I read Mark C. Taylor’s April 27 New York Times piece on restructuring higher education with wildly mixed feelings.
Since I have been arguing that we cannot scrimp our way through the current recession without making fundamental changes in the ways universities are organized and behave, I am sympathetic to Taylor’s call. But his op-ed is a bewildering mélange of old ideas that do not, in my view, cohere.
Taylor may think that the American university is still enmeshed in the difficulties that Immanuel Kant perceived in the German institutions of the late 18th century, but I do not agree. Taylor’s major recommendations flow from his objection to overspecialization in research and teaching — this has been the major theme in criticism of American universities for at least 20 years. He is also critical of our overproduction of Ph.D. students, though none of his recommendations address that problem.
He is in favor of both the elimination and regulation of departments. Either? Which? His response here, one that many others have suggested, is to organize academic units around problems — something that has been tried without great success at several institutions, since it is not easily accomplished. Taylor seems cheerful about the imminent death of academic book publication in the humanities, and thinks our students should use “alternative formats.” Many of us have been flogging this notion for a long time — but the larger issue is what is to be presented with the new technology, not how it is to be reproduced. He wants to expand career options for graduate students, a good idea that many in the field have been working on since the 1970s. Finally, Taylor wants to abolish tenure, to which I say “bad luck.”
Perhaps he has never advocated an unpopular idea and feels no need of protection. But some of us do feel the need, and with good reason (and I am someone who has not had tenure since 1986). With the exception of the tenure notion, these are plausible and useful suggestions, but they seem to be randomly thrown into the pot and stirred. If one agreed with Taylor, where would one start? Not, I think, by trying to change everything at the same time.
Taylor is, by all accounts, a very fine scholar and teacher (confession: his college roommate, a former student of mine, tells me he is a great guy). He could help us who are trying to convince universities to focus on What Might Be Done by taking a step back and suggesting how these problems are related to one another, and how we might begin to address them. This is not a seamless web, but universities are very complicated places and it does not seem possible to revolutionize undergraduate education, graduate training, the system of scholarly communication and the sociology of knowledge simultaneously.
I would vote for focusing on reforming undergraduate education as the place to start in attacking most of the problems Taylor identifies. What do you think?
