Just about everything that is wrong with higher education today can be distilled down to the arcane eight-point type found at the bottom of the page. Which is to say that most of what takes place on college campuses these days is as old-fashioned and piddling as a washed up old footnote.
In these globalized times, history moves fast and, as the Columbia University religion professor Mark C. Taylor has been pointing out recently, university life has failed to keep up with the times, becoming increasingly irrelevant to undergraduates no longer interested in disciplines like the old standards such as History, Classics and Philosophy. Students are bored by lectures and are in the market for a less specialized, more flexible approach to learning, one that won’t have them slogging through the footnotes appended to some tired monograph (a word that can put you sleep) written by some pampered, tenured professor who is more interested in jetting off to some conference to burnish his reputation than in teaching students. In the world of higher education today, minutia is the order of the day. The phrase footnote to history has veered off the road to become footnote as history. As Professor Taylor writes in the New York Times: “A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.”1 What a bunch of schmoes!
We academics—and surely it is no coincidence that the word academic itself means not just a teacher or scholar but denotes in its adjectival form something of no practical relevance—need to reinvent the university by tearing down the walls of the ivory tower and acknowledging that in the twenty-first-century economic world we can scarcely afford an institution that does not bow down to market imperatives. As Taylor so nicely puts it: “Let’s make no mistake: higher education is a business.”2
The idea of graduate students running around writing doctoral dissertations as if they were living in the Middle Ages would be funny were it not for the fact that thousands of such students are today squandering their very best years, squirreled away in the archives writing treatises about as likely to be read as documents with titles such as Erring: A Postmodern A/theology3 or Altarity4 or “nO nOt nO” (admittedly works written by Professor Taylor himself in an earlier, perhaps more medieval time in his life).5 Almost inevitably, Taylor concludes, the monograph is a “financial failure” and the dissertation process itself a “rite of initiation [that] produces little of lasting value.”6
Channeling Milton Friedman, Taylor saves his powder for tenure, which he describes as nothing but a giant “liquidity issue.”7 There is no arguing with him here. Tenure is a retrograde concept that has no place in the post-Fordist world centered on flexibility in the workplace. “To be able to adapt to a rapidly changing world,” Taylor helpfully notes, “it is essential for higher educational institutions to maintain flexible workforces.”8 Lucky for us that about two-thirds of the people teaching at colleges and universities today are contingent workers, as Taylor duly notes, meaning that they have no job security whatsoever and have to answer to the iron laws of supply and demand just like the rest of the working population.9
Meanwhile, the idea that tenure protects academic freedom is, as Taylor points out, simply nonsense. You would think rich people were still running around, as they were in 1901, prevailing on university presidents to fire professors because they did not like their views on economic policy.10 That couldn’t possibly happen again, which is why Taylor concludes that tenure, plain and simple, needs to be ended. Some might think it heartless of me, but I rather applaud Taylor’s courage for telling it like it is: “The reality is that faculty members are in no better position to resist such an initiative [the abolition of tenure] than the autoworkers’ union is to oppose changes in Detroit.”11
Sweeping away tenure, dissertations and monographs (some of which have just a single footnote the length of all the endnotes—nicely streamlined into just three pages—found in Professor Taylor’s new book12) would, of course, help break down the walls between the disciplines and leave more room for creativity and innovative courses. One such course that Taylor co-taught back in his days at Williams College is titled What is Life? Not surprisingly, teaching the course, according to Taylor, “takes a serious commitment, much hard work and lots of time to reach a level of competence” commensurate with the task of educating students on what is, quite obviously, the ultimate question.13
This kind of creative approach to teaching is just what the doctor ordered and Taylor’s recommendation that academics embrace it comes none too soon given the current economic meltdown. After all, the world is still recovering from a financial crisis that the discipline of economics did absolutely nothing to help us understand when it wasn’t actively promoting precisely the commodified forms that created the crisis in the first place. If only all these economics majors would branch out. “Imagine how different our world might be,” writes Taylor, “if the people making financial decisions that impact all of our lives had studied not merely mathematical models but also history, literature, sociology, political science, anthropology and, yes, even religion.”14 Imagine if Richard Fuld at Lehman or Angelo Mozilo at Countrywide or Phil Gramm or Alan Greenspan had taken a more wide-ranging approach in college or, even better, if they had had the benefit of Professor Taylor’s guidance and learned about the importance of private enterprise to higher education. Who knew?
