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Nick Thompson

FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

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I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily correct but because it suggests great opportunities for institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.

I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism, tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.

And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No. I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the last four decades, is the application of power in the absence of honest critique.

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

OPINION | April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
2. More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
3. Corner Office: He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
4. Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals
5. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

» Go to Complete List

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law

>
> The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational
> system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate
> those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own
> pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these
> students having futures as full professors.
>
> The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid
> graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching,
> universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing
> undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still
> encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper
> to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as
> little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire
> full-time professors.
>
> In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard
> for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the
> illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical
> presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there
> will always be too many candidates for too few openings.
>

George Duncan-2

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Based on my experience at Carnegie Mellon for 34 years, I can agree with many of the recommendations. In particular, I see merit in replacing tenure with term contracts, emphasizing interdisciplinary programs with a problem focus, more sharing of teaching across institutions, and providing alternatives to the traditional thesis.

However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about through regulation (does he really think that the federal government could take this on?),

Some of these will perhaps come about through internal moves by various universities. For example, Carnegie Mellon which is perhaps the most flexible university in responding to a changing environment, does have a remarkable array of interdisciplinary programs and emphasizes opportunities for doctoral students to cross departmental boundaries. It still has tenure, and I have thought for decades that the impetus for change there come from state legislatures that would abolish it in their state universities. But despite periodic noises it hasn't happened, perhaps never will. The moves by various universities like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon towards more on-line courses and expanding their availability, will think over time lead to more sharing of teaching resources. Why should a dozen universities offer advanced PhD courses in say Galois fields each with three students, when one could do it with 36 students and the best teacher of the topic? Why should every undergraduate institution want a high-level professor of physics, when they can import a course with the top lecturer in the country and provide the personal interaction with students through lecturers who care about students and earn perhaps $40K a year? Some universities do already provide alternatives of varying sorts to a traditional thesis, especially in more professionally oriented doctoral programs, such as those in social work or education.

I cannot agree with the negative tone of the article about preparing for the academic life. If a person is successful at it, academia provides a remarkably fulfilling career. Name another profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at Columbia you make a pretty decent salary. So not all who aspire, make it. What percentage of Carnegie Mellon's drama graduates make it to Broadway or Hollywood? What percentage of graduates of art school ever sell a painting? The responsibility, I think, is for schools to do the best job they can to support the student's highest aspirations while at the same time providing a decent education for fallback positions.

Last of all, the piece neglects the fact that most graduate students are not PhD students but instead are enrolled in professional degree programs. They can have their problems too but at least they have to be fairly directly responsive to a market--most are paying some $50K in tuition plus the opportunity costs of non-employment.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily correct but because it suggests great opportunities for institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.

I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism, tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.

And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No. I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the last four decades, is the application of power in the absence of honest critique.

n

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

OPINION | April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
2. More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
3. Corner Office: He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
4. Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals
5. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

» Go to Complete List

Advertisement

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Watch the new trailer!
Click here to view trailer

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics, Emeritus
Heinz College
Carnegie Mellon University
(505) 983-6895

Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Russ Abbott

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual. It puts most people, especially those over 50, in a very precarious position. How many of the people on this list would like to have their term up this month and face the prospect of looking for a job in the current environment? Employment is a relationship between employee and employer that generally goes beyond term contracts. I don't think that reducing it to something as limited as that is a good idea.

-- Russ

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:35 PM, George Duncan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Based on my experience at Carnegie Mellon for 34 years, I can agree with many of the recommendations. In particular, I see merit in replacing tenure with term contracts, emphasizing interdisciplinary programs with a problem focus, more sharing of teaching across institutions, and providing alternatives to the traditional thesis.

However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about through regulation (does he really think that the federal government could take this on?),

Some of these will perhaps come about through internal moves by various universities. For example, Carnegie Mellon which is perhaps the most flexible university in responding to a changing environment, does have a remarkable array of interdisciplinary programs and emphasizes opportunities for doctoral students to cross departmental boundaries. It still has tenure, and I have thought for decades that the impetus for change there come from state legislatures that would abolish it in their state universities. But despite periodic noises it hasn't happened, perhaps never will. The moves by various universities like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon towards more on-line courses and expanding their availability, will think over time lead to more sharing of teaching resources. Why should a dozen universities offer advanced PhD courses in say Galois fields each with three students, when one could do it with 36 students and the best teacher of the topic? Why should every undergraduate institution want a high-level professor of physics, when they can import a course with the top lecturer in the country and provide the personal interaction with students through lecturers who care about students and earn perhaps $40K a year? Some universities do already provide alternatives of varying sorts to a traditional thesis, especially in more professionally oriented doctoral programs, such as those in social work or education.

I cannot agree with the negative tone of the article about preparing for the academic life. If a person is successful at it, academia provides a remarkably fulfilling career. Name another profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at Columbia you make a pretty decent salary. So not all who aspire, make it. What percentage of Carnegie Mellon's drama graduates make it to Broadway or Hollywood? What percentage of graduates of art school ever sell a painting? The responsibility, I think, is for schools to do the best job they can to support the student's highest aspirations while at the same time providing a decent education for fallback positions.

Last of all, the piece neglects the fact that most graduate students are not PhD students but instead are enrolled in professional degree programs. They can have their problems too but at least they have to be fairly directly responsive to a market--most are paying some $50K in tuition plus the opportunity costs of non-employment.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily correct but because it suggests great opportunities for institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.

I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism, tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.

And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No. I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the last four decades, is the application of power in the absence of honest critique.

n

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

OPINION | April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
2. More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
3. Corner Office: He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
4. Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals
5. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

» Go to Complete List

Advertisement

500 Days of Summer Premiered at Sundance, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Coming This Summer
Watch the new trailer!
Click here to view trailer

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics, Emeritus
Heinz College
Carnegie Mellon University
(505) 983-6895

Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Pamela McCorduck

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

My impression of the op-ed piece was that it was mostly about the humanities, where I'm sorry to say the numbers are correct: many graduate students spend six to eight years on the worst of the trivium, pile up debt, and face a labor market that has nearly no jobs for them. There's nearly no support, and one reason they take so long is because they're expected to teach a heavy course load. My Spanish tutor is a good example, although if his dissertation can be pushed by a certain meddling tutee to get bigger and more comprehensive than he first envisioned it, he may--well, who knows? Whereas in the sciences and engineering schools, students expect to spend no more than four years getting a Ph.D., and can be confident of finding a position when they get out. The major universities offer them support, which makes their debts if not nonexistent, certainly less onerous.

Please don't mistake this for an argument against the humanities. A university without the humanities would be a sorry thing indeed. But I agree with the writer that the model needs some drastic changes.

George is right to argue that a university owes it to its students to support their highest aspirations. But this needs to be tempered with some realism, and the reality is above.

Pamela

On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:03 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual. It puts most people, especially those over 50, in a very precarious position. How many of the people on this list would like to have their term up this month and face the prospect of looking for a job in the current environment? Employment is a relationship between employee and employer that generally goes beyond term contracts. I don't think that reducing it to something as limited as that is a good idea.

-- Russ

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:35 PM, George Duncan <[hidden email]> wrote:

Based on my experience at Carnegie Mellon for 34 years, I can agree with many of the recommendations. In particular, I see merit in replacing tenure with term contracts, emphasizing interdisciplinary programs with a problem focus, more sharing of teaching across institutions, and providing alternatives to the traditional thesis.

However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about through regulation (does he really think that the federal government could take this on?),

Some of these will perhaps come about through internal moves by various universities. For example, Carnegie Mellon which is perhaps the most flexible university in responding to a changing environment, does have a remarkable array of interdisciplinary programs and emphasizes opportunities for doctoral students to cross departmental boundaries. It still has tenure, and I have thought for decades that the impetus for change there come from state legislatures that would abolish it in their state universities. But despite periodic noises it hasn't happened, perhaps never will. The moves by various universities like MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon towards more on-line courses and expanding their availability, will think over time lead to more sharing of teaching resources. Why should a dozen universities offer advanced PhD courses in say Galois fields each with three students, when one could do it with 36 students and the best teacher of the topic? Why should every undergraduate institution want a high-level professor of physics, when they can import a course with the top lecturer in the country and provide the personal interaction with students through lecturers who care about students and earn perhaps $40K a year? Some universities do already provide alternatives of varying sorts to a traditional thesis, especially in more professionally oriented doctoral programs, such as those in social work or education.

