a poor player

Dunkirk NY – There have been a slew of articles this past weekend on the state of higher ed. One would expect that during the traditional start of the school year. But this year seems different, as a lot more of these articles are starting to peel away the secrecy surrounding many of higher education’s dirty little secrets. I’ve chosen a few excerpts for your consideration.

This first is from the NY Times, an article entitled Why College Costs Rise, Even in a Recession. The article details why it’s so hard to contain college costs. Three reasons predominate: you can’t fire professors, you can’t cut departments, and professors teach less while doing more research. It contains insights from Mr. Lawrence Weiss, President of Lafayette College in PA. A small quote:

About all Mr. Weiss will say about this is that he agrees that Lafayette needs to do a better job of discriminating between the things it can and cannot do well. He is too good on the politics to single out any department. But there is little doubt that he and administrators like him will need to give up on some foreign languages, minor sciences or parts of the arts pretty soon.

Note the comment about reducing the arts. I’ve said before that the arts make a tempting target for college administrators as the economy worsens. It still could happen.

The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, laments the transformation from a university as a place to study the liberal arts to a place to seek job skills. She writes:

Since the 1970s there has been a steep decline in the percentage of students majoring in the liberal arts and sciences, and an accompanying increase in preprofessional undergraduate degrees (emphasis mine). Business is now by far the most popular undergraduate major, with twice as many bachelor’s degrees awarded in this area than in any other field of study. In the era of economic constraint before us, the pressure toward vocational pursuits is likely only to intensify.

As a nation, we need to ask more than this from our universities. Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. Human beings need meaning, understanding and perspective as well as jobs. The question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to.

It would be nice, of course, if theatre education trends took some guidance from this.

Lastly, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an article detailing the rise in research and its growing irrelevancy to anyone outside academia:

(Dr. Mark) Bauerlain’s American Enterprise Institute paper, “Professors on the Production Line, Students On Their Own,” reveals the following: Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.

Indeed, prestigious professors frequently have little interaction with students at all, lecturing to hundreds at a time, consigning discussions and grading to graduate students. Meanwhile, the research these professors are turning out is increasingly obscure and often politicized. If they’re dealing with well-studied writers, they must pursue ever more oddball interpretations of the works in order to produce something original. Here’s Bauerlain again, explaining why: In the year 2007, literary scholars and critics published 85 studies of the life and writings of William Faulkner. Nearly all of them appeared in U.S. publications, and the total included 11 books and eight dissertations. The previous year saw 78 entries on Faulkner, and the one before that 80 of them.

In fact, from 1980 to 2006, Faulkner attracted fully 3,584 books, chapters, dissertations, articles, notes, reviews and editions. During the same years, Charles Dickens garnered 3,437 studies, while Emily Dickinson tallied 1,776. Towering at the top was William Shakespeare with 21,674 separate pieces of scholarship and criticism.

I’ve really no idea what will be the tipping point that will bring serious reform to higher education, but hopefully as more information like this continues to get out to the public, the sooner we’ll reach that point.  -twl