By Professor Doom
Admin: “You
need to remove explicit functions from your algebra courses. Students have no
use for that.”
It’s no great
secret that a great number of our college graduates are basically unemployable,
or no more employable than they when they graduated high school.
Admin: “You need to remove inverses from
your algebra courses. Students have no use for that.”
Now, admittedly,
higher education was never meant to be a jobs training program. A generation
ago, a college degree, at least at the undergraduate level, signified the
graduate had demonstrated knowledge in a wide range of basic topics. A college
graduate who couldn’t add fractions, who didn’t know what century the American Civil
War took place, who couldn’t compose a decent essay in English, who couldn’t
speak at least a little of a foreign language, who didn’t know the basics of
scientific principle, who was deficient in just
one of the previous things, was considered very suspect.
Admin: “You
need to remove logarithms from your algebra courses. Students have no use for
that.”
And today, it’s
quite common to see college graduates, with 4.0 GPAs no less, who cannot
demonstrate even one of the previous…literally ignorant of every topic that was
considered key to education a generation ago.
These topics,
taken together, are called General Education (or “Gen Ed” for insiders), and
the General Education of today is a shadow of what it was a few decades ago.
Admin: “You
need to remove exponentials from your algebra courses. Students have no use for
that.”
What happened?
Admin: “You
need to remove systems of equations in three variables from your algebra
courses. Students have no use for that.”
There are many answers
to that question, but today I want to focus on the most straightforward answer:
administration. A powerful administrative caste took over education, and
educators, scholars, no longer have say in what constitutes college material.
Admin: “You
need to remove matrices from your algebra courses. Students have no use for
that.”
--the more
mathematically inclined reader might see a pattern to the removals, though
there was nothing I could do to explain to admin what they were doing…they know
nothing of the subjects they’re telling me how to address.
Educators are
deeply disenfranchised from higher education today; admin, often with no
education themselves, now get to control education. Primarily, this control is
used to subtract from what education used to be, although often they’re just
content to add to their own power.
Admin: “Can
you explain why the retention rate calculus 5 years ago was 80%, and now it’s
40%?”
Me: “…”
---“retention
rate” is admin-speak for “passing rate.”
For the most part, professorial “influence”
on campus is a sham, an illusion that we have anything to do with what goes on
now. Sometimes admin doesn’t bother with the illusion:
So admin at
Concord U decided to dispense with the formality, and just rip away more
content from the General Education requirements. The professors complained, accomplishing
nothing, of course:
“They say
that the administration tried to make the changes without any faculty review, and that when the faculty were permitted to review proposed
changes, professors' views were ignored. The university's board chair said the
board backs the administration.
The faculty voted 52-22 that they
have no confidence in Vice President Peter Viscusi. Although the vote has no
actual power,…”
The faculty
say they do not like this method of doing things, and board responds with
casual disrespect:
“Elliott
Hicks, chairman of the school’s board of governors, said the vote hasn’t
changed his or other board members’ support for Viscusi and that the board
doesn’t plan to make any changes to his employment.”
The changes are pretty
big, and the scholars who know about education have legitimate concerns,
concerns that are, ultimately, irrelevant:
“Faculty
members, including some who wished not to be named for fear of retaliation from
the school’s administration, identified several concerns with Viscusi. Chief among them were the changes to
the school’s general education requirements. The new requirements reduce the number of general credits required of all students to
graduate by about 20 percent.”
--what, the
faculty don’t want to be named because they fear retaliation? But, but,
administrators are so reasonable…
Isn’t that
fascinating? Admin can just take out 20% of what a degree entails, and there’s
nothing to stop them. Tuition won’t be reduced 20%, of course. What is the
reason for the heavy debasement of education at Concord U? What will the money
that used to go towards teaching these courses go to?
In addition
to changing the school’s general education requirements, the school’s board of
governors voted this week to restructure the university in part. The new
structure creates four new positions for deans, positions that didn’t exist
before.
Ah, great, the
reduction in classes will allow the hiring of more deans…how much more of this
can we take? Our campuses are drowning in administrators while our graduates
are drowning in debt. Does nobody suspect these two things are related somehow?
It's
interesting to see an administrator seize control of the curriculum in order to
make an institution "to help save the school money and allow it to better
compete with other schools..." by taking it out of the business of
educating in order to be "competitive."
Our higher education
system is so overbuilt, so open to anyone who wants to take out a student loan,
that all our campuses are now in competition with each other to offer the
easiest, most convenient degree. Our “leaders” use the debasement of coursework
to justify further debasement, to stay “competitive” with other schools for
that sweet, sweet, student loan check.
Throughout this
post, I’ve included many missives from admin, debasing our introductory math
course ever further—a course necessary for students to progress to actually
college level coursework. When I complained to admin that removing so much
material from our algebra courses would make the courses unsuitable to prepare
students for further work, they replied: “Other schools are doing the same to
their algebra course, so we are justified for doing it here.”
And there was, of
course, nothing I could do. We are now at the state where higher education’s
failure to educate is being used as justification to fail even more
extravagantly. How many more states are left before higher education can only
move to the state of collapse?
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