Running into class, but here's a quick link…
Yet another opinion article telling students to avoid graduate school and calling for a rehaul of the entire system of academia.
I'm going to have to write an a post on Jay McInerney and New York City in 1980s.
UPDATE: Tim Burke responds to the Taylor article. Good comments there, too. Dean Dad does an excellent job rejecting Taylor's proposal for doing away with departments. More from GeekyMom.
Apt. 11d 
Link to the Taylor op-ed needs fixing.
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Thanks, harry. I fixed it. What did you think of the article?
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Cathy Davidson loved it.
I kind of love his solutions, too. I love the idea of problem-based programs. This term, I stopped giving writing assignments. I now give “projects.” I like the word project because it suggests that writing is part of a bigger process, with many pieces. My projects are trying to incorporate social media much more, too. In fact, I may allow my students to do their annotated bibliographies using Delicious or Diigo. I just can’t figure out a way around the database problem (what if my students use Academic Search Premier for research; how do they link it on Delicious–any ideas?).
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He’s an impractical idealist.
Well, I hope I’ll have more time to think over a response, but my initial response is that I agree with just about everything, but can’t see how to begin to get from here to there (and he doesn’t really give much of a clue). Universities are like schools, but ten times worse — faculty hold very little power to make things better, but enormous power to stop things from getting better, and unlike schools there is no movement of hard-nosed reformers trying to make them budge.
Ok, I promise I’ll try to develop a more thoughtful response which sounds as positive as I feel.
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“The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.
In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.”
I liked this line in the article. It’s nothing new, but a surprising number of people are ignorant about this fact. I am more and more convinced that academia is a giant pyramid scheme.
The other suggestions in this opinion piece didn’t do much for me. A little interdisciplinary work isn’t going to change anything.
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I have to say that I find myself mostly unimpressed by Taylor’s editorial. Some good ideas, certainly, and I suppose–-as you say, Laura-–that it can’t hurt to give these good (and obvious, I think) ideas another voicing, since so many people seem to be ignorant of them. But something to be impressed by? The truly elite research universities and liberal arts colleges have–from the perspective of those of us to teach plebeian kids down at second and third tier schools–comparatively enormous reservoirs of cash and alumni support to draw upon, enough to keep them from truly facing crises for many years yet to come. Actual reforms will have to be tested and pioneered on a much more humble level.
Is academia a giant pyramid scheme? Not all of it is, but I would suggest that dozens of universities, perhaps hundreds, partake of exactly that.
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Taylor points out “Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained.” When I think of the twenty or so people I started grad school with, that rings true. I believe that only two of us are poli sci professors. Which is equal to the number of people in my entering class who have planted pansies in my back yard.
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I think the time is ripe for another Closing of the American Mind.
Taylor’s suggestion to provide grad students with the tools to find work outside the university wouldn’t take much to implement and would be very useful. There needs to be a placement service or head hunters or something.
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“The truly elite research universities and liberal arts colleges have–from the perspective of those of us to teach plebeian kids down at second and third tier schools–comparatively enormous reservoirs of cash and alumni support to draw upon, enough to keep them from truly facing crises for many years yet to come. Actual reforms will have to be tested and pioneered on a much more humble level.”
Haven’t the elite colleges with mega-endowments demonstrated in the past that they really don’t like drawing down their funds?
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I just found my old classmate on Facebook. His friend list looks like the citations for a JoP paper.
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I thought the article flakey, an another example of academic irrelevance it’s complaining about, even when applied to academia. It’s narrow — because it ignores the fact that the needs/market forces play out differently in different fields. It’s unrealistic (i.e. ivory tower), because it implies that change can come through mandates. And, it’s misguided because it presumes that any of his suggestions would make anything better, without defining what better actually is, or what’s the worst of the current scheme.
I think academia is a pyramid scheme, but, so, I think, are financial services & legal work.
I think some of his tricks are already being tried, and that they don’t particularly improve things. Science has been shifting into the “interdiscplinary” mode for a while now (think “neuroscience”, “environmental science”, “bioengineering”, . . . ). The problem with those fields, which are reasonably mature, as compared, say, to physics or chemistry, is that it’s nearly impossible to define what the common knowledge base should be for a “neuroscientist.” That could be good — you know a broad array of things. Or it could be bad — you know nothing. As one of the comments at the NYT said, are we going to replace physics/chemistry/biology with “water” (where everyone studies water using different techniques)?
The abolition of tenure is happening, too, at the research university in science in the form of “research professors” who are on “soft money” and need to write grants on a five year cycle to fund their salaries.
Do either of these changes make things better for participants in the enterprise? not particularly.
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I agree with bj and russell to a degree. I wasn’t particularly impressed as this is totally pie in the sky temporizing without a snowball’s chance of actually coming to pass. I think Dean Dad’s latest analysis of the structural problems in higher ed in Inside Higher Ed was a much better look at the problem. Although in many ways it was the reverse of Taylor’s article, which focused on solutions and didn’t fully explore or identify the problems. Dean Dad’s column expertly diagnosed the problem and offered little in the way of solutions. However, I think he nailed the problem in the way it has to be discussed before potential solutions can be explored.
update–I see that Dean Dad responds to Taylor as well.
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean
update–Dean
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BJ,
Professors on soft money, once they get enough of it, are willing to hire experienced staff at rates well above grad student pay. They have a fief and want to keep it going. Paying more, they are concerned about productivity and staff retention. Thus you get benefits, actual offices with real desks, chairs that go both up and down, up to date computers, and other things that graduate students never see.
Plus, grants administration is as close to money laundering as you can get without risking jail.
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Dead Dad does do an excellent job rejecting Taylor’s proposal for getting rid of the departments. Completely agree with everything he said. At the same time, I would have liked to see other solutions. Taylor gets points for trying.
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I don’t think we need to throw out the problem-based structure, just his way of organizing it (he’s right–the sunset clauses combined with the non-permanent faculty issue make the system unworkable unless you hire a permanent administrative staff whose job it is to make those decisions, which will then lead to conflict because of lack of faculty input, etc.).
It could be that the root of the problem is the K-12 education system and the college admissions system. When we admit students to college who lack a lot of basic skills, there is going to be a huge gap between what college professors want to teach and what they can teach. We need all those cheap grad students there to reteach the basic skills that K-12 has failed to teach and that tenured faculty think they shouldn’t have to teach. The other big higher-ed related article I’ve seen around is this one by the president of Delta talking about what he expects out of new hires. Does knowing how to write a compare-contrast essay help a future employee of Delta? I don’t know. I’d rather be working on things like persuasion and argument analysis and that “situational awareness” that our students so lack (not knowing who Susan Boyle is; not knowing what TWITTER or RSS was until I made them learn a few weeks ago).
I was at a faculty meeting last week about the struggles that humanities (as a discipline) faces in our career-oriented university. Now, I am old-school in some ways and can appreciate the need for close reading skills. But on the other hand, I showed Mike Rowe’s TEDTalk on “Dirty Jobs” in the first week of class, and it really set the stage in my class for discussion of “big” ideas. I mean, the man has just bitten off sheep testicles, and he’s thinking about Aristotle. We didn’t read Aristotle on peripeteia, but we sure talked about it.
We (faculty) always want to start at the beginning and move forward (let’s start with ancient Greece! or the Puritans! Or Chaucer!), but problems don’t work like that. Problems present themselves, and then we move backwards to find the causes, laterally to figure out the effects, and forward to find solutions.
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Joannejacobs.com has a post up entitled “No-frills bachelor’s degrees” on a budget alternative to the bread-and-circuses model for higher education.
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