- Mark C. Taylor, “End the University as We Know It,” New York Times, April 26, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html (accessed January 1, 2011). ↩
- Mark C. Taylor, Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (New York: Knopf, 2010), 168. ↩
- Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). ↩
- Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). ↩
- Mark C. Taylor, “nO nOt nO,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 167–198. ↩
- Taylor, Crisis on Campus, 195. ↩
- Ibid., 207. ↩
- Ibid., 209. ↩
- Ibid., 43. Sadly, Professor Taylor may actually understate the success of the casualization of the workforce. The president of the Association of University Professors Cary Nelson asserts that there are almost one million contingent faulty out of a total of 1.4 million faculty teaching in U.S. colleges and universities. See Cary Nelson, No University Is an Island: Saving Academic Freedom (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 81. ↩
- Some conspiracy-minded people have floated the idea that in 1901 Mrs. Leland Stanford objected to the economist Edward Ross’s ideas and prevailed on the president to fire him from his post at the eponymous university. See, e.g., Joan Wallach Scott, “The Critical State of Shared Governance,” Academe Online, http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2002/JA/Feat/Scot.htm (accessed January 4, 2011). ↩
- Taylor, Crisis on Campus, 214. ↩
- Ibid., 227–230. ↩
- Ibid., 150. ↩
- Ibid., 152. ↩
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I hope you won’t mind if I disagree with part of your analysis. I am on the board of Baruch College, which as you know is part of the City University of NY. For the last two years, our budgets have been slashed by the state and many worthwhile programs at all of the CUNY campuses have been negatively affected. While this is taking place, the Baruch College Fund is subsidizing the salaries of about 100 faculty members who we either wanted to attract (new faculty) or keep (if we thought they were in imminent danger of being poached.) By and large, our bet paid off and the college profited from their presence as our ratings have improved.
In the new financial environment, the Fund is no longer able to maintain these subsidies. And, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not so sure we should have done so in the first place. Let me explain my point of view. As a business school, it seems to me that our scholarship should be helpful to the business community. Yet the research I read is usually (though not always) done to promote the interests of faculty interested in promotion and/or tenure. It is written for other faculty and is of no conceivable interest to those who actually toil within the business profession. There is almost a self-perpetuating mechanism at work in which faculty is required to do research to be deserving of promotion. Good research is defined as publishing in a recognized journal. And journals come into being in order to publish the work of academics who otherwise would have no outlet for their work. The problem is that the greatest part of the research is a complete waste of time and effort and finds no application in the world of business. The authors often investigate completely unimportant or simply imaginary problems and try to solve them using complex approaches wrapped in mathematical trivia that is only directed to other academics in the field. No businessperson, and I count myself as one, has the vaguest understanding of what they’re talking about and most don’t care as the work is done to prove advance personal ends not to advance the profession. As for the students, nobody has ever told me why they are responsible for paying for academic research they don’t read nor could they possibly benefit from it if they did. This seems to be a kind of tax on people who neither purchase nor benefit from the product.
Finally, I’ve heard the argument that good researchers are on the cutting edge of scholarship and are therefore better teachers. My own experience is exactly the reverse. A fraction of all the research done has any application to the classroom and where the application exists, it can just as easily be applied by someone who has read and understood the material as opposed to the person who actually did the work. I’m not against research, I merely want it to be done by the few who do it well and who demonstrate its applicability to the business community or to the students at the institution.
At a business school, faculty teach students about metrics and accountability. Where is the accountability in the tenure system ? Once tenured, it takes something beyond a felony to terminate an instructor. Academics get tenure in their 30s and the institution is bound to them until faculty decide to retire. This is a multi-million dollar commitment whether faculty are productive or not. In addition, most of these tenured researchers don’t even like to spend time in the classroom. They much prefer to further their careers by investigating, writing, and consulting, even though it is the students who pay their salaries while receiving none of the benefits. So I guess I agree with you here though I would compromise on a system in which tenure was granted and then reviewed every five or ten years.
It is hard for me to comment on whether the “greatest part” of the scholarship that goes on at business schools is a “a complete waste of time and effort.” Even someone as skeptical as I am about what happens at a business school finds that a bit hard to fathom.
That said, let me address an inaccuracy in the comment made regarding tenure, that being the idea that once someone is tenured it “takes something beyond a felony to terminate an instructor.” This is a common misconception. The reality is that tenure is in no way a guarantee of lifetime employment and faculty can, in fact, be let go for everything from incompetence to failure to execute one’s duties to financial emergency. There just needs to be just cause for the dismissal and an attention to proper process. My own university’s faculty handbook makes it very clear that tenured faculty can be dismissed for reasons such as “grave misconduct,” “educational considerations,” or “financial exigent circumstances.” No felony needed.
Finally, the idea that faculty prefer to engage in scholarship as opposed to teaching is itself a function of the reward structure in the academy today. It is worth noting, however, that it was only in the 1980s as universities became more tuition dependent and thus began questing more vigorously for increased enrollments and higher status that they began encouraging faculty to publish more. In part, this desperate concern with tuition and enrollment that, in turn, drove administrators to place more emphasis on faculty research, was a result of the fact that direct federal financial support to universities fell after the Nixon administration began doling out money directly to individual students instead. As Ellen Schrecker explains in The Lost Soul of Higher Education (2010), as late as the middle of the 1980s, even as “colleges and universities began to put priority on scholarship in tenure and promotion decisions, surveys of faculty members showed that they preferred teaching to research.” (188)