Posted on 04/27/2009 8:54:51 AM PDT by lewisglad
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 formation of modern universities.
In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.
The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.
The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We get the point. But maybe The Times will invite the student to write a rebuttal on the purpose of studying religion and Christianity in college. The topic dovetails with some of the primary sources of Christian philosophy and theology in the Western tradition: Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus: Natural Theology in the High Middle Ages by Alexander W. Hall. With some creativity it could pick up on where Philipp W. Rosemann, Catherine Pickstock, Sebastian Day, Allan Wolter, and Richard Cross left off.
Public universities and the media could merge and we’d never know the difference.
Repair of American universities require great land mines and pieces of real thought and usefulness.
I quit college once over sitting in some young prof’s class where she was teaching ‘body theory.’ I looked at her and just plain thought, “You know. She has done this school thing her whole life and really believes all this stuff. I can’t believe this is considered higher order thinking.”
Bingo. It’s a problem. Most faculties are unbalanced, tilt left, and are out of touch with mainstream American culture and the students. There are exceptions, but generally, yes.
Teacher unions & tenure must END.
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