Posted on 02/23/2013 6:55:16 AM PST by Kaslin
What ever happened to the medium once known as Little Magazines? This country once had a select group of literary and political journals that represented the vanguard of American thought and art. Some were both literary and political. High Culture, it was called when there was still such a thing.
For example, the old and much-missed Partisan Review. Its first issue as an independent journal in 1937 included Delmore Schwartz's short story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," a poem by Wallace Stevens, and pieces by Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson -- once names to conjure with.
Begun as the honest left's answer to Stalinism, the magazine's quality and independence scarcely wavered till it was overwhelmed by much more respectable publications with much less talented writers and editors. (Respectability is the death of thought.)
The Fugitive, that last redoubt of unreconstructed Southern letters in the 1920s, had editor-writers like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren as it took its last stand in the 1920s.
As for the late Partisan Review, an era of tame criticism and lame taste consigned it to irrelevance long ago. Besides, once Soviet Communism had imploded, the magazine had lost its reason for being. Not even the sainted John Silber of Boston U., that unlikely combination of intellectual and college administrator, could save it from Progress.
A little magazine does remain here and there. On the right, William F. Buckley's National Review still stands athwart History yelling "Stop!" and, on the left, the New Republic is still worth reading even if its gaudy new typography and lay-out make it look like a society matron got up as a streetwalker.
But my favorite little magazine still standing, an almost lone voice of sanity and connection to past standards -- that is, high culture -- has to be the New Criterion, est. 1982 by Hilton Kramer, the late art critic and refugee from the ever-more-with-it, and ever more tedious, New York Times.
An item in the January issue of the magazine caught my sorrowful eye, for I'm of an age at which the obituaries are the first thing I check out in the morning paper. Just to know who's gone today. The dear departed in this case: Higher Ed.
The cause of death was the usual in modern, bureaucratized, obese and increasingly ossified academia: administrative bloat aggravated by diluted standards and the erosion of the core curriculum, the basis of liberal education.
Tenured faculty now teach less and less as the "drudge work" of dealing with undergraduates is shifted to a corps of slave laborers styled adjunct professors or TAs, teaching assistants. In both ill-paid categories, I learned mainly how little I knew. I had to conquer my embarrassment at that continuing revelation every time I stepped into a classroom in place of the real teacher who should have been there.
Now, one by one, the disciplines that were once the basis of a liberal education are eliminated as not worth the trouble. Literature, foreign languages, real history as opposed to current ideology, and the arts and sciences in general give way to simulacra with the telling label Studies after their name. As in Queer Studies or African Studies. (The other day I ran across a twofer: Queer African Studies.)
Consider the sad example offered by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where German is out and Movies are still in. Excuse me, Film Studies.
In this ever-encroaching bog called Higher Education, which keeps getting lower, administrators prosper while scholars grow scarcer. Matthew Arnold, who defined liberal education as the study of "the best that has been thought and said," is dismissed as another dead white male -- if he is remembered at all.
Deconstructionism, post-structuralism, or whatever ism may be in vogue today, is all the rage, sometimes literally.
Cardinal Newman's serene guide to the perplexed, "The Idea of a University," is as forgotten as Ortega y Gasset. Who now cares what such have to say? They're old -- that damning pejorative -- much as Greek and Latin and the King James Bible and Shakespeare are old. It's new that counts, just as tinkling brass and clashing cymbals impress every new generation of suckers under the impression they're music.
While the cost of a university education grows ever higher, higher education grows ever lower, forever ceding ground to popular fashion. All that tuition and all those contributions by well-meaning donors tend to be eaten up by all those overpaid administrators.
An eye-opening survey of college administrative costs in the Wall Street Journal not long ago noted that, when "Eric Kaler became president of the University of Minnesota last year, he pledged to curb soaring tuition by cutting administrative overhead. But he hit a snag: No one could tell him exactly what it cost to manage the school.
Like so many institutions of "higher" education, only its tuition grew higher as the University of Minnesota went on a spending spree over the past decade, paid for by a steady stream of state money and rising tuition. Officials didn't keep close tabs on their payroll as it swelled beyond 19,000 employees, nearly one for every 3 1D2 students.
That ratio is all too typical of the Higher Learning in America, which hasn't changed all that much since the acerbic Thorstein Veblen wrote his scathing study of it by that name in 1918 -- except to grow a lot more expensive and a lot less substantial.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of administrators, managers, "directors," clerks and factotums high and low at American colleges and universities has increased 50 percent during the past decade -- easily outpacing the number of actual teachers on the payroll. It's part of the reason that college tuition in this country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has risen even faster than health-care costs.