I cannot agree with the negative tone of the article about preparing for the academic life. If a person is successful at it, academia provides a remarkably fulfilling career. Name another profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at Columbia you make a pretty decent salary. So not all who aspire, make it. What percentage of Carnegie Mellon's drama graduates make it to Broadway or Hollywood? What percentage of graduates of art school ever sell a painting? The responsibility, I think, is for schools to do the best job they can to support the student's highest aspirations while at the same time providing a decent education for fallback positions.

Last of all, the piece neglects the fact that most graduate students are not PhD students but instead are enrolled in professional degree programs. They can have their problems too but at least they have to be fairly directly responsive to a market--most are paying some $50K in tuition plus the opportunity costs of non-employment.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily correct but because it suggests great opportunities for institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.

I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism, tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.

And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No. I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the last four decades, is the application of power in the absence of honest critique.

n

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

OPINION | April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
2. More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops
3. Corner Office: He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
4. Shortage of Doctors Proves Obstacle to Obama Goals
5. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

» Go to Complete List

Advertisement

500 Days of Summer Premiered at Sundance, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Coming This Summer
Watch the new trailer!
Click here to view trailer

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

--
George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics, Emeritus
Heinz College
Carnegie Mellon University
(505) 983-6895

Life must be understood backwards; but... it must be lived forward.
Soren Kierkegaard

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Merle Lefkoff

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Did you guys read the same op-ed piece that I read? It's about
revitalizing higher education as a complex adaptive network. It's about
how specialization doesn't work for today's world. It's about how
irrelevant and boring higher education has become. And all you guys can
talk about is JOBS and MONEY. I guess most of you are somehow
connected to the privileged, but sadly constrained world of academia.
Come out into the fresh air where the work is always exciting, and the
money is just enough to sustain the excitement.

Merle Lefkoff
oops--Ph.D.

Pamela McCorduck wrote:

> My impression of the op-ed piece was that it was mostly about the
> humanities, where I'm sorry to say the numbers are correct: many
> graduate students spend six to eight years on the worst of the
> trivium, pile up debt, and face a labor market that has nearly no jobs
> for them. There's nearly no support, and one reason they take so long
> is because they're expected to teach a heavy course load. My Spanish
> tutor is a good example, although if his dissertation can be pushed by
> a certain meddling tutee to get bigger and more comprehensive than he
> first envisioned it, he may--well, who knows? Whereas in the sciences
> and engineering schools, students expect to spend no more than four
> years getting a Ph.D., and can be confident of finding a position when
> they get out. The major universities offer them support, which makes
> their debts if not nonexistent, certainly less onerous.
>
> Please don't mistake this for an argument against the humanities. A
> university without the humanities would be a sorry thing indeed. But I
> agree with the writer that the model needs some drastic changes.
>
> George is right to argue that a university owes it to its students to
> support their highest aspirations. But this needs to be tempered with
> some realism, and the reality is above.
>
> Pamela
>
>
>
> On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:03 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>
>> I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term
>> employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no
>> obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual. It puts most
>> people, especially those over 50, in a very precarious position. How
>> many of the people on this list would like to have their term up this
>> month and face the prospect of looking for a job in the current
>> environment? Employment is a relationship between employee and
>> employer that generally goes beyond term contracts. I don't think
>> that reducing it to something as limited as that is a good idea.
>>
>> -- Russ
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:35 PM, George Duncan <[hidden email]
>> <mailto:[hidden email]>> wrote:
>>
>> Based on my experience at Carnegie Mellon for 34 years, I can
>> agree with many of the recommendations. In particular, I see
>> merit in replacing tenure with term contracts, emphasizing
>> interdisciplinary programs with a problem focus, more sharing of
>> teaching across institutions, and providing alternatives to the
>> traditional thesis.
>>
>> However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about
>> through regulation (does he really think that the federal
>> government could take this on?),
>>
>> Some of these will perhaps come about through internal moves by
>> various universities. For example, Carnegie Mellon which is
>> perhaps the most flexible university in responding to a changing
>> environment, does have a remarkable array of interdisciplinary
>> programs and emphasizes opportunities for doctoral students to
>> cross departmental boundaries. It still has tenure, and I have
>> thought for decades that the impetus for change there come from
>> state legislatures that would abolish it in their state
>> universities. But despite periodic noises it hasn't happened,
>> perhaps never will. The moves by various universities like MIT,
>> Stanford and Carnegie Mellon towards more on-line courses and
>> expanding their availability, will think over time lead to more
>> sharing of teaching resources. Why should a dozen universities
>> offer advanced PhD courses in say Galois fields each with three
>> students, when one could do it with 36 students and the best
>> teacher of the topic? Why should every undergraduate institution
>> want a high-level professor of physics, when they can import a
>> course with the top lecturer in the country and provide the
>> personal interaction with students through lecturers who care
>> about students and earn perhaps $40K a year? Some universities do
>> already provide alternatives of varying sorts to a traditional
>> thesis, especially in more professionally oriented doctoral
>> programs, such as those in social work or education.
>>
>> I cannot agree with the negative tone of the article about
>> preparing for the academic life. If a person is successful at it,
>> academia provides a remarkably fulfilling career. Name another
>> profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work
>> in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and
>> students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at
>> Columbia you make a pretty decent salary. So not all who aspire,
>> make it. What percentage of Carnegie Mellon's drama graduates
>> make it to Broadway or Hollywood? What percentage of graduates of
>> art school ever sell a painting? The responsibility, I think, is
>> for schools to do the best job they can to support the student's
>> highest aspirations while at the same time providing a decent
>> education for fallback positions.
>>
>> Last of all, the piece neglects the fact that most graduate
>> students are not PhD students but instead are enrolled in
>> professional degree programs. They can have their problems too
>> but at least they have to be fairly directly responsive to a
>> market--most are paying some $50K in tuition plus the opportunity
>> costs of non-employment.
>>
>> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson
>> <[hidden email] <mailto:[hidden email]>>
>> wrote:
>>
>> I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to
>> have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily
>> correct but because it suggests great opportunities for
>> institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or
>> Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could
>> re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.
>>
>> I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over
>> the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual
>> courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long
>> term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it
>> unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism,
>> tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have
>> allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial
>> incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with
>> bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's
>> ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.
>>
>> And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you
>> get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with
>> financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of
>> Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I
>> worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No.
>> I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak
>> directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about
>> what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest
>> critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the
>> last four decades, is the application of power in the absence
>> of honest critique.
>>
>> n
>>
>> Nicholas S. Thompson
>> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
>> Clark University ([hidden email]
>> <mailto:[hidden email]>)
>> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>> <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> The New York Times <http://www.nytimes.com/> E-mail This
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&page=www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/opinion&pos=TopRight-EmailThis&sn2=94d3287b/805f85e3&sn1=9bd7f9f2/7016809f&camp=foxsearch2009_emailtools_1011072b_nyt5&ad=500DOS_88x31_b&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2F500daysofsummer>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> *OPINION * | April 27, 2009
>> *Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
>> <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?emc=eta1>*
>> By MARK C. TAYLOR
>> If higher education is to thrive, colleges and
>> universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be
>> rigorously regulated and completely restructured.
>>
>>
>>
>> Most E-mailed
>> 1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
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Gus Koehler-2

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Russ Abbott

Term contracts are like having a small business; the time is always up. As to humanity’s Ph.Ds, I got one in Political Philosophy and Sociology just as a major recession set in. No jobs in the US at all as whole departments were eliminated. Only one in Nigeria. I had to totally retool throwing everything I had done over 7 years in the trash. Do I regret it. NO. Who is lucky enough to pursue major questions and ideas for a sustained period that are important enough to make a major sacrifice for? I did it. Really fulfilled a part of my life and I grew a lot.

Also, try being a freeway flyer professor which is a lot of what you’re talking about here as the NEW faculty. No benefits, no time to retool, no money for conferences, no retirement, no intellectual protection or choice (text selected for you for example), no nothing and then out the door. 50% of the faculty in California are on this road to nowhere. University politics are the shits, particularly from the bottom up. But try the realpolitk of trying to feed or educate people in state budget battles like we have today. Enough to give you nightmares and make you cry. Truly, as some say, university politics are fighting over nothing.

