More Money Than Brains (14 page)

Students love bitching about their profs on the Web. Rate My Professors has amassed millions of gripes from the disgruntled students of many lands. In the summer of 2009, the site celebrated cracking the ten-million-reviews mark. Many
universities and student unions have launched their own professor-review websites and guides. There we see students complaining about things that bother them more than any sort of perceived bias or attempted brainwashing. They savage hard markers, heavy foreign accents, favouritism, and bad dressers, dissing the grouchy and the incoherent and the dull and the unfair and the not hot.

Arguing that ideological bias is the most serious problem afflicting our universities perpetuates two ideas that hurt our capacity to consider ideas: namely, that every truth depends on your political persuasion and that there are only two sides to every argument. The fancy technical term for this is bi-univocal, and the best example of it is the news. Show the protestors and the anti-protestors, a head that says yea and another that says nay. Teach evolution
and
creationism! Equal time for all, regardless of evidence, relevance, or import – which are antiquated and elitist notions, or crafty cover for activist agendas.

Horowitz buries the lead and misses a real problem in his rush to assemble his festive bonfire of straw men. In a footnote in
The Professors
, he talks about how he never heard this kind of political indoctrination when he was a student at Columbia College in the 1950s. He writes, “There was a reluctance to look at events more recent than twenty-five years in the past because of the dangers of ‘present-mindedness’ and the fear that events so fresh could not be examined with ‘scholarly disinterest.’ “
¹⁴

Times have changed. We prefer fresh ideas and new breakthroughs. Twenty-five-year-old ideas happened before many
of our students were born. They will probably be uninterested, not disinterested in the scholarly way that Horowitz intends. The university’s current “student-centredness” combined with inadequate student preparation in the K–12 system has condemned us to the present, so we are often stuck in a cul-de-sac of current events. This means a lot of talk about pop culture and contemporary issues, even when a prof is trying to teach an old text. And it isn’t just the kids who are stuck in their own cultural moment. The disciplines are suffering from the same presentism too. In a 2008 editorial called “Gone and Being Forgotten,”
UCLA
professor Russell Jacoby wonders where all the old thinkers have gone. People aren’t reading Hegel in poli-sci or Freud in psych; instead, they’re reading the latest theories and research.
¹⁵
These fields are behaving as though they’ve been promoted to the hard sciences – yet another sign of our tendency to treat technical reason as the only worthwhile form of thought.

Here’s a gem from the Spellings Report that exhibits the same relentless presentism: “We recommend that America’s colleges and universities embrace a culture of continuous innovation and quality improvement.”
¹⁶
This is the misshapen issue of Stalinist crop projections mating with management-speak. Are philosophy, history, and literature fields in which one witnesses “continuous innovation and quality improvement”? Not really. Scientistic – not scientific – notions of constant improvement and innovation are utterly at odds with any thoughtful study of our past. Given that the university is one of a handful of institutions that maintains a connection
to the past, it is all the more distressing to see this presentism and scientism at work in academia.

The liberal arts are not just old; they are also accused of being weird, and deliberately so. Humanities professors are routinely derided as professional obscurantists and obfuscators, traffickers in snooty jargon. To cite just one example, when revered French thinker Jacques Derrida died in 2004, the supposedly liberal and brainy
New York Times
ran a dismissive obituary of the “abstruse” thinker that incited the ire of professional nerds all over the world. Derrida’s obituary was merely the latest in a long line of anti-theory screeds. In short, the message is “This shit is hard on purpose and it makes no sense!” Deconstruct the Western tradition and the Gray Lady spits on your grave. Deconstruct the global economy and she reports your latest multi-million-dollar bonus.

I concede that there exists some dreadful, deliberately prolix academic writing. That’s inevitable under publish-or-perish rules in a weak job market. But the subtext here is blatantly anti-intellectual. It says that philosophy and literature profs are only faking it, putting on airs, when they produce work that is difficult or complex. Literary and philosophical thinking dare not outpace common sense or popular taste.

Conversely, the sciences, because they are a form of technical reason, have the right to be as complicated as they wanna be. Nobody ever blusters about the physics department, castigating the way their needlessly elaborate equations spurn the understanding of the common man. Nobody demands transparency from the chemistry department
because their complex formulas might grow up to be pills or pantyhose or explosives, y’know, like, things people can use. When it comes to, like, words, and the, like, meaning of stuff, everybody’s got a write 2 they’re opinion and no body’s better then any buddy. Who teh heLL R u 2 tEll me what 2 reed or how 2 spel?

The activities at the very heart of the university – reading and writing – get demoted to gen ed requirements or electives that round out “real” subjects like business and hotel management. Students approach them with all the vim and vigour that the descriptors
general
and
mandatory
usually elicit. That single required English course or philosophy elective that Useful Studies majors are frogmarched through then gives them the right to dismiss such disciplines as fluff, to wave away thousands of years of human endeavour as nothing other than preparation for a career in front of a deep-fat fryer, har-dee-har-har.

We treat university education as another consumer good, a product, not a process. University rankings such as the ones generated by
U.S. News and World Report
, or the Canadian version in
Maclean’s
magazine, always sell really well. People love a list. But the rankings also show us the conflicting missions of the university. They imply that a college education, like any other consumer good, is easy to review and rank. But when universities question them for this very reason, academia gets thwacked with the public-service, taxpayer-accountability stick. Post-secondary education is stranded in a weird limbo somewhere between being a public service and a big-ticket purchase.

