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Do We Really Need Universities?
New York, 10:23 AM
Fri Dec 11
62 posts in the last 24 hours
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05/02/09
Because we have never heard that before. They'll throw in "talking just to hear your own voice," "mental masturbation," and all those other golden oldies that for some reason people like to think they are the first to have said.
I would like nothing more than to be made irrelevant. I don't really care about paying off my student loans. I don't want a career that requires, above all else, my abjection. And I know I'm not the only one who thinks this. My job is my job, just like everyone else's. You know how waitresses at Hooters are required to shave their legs and have big tits and all that in order to keep their jobs and get good tips? I'm required to write laborious prose that no one will read about subjects that no one cares about, give lectures that would make any human drool with boredom, and talk about shit that, yes, is often irrelevant in order to keep the job that puts food on my table and gas in my car. Most of us don't like it any more than you do.
05/03/09
Because in general, far too many liberal arts academics are paid large sums of money to create massive amounts of academia that doesn't create any value to anyone, anywhere, ever. That's why people rail against the system. Because generally people prefer that large amounts of money produce valuable content that people enjoy, whether that content be Gawker posts (clearly valued), bridges, useful computer programs or whatever. Money paid to academics to create obscure academia is money wasted if there is no benefit.
05/04/09
The idea that we get paid large sums of money, however, is laughable. Once an academic has tenure she might, maybe, break six figures -- just barely. There are superstars in every field who can make more, but they are by far the exceptions.
05/02/09
It is true that one should not pursue a graduate degree unless one is funded. I have been funded for my entire graduate career -- ending in about a month -- and I have still gone into debt. Traveling to conferences, buying endless numbers of books, even publishing articles in scholarly journals, all of it costs money. And even in the most generously funded programs, a fellowship or assistantship simply does not cover all this. Tuition and basic living expenses, sure. But if you want to get a job, you are going to go into debt paying for all the extras that aren't really extra if you intend to use the degree.
I saw many comments on the NYT site insinuating that if you're "good enough," grad school should never put you in debt. This is some posturing bullshit. Those at the top of their fields are often those with the most debt, for the reasons I enumerated above. We are also fortunate to be the most likely to get jobs, except that is little consolation in the current hiring environment.
This is going nowhere fast. But I feel like it needed to be said.
05/02/09
Changing education is never going to help everyone "do what they love." and get paid for it. The needs of a society are in no way correlated with the distribution of the innate skills, desires, and aptitudes of the society's population. Not everyone is going to be an architect, a wildlife photographer, a fashion model, a published writer, etc, etc, etc.
Post high-school education is for three things:
1) high-level trade skills - write a sentence, a computer program, design a circuit, do lab work.
2) shared base of experience and knowledge to facilitate future personal and business relationships
3) development of personal relationships
Do parents really want their kids to go to Yale because some history professor there published 30 papers last year? I doubt it - it's about the other students, and the other students parents, and the alumni, and the aggregate value of the Yale name based on that network of relationships. The actual education component is important, but its specifics aren't.
Without tenure as the carrot, how many grad students would quit? It's a nice reward to hang in front of people, even when everyone knows only a small percentage make it.
So all of this thoughtful commentary seems to ignore the actual drivers of the entire system, and as a result comes across as a kind of silly, if sweet, rehash of their coddled undergrad years.
05/02/09
sorry - missed a benefit of post-hs education - you get to brag about it on semi-anonymous internet blog discussions. fun! :)
some guidelines - all bragging should be passive voice. That way, it's not really bragging. Bonus points if you can simultaneously denigrate someone's presumed lack of educational accomplishments. And make sure you build up to it. It's declasse to start off with "well, I went to Yale, so...". Get three or four points it before you break out with the "as someone who did get an undergraduate degree from Yale, Taylor's comments really resonated with me."
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05/02/09
My little one is in a highly gifted magnet junior high. They are being taught, from what I can tell, at a level even lower than the typical Canadian junior high school.
