Posted on 09/02/2010 6:30:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
WASHINGTON -- What is your vision of a university?
Is it the classic vision, with profs walking the ivy-clad pathways, their books under their arms? Perhaps they wear tweed coats and smoke pipes -- not the lady profs, but the men. The ladies dress accordingly, and maybe they smoke pipes. All pore over their books for hours and impart their knowledge to a select body of students. Not the mob that today is forced -- rather cruelly -- to attend classes in remedial education to make up for what they missed in high school, very elementary things, such as reading and the rudiments of writing.
No, not at all -- the profs are indistinguishable from the students today. Most are disgruntled. Some are furious. In years gone by, they felt superior because of their learning. Today they feel superior because of their ontological existence and because they are tabernacles of certain mysteries. The mysteries are to be found in feminism, African-American studies, gay studies and matters too obscure and tedious for ordinary Americanos to grasp.
As for a vision of the university most Americans hold, think of a football team or a basketball team. The athletes are uncommonly large. They attend classes, but mostly they attend practice. Some fight criminal charges for fracases in which they have involved themselves. I am told that the football coach and the basketball coach have an informal budget for criminal lawyers just to keep the athletes out of jail. Or the athletes are fighting drug charges or are in rehab. To be really expert, the coach of the football team or the basketball team on most campuses has to be versed in pharmacology and possibly in mental health. For all intents and purposes, the athletes are preparing themselves for a tryout with a professional team. Those who fail to make the pros disappear. Tom Wolfe drew a vivid portrait of what goes on in college in his masterful book "I Am Charlotte Simmons."
Yet that is only one vision of the university. The other is ceaseless demonstrations on behalf of radical politics. Every campus with any claim to seriousness has whole sections of the faculty constantly on the alarm for some pressing political crisis -- the environment, world peace and, more recently, Muslim rights. Most faculty members do not regularly attend church, synagogue or yoga studios, but for some reason, they are very concerned with Muslim rights, possibly because Muslims -- at least a significant majority of them -- are very anti-Western. I believe that if the fascists were around today and they had their wits about them, they would be forthrightly anti-Western civilization. That would assure them the sympathy of the university. I can see it now, a department of fascist studies on every great university campus.
These thoughts are engendered by a very challenging omnium-gatherum of ideas about the university, Herbert London's "Decline and Revival in Higher Education." London has been following the university for three decades from the inside. He was dean of the Gallatin School at New York University, "an experimental college." He deposits many of his reflections, going back to the early 1970s, in his book. He is particularly cogent on the fate of tenure and, even more poignantly, the fate of the athletes who do not make it into the professional ranks. They are the majority of the athletes, and once they have failed to make the pro ranks, there is nothing for them. They are blanks. They shuffle off to obscurity, the lucky ones to find work of a menial nature, the unfortunate to rehab or the slammer. As I read this book, I thought of the legendary former basketball coach of Indiana University, Bob Knight. He insisted his athletes graduate. Naturally, he was driven from the university by one of higher education's all-time frauds, Myles Brand.
I put the book down amazed that the athletic departments and the politicized faculties apparently have cut a deal. They will not inhibit each other. They have nothing in common save their insouciance to the true mission of the university, learning. London says that learning, for the most part, should involve the great books of our civilization. He tried to make that work at New York University and failed. He eventually left, frustrated by the politicians on the faculty and the administration.
He has hope for a revival of the university. Yet I am dubious. The powers arrayed against a teacher like London or against a coach like Knight are too powerful. Knight should have gone into the pros and forgotten his idealism, though his charges were lucky he stayed awhile. London has gone into the world of think tanks. He is at the Hudson Institute. Now the role for him is clear. He should make his think tank into an academy and teach the great books. So should other think tanks. Learning is only for the few, and the think tanks have plenty of room for growth.
In general, college professors are hippies that never grew up.
I remain dubious as to any hope for reviving classical (or even decent and worthwhile) college education.
They are a joke and should be treated as such.
As for a vision of the university most Americans hold, think of a football team or a basketball team.
If there are any peculiar affectations of American higher education this is one of them:
What is the ranking of the Sorbonne's football team? Or the Oxford or Cambridge rugby teams? Or the University of Rome's sailing team?
Or, why do major league baseball organizations farm their selectee's through legitimate invested local enterprises (minor league) while major league football and basketball use (and abuse) American institutions of higher learning?
What is going on here? If it's money for the institution, that gleaned from the nation's inane sports fanaticism, then how wisely, or efficiently, is it reinvested back into the basic purpose of the institution in the first place, engineering, biochemistry, nuclear physics? As opposed to major league baseball teams who fund and nurture their own product.
Not to say sports don't have some place in college, lettered myself, and they do contribute something to the character of the participant. But about this vicarious fanatical obsession of the ambient population, and the attendant lecherous parasitism of professional sports?
What is the attendance at the Sorbonne's football games anyway?
Concerning Coach Knight, it was railroad job on how Brand ran him out especially with the joke of a zero tolerance policy. Granted that Coach Knight had his faults but he had one of the most successful teams and his players did well afterward. I read one of the books on Knight and one well know player Steve Alford wanted to major in P.E. and Knight said that would be worthless and steered him to Business. Since Knight left, the B-ball program doesn’t have the prominence that it once had.
The ironic thing is Myles Brand got an executive position at the NCAA ! I am sure there were some backroom deals to have him rewarded for running Knight out !
Hillsdale College
Patrick Henry College
I’ve had the dubious distinction of attending college off and on since 1974.
My first experience at American University was actually impressive. Many courses were tough and taught well. A decade later, at the University of Oregon, the science classes had rigor. Surprisingly, some of the journalism classes were also taught by old-school hard-ass professors who thought their role in life was weeding out incompetence wherever it appeared. The liberal arts classes, except for the Shakespeare class, were breezy. Then I decided to become a teacher. The coursework at the University of Alaska was embarrassingly easy. I managed 28 credits a term, plus working 40 hours weekly, plus two hours of commuting daily. Since then, when you work as a teacher, college classes are mandatory. The coursework at the graduate level reminds me of the entry-level classes at American University from 35 years ago - with the difference that some of the graduate teachers are outspoken liberal activists who operate in frankly racist and class-oriented terms.
I tell my bright students now that college is worth the money for science and engineering, or if they are required by bureaucratic fiat to jump through hoops. Otherwise, I recommend military service or opening a business. Higher education is a wasteland.
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