate students, ensuring a whole host of problems for the students in the process, like, "Can you find a job?" I myself am increasingly certain that I won't go on for a doctorate after I get my master's degree, barring some event that makes me want to risk the abominable job market and heavy debt loads for doctoral students in academia. I doubt that anything can resolve this problem, not even mass resignations on the part of baby-boomer professors and their migration to Borneo or the Kalahari. The question of oversupply means, of course, that universities can never be for more than a minority of students a way to become permanent, professional students.
Mind, this won't necessarily make a difference to universities since increasing class sizes and cutbacks to the academic infrastructure ensure that it will be impossible for students to receive the sort of individualized attention needed to allow a flourishing of independent thought. Dr. MacLaine mentioned a seminar in Vancouver given by a professor who regularly taught classes with hundreds of students, walking around with a microphone headset, gesturing broadly, ensuring mass participation through hand-raising, and generally acting more like a pop-music star in concert or an evangelical preacher on Vision TV than a professor. This sort of orgiastic performance works very well if you want to communicate an intellectual orthodoxy; perhaps the operators of madrassahs and Christian-indoctrination universities might want to look into this.
And on top of this, the university is increasingly being seen as a place to learn valuable skills not as a place to be a permanent student; as a sort of vocational school, not as a place to remain a student.
What is to be done? Well, that's for the next post.
