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[yellowtractor]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

Not a CHE article, rather an astonishing piece of wrong-headed puffery mixing fact, fiction, delirium, and corrective social engineering.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

[dellaroux]

I'm not quite clear how wrong-headed it is...much of it seems to summarize things that are said here every day.

Can you clarify? (asked seriously, maybe you're seeing something I'm missing...)

[tuxedo_cat]

Taylor:  "I have News!  Dirty Secrets heretofore unbreathed in the public square!  Absurd Analogies and Logical Fallacies outstripped only by my more Absurd proposals!  And you can trust me about all this because my obscure corner of the Ivory Tower conveniently reflects all of higher education."

Academia:  <snore>

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Well, for example Taylor doesn't explain his assertion that religious studies is necessary to "adequately address" the "significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties" of water distribution. My guess is that the Civil Engineers and Ecologists can solve the technical problems as well without experts on Erasmus and Buddhism getting underfoot as with their help. - DvF

[yellowtractor]

Taylor:  "I have News!  Dirty Secrets heretofore unbreathed in the public square!  Absurd Analogies and Logical Fallacies outstripped only by my more Absurd proposals!  And you can trust me about all this because my obscure corner of the Ivory Tower conveniently reflects all of higher education."

Academia:  <snore>

That was mostly my thought, though I would have expressed it less elegantly.

it is hardly news that (a) the academic job market vis-a-vis graduate training in the humanities is a scandal and that (b) the situation persists because of the ways in which larger R1 univesities rely on graduate students (as a reservoir of cheap casual labor) to staff their lower-level undergraduate classes.  We discuss this on the Fora all the time.  Taylor has no concrete remedies to offer, however--only high-sounding rhetoric, alongside a number of other generalized points that are, from my anecdotal perspective at least, fictive.

And an idea that it would be better if students could major in Water.

[frenchdoctor]

oh, yeah. No tenure is the solution. Everything will go better when all teachers will be adjuncts. In the "new university," suppressing freedom is the way to more freedom. Suppressing job security is the way to more job security. Sure.

So, we have a tenured professor who disagrees with tenure. Why doesn't he quit his own tenure and start a new, enthralling career as adjunct, looking for a few hours of underpaid teaching here and there ? Live your ideal ! Quit your alienating life now ! Abolish your own department, abolish your own tenure, abolish your own job ! Revolution ! Freedom !

I thought that this kind of socialite revolutionaries were a French speciality. I see you have some of them, too.  Academia would be much less funny without them, I believe.

On a lighter note, I notice that the word "post-modern" appears a lot in the author's presentation. Just sayin'.

[yellowtractor]

On a lighter note, I notice that the word "post-modern" appears a lot in the author's presentation. Just sayin'.

It doesn't appear even once ("post-modern" or even "postmodern").  Your point is...what, precisely?

[jonesey]

This article isn't written for academics.  I know it's hard to believe from the internet ivory tower that is the CHE, but many (I dare say most) people have no idea about what's happening in higher ed.  What Dr. Taylor has done is let people know (and by people I mean "non-academics") know what's been going on in universities for quite some time.

Sure, it's old news to us, but most people have no idea just how f'ed up higher ed is.

[yellowtractor]

This article isn't written for academics.  I know it's hard to believe from the internet ivory tower that is the CHE, but many (I dare say most) people have no idea about what's happening in higher ed.  What Dr. Taylor has done is let people know (and by people I mean "non-academics") know what's been going on in universities for quite some time.

Sure, it's old news to us, but most people have no idea just how f'ed up higher ed is.

In which case it's even more egregious, because it's full of (a) falsehoods and (b) whippy plans for changing higher education with no practical advice about just how this will be accomplished (starting with his own tenured chair in a humanities field some on this forum would view as eminently ripe for disciplinary sacrifice).

It's just erroneous to compare graduate education to Detroit, because the graduate setup (at least in the humanities, across the R1's of the USA) is extremely good at doing what it is, in the moment, designed to do:  filling classrooms with adjunct professors who just happen to be pursuing a concurrent degree.  Yes, this is a problem--but only if you have some idea that the main purpose of graduate education is to prepare bright young scholars for tenure-track positions inside academe.  To the extent that academia operates as an industry in capitalist society, ranks of graduate students--and/or adjuncts--appear to be necessary in order to keep everything running.

If it is true, as you imply, that all of us inside academia know that this is a canard (i.e., that graduate study is intended to prepare all successful participants for tenure-track careers inside academia), but those outside academia do not, then this needs addressing, surely.  I would welcome an incisive, visionary article on this subject, in the New York Times or elsewhere.

The reason why the current setup persists is because nobody has found a better way of teaching those classes.  Sure, some folks insist that distance or on-line classrooms will reduce the number of professors required to teach ("teach") all those intro-level classes, but we've explored that canard elsewhere on the Fora.  It would have been nice if Taylor had addressed this actual situation, or at least suggested how his plan for a radical reshaping of American higher education would address it.

