One-eighth of the student body, or 200 out of 1,600 students, has been laid low with the flu at Albion College this week, and as a result, all classes, sports contests, and other public events on the Michigan campus have been canceled until Monday morning, according to the Jackson Citizen Patriot.
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2 Responses to Albion College Cancels Classes as Flu Hits Hundreds
opentosuggestion - August 21, 2011 at 5:24 pm
I find it fascinating that critics of the culture of American universities continue to assume that American universities are defined by their arts disciplines. On the basis of my time in the US, the humanities programmes were small by comparison with the whole of their universities, and frankly I saw little indoctrination in these courses, which were mostly populated by students keen to fulfill their universities’ general education requirements and be done with it. And how much indoctrination goes on in the accounting department, or in the chemistry department? And yet no one can doubt that degree to which scientists and commerce staff must push back against administrators who often remain unfamiliar with the realities of their teaching and research. Perhaps Ginsberg, but certainly Wood, continues to believe that we are living in the mid-twentieth century. But the perils of what is perhaps better called the ‘all-managerial’ university are very real, if universities want to be something other than degree-mills or Walmart-style shops for occupational training — or, at the higher end, institutions that devote too many resources to appointing star staff who have little to do with undergraduates. I don’t know the solutions to the contemporary problems confronting American (or other) unversities, but neither pining for an irrecoverable past nor schematically politicising the present strike me as the best approaches.
peterwwood - August 22, 2011 at 11:58 am
Dear Opentosuggestion, I am a little puzzled that you find that either Ginsberg or I “assume that American universities are defined by their arts disciplines.” For my part, I see the humanities as fundamental and likely to endure no matter how much they are dwarfed by the sciences, marginalized by vocational programs, given short shrift by the “all managerial” university, or hollowed out from within by faculty members of anti-humanistic bent. The appeal of these disciplines–philosophy, history, literature, languages, political theory, psychology, and in some cases the social sciences–is for sure limited to a relatively small percentage of undergraduate students. Everyone acknowledges that. But the shift over the last half century to mass higher education marketed on the basis of the university’s ability to credential students for white collar jobs hasn’t extinguished these disciplines or erased the need to pursue them.
As to whether “indoctrination” slips into accounting or chemistry classes or other courses that would seem immune to the distempers of our time: one wouldn’t think so, and it is only rarely that I hear of cases where faculty members in fields such as these depart from their syllabi to engage in political advocacy. But that isn’t the end of the matter. The sciences are under lots of pressure, for example, to recruit more female and minority students and to make more female and minority faculty appointments. Observers are constantly looking for evidence that some hidden social injustice is at work to deny fair opportunities in these fields. A few days ago, for example, teh New York Times ran a front-page story about a new study carried out by Donna K. Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas, who reports that a black scientist is one-third less likely than a white scientists to win an NIH grant. (The grant applications are reviewed by peers who have no idea of the race of the applicant.) The Times quotes Dr. Francis S. Collins, the director of the N.I.H.,saying “This situation is not acceptable.”
Really? Colorblind peer-review of scientific proposals produces a result that rubs against a preconception of how the outcomes should be distributed and a leading scientists who is also an important government official finds fault with the peer review? That is pretty strong evidence of one way that fields that would seem to be immune from “indoctrination” in the classroom are nonetheless politicized.
And that kind of politicization falls very much into the topic raised by Professor Ginsberg in his new book. University administrators can and do use studies such as Professor Ginther’s to justify taking a strong hand in academic affairs. And faculty members, who either actively support the diversity doctrine or are cowed by it, passively accept these sorts of administrative intrusions.
I don’t believe we are living in the mid-twentieth century; and I am not happy about the rise of the all-managerial university or the crowding out off higher education by occupational training. Understanding how we got here, however, is important. Ginsberg’s book offers a valuable insight on that.
Peter Wood