August 23, 2011, 12:07 pm
By Michael Brown
Faculty who choose to act on their sense of social responsibility, beyond research and teaching, are not often rewarded by universities, and perhaps should be. I do not feel confident in what I believe might be done to remedy this situation. I am not sure that encouraging public engagement without clarifying what it means and entails is even a benefit to society.
Most of us would probably agree that engaging the public is good for some things and bad (or matters of indifference) for others. An example of a bad idea is the attempt to promote racism or fascism by faculty who claim to have arrived at their ideas rationally and according to some notion of the good of society. Should we reward such a project even though it seems to be an instance of engaging the public?
Once we try to define what we mean by the words “public” and “community” and what it means to “engage” them,…
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July 21, 2011, 12:59 pm
By Michael Brown
Should we agree with Stanley Fish and others who feel that we should eliminate references to politics in debating the importance of the humanities and the future of higher education? Is it even possible to defend the humanities without placing the debate in an abiding political context, whether we like it or not? We need to acknowledge that the debate is taking place at the very moment that policy initiatives are aimed at reconstituting the curriculum and the institutional structure of higher education. Haven’t we already admitted that to conceive of the humanities in the context of higher education is to ask what is at stake in the debate—on all sides? This is a political question.
One part of defending the humanities has to do with the idea of critical thinking: that is, the sort of critical thinking that is both grounded in the humanist disciplines and crucial for any…
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July 1, 2011, 6:01 pm
By Michael Brown
Short-term economic goals are insufficient to justify sacrificing longer-term goals, and there is agreement among economists and sociologists that job creation in the short run is no longer on the agenda of those in power. So the problem of higher education is not merely one of meeting short-term job needs in a way that can be made compatible with the long-run goals of education. It is that those goals are also no longer on the agenda; and the defense of the humanities is certainly as weak thus far as Iain Pears says it is. But these are not sufficient reasons to abandon a principled defense of them in the interest of an education oriented toward job training for a jobs market that is unreliable, volatile, and unpredictable.
The problems with the current attempts to defend the humanities are clear: (1) The opposition seems to be uncompromising in its attempt to institute a core…
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May 11, 2011, 1:17 pm
By Michael Brown
The tenure process should be as transparent as possible. However, certain legitimate criteria for tenure may not lend themselves to precise instructions in advance and there may be reasons for a given judgment that are impossible to specify at the time a person is hired.
Collegiality is not a favorite topic of mine, but it needs some discussion, since many tenure-and-promotion committees consider it seriously. This “category” may be responsible for some of the worst decisions to deny tenure.
There are, of course, other reasons given for denying tenure that seem dangerously close to a denial of academic freedom, as when someone doing work at what are said to be the margins of a field or at its points of intersection with other disciplines are said not to be working within the specific discipline. This happens enough times to be particularly worrisome in certain fields,…
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April 11, 2011, 3:57 pm
By Michael Brown
The problem of reconciling the humanities and the sciences poses a greater crisis for the humanities than for the sciences.
One solution proposes a core curriculum consisting fundamentally of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Giving priority to these disciplines idealizes rationality and quantification over disciplines said to specialize in expression, appreciation of qualitative aspects of life, and the promotion and expression of “values.”
A STEM-oriented curriculum essentially holds that the future of higher education should emphasize the value-neutrality of market reason over that which helps determine values (Christensen, et al). Markets quantify before they do anything else, and the thinking goes that the knowledge that markets make available is, like the natural sciences, value-neutral and therefore universal. It follows that instrumental reason is the only …
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March 15, 2011, 3:49 pm
By Michael Brown
The principles of John Dewey’s “pedagogical vision,” applied to postsecondary education, should not be evaluated according to the techniques of teaching with which they are often identified. Many of these techniques are undeniably positive, and should be evaluated according to the vision of life that lies behind them and the way in which Dewey connects his idea of life to teaching and learning.
He considers life as intensively social in all respects, as ongoing, and as reflexive in the sense of being partly about its own continuation as a course of activity that has value in its own right.
This is how he can say that education is continuous with other life processes. But this means that the “formal” aspects of education are incapable on their own of educating. “Informal” aspects, which are self- and peer-determined, are just as important.
Once we admit that, we…
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March 10, 2011, 2:30 pm
By Michael Brown
Critics of the “blame the teachers” mentality seem to agree with several educational principles that we have promoted in our blog, and that continues a tradition initiated in the United States by John Dewey. The most important principle on which they agree is that education is not only not separate from life; it is an instance of the process of living. Therefore, there is more to it for the student than what goes on in classes and in time spent studying. They also agree that the outcome of education is not merely a collection of memorized facts, but a way of learning that involves learning how to learn.
The idea that students ought to learn how to think for themselves is intelligible only if we agree that “thinking by myself” is also and inevitably “thinking with others.” That goes along with respecting dialogue over debate and questions over answers. It also means being a…
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March 5, 2011, 4:55 pm
By Michael Brown
Written with Mary Churchill
Mike: I agree with your criticism of the corporate model, but it is worth talking a bit about alternatives to it, as far as faculty is concerned. From the point of view of faculty, there two key provisions of a viable alternative. The first involves maintaining the principle of collegiality. This entails accepting limits on administration that allow for a re-establishment of faculty authority over teaching personnel, curriculum, methodologies, and especially standards. The second involves translating faculty authority in relation to administration into more than mere consultation and input. This might involve, at the very least, representation and actual participation in all administrative decisions that have to do with the educational process itself.
Mary: I think one of the main difficulties lies in getting concrete about what we mean by “the…
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February 28, 2011, 2:18 pm
By Michael Brown
There is an enormous difference between a discussion about the activity of educating and a discussion about educational institutions. A failure to appreciate this difference can lead to confusion on the part of faculty who want to understand current changes in the university and what they should try to do about those changes. Faculty members are often drawn into discussions of matters over which they have no power, and which have nothing to do with the activity of educating. Sometimes those discussions are held at the expense of matters in which faculty’s legitimate authority is threatened.
For example, Andrew Ross, in his article “The Corporate Analogy Unravels” (The Chronicle Review, October 17, 2010), criticizes faculty who emphasize the corporate model as corrupting the idea and practices of education. He accuses them of relying on an analogy between corporations and…
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