And, yes I continue to research various issues of interest to me and publish in academic journals though it makes no difference at all to my income, only to my mental well being and to continue to adventure. Oh, and I do try to pull together academic researchers at universities to go after NSF money and other funds to do research of interest to me including inventing new products. Not much luck so far. But it’s the constant retools and moving into new policy areas that puts food on the table and grows my company.

Remember the promise of these time—4 to 7 jobs in a life time. Yes, I would take an academic position. Yes, tenure is very, very important to think free.

Gus

Gus Koehler, PhD., CEO

www.timestructures.com

1545 University Avenue
Sacramento, CA 95825
916.564.8683 Fax: 916.564.7895

Cell: 916.716.1740

www.timestructures.com
[hidden email]

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 6:04 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:35 PM, George Duncan <[hidden email]> wrote:

However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about through regulation (does he really think that the federal government could take this on?),

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,

Clark University ([hidden email])

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

Error! Filename not specified.

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OPINION | April 27, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
By MARK C. TAYLOR
If higher education is to thrive, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured.

Error! Filename not specified.

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1. Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
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5. U.S. Declares Public Health Emergency Over Swine Flu

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Owen Densmore

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Administrator

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Oh Gawd: The Agile University?

I sometimes feel I'm living in an alternative university (er, universe).

1 - Are we talking about education or academia? If the latter, yes
its fucked up. I worked in Silicon Valley and knew I could be "let
go" at any time. I didn't mind, there were lots of jobs, and I
cleverly made myself (gasp!) USEFUL. If the former, my Physics/Math
background was not described by the (rather poor) article .. it was
not too narrow (Hilbert Spaces are fungible), and to this day still
relevant. I was not a slave -- I got a fellowship.

2 - None the less, education has been migrating towards blurring the
lines between Education and Creativity. I.e. my Stanford, U of
Rochester, RIT and other grad students were all Creative .. they got
things done, and did it through Agile (in the current programming
paradigm sense) techniques that leveraged their schools and industry.
I think this is a Good Thing.

3 - So I presume I'm listening to a conversation far removed from my
experiences. For one thing, in my life education never stopped. At
Xerox, Apple and Sun I was expected to learn new stuff continuously.

4 - Dave West is taking a shot at fixing what some of the discussion
apparently is focused on: restructuring. In Computing we discuss
"Refactoring" programs .. changing their Architecture as they scale in
size and scope. Dave's approach refactors along a time/topic/
methodology triple: Shorter bursts, therefore adaptive depth/breadth
topics, and with a project focus.

> @George: Name another profession where you mostly get to do what you
> want to do, work in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent
> colleagues and students to chat with, and if you are a full
> professor at Columbia you make a pretty decent salary.

Ans: All my jobs in industry. Every one. Not just the companies (3)
but jobs within them (12, say).

> @Russ: I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term
> employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no
> obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual.

Ans: Me. I liked it. Thrilling, and boy does it keep my honest!

> @Pamela: My impression of the op-ed piece was that it was mostly
> about the humanities, where I'm sorry to say the numbers are
> correct...

Ans: Thanks! That does clarify a lot for me. Although its a bit
spooky .. after all we are all human, the presumed focus of
humanities, and its being mishandled is both sad and frightening.
Dave's approach seems apposite.

> @Merle: Did you guys read the same op-ed piece that I read? It's
> about revitalizing higher education as a complex adaptive network.
> It's about how specialization doesn't work for today's world. It's
> about how irrelevant and boring higher education has become. And
> all you guys can talk about is JOBS and MONEY. I guess most of you
> are somehow connected to the privileged, but sadly constrained
> world of academia. Come out into the fresh air where the work is
> always exciting, and the money is just enough to sustain the
> excitement.

Ans: Well, sorta .. and along with Pamela it does explain that I
indeed DO live in a parallel universe. It became clear after a few
emails that there were two conversations going on, one about academia,
one on education. I like the latter and find the former quaint. I
think the 6 points sorta blur the two, but I sorta like them.

I think I've been living in the future too long.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Russ Abbott

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Owen, you said,

I worked in Silicon Valley and knew I could be "let go" at any time. I didn't mind, there were lots of jobs.

Being an at-will employee (is that what it's called?) is a lot different from being on a term contract. A specific initiative is required to terminate at-will employees. With a term contract, a specific initiative is required to retain someone. A world in which everyone is a term employee would be a chaotic jungle. I doubt that you or anyone else would like to live there -- especially when it's not the case that there are lots of jobs. It's like a continual game of musical chairs. You have to hope that when your music stops (i.e., your term expires) that there is a chair available. What if there isn't? The only way I can see that working is if there is a guaranteed employer of last resort.

There is a reason this won't work. When we were hunters and gatherers, anyone could (presumably) make a living without have a job. Just go out and hunt and gather. That's not true today. Someone who loses his job doesn't have the option of going out and hunting and gathering for himself. There were a couple of moving segments on NPR over the past few weeks on a women who lost her reasonably good HR job. She was willing to work, but there were no jobs. What were her options? Not very many? Let's not make the situation many people find themselves in today the standard for all time.

-- Russ

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 10:09 AM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Oh Gawd: The Agile University?

I sometimes feel I'm living in an alternative university (er, universe).

1 - Are we talking about education or academia? If the latter, yes its fucked up. I worked in Silicon Valley and knew I could be "let go" at any time. I didn't mind, there were lots of jobs, and I cleverly made myself (gasp!) USEFUL. If the former, my Physics/Math background was not described by the (rather poor) article .. it was not too narrow (Hilbert Spaces are fungible), and to this day still relevant. I was not a slave -- I got a fellowship.

2 - None the less, education has been migrating towards blurring the lines between Education and Creativity. I.e. my Stanford, U of Rochester, RIT and other grad students were all Creative .. they got things done, and did it through Agile (in the current programming paradigm sense) techniques that leveraged their schools and industry. I think this is a Good Thing.

3 - So I presume I'm listening to a conversation far removed from my experiences. For one thing, in my life education never stopped. At Xerox, Apple and Sun I was expected to learn new stuff continuously.

4 - Dave West is taking a shot at fixing what some of the discussion apparently is focused on: restructuring. In Computing we discuss "Refactoring" programs .. changing their Architecture as they scale in size and scope. Dave's approach refactors along a time/topic/methodology triple: Shorter bursts, therefore adaptive depth/breadth topics, and with a project focus.

@George: Name another profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at Columbia you make a pretty decent salary.

Ans: All my jobs in industry. Every one. Not just the companies (3) but jobs within them (12, say).

@Russ: I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual.

Ans: Me. I liked it. Thrilling, and boy does it keep my honest!

@Pamela: My impression of the op-ed piece was that it was mostly about the humanities, where I'm sorry to say the numbers are correct...

Ans: Thanks! That does clarify a lot for me. Although its a bit spooky .. after all we are all human, the presumed focus of humanities, and its being mishandled is both sad and frightening. Dave's approach seems apposite.

@Merle: Did you guys read the same op-ed piece that I read? It's about revitalizing higher education as a complex adaptive network. It's about how specialization doesn't work for today's world. It's about how irrelevant and boring higher education has become. And all you guys can talk about is JOBS and MONEY. I guess most of you are somehow connected to the privileged, but sadly constrained world of academia. Come out into the fresh air where the work is always exciting, and the money is just enough to sustain the excitement.

Ans: Well, sorta .. and along with Pamela it does explain that I indeed DO live in a parallel universe. It became clear after a few emails that there were two conversations going on, one about academia, one on education. I like the latter and find the former quaint. I think the 6 points sorta blur the two, but I sorta like them.

I think I've been living in the future too long.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Russ Abbott wrote:
> A world in which everyone is a term employee would be a chaotic jungle.
Actually it sounds pretty good. For one thing, the `good' positions (I
guess that basically means autonomous R&D for a lot of us) would have
more turnover and more minds would offer fresh perspectives on
problems. `Bad' positions would also inevitably get visited by `good'
minds, and probably ways would be found to improve those positions.
Sicne change would be the norm for the upper socio-economic classes as
well, it would be made less risky and painful.

Marcus
--
Specialization is for insects -- Robert Heinlein

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Pamela McCorduck

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Merle Lefkoff

Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:

From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
To: [hidden email]
Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
Know It - NYTimes.com

I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation: what
hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL graduate
programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?

Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have never
allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
with that attitude towards the craft of learning...

