June 14, 2011, 1:39 pm
By Mary Churchill
What is missing from A.C. Grayling’s new venture is education, or rather, an explicit idea about the mission of higher education. His project may be new in the U.K., but it is familiar to anyone who has worked with for-profit institutions of higher education. It is driven by the market and is sensitive to the whims of the market.
From the copy on the Web site, the target audience appears to be parents who want to hold on to 19th-century traditions and conceptions of the “humanities,” while making sure their children learn practical skills in how to lead companies. The intended student audience seems to be those who want to travel and have fun.
As a business venture, this seems like a good enough plan. This group will have rejected the most popular majors in the United States, business and engineering, or perhaps those areas will have rejected them. Most likely these are…
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May 19, 2011, 1:17 pm
By Mary Churchill
Written with Michael Brown
Mary: The issue of collegiality seems like the dirty little secret of tenure-and-promotion discussions and decisions. Mike, I think you are correct to be suspicious of the role played by administration in dictating tenure decisions. However, just as I have seen deans and provosts trump department recommendations to deny tenure, I have also seen the administration step in and award tenure when departments have voted to deny tenure. In those cases, it has clearly been an issue of “fit,” or, as you put it, collegiality. Too often, fit is conditioned by one’s race and gender. In a department dominated by white men, younger women and men of color often struggle to find that fit.
When an assistant professor is not well liked in a department and is not viewed as a team player, I feel like a colder eye is used when evaluating the tenure dossier. At times…
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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 28, 2011, 1:09 pm
By Mary Churchill
Written with Michael Brown
Mike: Mary, your point that some way of teaching science is an essential ingredient in any reasonable educational program is clearly important in clarifying what kind of curriculum might adequately represent the sciences and the humanities. There is much that is technical about science that is thought of as a profession, and there certainly are technical features of the humanities, even for nonspecialists. But there are substantive and theoretical aspects of both the sciences and the humanities that would allow students to respect and appreciate what is done in each set of fields. Teaching either the humanities or the sciences from the point of view of their technical aspects tends to leave too many students behind in their appreciation of what those fields study, how they approach their material, and what limits might exist to communicating the results of…
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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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April 4, 2011, 4:38 pm
By Mary Churchill
Mike: The corporate form dictates rationalization whether or not the enforcers of it claim to value quality, spontaneity, creativity, and learning to learn. This is more noticeable in the case of the university precisely because education is conceived of as a process that requires sensitivity on the part of teachers to differences among students and subject matter that is developed only holistically.
The important point is that rationalization is not just a matter of the ideology of management, and it is not an expression of character. It is a process that lacks any internal capacity to limit itself. This is well known to generations of researchers on social organization and one of the things that this research has constantly warned against. The demand for accountability in increasing detail explains the evident tendency to define “educational work” in terms of increasingly small …
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March 25, 2011, 2:33 pm
By Mary Churchill
Whether we call it play, down time, or hanging out, it is difficult to justify the importance of the unstructured or informal moments in our lives in a culture dominated by a hyper-focus on increasing productivity, maximizing efficiency, and accountability at any cost. I worry that the “time is money” adage rules our lives. I am a regular reader of the blogs at the Harvard Business Review, and several recent posts have focused on the connection between energy, creativity, and innovation. Earlier this week, Tony Schwartz wrote the following in a post on the personal energy crisis: “The paradigm of “more, bigger, faster”—the free-market rallying cry ever since the industrial revolution began 200 years ago—has hit a wall.” We have hit a wall. More, bigger, and faster does not mean better.
Like Schwartz, most of my colleagues admit to feeling an increasing pressure to schedule…
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