Posted by
lrudolph on
Oct 12, 2010; 10:30pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/vol-88-issue-12-tp5627122p5628874.html
On 12 Oct 2010 at 13:45, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> The only question in my mind - and you raise many good challenges even to
> the question - is: Would "we", whoever "we" is, be happier 25 years from
> now, if there were a City University of Santa Fe offering graduate
> education in the things that Santa Fe does best.
"Graduate education" (particularly in the current sense, with its
overlay of increasingly bogus "accreditation" standards and
standards-enforcement bodies [1], and the creeping cargo-cult
management [2] that has already laid much "undergraduate
education" low) is neither intensionally nor extensionally
identical with "educating graduates".
How could "you"-all not be happy (or, more precisely, happier than
you would be otherwise) if you and your successors were (among other
activities) truly educating graduates "in the things that Santa Fe
does best"? That's not a rhetorical question; I really don't find
it easy to imagine how someone, engaged in right livelihood and
knowledgeable about it (and other things), *wouldn't* enjoy truly
educating others (who had come to seek such education and who had
given some evidence of being educable as well as willing).
On the other hand, I find it very easy to imagine how engaging
in "graduate education" as it is (and how it is coming to be)
could make someone unhappy. It very often does (and perhaps
oftener ought to).
Lee Rudolph
[1] A couple of years ago, I heard the then-provost of
Vanderbilt University on the radio, speaking as a member
(perhaps as the chair) of a Federally-chartered commission
charged with setting accreditation standards for higher
education. They had been charged with creating--and were
in the process of pilot testing--a *standardized test* for
"critical thinking", whereby to determine how well given
institutions of higher learning were teaching "critical
thinking". Jesus wept. (The project seems to have sunk
out of sight for the time being.) I admit, this was
for "undergraduate education", but the trend is there
at the graduate level as well, just delayed.
[2] I mean this in a sense analogous to Feynman's phrase
"cargo-cult physics". University administrators increasingly
go through ritual performances that have the *form* of
activities that businesses (at least, businesses run by
MBAs) go through for (presumably) reasons that bear a
demonstrable relation to those businesses' reason for
being, and have been validated empirically. These rituals
involve an enormous amount of quantification, 5-year-planning,
"branding" [3], and so on, but in (I hope) contrast to the
practices in businesses, the university practices are entirely
ungrounded in the reality of the university (even the tawdry
one on the ground, much less the ideal "community of learners"),
they are never validated empirically *even on their own terms*,
and they consume enormous amounts of time and effort extorted
from non-administrative staff (definitely including professors).
Yet somehow the cargo plane loaded with goodies never lands!
[3] Clark's new brand is "ClarkYOU". I am not kidding.
How *could* they? ClarkYOU and the horse you rode in on,
pardner.
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