Flunk him out.

David Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>

Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT

To: [hidden email]

Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know

It - NYTimes.com

Dave,

A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my

reply:

With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,

comprehensively.

First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American

graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the

world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa

restrictions that have made it more difficult for American

universities to get the very best students from around the world, so

graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)

Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion

professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what

I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM

fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-

oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the

humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very

different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)

Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly

appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build

on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for

"interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe

led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate

preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give

an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared

for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work

must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline

involved.

Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual

freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial

positions (though this may be more of an issue in other

disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that

one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an

effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created

by a selected community of scholars.

Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing

intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must

provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too

much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental

structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,

centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I

suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would

like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the

institution support creative thinkers.

Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a

system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid

off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I

predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and

intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.

Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,

impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his

field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that

in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career,

the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the

institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and

cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end

up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in

one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem

with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume

responsibilities like administration and student advising", then

perhaps his department needs new leadership.

Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are

superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some

of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-disciplinary

work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the

framework we have.

Cheers,

Ben

On Apr 28, 2009, at 12:42 AM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:

Did you guys read the same op-ed piece that I read? It's about revitalizing higher education as a complex adaptive network. It's about how specialization doesn't work for today's world. It's about how irrelevant and boring higher education has become. And all you guys can talk about is JOBS and MONEY. I guess most of you are somehow connected to the privileged, but sadly constrained world of academia. Come out into the fresh air where the work is always exciting, and the money is just enough to sustain the excitement.

Merle Lefkoff
oops--Ph.D.

Pamela McCorduck wrote:
My impression of the op-ed piece was that it was mostly about the humanities, where I'm sorry to say the numbers are correct: many graduate students spend six to eight years on the worst of the trivium, pile up debt, and face a labor market that has nearly no jobs for them. There's nearly no support, and one reason they take so long is because they're expected to teach a heavy course load. My Spanish tutor is a good example, although if his dissertation can be pushed by a certain meddling tutee to get bigger and more comprehensive than he first envisioned it, he may--well, who knows? Whereas in the sciences and engineering schools, students expect to spend no more than four years getting a Ph.D., and can be confident of finding a position when they get out. The major universities offer them support, which makes their debts if not nonexistent, certainly less onerous.

Please don't mistake this for an argument against the humanities. A university without the humanities would be a sorry thing indeed. But I agree with the writer that the model needs some drastic changes.

George is right to argue that a university owes it to its students to support their highest aspirations. But this needs to be tempered with some realism, and the reality is above.

Pamela

On Apr 27, 2009, at 9:03 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

I doubt that any working person would happily agree to term employment if it implies that after N years the employer has no obligation, legal or moral, to retain that individual. It puts most people, especially those over 50, in a very precarious position. How many of the people on this list would like to have their term up this month and face the prospect of looking for a job in the current environment? Employment is a relationship between employee and employer that generally goes beyond term contracts. I don't think that reducing it to something as limited as that is a good idea.

-- Russ

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:35 PM, George Duncan <[hidden email] <[hidden email]>> wrote:

   Based on my experience at Carnegie Mellon for 34 years, I can
   agree with many of the recommendations. In particular, I see
   merit in replacing tenure with term contracts, emphasizing
   interdisciplinary programs with a problem focus, more sharing of
   teaching across institutions, and providing alternatives to the
   traditional thesis.
        However, I see no way that any of these will ever come about
   through regulation (does he really think that the federal
   government could take this on?),
        Some of these will perhaps come about through internal moves by
   various universities. For example, Carnegie Mellon which is
   perhaps the most flexible university in responding to a changing
   environment, does have a remarkable array of interdisciplinary
   programs and emphasizes opportunities for doctoral students to
   cross departmental boundaries. It still has tenure, and I have
   thought for decades that the impetus for change there come from
   state legislatures that would abolish it in their state
   universities. But despite periodic noises it hasn't happened,
   perhaps never will. The moves by various universities like MIT,
   Stanford and Carnegie Mellon towards more on-line courses and
   expanding their availability, will think over time lead to more
   sharing of teaching resources. Why should a dozen universities
   offer advanced PhD courses in say Galois fields each with three
   students, when one could do it with 36 students and the best
   teacher of the topic? Why should every undergraduate institution
   want a high-level professor of physics, when they can import a
   course with the top lecturer in the country and provide the
   personal interaction with students through lecturers who care
   about students and earn perhaps $40K a year? Some universities do
   already provide alternatives of varying sorts to a traditional
   thesis, especially in more professionally oriented doctoral
   programs, such as those in social work or education.
        I cannot agree with the negative tone of the article about
   preparing for the academic life. If a person is successful at it,
   academia provides a remarkably fulfilling career. Name another
   profession where you mostly get to do what you want to do, work
   in a pretty pleasant envirionment with intelligent colleagues and
   students to chat with, and if you are a full professor at
   Columbia you make a pretty decent salary. So not all who aspire,
   make it. What percentage of Carnegie Mellon's drama graduates
   make it to Broadway or Hollywood? What percentage of graduates of
   art school ever sell a painting? The responsibility, I think, is
   for schools to do the best job they can to support the student's
   highest aspirations while at the same time providing a decent
   education for fallback positions.
        Last of all, the piece neglects the fact that most graduate
   students are not PhD students but instead are enrolled in
   professional degree programs. They can have their problems too
   but at least they have to be fairly directly responsive to a
   market--most are paying some $50K in tuition plus the opportunity
   costs of non-employment.

   On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Nicholas Thompson
   <[hidden email] <[hidden email]>>
   wrote:

       I think everybody who thinks about higher education ought to
       have a look at this article, not because it is necessarily
       correct but because it suggests great opportunities for
       institutions -- such as the "City University of Santa Fe" or
       Clark University -- which by reason of their small size could
       re-organize quickly to respond to these realities.
                I have to admit that I am ambivalent about tenure. If, over
       the last 40 years, tenure had seemed to foster intellectual
       courage and a willingness to speak one's mind and invest long
       term in the institute, then I would continue to favor it
       unequivocally. But since the onset of Academic Reaganism,
       tenure seems only to meant that most faculty members have
       allowed themselves to be manipulated by ever more trivial
       incentives -- the merit raise or the honorific reception with
       bad wine, stale cheese and crackers. Time to read Fromm's
       ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM again, i fear.                  And I have to deplore the implication that the only way you
       get people to pull their weight is by threatening them with
       financial sanction. On the contrary, the entire faculty of
       Clark University was subjected to bad pay for all the years I
       worked there, and it never changed anybody's behavior. No.         I think the failure has been in our unwillingness to speak
       directly and from the heart and in person to colleagues about
       what we need from them. True collaboration requires honest
       critique in the absence of power; what we have had, over the
       last four decades, is the application of power in the absence
       of honest critique.                  n
                Nicholas S. Thompson
       Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
       Clark University ([hidden email]
       <[hidden email]>)
       http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
       <http://home.earthlink.net/%7Enickthompson/naturaldesigns/>



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           *OPINION * | April 27, 2009
           *Op-Ed Contributor: End the University as We Know It
           <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html?emc=eta1>*
           By MARK C. TAYLOR
           If higher education is to thrive, colleges and
           universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be
           rigorously regulated and completely restructured.



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"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Owen Densmore

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Administrator

On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
> Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:

Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world. Although
I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal arts".

In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally become
part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study our
organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise spanning
everything from psychology to brain studies) help us figure out how to
integrate computers into human activities.

I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?

-- Owen

> From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
> To: [hidden email]
> Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
> Know It - NYTimes.com
>
> I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation: what
> hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL graduate
> programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
>
> Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have never
> allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
> with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
>
> Flunk him out.
>
> David Farber wrote:
>>
>>
>> Begin forwarded message:
>>
>> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
>> To: [hidden email]
>> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
>> It - NYTimes.com
>>
>> Dave,
>>
>> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
>> reply:
>>
>> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
>> comprehensively.
>>
>> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
>> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
>> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
>> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
>> universities to get the very best students from around the world, so
>> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
>>
>> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
>> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what
>> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
>> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
>> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
>> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
>> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
>>
>> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
>> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build
>> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
>> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
>> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
>> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
>> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
>> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
>> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
>> involved.
>>
>> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
>> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
>> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
>> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that
>> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
>> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created
>> by a selected community of scholars.
>>
>> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
>> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
>> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too
>> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
>> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
>> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
>> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
>> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
>> institution support creative thinkers.
>>
>> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
>> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid
>> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
>> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
>> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
>>
>> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
>> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
>> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
>> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career,
>> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
>> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
>> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
>> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
>> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
>> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
>> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
>> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
>>
>> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
>> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
>> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-disciplinary
>> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
>> framework we have.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Ben

Nick Thompson

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Owen asked:

"I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?"

