By Professor Doom
“We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
--from 1984,
a catchphrase to prevent the citizens from thinking much about the purpose of
the war.
It’s fascinating
how easy it is to lose track of relatively recent history. Oh, we know Rome
built a huge empire, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and all the rest, but it
seems as we get closer to “today,” we start to forget everyday things that were
known to all.
People think, for
example, constantly rising prices, what is commonly called “inflation,” is how
the world has always been, little realizing that before the advent of fiat
currency, prices were
relatively stable. As a child, George Washington paid about as much for
bread as his great-grandfather did when he was a child…nobody in our modern
world can honestly say that, and most people can’t conceive of a world without
constantly rising prices eroding any attempt at savings.
My blog is more
about education than bread, but much the same applies. We’ve lost track of what
higher education used to mean. It was only a few years ago, when I’d stumbled
on a long-forgotten box of old tests, looked at them, and realized “I’d be
fired if I gave tests like this today” that I began to realize that the changes
I was seeing were not simply the imaginings of an ever-more-curmudgeonly
professor. I had concrete proof of the changes, seen with my own eyes, held in
my own hands. Seeing those old tests led to the eventual birth of this blog,
but I digress.
A recent
Harper’s magazine article really hammers home the changes in higher education
within the last handful of decades, beyond the astronomical tuition. Even when
it comes to tuition, people don’t realize how cheap higher education used to
be. Two generations ago, tuition at Harvard, perhaps the most prestigious
school in the country, was a mere
$2000, while the
minimum wage was $1.40. Tuition then was less than a year’s pay for even the
lowest paid workers…and now it’s up by a factor of 20 (realistically, various
fees put it way more than that), beyond the reach of a minimum wage worker,
beyond the reach of even “well paid” workers today.
It isn’t just
tuition, however. The whole idea of higher education has been warped to the
point it would be unrecognizable to someone from less than a century ago.
A century ago,
“mission statement” was a meaningless phrase, although all institutions today
have a mission statement. That said, certainly institutions of the past thought
about their purpose. Consider the following from a liberal arts college founder,
from about 1925 or so:
The
paramount obligation of a college is to develop in its students the ability to
think clearly and independently, and the ability to live confidently,
courageously, and hopefully.
Note how this is
a complete sentence, and identifies the primary purpose of the college quite
clearly. Even though the word “education” isn’t there, it’s very clear that the
purpose of the institution is to help students mature into better human beings. Note also the length of the
sentence: you have to pay attention to the whole thing to comprehend the value
of what is written. Incidentally, I encourage the gentle reader to read texts
from this period and earlier, to see how much the English written language has
degenerated into brief sequences of grunts by comparison.
The same school
now has a mission statement. Consider this quote from it:
leadership
service
integrity
creativity
service
integrity
creativity
Instead of
a real sentence indicating purpose, we now have isolated words that don’t
remotely comprise a coherent thought. With no supporting words, these words can
mean whatever the reader wants them to mean…and I’ve certainly encountered many
an administrator that honestly doesn’t know the meaning of these, and quite a
few other, words…but can still recite the words by rote, little different than a
trained parrot.
The excellent
article highlights the above issues, but, not being too familiar with higher
education, the author makes a misstep:
(“Integrity”
is presumably intended as a synonym for the more familiar “character,” which
for colleges at this point means nothing more than not cheating.)
It’d be nice if
integrity even stood for as little as “not cheating.” Every semester I get an
expanded list of cheating methods to watch out for, assuming I was foolish
enough to catch cheaters. I’ve seen many faculty destroyed for catching
cheaters. Administration, in their zealous pursuit of growth at all costs,
penalizes faculty for catching cheaters in ways
I’ve discussed before in my blog. Just this semester, a friend’s
child just started at a state (flagship) university; her first day there she
was given access to a “secret” database of questions/answers for the tests of
her classes. We all pretend our schools of higher education are doing a good
job, but…I really think some legitimate scrutiny is in order.
So, whatever
“integrity” means, I know on campus it sure has nothing to do with cheating.
But the most important thing to note about the second text is what it
doesn’t talk about: thinking or learning.