05/02/09
Us entry-level-middle-class people are in a jam. Our communities do not usually reflect our skills, the schools we attend do not usually reflect our skills, the jobs that we hold before and after school do not usually reflect our skills. People that we speak to either find us to low-brow or too high-brow. Nobody wants to tip their hands to us. We are either too privileged to be treated as poor or not considered 'in' to be treated as rich. We are the middle kids in the current American family. We get boned.
here's a start:
Fuck it. Rock out. Pay no mind. Keep being creative. Keep following your interests. Keep learning.
Except this time, when you come across a kid or parent that is not in the know, share your knowledge. All of it. Tip your hand to those that are in that in-between position.
05/02/09
Thank you for paragraph 2. With a graduate degree, I find my job being turned into something ever more like what my mother did without finishing high school. She would not have wanted that for me.
05/02/09
"95% of my Students are in School for no other reason than to pay for the Education of the top 5% that show real Promise. Most of my Kids are wasting their time and will never make art again once they leave school.." What a waste.
Mr. Taylor has shown us all what real courage looks like. His ideas are brilliant and within the realm of possibility in an almost scary, obvious way. But I always just assumed that for someone in his position to talk about abolishing tenure and shuttering Departments would instantly make him thousands of enemies all over the world.
Imagine, Kids being taught to their strengths and put on career paths that make sense for them. Entire institutions reinventing themselves over and over.
I'd go back to School to see that.
05/02/09
Rather, he could begin class on the very first day:
"Hello class. Welcome to 345. Postmodernism and Visual Culture. Before we begin, I'd just like to tell you that the %95 do-nothings are here to pay for the 5% do-somethings. Now, who's ready to learn some shit?"
Refreshing.
05/02/09
I always vision them at a desk, behind a wall of book, with a mustache trying to think of profound, pseudointellectual things. Throw in a perpetual motion machine.
Others just care about having a "prestigious" name on them. This is a load of bull fuck.
I know people who go to Northwestern. I didn't know it, but I was telling her how ridiculous it was to pay $50K to blow on that school. Her statements were like, "It's so fun! I learned all sorts of cultural stuff".
You can get that at a community college. Private college fucks are using defense mechanisms to avoid the truth; they wasted a quarter million.
05/02/09
I think that 'academics' are idiotic, mental masturbating slobs. I always vision them at a desk, behind a wall of book...
Says it all, really.
05/02/09
And what do you do that's so worthwhile?
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05/02/09
When i taught at various colleges and universities, i referred to people like that as "pigs": As in, don't teach pigs to sing, because you waste your time and annoy the pigs. I spent a lot of time annoying pigs.
05/02/09
There are millions of digitized books available on a number of websites, for free. Project Gutenberg, for starters. The UPenn Open Books Page. Read them on a Kindle, Ipod, PDA or subnotebook.
I'm not saying the non-college route is the best way to go for all majors, not by any means. For some, you're better off learning your own way, on your own time with hardly any money wasted. You have to be very self-disciplined, but if you're that sort of learner your lust for knowledge is already insatiable.
05/02/09
I'm confident I could do the equivalent of many Phd's as long as the reading and writing is confined to about a blog paragraph at a time.
05/03/09
05/02/09
Philosophy, history, law, anthropology, art, religion, and the other myriad soft subjects are fine and interesting things to study, contribute much to our fabric of life, but undeserving of even a dime of public money.
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05/02/09
Kernel of truth there though....I have not met many doctors or engineers who weren't taught to think for themselves by their parents and by reading many of the great books that pass on society's collective wisdom on their own time...but I've met a lot of people who drank their way through college and collected easy humanities degrees, and can't understand science or do any math.
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How many history majors, philosophy majors, etc can the economy support? Especially if they plan to stop after a BA? The job market demands advanced degrees in those fields.
The only problem I see is colleges allowing students to rack up thousands in debt only to find their degree is nearly worthless.
But then what do you do? Do you force more people to get business and management degrees?
05/02/09
But that's not the market reality. Engineering, Science and such are basically professional trade skills. Being an arrogant philosophy/history know-it-all isn't.
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05/02/09
Even engineering requires more than simply a BS, whether it's an MS or a professional certificate. The bachelors degree just doesn't cut it.
And by the way, nice anti-intellectualism there. You, sir, are why universities have ceased to be centers of inquiry and have become instead trade schools, only not as useful.