It would do, if academia didnt attract people who are so damned riskaverse.
But at least at Clark, it seemed that people were looking form
opportunities to have their freedom restricted. And if you are looking to
be restricted, there are lots of excuses to be restricted in Academia. For
instance, you can do the research that you think will please journal
editors. Or you can only do research that you think federal agencies will
support. Or research that university resources are being directed towards.
Or research that attracts graduate students. Once the academic community
bit down on Academic Reaganism, everybody started evaluating one another on
how much money they were bringing in. And, of course, the University did
all it could to encourage this sort of behavior. It tried to regulate
faculty behavior with so-called merit raises .... George Orwell would have
been proud ... which, on average were hardly up to the standard of living.
In all my time there, I NEVER heard anybody stand up and say, "F* this
crap: I am just going to do my thing"

So, in the end, I am not sure about tenure. I think it made it possible
for me to relax a bit in midcareer, write on what I cared about, and stand
up for things I believed in. My family never suffered for my lippiness.
Well, not much anyway. Consequently, I am for it for me. But then, I
dont work there anymore.

All the best,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> [Original Message]
> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 4/28/2009 8:47:16 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It
>
> On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
> > Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:
>
> Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world. Although
> I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal arts".
>
> In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally become
> part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study our
> organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise spanning
> everything from psychology to brain studies) help us figure out how to
> integrate computers into human activities.
>
> I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?
>
> -- Owen
>
> > From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
> > Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
> > To: [hidden email]
> > Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
> > Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
> > Know It - NYTimes.com
> >
> > I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation: what
> > hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL graduate
> > programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
> >
> > Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have never
> > allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
> > with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
> >
> > Flunk him out.
> >
> > David Farber wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> Begin forwarded message:
> >>
> >> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
> >> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
> >> To: [hidden email]
> >> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
> >> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
> >> It - NYTimes.com
> >>
> >> Dave,
> >>
> >> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
> >> reply:
> >>
> >> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
> >> comprehensively.
> >>
> >> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
> >> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
> >> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
> >> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
> >> universities to get the very best students from around the world, so
> >> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
> >>
> >> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
> >> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what
> >> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
> >> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
> >> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
> >> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
> >> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
> >>
> >> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
> >> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build
> >> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
> >> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
> >> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
> >> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
> >> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
> >> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
> >> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
> >> involved.
> >>
> >> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
> >> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
> >> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
> >> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that
> >> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
> >> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created
> >> by a selected community of scholars.
> >>
> >> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
> >> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
> >> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too
> >> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
> >> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
> >> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
> >> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
> >> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
> >> institution support creative thinkers.
> >>
> >> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
> >> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid
> >> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
> >> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
> >> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
> >>
> >> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
> >> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
> >> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
> >> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career,
> >> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
> >> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
> >> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
> >> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
> >> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
> >> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
> >> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
> >> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
> >>
> >> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
> >> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
> >> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-disciplinary
> >> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
> >> framework we have.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >>
> >> Ben
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Tom Johnson

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Owen:

For me, the best thing about tenure was that it allowed me to take up to two years of unpaid-leave whenever I wanted, safe in the knowledge that my job (with fine retirement and health bennies) would be there when I came back. Without that safety valve, I surely would not have been able to bear my 19th century dean and many of my colleagues as long as I did. This, of course, may not be universal policy, and it was something that I only discovered after receiving tenure.

I can say, however, that half my colleagues never even took sabbaticals (a semester off at full pay or two at half pay), much less invested in their own continuing education during the regular year.

-tom

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 9:20 PM, Nicholas Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Owen asked:

"I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?"

It would do, if academia didnt attract people who are so damned riskaverse.
But at least at Clark, it seemed that people were looking form
opportunities to have their freedom restricted. And if you are looking to
be restricted, there are lots of excuses to be restricted in Academia. For
instance, you can do the research that you think will please journal
editors. Or you can only do research that you think federal agencies will
support. Or research that university resources are being directed towards.
Or research that attracts graduate students. Once the academic community
bit down on Academic Reaganism, everybody started evaluating one another on
how much money they were bringing in. And, of course, the University did
all it could to encourage this sort of behavior. It tried to regulate
faculty behavior with so-called merit raises .... George Orwell would have
been proud ... which, on average were hardly up to the standard of living.
In all my time there, I NEVER heard anybody stand up and say, "F* this
crap: I am just going to do my thing"

So, in the end, I am not sure about tenure. I think it made it possible
for me to relax a bit in midcareer, write on what I cared about, and stand
up for things I believed in. My family never suffered for my lippiness.
Well, not much anyway. Consequently, I am for it for me. But then, I
dont work there anymore.

All the best,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism -- Santa Fe, NM USA
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c) 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com [hidden email]

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
-- Buckminster Fuller
==========================================

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Pamela McCorduck

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a
high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure
helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never have
worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took both
intellectual and missionary work over more than a decade before it
even began to pay off. As a young untenured assistant professor, he
could never have done this--he'd be out after his sixth year.

I could write an essay on where the liberal arts went wrong (an old
English major here) but I'll spare you except to say as disciplines,
they went from irrelevant to downright scandalous, the result of one
part science-envy, one part who the hell knows. I'm speaking here of
literary studies, not anthropologists or psychologists, who have an
honest claim to be scientists, in that they study phenomena to try and
understand them, illuminate those phenomena for others.

Merle and others have smacked our wrists for thinking about
employability, but it's a fact of life for most people. I don't think
it needs to be THE central issue in higher education, but it needs to
be considered. However, I like her idea that the university is a
complex adaptive system waiting to happen, and would love to take that
discussion on further.

Pamela

On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:

> On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
>> Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:
>
> Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world.
> Although I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal
> arts".
>
> In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally become
> part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study our
> organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise spanning
> everything from psychology to brain studies) help us figure out how
> to integrate computers into human activities.
>
> I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?
>
> -- Owen
>
>> From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
>> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
>> To: [hidden email]
>> Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
>> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
>> Know It - NYTimes.com
>>
>> I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation:
>> what
>> hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL graduate
>> programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
>>
>> Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have never
>> allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
>> with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
>>
>> Flunk him out.
>>
>> David Farber wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>
>>> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
>>> To: [hidden email]
>>> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
>>> It - NYTimes.com
>>>
>>> Dave,
>>>
>>> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
>>> reply:
>>>
>>> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
>>> comprehensively.
>>>
>>> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
>>> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
>>> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
>>> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
>>> universities to get the very best students from around the world, so
>>> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
>>>
>>> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
>>> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to (what
>>> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
>>> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
>>> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
>>> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
>>> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
>>>
>>> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
>>> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to build
>>> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
>>> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
>>> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
>>> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
>>> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
>>> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
>>> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
>>> involved.
>>>
>>> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
>>> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
>>> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
>>> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions that
>>> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
>>> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge created
>>> by a selected community of scholars.
>>>
>>> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
>>> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
>>> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly too
>>> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
>>> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
>>> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
>>> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
>>> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
>>> institution support creative thinkers.
>>>
>>> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
>>> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get laid
>>> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
>>> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
>>> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
>>>
>>> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
>>> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
>>> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
>>> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a career,
>>> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
>>> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
>>> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
>>> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
>>> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
>>> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
>>> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
>>> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
>>>
>>> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
>>> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
>>> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-disciplinary
>>> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
>>> framework we have.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Ben
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look
respectable."

John Kenneth Galbraith

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Owen Densmore

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Administrator

In reply to this post by Tom Johnson

On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:46 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:

> Owen:
>
> For me, the best thing about tenure was that it allowed me to take
> up to two years of unpaid-leave whenever I wanted, safe in the
> knowledge that my job (with fine retirement and health bennies)
> would be there when I came back. Without that safety valve, I
> surely would not have been able to bear my 19th century dean and
> many of my colleagues as long as I did. This, of course, may not be
> universal policy, and it was something that I only discovered after
> receiving tenure.
>
> I can say, however, that half my colleagues never even took
> sabbaticals (a semester off at full pay or two at half pay), much
> less invested in their own continuing education during the regular
> year.
>
> -tom

Interesting. I talked Sun Microsystems into pseudo-sabbaticals .. one
to go to Italy and study italian and work "in the field" with Sun's
Milan office, the other to go to the SFI summer school. The deal was
that I'd pay for my daily costs and Sun would not dock me vacation time.