What Taylor is doing is pandering to a popular view that professors are underworked, overpaid, coddled by this archaic idea of "tenure," and do no research of value to the larger human condition.  I don't believe any of those four things, and I'm tired of reading self-aggrandizing pronouncements from those who apparently do.

[jonesey]

It depends, of course, on what one feels the purpose of Humanities scholarship is in the first place, doesn't it (which leads to other, more exhaustive threads found elsewhere on the CHE). 

Without getting into that, I agree that if you don't buy into his premise (i.e. that the purpose of graduate education is only to produce TT professors) then the rest of his argument falls apart.  There are many people who do believe that the only purpose of a Humanities PhD is to become a TT professor.  Otherwise, why would you get that degree? (Again, this has been discussed ad nauseum, elsewhere).

The answer most people seem to have regarding underpaid TA's teaching undergrads is that all of these slots should be filled by TT professors.  In other words; hire more and get rid of graduate assistants.  This, of course, would cost lots of money (money that most schools don't have). 

[sonny_b]

I think most of the "problems" Taylor described don't apply to the sciences.  For example, in the sciences, irrelevant research will not be funded by grants.  Faculty who don't get grant funding can't carry out projects and don't make tenure.  Thus, irrelevant research is not done much.

Most science MS or PhD graduates find jobs in their field.  Not necessarily as faculty, but jobs are there.  But, why does he mix the ideas of a university as a place of higher learning in the original sense, with the newer ideas of "college" as a vocational school?  

I also disagree with the idea that after tenure, faculty become autonomous and administrators have no leverage.  If a tenured faculty becomes deadwood, he or she could have grad student funding taken away, lose lab space, be moved to the worst office, be assigned more committee work, be assigned more courses, etc.  

Besides, even if faculty could stop being productive, it almost never happens from my observations.  I've seen senior faculty switch interests from cutting edge research to mentoring undergraduates, or wind down research altogether and become awesome teachers.

[tuxedo_cat]

You just know that the thing that set Taylor off was this colleague of his, boasting about his grad student devoting his life to some supposedly insanely arcane object of study: "how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations."  Btw, given that in medieval scholasticism, the primary method at hand for _making_ a viable argument is by citing prior authorities, this kid is actually studying one of the central tools of epistemology for the era.  I know, I know, we came up with the scientific method an all, so who cares what the paradigm was before that.  It's just intellectual history.

Did anyone else notice that Taylor's primary gripe is with graduate education, which means that, of course, we should dismantle the _entire_ institution which, incidentally, includes a few undergraduates. . . ?

But YT's broader diagnosis is right on the mark.  Maybe we could send Taylor and Stanley Fish on some lovely pleasure cruise together for the next six months so they could stay out of everyone's hair (this would be easier to arrange than the alien kidnapping scenario.  I think).

[aristotelian]

He laments that adjuncts are paid $5k per course...that just shows how out of touch he is.  If only adjuncts could get $5k a course!

Other than that, his daignosis of the problem isn't too far off, but his solutions are not convincing.  Either they are absurd (abolish tenure; abolish departments) or simplistic truisms (collaboration among institutions, increasing careers options).

The idea that interdisciplinary work will solve all of this is ridiculous.  Interdisciplinary work just happens to draw on multiple disciplines.  Other than that it is just as "academic" and specialized as traditional scholarship.

The idea of problem-based disciplines is interesting, but one need not abolish traditional disciplines in order to do that.  In fact there are all kinds of centers and programs that do exactly the kinds of things that he is talking about.

[grasshopper]

I don't get how all these undergraduate interdisciplinary programs are going to function if each institution specializes in only one discipline.

And wouldn't this institutional disciplinary specialization compound the problem that Taylor sees with over-specialization within disciplines?

And although I do interdisciplinary work in Religion, I don't see myself as particularly qualified to solve the water crisis. Although I guess I could probably come up with some comparative study of water-worship across religions. Would that help?

[svenc]

<OK, we have case of dueling threads here.   I'll repost my comments here, as this seems to be the more active thread.>

The article calls for imposing mandatory retirement and abolishing tenure as ways of increasing the employment pool.

The author has got his head so far up the backside of his own underemployed, overpopulated field that he is calling to toss out the whole university system to address criticisms that mostly apply to (some) arts and humanities fields.  I don't see the relevance of his concerns to much of the sciences, engineering, medicine, economics, business, etc.

I'm not trying to start an interdisciplinary war here; I'm criticizing the author for coming up with a laundry list of woes facing his discipline and using them as a starting point for wanting to restructure the entire university rewards and training system.  I don't see how forcing medical researchers to retire at age 62 will help find employment for his graduate students.