To be fair, the
older statement also says nothing about learning. I know, it’s all too easy to be nostalgic for
the good old days, but it’s clear that in the past, higher education as least
gave the intention of trying to help students to improve themselves…and it’s
similarly clear that this endeavor is not on the table today.
The author of the
article discusses what is on the table today:
“College…has three potential purposes:
the commercial (preparing to start a career), the cognitive…and the moral...
“Moral,” here, does not mean learning right from wrong. It means developing the
ability to make autonomous choices — to determine your own beliefs,
independent of parents, peers, and society. To live confidently, courageously,
and hopefully.
“…Only the commercial purpose now
survives as a recognized value.”
The
author then goes on to decry that our institutions of higher education have
ever dwindling majors in the “pure knowledge” fields, and more and more are attempting
to become jobs training centers. While the author says much I agree with, he’s
not considered why this is the case.
There are two primary issues. First, as
always, the student loan scam has driven the price of tuition so high that
students must indebt themselves to go to college. Because of these loans,
education as an end must suffer—a student taking out a loan should focus on jobs training, as he’ll
need a means to pay off the loan. This provides a significant drift away from
knowledge and into technical training.
The second is more subtle. Administration
is paid based on growth, and, bottom line, at the risk of sounding elitist, it
requires much more effort to master things like science, mathematics, and
literature, than it does to figure out how to do well in fields where a primary
requirement is not shave. So, campuses, to increase retention
and growth, are flooded with pointless courses that accomplish nothing. Students,
not knowing better, and seeing they’re charged the same for “Game of Thrones” courses as for “applications of fluid
dynamics” courses, sign up for the former if they can’t handle the latter.
Admin: “There were many applicants for
the position, but I couldn’t accept any of them. So, we’re advertising the
position again and do let me know if you know someone.”
Me: “What was wrong with the
applicants?”
Admin: “They were Education degree
holders. I really need someone competent. Do you know anyone?”
--yes, some admin don’t care who they
hire to teach, as long as the candidate will work for nothing. But at
institutions where it matters, suddenly all degrees are not equal.
Education Departments are notorious for
offering simple degree programs, sucking in students—driving down the costs of hiring teachers
while simultaneously creating legions of degreed but unemployed people…because
you don’t need 25% of your population to be professional teachers, even as 25%
of the student base is taking Education courses. Our “leaders” of higher
education should know that and take moves to stop it, but instead they just get
excited that the Education departments are growing so nicely.
This trend towards “university as
jobs-training” is being further accelerated by our political caste:
“We see it in our president’s
swipe, last year, at art-history majors. “I promise you,” said our intellectual
in chief, “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing
or the trades than they might with an art-history degree.” We see it in
Governor Rick Scott’s proposal to charge liberal-arts majors higher tuition at
Florida’s state universities….(Governor) Walker “proposed striking language
about public service and improving the human condition, and deleting the
phrase: ‘Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.’
” The university’s mission would henceforth be
to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”
I suspect there’s more going on here than
public interest. There are now 4 year Hotel Management degrees, for example. Even
though one could learn everything useful about hotel management quickly,
colleges somehow manage to take 4 years to teach what many immigrants figure
out how to do within months of coming to this country. Even if learning such
things took so much time, I’m not convinced our youth should be encouraged to
take out massive loans for skills trivially learned on the job. Alas, teaching
trivial skills is good for growth…
Part of the problem with higher education
is the untouchable administrative caste, which has no respect or understanding
of education. While the statement quoted above about the “paramount obligation”
of the college comes from the college’s founder, the four disjointed words
comes from our new breed of looters leaders. The author inadvertently reveals
how worthless these “leaders” are when he asks a Poo Bah of higher education a
question:
“Leadership,” he said.
Instead of coherent answers, the Poo Bah can only grunt out a meaningless slogan. It’s little different than the Oceania of 1984, where whenever a citizen was asked about the reasons for the war, he could only respond mindlessly: “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”
Orwell was wrong in his 1984
prediction about using an entire sentence as a slogan, we’re degraded to the
point that we are training our kids, even
our leaders, to only grunt out single word slogans. That said, Orwell’s prediction
was correct: we’re being trained not to think. A century ago, our leaders knew
what higher education was ultimately about, but today’s leaders don’t care, or
even know.
One more generation perhaps, and everyone
will believe “Higher education was always about Leadership.”
