Time to rethink college

Is training to become a master auto mechanic, paramedic, or skilled electrician as valuable to society as a feminist-studies curriculum? Victor Davis Hanson writes that in our colleges today

There are far too many special studies courses and trendy majors — and far too few liberal-arts surveys of literature, history, art, music, math, and science that for centuries were the sole hallowed methods of instilling knowledge.

Administrators should decide whether they see students as mature, independent adults who handle life’s vicissitudes with courage and without need for restrictions on free expression. Or should students remain perennial weepy adolescents, requiring constant sheltering, solicitousness, and self-esteem building?

The now-predictable ideology of college graduation speakers should instead be a mystery. Students should not be able to guess the politics of their college president. Ideally, they might encounter as many Christians as atheists, as many reactionaries as socialists, or as many tea partyers as Occupy Wall Street protestors, reflecting the normal divisions of society at large.

Read more here.

The university has become a rogue institution

Victor Davis Hanson writes about what is wrong with our colleges and universities. He is on the faculty at Stanford, I believe.

Tenure: Whatever may once have been the case, in our time tenure does not ensure free expression, but instead a banal orthodoxy, in which 90 percent of the faculty in the humanities share the same progressive outlook. Worse, the nontenured faculty member, in the fashion of the Middle Ages, was admitted to the guild only if his tenured peers believed that he was agreeable in politics and attitude.

Faculty Exploitation: At some public universities, nearly half of the curriculum is taught by part-time faculty — in effect a subsidy that allows the tenured caste to teach smaller and less-in-demand classes, where less time is needed for preparation and grading. Worse still, universities knowingly turn out too many PhDs in the humanities, which ensures a glut of job applicants, which, again, ensures a continued supply of cheap temps to sustain tenured privilege.

Curriculum: Somewhere around 1980, a new generation of faculty created a whole new curriculum with the suffix “studies.” The result was advocacy, not disinterested empiricism. Nationwide, thousands of traditional classes in history, philosophy, literature, and the social sciences gave way to ethnic studies, women’s studies, leisure studies, gender studies, peace studies, environmental studies, etc. “Studies” contributed in no small part to the unfortunate emergence of the arrogant and ignorant graduate, who left the campus zealous for social change but sadly without the skills to even articulate his goals.

Admissions: That no one will ever know exactly on what criteria the president of the United States was admitted to Columbia College or Harvard Law School is a testament to the secrecy and mystery of the university guild that has such intrusive interest in the less-than-transparent workings of other institutions.

Administration: Left unspoken is that many of these trumped-up six-figure positions are to promote “diversity” and “technology” that have little to do with mastery of reasoning, prose, and scientific knowledge.

The Credential: If the schools of education did not have a monopoly over credentialing, they would quickly dissolve, given that their product has made the public schools far less credible.

National Competency Testing: In addition, to receive the bachelor’s degree, graduating seniors should be required to take a national competency test in general education — something open as well to non-college students who wish to win the BA or BS degree by examination. This idea of national audit remains an anathema to universities, because there is no proof that the graduates of our most prestigious schools would do any better than those of state colleges — or than autodidacts or the homeschooled.

Budget: Students should have the choice of deciding whether they wish to attend a college that budgets for rock-climbing walls, an Assistant Dean of Internet Technology, or visits by a Michael Moore or John Edwards, at thousands of dollars per campus rant.

Publication: Faculty are terrified of a future where one’s life’s work can be instantly accessed, and where its usefulness can be assessed by the number of scholars who consult it, footnote it, or buy it.

Legal Exemption: Entering a campus should not mean sacrificing constitutional protections. Yet the rights of the accused are often subordinate to campus speech codes and protocols dealing with supposed sexual and racial insensitivities.

The common theme of all university reform should be transparency. Faculties are superb self-appointed auditors of others; it is time we should extend the same audit to them as well.

Entitled, impatient, disillusioned, and unemployed

Did you know that a record 85% of recent college graduates are now living back home with their parents? So says the introduction in Psychology Today to an article by recent grad Cristina Schreil.

“We are a very entitled generation,” 23-year-old Lilia Sterling, who moved in with her parents after graduating from NYU, observed. Sterling confronted a fruitless job search.

“My parents said, maybe not explicitly, do whatever you love, do whatever makes you happy.” Months later, she finally realized, “‘It’s time to do whatever I can.’”

Brianna Flaherty, who graduated in May and lives in New York City before she’ll have “to give up and move home,” is unemployed. She spends hours on Craigslist and writing cover letters. When she interviewed at a bakery recently, there were 250 others competing with her to frost cupcakes at 5:00am.

“I no longer buy into the idea that having a degree will give you your dream job,” she told me. She’s exasperated. “I see on Craigslist that my Creative Writing degree, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, qualifies me to be a receptionist.”

Christina adds,

Perhaps one difference between college grads in recessions of the past and grads today is our lack of patience.

“We’re used to getting what we want, right away,” says Alana Dowden, a grad from University of California, Santa Barbara. “If we want to download a song, we can hear it in seconds.” To Dowden, this could prove frustrating for job-hunting grads that need to adapt to the “real world,” adopting a completely different outlook than they did in school.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking to the Psychology Today article.