Posted on 05/29/2015 5:31:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I've written before of their shameful practices -- the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.
In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.
Alas, even the great strengths of our colleges and universities are threatening to become weaknesses. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.
American colleges, dating back to Harvard's founding in 1636, have been modeled on the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea is that students live on or near (sometimes breathtakingly beautiful) campuses, where they can learn from and interact with inspired teachers.
American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins' founding in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are taught by scholars whose Ph.D. theses represent original scholarship, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning.
That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. In these disciplines it's rightly claimed that American universities are, as The Economist recently put it in a cover story, "the gold standard" of the world. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences and humanities. "Just as the American model is spreading around the world," The Economist goes on, "it is struggling at home."
Consider the Oxford/Cambridge residential college model. Up through the 1960s, college administrators acted in loco parentis, with responsibilities similar to those of parents. Men's and women's dorms were separate and mostly off-limits to the other sex; drinking and drug use were limited; cars were often banned.
The assumption is that 18- to 21-year-old students were, in important respects, still children. The 1960s changed all that. Students were regarded as entitled to adult freedoms: unisex dorms and bathrooms, binge drinking, a hookup culture.
But now the assumption is that adult-aged students must be coddled like children. They are provided with cadres of counselors, so-called "trigger warnings" against supposedly disturbing course material and kangaroo courts to minutely regulate their sexual behavior.
Most colleges and universities abroad and many in this country (notably for-profit and online) don't use the residential model. Students live with parents or double up in cheap apartments and -- horrors! -- commute, like most employed adults.
The residential college model, with its bloated ranks of coddler/administrators, has become hugely expensive and increasingly dysfunctional. It's overdue for significant downsizing.
The Ph.D. university model is also metastasizing. A plethora of humanities and social science Ph.D. theses are produced every year, many if not most written in unreadable academic jargon and devoid of scholarly worth. Most will probably be read by only a handful of people, with no loss to society. But some worthy scholarship will be overlooked and go unappreciated.
A glut of Ph.D.s and an ever-increasing army of administrators have produced downward pressure on faculty pay. Universities increasingly hire Ph.D.s as underpaid adjuncts, with low wages and no job security.
The last half-century has seen a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who go to college and a huge increase in government aid to them. The assumption was that if college is good for some, it's good for everyone. But not everyone is suited for college: witness the increasing ranks of debt-laden nongraduates.
And the huge tranches of government money have been largely mopped up by the ever-increasing cadres of administrators. Do students get their money's worth from the masses of counselors, facilitators, liaisons and coordinators their student loans pay for? Or would they be better off paying for such services only as needed, as most other adults do?
As Glenn Reynolds of instapundit.com has written convincingly, the higher education bubble is now bursting. Colleges are closing; college applications and graduate program enrollments are declining; universities are facing lawsuits challenging the verdicts of their kangaroo courts.
Naturally, administrators seek more money. But the money pumped into these institutions is more the problem than the solution.
Oh how will we survive without diversity officers or gender and sexuality resource centers on campus.
Totalitarianism flourishes when it has an ill-prepared, ill-educated and ill-informed populace on which to feed. So this development in the left wing destruction of American education is no accident.
[Humanities were the first casualties, with little left today but wreckage.]
We kicked GOD out of the public education system. That was the first and last casualty - the rest is an aftermath of destruction.
Oh no! I was planning to go back to school in my retirement years to do some racialist/genderist coursework in the women/minority/antiwhite studies department. Guess I’ll have to do something else now.
My son just graduated from UK. It cost 100 times what I paid.
His parking pass was more than double my tuition.
The inflation in higher education seems unstoppable leaving many students in a huge debt with a degree that will not provide a living.
I don’t know how we might cure our colleges and universities of their left wing bias. It’s a problem 50 years in the making. A dramatic limit on the federal student loan program would go a long way to solving the cost issue. Until then, there are some ways parents can address the absurdly high cost of a college education. A child does not have to attend an Ivy League school or one that aspires to be like the Ivies. The college from which I graduated is such a school and now charges more than 15 times what I paid in 1973. In state tuition at state institutions, while much higher than it was 40 years ago, has not increased at the same rate. Catholic schools, such as Santa Clara, are more modestly priced and still offer academic merit scholarships. One of my daughters attended Santa Clara on such a scholarship and paid less than she would have paid at a UC. Here in California the state universities offer a fine alternative to UC, and our community colleges are beginning to offer some four year degrees.
I’m going online. No one knows who or what I am, I can focus on regurgitating the textbook and I keep my opinions to myself.
It’s simple and it’s cheaper.
A mind that can think does not need a school to learn
Maybe not a school, but it needs someone to teach it
They have also become, in many parts of the country, the largest local employer.
Catch meet 22.
but teacher can also feed you lies and faulshoods...a big fool can teach a little fool to be a bigger fool...
if you want to look at it from a religious perspective...God it the teacher of truth.. Satan is the teacher of lies..and tour in the middle to try to discern the difference...and you have the gift of that ability
When you remove or overpower the controls, the negative feedback that corrects course and help to maintain the balance, you get a bubble.
And if the controls aren't put back in place, the bubble eventually pops, sweeping away all that was counter to the natural controls and restoring the natural order and balance.
Whatever their reasons (their "of the world" nature is a clue), progressives are all about removing the natural controls and replacing them with those of their own worldly design.
The bubble they've created in education will also pop, sweeping away their excesses and restoring the natural order.
And then, assuming we survive both this progressive algae bloom in academia and its pop, the clean up can begin...
Godspeed...
In the area I live we have five community college campuses. Three of the five campuses are the main employers for their area!
Having worked in a community college system for over 20 yrs. all I can say is bloat and waste are endemic in the system. Administrative positions will be filled ASAP while faculty/staff positions vital for operations and where actual student contact is made are left unfilled for years in some cases resulting in some employees forgoing vacations because if they take off the doors shut.
My wife’s works at a four year university and her former supervisor worked as controller for a big ten college for a little over a year coming from the private sector. She had to deal with over 20 separate unions alone, it was a disaster and no one, faculty, staff or administration thought they were accountable for anything money wise, she left asap.
She and my wife currently work at a four yr. university and the entire universities response to any shortfall in revenue is lets raise tuition again! Finally my wife asked one of her supervisors after hearing this statement, have you all ran a formula to see how many students you lose every time you raise tuition? She got the deer in headlights look.
Another problem with academia is there is no communication whatsoever between any departments, none. You usually find out on the fly when a student comes and asks for something you have never heard of and you call and lo and behold a new policy has been implemented affecting your department but damned if they tell you or let you in on it. The NSA could take lessons from these power tripping leftist in secrecy!
I think coming quite soon that higher education is going to face a market correction. People are figuring out that going into debt for a degree that means nothing because there are not jobs for it is insane. I do believe that trades and medical programs will continue to flourish, but the big four yr. schools are in for a reckoning.
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