Academe: Fun While It Lasted.

“Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.” In the NYT, Mark Taylor, the chair of Columbia’s religion department, reads the writing on the wall and calls for a complete overhaul of graduate school education in America. “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).” Ya, sounds about right.

6 thoughts on “Academe: Fun While It Lasted.”

  3. I found that editorial immensely irritating. I’ll just cut and paste my vent from a friend’s link on Facebook:

    “Hmm… Although there are some interesting ideas there, it sounds like the creation of universities run by dilettantes focusing on whatever fad of the moment with no real training on method (because any method you will study will be obsolete in seven years) who are as desperate for reappointment as assistant professors now are for tenure, with the difference that it lasts their entire careers.

    Does he have any idea what broad level of erudition goes into writing what he considers a laughable dissertation on Duns Scotus’ citations? That person will be able to teach Latin, philosophy, medieval history, paleography, the history of the book, the history of information science, religion… etc. Does he prefer someone who instead of writing a dissertation like that does a hip powerpoint you can upload into your ipod titled “Mind, Spirit, Religion, and the Environment,” that is “broad” because it treats a hundred different topics in a flippant way?

    Yo, Taylor, don’t mess with my man Scotus.”

  4. I see your point, and I agree with his diagnosis a good deal more than I do his prescription. (Speaking of trendy/flippant, the “water wars” vision of the future that Taylor mentions as a good meta-topic was apparently all the rage in academe a few years ago, and has since been challenged somewhat.)

    I also agree with the spirit of his comments about the academy overprivileging minutiae, inscrutability, trendy/po-mo jargon for its own sake, and general apathy (if not antipathy) to real world problems. But I’ll concede that’s a personal pique — I’ve come to the conclusion over this long ordeal that I’m probably temperamentally ill-suited for this line of work. And, besides, these tendencies are probably more specific to US history than ancient and medieval departments anyway.

    And, as far as the economic argument goes, Taylor is definitely on solid ground. What’s Mr. Scotus going to do with all his vaunted erudition when he discovers there are no jobs?

  5. And what’s worse, we’re not alone…

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124087181303261033.html

    According to this article, there are 5.6 million unemployed Chinese graduates from last year still looking for jobs, and they’re about to be joined by 6.1 million new graduates. The problem? Chinese universities are not producing students with the needed skills. The article ends with an English major saying:

    “There are no job prospects for someone like me,” she said during a quick meal at the school’s cafeteria. “I think I’ll just go to grad school.”

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