Ping
College Education ping.
Or is it corrupt education ping?
Let JamesP81, Jalisco555, or me know if you want on or off this college education ping list.
My husband, also a professor, thinks that schools should get rid of all administrators who have nothing to do with the students....now that would save some bucks, and professors, as one group, would love to have fewer adminstrators. Especially those who make so much more than they do....
In a very serious way, the wave after wave of scandals that sweep through these schools are caused by a culture of breathtaking elitism and disdain. When I first became a professor, many of my mentors came from the same humble stock that I did. Most of them taught with the idea that they would teach well to students who, they hoped, would learn something and move up in the world. (Some were elitist jerks of course and some were just jerks period.)
Now, however, academics have selected themselves on becoming the arbiters of ethics, politics, morality, religion and so forth. There is, in this, a great injustice. There is surely a great difference between educating someone so that they can appreciate the subtleties of some subject and setting oneself up as the final judge of what is right and what is wrong.
My first department had a bowling team--and that was at one of the largest schools in the nation. Now, however, the members of that department would regard such as too lowbrow. Similarly we academics all too often dismiss those who do not agree with us as being simply not of sufficient quality to "get it." I can well remember a professor of English telling me that there was "too much democracy" in America and that she and others really knew what "what best."
So if the professors are the arbiters and if the hoi-polloi's opinion can only be that of the dull uneducated, then, all too often, the concerns of the average parent or taxpayer disappear in the grandiose schemes for the "better sort."
Drives me nuts.
McVey