Both were life-changing .. wish I had done a couple more!

So if that is tenure-related, I'd say its quite important. It gets
one un-stuck.

-- Owen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Owen Densmore

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

Administrator

In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck

Well, not to go on, but:

- Wouldn't most of the problems tenure solves be solved by variations
on the 20% theme: You have 20% of your time to be exploring "research"
that is not on your main "deliverable" path? Google does this. Xerox
too. Ditto SunLabs. And any savvy engineer/researcher does it on the
sly. Sabbaticals are on a different time scale, but similar in nature.

And as far as jobs -- I don't recall even thinking about jobs until
well after getting out of schools. I just assumed, due to all the
money flying around for tech/sci/math after Sputnik, that learn Math
and Physics .. mainly 'cause they are deeply philosophic and you *do*
need somehow to figure our how the world works. But it wasn't related
to work, only getting aligned with the world somehow.

But I certainly also hear a lot about folks studying X for job Y.
Isn't that a pretty new thing, tho? Most folks go to college to go
through that last phase of life before "growing up".

Man, I'm old.

-- Owen

On Apr 29, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:

> Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a
> high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure
> helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never
> have worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took
> both intellectual and missionary work over more than a decade before
> it even began to pay off. As a young untenured assistant professor,
> he could never have done this--he'd be out after his sixth year.
>
> I could write an essay on where the liberal arts went wrong (an old
> English major here) but I'll spare you except to say as disciplines,
> they went from irrelevant to downright scandalous, the result of one
> part science-envy, one part who the hell knows. I'm speaking here of
> literary studies, not anthropologists or psychologists, who have an
> honest claim to be scientists, in that they study phenomena to try
> and understand them, illuminate those phenomena for others.
>
> Merle and others have smacked our wrists for thinking about
> employability, but it's a fact of life for most people. I don't
> think it needs to be THE central issue in higher education, but it
> needs to be considered. However, I like her idea that the university
> is a complex adaptive system waiting to happen, and would love to
> take that discussion on further.
>
> Pamela
>
>
>
>
> On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>
>> On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
>>> Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:
>>
>> Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world.
>> Although I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal
>> arts".
>>
>> In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally
>> become part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study
>> our organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise
>> spanning everything from psychology to brain studies) help us
>> figure out how to integrate computers into human activities.
>>
>> I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?
>>
>> -- Owen
>>
>>> From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
>>> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
>>> To: [hidden email]
>>> Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
>>> Know It - NYTimes.com
>>>
>>> I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation:
>>> what
>>> hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL
>>> graduate
>>> programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
>>>
>>> Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have
>>> never
>>> allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
>>> with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
>>>
>>> Flunk him out.
>>>
>>> David Farber wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>>
>>>> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>>> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
>>>> To: [hidden email]
>>>> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
>>>> It - NYTimes.com
>>>>
>>>> Dave,
>>>>
>>>> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
>>>> reply:
>>>>
>>>> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
>>>> comprehensively.
>>>>
>>>> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
>>>> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
>>>> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
>>>> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
>>>> universities to get the very best students from around the world,
>>>> so
>>>> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
>>>>
>>>> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
>>>> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to
>>>> (what
>>>> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
>>>> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
>>>> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
>>>> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
>>>> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
>>>>
>>>> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
>>>> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to
>>>> build
>>>> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
>>>> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
>>>> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
>>>> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
>>>> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
>>>> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
>>>> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
>>>> involved.
>>>>
>>>> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
>>>> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
>>>> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
>>>> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions
>>>> that
>>>> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
>>>> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge
>>>> created
>>>> by a selected community of scholars.
>>>>
>>>> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
>>>> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
>>>> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly
>>>> too
>>>> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
>>>> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
>>>> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
>>>> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
>>>> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
>>>> institution support creative thinkers.
>>>>
>>>> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
>>>> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get
>>>> laid
>>>> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
>>>> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
>>>> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
>>>>
>>>> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
>>>> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
>>>> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
>>>> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a
>>>> career,
>>>> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
>>>> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
>>>> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
>>>> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
>>>> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
>>>> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
>>>> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
>>>> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
>>>>
>>>> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
>>>> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
>>>> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-
>>>> disciplinary
>>>> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
>>>> framework we have.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> Ben
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>
>
> "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look
> respectable."
>
> John Kenneth Galbraith
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Prof David West

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

some context

Education, especially higher education used to be considered a "calling"
(not unlike a religious calling) and the objective was wisdom and the
advancement of human knowledge. Access to the academy was closely
guarded and elitist.

K-12 education started moving away from this model in the 1800s in
response to an idealist notion of "universal education" and a market
notion of needing an educated (to a certain vocation driven extent)
workforce. Today, the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake is
vestigial at best, and knowledge for a job dominates the philosophy,
structure, and process of that segment of our educational system.

College and graduate education was slowly succumbing but reasonably
resistant to those same influences until the end of WWII. At that point
the universal education and vocational training forces were compounded
by the need for a factory, assembly line, high volume educational
process and a severe need to use education as a means for regulating the
workforce. (You had to get all those women out of the workforce and
find something for the unemployable - because of lack of demand -
ex-soldiers to do.) Over time "higher ed" succumbed to these forces
just as K-12 did.

In parallel, there was a change in management philosophy, away from
considering educational institutions as something akin to a "church" led
by wise elders (faculty) to considering them as a business led and
governed by MBAs with curricula as commodity and students as customers.

The result is an educational system that is substantially bankrupt and
that substantially should be abandoned as the op-ed piece suggests.

Tenure evolved from being an acknowledgement of accomplishment and
scholarship plus protection from political and ideological harassment to
a labor relations negotiating chip as the threat to faculty primarily
became (and is) grounded in budget decisions. Today the issue with
tenure is not who has it and why but the proportion of expensive
tenured/tenure track versus adjunct and non-tenure track in the faculty.
This ratio is effectively more important in accreditation criteria for
an institution than the quality of education it delivers. (The second
most important accreditation criteria - not surprisingly - is outcomes
assessment, skewed to how much money your graduates earn in the
workforce and how pleased their employers are with the education you
provided.)

Yes, I know I am painting in broad strokes, and that there are
exceptions.

davew

On Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:58 -0600, "Owen Densmore" <[hidden email]>
wrote:

> Well, not to go on, but:
>
> - Wouldn't most of the problems tenure solves be solved by variations
> on the 20% theme: You have 20% of your time to be exploring "research"
> that is not on your main "deliverable" path? Google does this. Xerox
> too. Ditto SunLabs. And any savvy engineer/researcher does it on the
> sly. Sabbaticals are on a different time scale, but similar in nature.
>
> And as far as jobs -- I don't recall even thinking about jobs until
> well after getting out of schools. I just assumed, due to all the
> money flying around for tech/sci/math after Sputnik, that learn Math
> and Physics .. mainly 'cause they are deeply philosophic and you *do*
> need somehow to figure our how the world works. But it wasn't related
> to work, only getting aligned with the world somehow.
>
> But I certainly also hear a lot about folks studying X for job Y.
> Isn't that a pretty new thing, tho? Most folks go to college to go
> through that last phase of life before "growing up".
>
> Man, I'm old.
>
> -- Owen
>
>
> On Apr 29, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
>
> > Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a
> > high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure
> > helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never
> > have worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took
> > both intellectual and missionary work over more than a decade before
> > it even began to pay off. As a young untenured assistant professor,
> > he could never have done this--he'd be out after his sixth year.
> >
> > I could write an essay on where the liberal arts went wrong (an old
> > English major here) but I'll spare you except to say as disciplines,
> > they went from irrelevant to downright scandalous, the result of one
> > part science-envy, one part who the hell knows. I'm speaking here of
> > literary studies, not anthropologists or psychologists, who have an
> > honest claim to be scientists, in that they study phenomena to try
> > and understand them, illuminate those phenomena for others.
> >
> > Merle and others have smacked our wrists for thinking about
> > employability, but it's a fact of life for most people. I don't
> > think it needs to be THE central issue in higher education, but it
> > needs to be considered. However, I like her idea that the university
> > is a complex adaptive system waiting to happen, and would love to
> > take that discussion on further.
> >
> > Pamela
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
> >
> >> On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
> >>> Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:
> >>
> >> Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world.
> >> Although I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal
> >> arts".
> >>
> >> In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally
> >> become part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study
> >> our organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise
> >> spanning everything from psychology to brain studies) help us
> >> figure out how to integrate computers into human activities.
> >>
> >> I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?
> >>
> >> -- Owen
> >>
> >>> From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
> >>> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
> >>> To: [hidden email]
> >>> Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
> >>> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
> >>> Know It - NYTimes.com
> >>>
> >>> I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation:
> >>> what
> >>> hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL
> >>> graduate
> >>> programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
> >>>
> >>> Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have
> >>> never
> >>> allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
> >>> with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
> >>>
> >>> Flunk him out.
> >>>
> >>> David Farber wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Begin forwarded message:
> >>>>
> >>>> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
> >>>> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
> >>>> To: [hidden email]
> >>>> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
> >>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We Know
> >>>> It - NYTimes.com
> >>>>
> >>>> Dave,
> >>>>
> >>>> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
> >>>> reply:
> >>>>
> >>>> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
> >>>> comprehensively.
> >>>>
> >>>> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
> >>>> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of the
> >>>> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
> >>>> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
> >>>> universities to get the very best students from around the world,
> >>>> so
> >>>> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
> >>>>
> >>>> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
> >>>> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to
> >>>> (what
> >>>> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
> >>>> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
> >>>> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
> >>>> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face very
> >>>> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
> >>>>
> >>>> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
> >>>> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to
> >>>> build
> >>>> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
> >>>> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
> >>>> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
> >>>> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you give
> >>>> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
> >>>> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
> >>>> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
> >>>> involved.
> >>>>
> >>>> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
> >>>> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
> >>>> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
> >>>> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions
> >>>> that
> >>>> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
> >>>> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge
> >>>> created
> >>>> by a selected community of scholars.
> >>>>
> >>>> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
> >>>> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution must
> >>>> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly
> >>>> too
> >>>> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
> >>>> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
> >>>> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
> >>>> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
> >>>> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
> >>>> institution support creative thinkers.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
> >>>> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get
> >>>> laid
> >>>> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
> >>>> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
> >>>> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
> >>>>
> >>>> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
> >>>> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
> >>>> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of that
> >>>> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a
> >>>> career,
> >>>> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
> >>>> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting and
> >>>> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
> >>>> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
> >>>> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant problem
> >>>> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
> >>>> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
> >>>> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
> >>>>
> >>>> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
> >>>> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed. Some
> >>>> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-
> >>>> disciplinary
> >>>> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
> >>>> framework we have.
> >>>>
> >>>> Cheers,
> >>>>
> >>>> Ben
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> ============================================================
> >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> >>
> >
> >
> > "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look
> > respectable."
> >
> > John Kenneth Galbraith
> >
> >
> > ============================================================
> > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Victoria Hughes

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

A good description of this process of altering the American use of
information is laid out in 'The Metaphysical Club- a history of ideas
in America between the Civil War and WW1' by Louis Menand. Won the
Pulitzer.
Growing up abroad I was dismayed, returning to the US for college, to
note an actual mistrust of intelligence and thoughtfulness in parts of
our country. No more enjoyment of learning for its own sake, or for
knowledge and identification with our place in the world.
Menand points out a shift from the 1800's in how we think about
thinking and social responsibilty, as 'commonwealth' was replaced by
'corporation', and changes arose in how we educated. Among many things.
Useful book. Made me realize that in my idiosyncratic love of knowledge
and learning I am classically American.
Of course the grand social experiment called television changed
everything, and now the web is doing it again. Our information stream
flows more and more internally. Try not using your computer - at all -
for even two days, and see what happens.
Tory

On Apr 29, 2009, at 12:39 PM, Prof David West wrote:

>
> some context
>
> Education, especially higher education used to be considered a
> "calling"
> (not unlike a religious calling) and the objective was wisdom and the
> advancement of human knowledge. Access to the academy was closely
> guarded and elitist.
>
> K-12 education started moving away from this model in the 1800s in
> response to an idealist notion of "universal education" and a market
> notion of needing an educated (to a certain vocation driven extent)
> workforce. Today, the idea of knowledge for knowledge's sake is
> vestigial at best, and knowledge for a job dominates the philosophy,
> structure, and process of that segment of our educational system.
>
> College and graduate education was slowly succumbing but reasonably
> resistant to those same influences until the end of WWII. At that
> point
> the universal education and vocational training forces were compounded
> by the need for a factory, assembly line, high volume educational
> process and a severe need to use education as a means for regulating
> the
> workforce. (You had to get all those women out of the workforce and
> find something for the unemployable - because of lack of demand -
> ex-soldiers to do.) Over time "higher ed" succumbed to these forces
> just as K-12 did.
>
> In parallel, there was a change in management philosophy, away from
> considering educational institutions as something akin to a "church"
> led
> by wise elders (faculty) to considering them as a business led and
> governed by MBAs with curricula as commodity and students as customers.
>
> The result is an educational system that is substantially bankrupt and
> that substantially should be abandoned as the op-ed piece suggests.
>
> Tenure evolved from being an acknowledgement of accomplishment and
> scholarship plus protection from political and ideological harassment
> to
> a labor relations negotiating chip as the threat to faculty primarily
> became (and is) grounded in budget decisions. Today the issue with
> tenure is not who has it and why but the proportion of expensive
> tenured/tenure track versus adjunct and non-tenure track in the
> faculty.
> This ratio is effectively more important in accreditation criteria for
> an institution than the quality of education it delivers. (The second
> most important accreditation criteria - not surprisingly - is outcomes
> assessment, skewed to how much money your graduates earn in the
> workforce and how pleased their employers are with the education you
> provided.)
>
> Yes, I know I am painting in broad strokes, and that there are
> exceptions.
>
> davew
>
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:58 -0600, "Owen Densmore" <[hidden email]>
> wrote:
>> Well, not to go on, but:
>>
>> - Wouldn't most of the problems tenure solves be solved by variations
>> on the 20% theme: You have 20% of your time to be exploring "research"
>> that is not on your main "deliverable" path? Google does this. Xerox
>> too. Ditto SunLabs. And any savvy engineer/researcher does it on the
>> sly. Sabbaticals are on a different time scale, but similar in
>> nature.
>>
>> And as far as jobs -- I don't recall even thinking about jobs until
>> well after getting out of schools. I just assumed, due to all the
>> money flying around for tech/sci/math after Sputnik, that learn Math
>> and Physics .. mainly 'cause they are deeply philosophic and you *do*
>> need somehow to figure our how the world works. But it wasn't related
>> to work, only getting aligned with the world somehow.
>>
>> But I certainly also hear a lot about folks studying X for job Y.
>> Isn't that a pretty new thing, tho? Most folks go to college to go
>> through that last phase of life before "growing up".
>>
>> Man, I'm old.
>>
>> -- Owen
>>
>>
>> On Apr 29, 2009, at 7:50 AM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
>>
>>> Yes, tenure helps. If you're pursuing really strange paths, with a
>>> high probability of failure (but a big payoff if they work) tenure
>>> helps. One example jumps to mind: Lotfi Zadeh says he could never
>>> have worked on fuzzy logic if he hadn't already got tenure. It took
>>> both intellectual and missionary work over more than a decade before
>>> it even began to pay off. As a young untenured assistant professor,
>>> he could never have done this--he'd be out after his sixth year.
>>>
>>> I could write an essay on where the liberal arts went wrong (an old
>>> English major here) but I'll spare you except to say as disciplines,
>>> they went from irrelevant to downright scandalous, the result of one
>>> part science-envy, one part who the hell knows. I'm speaking here of
>>> literary studies, not anthropologists or psychologists, who have an
>>> honest claim to be scientists, in that they study phenomena to try
>>> and understand them, illuminate those phenomena for others.
>>>
>>> Merle and others have smacked our wrists for thinking about
>>> employability, but it's a fact of life for most people. I don't
>>> think it needs to be THE central issue in higher education, but it
>>> needs to be considered. However, I like her idea that the university
>>> is a complex adaptive system waiting to happen, and would love to
>>> take that discussion on further.
>>>
>>> Pamela
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Apr 28, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Apr 28, 2009, at 6:47 PM, Pamela McCorduck wrote:
>>>>> Some other takes on the essay, from Dave Farber's listserv:
>>>>
>>>> Nice! I suspect it's pretty right on in the academic world.
>>>> Although I'm a bit surprised at the mud-slinging at "far liberal
>>>> arts".
>>>>
>>>> In industry, we were delighted to have the humanities finally
>>>> become part of the high tech world. We had anthropologists study
>>>> our organizations, and Human Interface experts (with expertise
>>>> spanning everything from psychology to brain studies) help us
>>>> figure out how to integrate computers into human activities.
>>>>
>>>> I've never had Tenure. Does it really help?
>>>>
>>>> -- Owen
>>>>
>>>>> From: "David P. Reed" <[hidden email]>
>>>>> Date: April 28, 2009 4:34:57 PM EDT
>>>>> To: [hidden email]
>>>>> Cc: ip <[hidden email]>
>>>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as
>>>>> We
>>>>> Know It - NYTimes.com
>>>>>
>>>>> I agree with Ben Kuipers below. But here's a simpler observation:
>>>>> what
>>>>> hubris allows a religion professor in Columbia to indict ALL
>>>>> graduate
>>>>> programs in ALL universities without doing any research whatsoever?
>>>>>
>>>>> Any serious professor in any serious graduate school would have
>>>>> never
>>>>> allowed him to get a Bachelor's degree, much less a graduate degree
>>>>> with that attitude towards the craft of learning...
>>>>>
>>>>> Flunk him out.
>>>>>
>>>>> David Farber wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Begin forwarded message:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> From: Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>>>>> Date: April 28, 2009 10:29:39 AM EDT
>>>>>> To: [hidden email]
>>>>>> Cc: "ip" <[hidden email]>, Benjamin Kuipers <[hidden email]>
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [IP] Op-Ed Contributor - End the University as We
>>>>>> Know
>>>>>> It - NYTimes.com
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Dave,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> A colleague forwarded that column to me last night, and here is my
>>>>>> reply:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> With all due respect, I disagree with this Op-Ed essay,
>>>>>> comprehensively.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> First, far from being "the Detroit of higher learning", American
>>>>>> graduate education, at least in the STEM fields, is the envy of
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> world. (This is changing under the influence of Bush-era visa
>>>>>> restrictions that have made it more difficult for American
>>>>>> universities to get the very best students from around the world,
>>>>>> so
>>>>>> graduate programs in other countries have been improving rapidly.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Second, Mark Taylor, the author of this essay, is a religion
>>>>>> professor at Columbia. Many of his criticisms are relevant to
>>>>>> (what
>>>>>> I might call) the "far liberal arts", rather than to the STEM
>>>>>> fields, the social sciences, and many of the more empirically-
>>>>>> oriented humanities. (I have a great deal of respect for the
>>>>>> humanities, including the "far liberal arts", but they do face
>>>>>> very
>>>>>> different intellectual issues from the STEM fields.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Third, while his praise for inter-disciplinary work is certainly
>>>>>> appropriate, he ignores the need for interdisciplinary work to
>>>>>> build
>>>>>> on a strong disciplinary foundation. There was a fad for
>>>>>> "interdisciplinary studies" starting in the 1960s, that I believe
>>>>>> led more-or-less nowhere, but turned out people with inadequate
>>>>>> preparation to do interesting interdisciplinary work. (Do you
>>>>>> give
>>>>>> an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
>>>>>> for?) Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary
>>>>>> work
>>>>>> must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
>>>>>> involved.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Fourth, I believe that the importance of tenure for intellectual
>>>>>> freedom is not so much freedom from reprisals for controversial
>>>>>> positions (though this may be more of an issue in other
>>>>>> disciplines), but freedom to pursue the intellectual directions
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> one considers important, over a career. This has proved to be an
>>>>>> effective way to get interesting and important new knowledge
>>>>>> created
>>>>>> by a selected community of scholars.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Fifth, to support individuals who devote a lifetime to pursuing
>>>>>> intellectual questions they consider important, an institution
>>>>>> must
>>>>>> provide some degree of stability in its own structure. Certainly
>>>>>> too
>>>>>> much stability invites stagnation, but a stable departmental
>>>>>> structure, along with a more fluid structure of laboratories,
>>>>>> centers, institutes, and the like, provides a good balance. I
>>>>>> suggest it already provides the flexibility that Mark Taylor would
>>>>>> like to see, without jeapardizing the stability that lets the
>>>>>> institution support creative thinkers.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Sixth, if you were to seriously eliminate tenure, and create a
>>>>>> system where a significant fraction of senior faculty would get
>>>>>> laid
>>>>>> off from the university, needing to find non-academic positions, I
>>>>>> predict that you would greatly reduce the level of creativity and
>>>>>> intellectual risk-taking in our major universities.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Seventh, Mark Taylor raises the spectre of "dead wood" faculty,
>>>>>> impervious to leverage or change. Perhaps this is a problem in his
>>>>>> field or his institution, but I have seen remarkably little of
>>>>>> that
>>>>>> in the departments I am familiar with. Over the course of a
>>>>>> career,
>>>>>> the focus of one's efforts inevitably changes, but if the
>>>>>> institutions pays reasonable amounts of attention to respecting
>>>>>> and
>>>>>> cultivating its senior faculty, the vast majority of them will end
>>>>>> up working for the benefit of the students and the institution, in
>>>>>> one way or another. If Mark Taylor is having a significant
>>>>>> problem
>>>>>> with unproductive faculty who are unwilling to "assume
>>>>>> responsibilities like administration and student advising", then
>>>>>> perhaps his department needs new leadership.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Summing up, I think that the critiques in this essay are
>>>>>> superficial, and the suggestions for change are wrong-headed.
>>>>>> Some
>>>>>> of his ideas, like his praise of problem-oriented inter-
>>>>>> disciplinary
>>>>>> work, are good ideas, but they are already achievable within the
>>>>>> framework we have.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ben
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ============================================================
>>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look
>>> respectable."
>>>
>>> John Kenneth Galbraith
>>>
>>>
>>> ============================================================
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

Tom Carter

Re: FW: NYTimes.com: End the University as We Know It

In reply to this post by Pamela McCorduck

Just a couple of brief comments . . .

From: someone@somewhere . . .

(Do you give
an undergraduate a major in "Water"? What are they then prepared
for?)

For what it's worth, the largest major on our campus is "Liberal Studies" . . . I'll let you speculate on "What they are then prepared for . . ."

I would say that one of the big problems with undergraduate education these days is the idea that your "major" is "preparing you for a job." That might, perhaps, be better said, "preparing you for the interview for your first job" . . . I've seen statistics indicating that it has been (and will be) typical for a person to change careers (not "jobs") 3 or 4 times during their working life. Suppose I, as an educator, want to help my students be prepared for the next 40 years of their lives. What should I help them learn?

My bachelors degree was in Philosophy, and my first "real" job was as a budget and forecasting analyst in a financial institution . . . turned out I was quite well "prepared" for that job . . . (but also, ask me sometime about IPOs and ethics and . . .)

Concerning tenure -- maybe understanding it is not a lot more complicated than understanding "emergence" :-) At some level, "tenure" is an emergent (partial?) solution to a set of problems -- I find this essay on the topic interesting:

http://agecon.unl.edu/royer/tenure.htm

Herb Simon once pointed out that good interdisciplinary work
must be first-class work within the standards of each discipline
involved.

I think Herb Simon (along with many other people) mistakes "interdisciplinary" for "multidisciplinary." I would agree with him if he's really talking about multidisciplinary work, but not so much if he's talking about interdisciplinary work.

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

John Kenneth Galbraith

Or, as someone said, "Economists have predicted 10 of the last 4 recoveries from recessions." :-)

tom

p.s. Also for what it's worth . . . some 15 years ago, I was part of a task force helping to "create" a new California State University (CSU Monterey Bay). They wanted it to be a "new kind of University," so they asked us to "think outside the box" (etc. . . .). My group was supposed to develop a division/college of "informatics and media" . . .

I put together a proposal:

http://csustan.csustan.edu/~tom/misc-admin/academic-organization/academic-organization.txt

(which, of course, was roundly rejected as "absurd," "utopian," "unworkable," "incomprehensible" . . .)