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The Chronicle of Higher Education is a mainstream website for higher ed. They generally don\u2019t cover serious criticism of their bread-and-butter, but recently they covered a mostly empty rant by a tenured professor. Since he\u2019s tenured, he can get away with using his real name instead of a pseudonym (most faculty, tenured or not, generally do so):<\/p>\n
Higher Education Is Drowning in BS<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n While I\u2019m certainly a critic of higher ed and appreciate criticisms in general, this isn\u2019t a very good rant. That said, let me cover some highlights of his many complaints, and then list a few monstrously huge issues he somehow overlooked.<\/p>\n BS is the university\u2019s loss of capacity to grapple with life\u2019s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity.<\/em><\/p>\n I\u2019m certainly willing to concede this has happened to some extent, but I\u2019m disappointed the professor is too afraid to point out why<\/em> and how<\/em> it happened. We don\u2019t get to deal with the big questions, perhaps, because we\u2019ve been disempowered by an edu-fascistic takeover of higher ed, the merger of administrative and ideological interests which have de-professionalized scholars to the point that all most of us can do is cower before the might of the true rulers of our universities.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure how this hasn\u2019t occurred to him, and I suspect he was just afraid to point the finger at the Emperors here.<\/p>\n BS is the expectation that a good education can be provided by institutions modeled organizationally on factories, state bureaucracies, and shopping malls \u2014 that is, by enormous universities processing hordes of students as if they were livestock, numbers waiting in line, and shopping consumers.<\/em><\/p>\n Again, the edu-fascistic interests who control our schools view the students of livestock, as I identified in an interview with a Poo-Bah<\/a>. Why won\u2019t you mention from whence the BS comes, professor?<\/p>\n BS is the shifting of the “burden” of teaching undergraduate courses from traditional tenure-track faculty to miscellaneous, often-underpaid adjunct faculty and graduate students.<\/em><\/p>\n But, every dollar not spent on education is a dollar which can go into an administrator\u2019s pocket. It really is curious he doesn\u2019t consider where these changes are coming from.<\/p>\n BS is third-tier universities offering mediocre graduate programs to train second-rate Ph.D. students for jobs that do not exist, whose real function is to provide faculty with graduate RAs and to justify the title of “university.”<\/em><\/p>\n These programs exist because they create growth for the school. That they do great harm to human beings by wasting years of their lives for worthless degrees is irrelevant. And, again, it doesn\u2019t take much to realize from where these \u201cinitiatives\u201d for these programs originate.<\/p>\n In short, much of his complaints deal with the administrative side of what\u2019s happened to higher ed. Does he know about the ideological takeover?<\/p>\n BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance.<\/em><\/p>\n The above is his only complaint against the ideological homogeneity of our campuses. While I give him credit for identifying the hypocrisy here, I do wish he\u2019d had the courage to specifically identify which side has taken over (hint: it\u2019s not the Right).<\/p>\n I do wish he\u2019d spent more time on this problem, because it\u2019s a major factor in what\u2019s happened on campus. Instead of studying actual academic subjects, concepts which have guided humanity for over a thousand years, the takeover has encouraged academics to be removed, and replaced by, well, BS subjects of no educational value (hi Gender Studies, although it\u2019s not alone on campus).<\/p>\n BS is hypercommercialized college athletics and administrations sucking the teats of big money, often in the process exploiting and discarding rather than educating student athletes, and recurrently corrupting recruitment programs, tutoring services, and grading systems.<\/em><\/p>\n The professor only lightly touches on the corrupted sportsball on our campuses, so allow me to fill in some details of the above. Sportsball athletes are supposed to also be students. Yes, some of them are legitimate students, but a great many really are just athletes. Since a top team needs those athletes to be competitive, \u201crecruitment\u201d tactics to get them can be pretty slimy. To make them look like students, these athletes often get their own special \u201ctutors,\u201d who do their academic work for them so they have more time to practice sportsball, and, ultimately, their grades are simply rubber stamps. UNC was caught doing this, but as UNC readily admits (after having no choice in the matter), they\u2019re not the only school engaging in such practices, just, perhaps, the only one who allowed the fake athlete\/academic system to leak into the general student population (or should I say \u201cstudent herd\u201d instead?).<\/p>\n BS is the ascendant “culture of offense” that shuts down the open exchange of ideas and mutual accountability to reason and argument. It is university leaders\u2019 confused and fearful capitulation to that secular neo-fundamentalist speech-policing.<\/em><\/p>\n BS is the invisible self-censorship that results among some students and faculty, and the subtle corrective training aimed at those who occasionally do not self-censor.<\/em><\/p>\n To be fair, I guess I should include the above as part of his criticisms of the ideological takeover of many of our campuses, although I do find it to be far too subtle. Which side is forbidding the open exchange of ideas, professor? Which side are the \u201cleaders\u201d capitulating to? Which side supports censorship?<\/p>\n Speaking of \u201csubtle,\u201d I\u2019m not sure that \u201ccorrective training\u201d he refers to is subtle. These \u201cwhite hate\u201d seminars can turn into days of indoctrination, and the threats of being forcibly subjected to such are seldom delivered subtly.<\/p>\n Sadly, the comments don\u2019t add much to the professor\u2019s rant, with only one person pointing out how none of it is supported by any provided evidence. I grant that much of what he has to say is self-evident, but I still think his clear fear of pointing the finger at who\/what is responsible for the great quantities of BS in higher ed is fairly revealing.<\/p>\n Much as Voltaire said, to learn who rules, determine who you are not allowed to criticize. The gentle reader should carefully consider who the professor fails to criticize here, to answer the all-important \u201cwhy\u201d campuses are drowning in BS right now.<\/p>\n www.professorconfess.blogspot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"