Some liberal arts colleges, such as St. John’s and Reed, have long refused to participate in the
U.S. News and World Report
rankings, arguing that they encourage educational homogeneity, stat gaming, and status seeking. In 2006, eleven Canadian university presidents announced that their institutions would not participate in the
Maclean’s
survey, citing concerns about the way the magazine weighted and packaged the data they submitted. Lest you surmise that this was merely sour grapes from the losers, the letter’s signatories included top-ranking schools such as the University of Toronto. Their actions emboldened another fifteen schools to drop out.

Undaunted,
Maclean’s
has continued to put together its guide using publicly available data. Its editorial about the boycott began, “Nobody likes being graded, particularly those used to giving tests, not sitting them,”
¹⁷
spinning the universities’ arguments against their methods as a refusal to submit to scrutiny. It sounds good, but the people used to giving tests and grades had to take a shitload of tests and get a gazillion grades themselves before they got to grade or test anyone else. Most of us remember how it feels. (Some of us even
like
it. Sick, I know.)

The grading certainly does not stop when profs start grading others. There are peer reviews that will determine whether they publish or perish, endless grant applications, and piles of files for tenure and promotion reviews. At the end of almost every course in North America, the students get to grade their instructors too, filling out little Wendy’s comment cards rating their professorial expertise, helpfulness, and so forth on a scale of one to five.

Nerds are hardly strangers to scrutiny. Universities love to crank out performance indicators and metrics and studies about themselves. They form associations to create new surveys and studies. They regularly poll the kids and the profs and the alums. Many of the universities on both sides of the border that dropped out of the college rankings have made piles of stats available on their websites. The problem is making this tide of info legible for non-experts such as high-school students, workers who want to take some classes, or parents, to present this information in a way that strikes a balance between specialist wonkery and marketing puffery.

I’m not saying the university is above or beyond scrutiny. It may be my favourite place, but several criticisms of the university are totally legit. Let’s start at the beginning. Many first-year classes are cash cows that treat students worse than cattle; at least future burgers get free drugs. If you’re sitting in a theatre with several hundred other people looking at PowerPoint slides straight out of some overpriced Psych 101 textbook, then you are being ripped off. And at the worst possible time too.

Given the gap that looms between high school and college-level work, it’s absolutely unconscionable and counterproductive for universities to leave students stranded during their frosh year. But that’s when the kids take the really huge prerequisite lectures they need to qualify for something that’s more like teaching and less like a cheesy motivational speech.

We could fix this with rigorous – and affordable – transition-year programs, sort of like Quebec’s
CEGEP
s. Give every student a basic grounding in reading, writing,
humanities, and sciences. Throw in some practical things like fiscal awareness to keep the real-worlders happy. Get the gen ed in at the beginning rather than in piecemeal electives that are too little, too late. This would provide a more structured and supportive introduction to the university or, for that matter, community college.

A transition year could serve as a bridge, allowing wafflers to sort themselves into college and community college slots. Departments of both institutions would ideally have a chance to tell students what they’re all about before they enrol there, only to drop out. And we could certainly run evening and weekend versions of such programs too, in order to accommodate the growing numbers of working adult students. We could even give them some sort of credential at the end, something to take up that awkward space between high school and a B.A., between under- and overqualified for crappy-to-middling work. At least students would have something to show for their efforts other than successful completion of a pile of multiple-choice tests or becoming part of the universities’ annual mass cull.

The most popular college major in America, according to the nice people at the
Princeton Review
, is business, a practical, get-a-job program that does not belong in the university at all. Business programs are relative Johnny-come-latelies; the first one, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, started in 1881. The collegiate business school did not really catch on in Canada or Europe until the middle of the twentieth century. It is now a popular major in Canada as well, ranking just behind social sciences and law, which tie
for first place on the list of most popular majors, and just ahead of health and education, the third-place winners.

If I were Queen of the Colleges for a day, the first thing I would do is burn down all the business schools and salt the ashes so no more M.B.A.-lings could spring up from the ruins. Then I’d torch public relations, leisure studies, hotel management, and every other career-training program, until all that remained at the university were the truly academic disciplines, namely the hard sciences, the social sciences – yes, that includes economics – and the liberal arts. These fields of study all offer something other than practical applications and ways to make a buck. If the university wants to survive as an intellectual institution, it must slash and burn the professional suburbs to save the theoretical town.

In all seriousness, we should transfer the primarily practical, get-a-job programs, such as business schools and faculties of public relations, to the community college system. This would also have the salutary effect of removing the outdated blue-collar stigma from community colleges. A much-ness of ink has been spilled about the acute shortage of skilled tradespeople in Canada and the U.S. The idea that white-collar jobs are the only good jobs, and that university is the only way to get them, is part of the reason why we have too many bad students and not enough good plumbers.

The kind of person who goes to school because he wants to make a lot of money in managing or marketing has much more in common with people who go to school because they want to make a lot of money being electricians. They are at school for the same reason: to get a credential and the technical
skills that qualify them for a career. The nerds, conversely, are there out of love for a specific discipline, a love that seems silly and self-indulgent to stolid money-minded types.

Of course we still need to train businesspeople and hotel managers. And I’m not saying their work isn’t complicated too. But the key word in that sentence is
train
, and training is not the same as teaching. Training means instructing students to do something specific, like marketing or accounting or welding. Teaching is all about developing broader skills, such as argumentation or experimentation, by looking at specificities that may well seem useless, like the literature that ate my youth or the protein my biochemist pal pursued for years. Those subjects might have some useful applications eventually – teaching, medical research – but that is not why we squandered our twenties in libraries and labs.