Case in point: the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, whose fund-raising arm (excuse me, Advancement Division) employed 139 at last count in November and had an annual budget of $10 million last year -- and still managed to overspend it by some $3.3 million. And it's not an outlier in the academic herd, but part of a whole swarm of colleges and universities moving ever deeper into the ever broader expanses of ever higher-priced mediocrity.
Soon education itself is reduced to an appendage of administration. Its purpose becomes to support the economy by supplying the requisite number of graduates to fill the slots that need filling. This is called economic growth. No one ever seems to ask what the purpose of economic growth is. That's the kind of question the humanities used to address, but they seem to have disappeared from college curricula, or at least been "downsized" -- out of economic necessity, we're told.
Some days I think the only hope lies in those small liberal arts colleges scattered here and there, like Hendrix and Lyon here in Arkansas, but they're becoming as rare in higher education as the New Criterion in the shrunken world of little magazines.
What is a 1D2 student?
Excellent article. I had no idea that a State school could have a 1:3 ratio of administers to students! I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was this bad.
Anyone that’s still bent on persuing a higher degree is a Useful Idiot unless they’re learning a trade. I’ll even throw lawyers in there for good measure, LOL!
I did a search for the magazine and found that the archive goes back to March 1990
Perhaps you meant a different magazine?
Okay, maybe it was 1990, after I graduated.
My my. Whatever are these poor people gonna do with themselves all evening in their cold, dark flats - huddled from the fury outside behind a dozen dead bolts, with no safe egress to go get a replacement pair of reading glasses at the hopefully-not-yet-burned-out corner store - once their savior Obama brings the lights down at the conclusion of his fundamental transformation?
Hate to say it, but you're right. At the risk of being called a useful idiot, I went back to school in my early to mid forties to complete a BA and then a Masters Degree.
I should've stopped at the BA. The extra expense that I paid out of my own pocket to earn my Masters has not translated to higher earning potential in my field. In fact, if I were to lose my job today I'd probably have to hide the fact I have a Masters to be considered for a position in my field. As I've been "passively" looking the last year, I've heard "over-qualified" enough times to know it's time to dumb-down my resume.
I can remember a time in our economy when having a college degree or a Masters was a virtual guarantee of employment. Not so much anymore.
Part of the problem is that students enter college knowing much less than they should after attending public schools--or being misinformed. I have been told that in the local public schools students are taught that at the time of Columbus people thought that the world was flat.
At public universities there may be pressure not to fail too many students because their tuition money is needed--so college courses become the equivalent of a high school course of 50 years ago. Plus student evaluations put pressure on instructors, especially those who do not have tenure, to keep the students happy, and making the course too hard may result in low student evaluation scores...which administrators have been known to treat as if they were Holy Writ.
Hope I didn’t offend. I’m just one that thinks having practical skills is far more useful than those other types of degrees. I have a business degree, but what has always gotten me in the door is my military experience. Once an employer knows you have organizational skills and are a super-duper multi-tasker and can see The Big Picture and not get bogged down in the trenches (so to speak!) you’re golden.
It’s really true that some of us DO get more done before 8am than most get done all day. *GRIN*
And that ‘dumbing down’ is probably the best thing you can do for yourself. Just get yourself in the door, don’t intimidate the person hiring you (so VERY easy to do!) and then shine, shine, SHINE! :)
Lunch break’s over - back to work!
Nope, not at all. Knew what you meant. :-)
I’m just one that thinks having practical skills is far more useful than those other types of degrees.
Agree with a minor qualification: Degrees that have practical application and those who hold them that also have experience are still in demand, at least somewhat.
It's the idiots that go out and get their BA or Masters in "english literature" or "lipstick lesbian leather studies and feminism" who complain they spent all their money on a college degree that are completely worthless.
If I had to do it over again, I'd have stopped at my BA because there's been no financial benefit that I've reaped as a result. So that's $37,000 spent over 13 months out of pocket that I'll likely never get back at this point. It used to not be that way. It used to be that increasing your education also increased your market value - not that way anymore either and from what I'm seeing it can be a detriment.
Hope you're well up there in Cheeseland. How much snow did you get from the last snowstorm? We got 5" of much needed snow down here S.W. of Chicago.
Regards,
USC
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.