A propósito del artículo El fin de la universidad como la conocemos: una visión desde EE.UU. publicado en abril pasado por Mark C. Taylor en el New York Times , el Chronicle of Higher Education dio a conocer, un mes después, un extracto de las respuestas más interesantes suscitadas por la polémica columna de opinión de Taylor.
A continuación la compliación del Chronicle hecha por Evan R. Goldstein.
Reimagining the University
By EVAN R. GOLDSTEIN
“Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning,” Mark C. Taylor declares in a hotly debated op-ed column published last month in The New York Times. The “mass-production university model,” Taylor continues, is not only obsolete — graduate students are being groomed for jobs that no longer exist — but it also contributes to the intellectual Balkanization of academe. “As departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems,” writes Taylor, a professor of religion at Columbia University. Attempts at reform are stymied by the selfregulating nature of universities.
To remedy such ills, Taylor proposes a sweeping overhaul of American higher education: Abolish permanent departments in favor of “problem-focused programs” that study issues like mind, body, media, and water; use technology to increase collaboration among institutions. When the departments remain, their expertise should be parceled out in a more cost-effective manner. He explains: “Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff.” Most controversial, Taylor suggests imposing mandatory retirement and replacing tenure with seven-year renewable contracts that “would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars, and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.”
Taylor’s grim diagnosis and far-reaching prescriptions have provoked a lively discussion online.
David A. Bell, professor of the humanities, the Johns Hopkins University: American universities obviously face serious challenges — all the more since the recession began. But to collapse all of those challenges into one single, facile analogy to Detroit does no one any good, except the yahoos on the right who delight in dismissing academia not simply as trivial and obsolescent, but as morally corrupting and unpatriotic. These critics would love not simply to restructure the humanities, but get rid of them altogether. Let’s not make their work easier for them. (The New Republic online)
Marc Bousquet, associate professor of cultural studies and writing with new media at Santa Clara University: Reality? Annual income for many adjuncts is about $5,000 dollars a year. On pay that can be lower than a grand per class.
They’re on food stamps.
But sure, you’re right. The problem is that we need to end tenure. When we end tenure, the market will ensure that these folks are paid fairly, that persons with Ph.D.’s will be able to work for those wages.
Oh, crap, wait. As anyone actually paying attention has observed, we’ve ALREADY ended tenure. With the overwhelming majority of faculty off the tenure track, and most of teaching work being done by them, by students, and by professional staff, tenured appointments are basically the privilege of a) a retiring generation b) grant-getters and c) the candidate pool for administration.
How’s that working out? Well, gee, we’re graduating a very poor percentage of students. Various literacies are kinda low. We don’t have a racially diverse faculty, and women, especially women with children, are far more likely to have the low-paying low-status faculty jobs.
Nice! Let’s get more of that! (Brainstorm, The Chronicle Review online)
Taylor Carman, associate professor of philosophy, Barnard College: Scholars in the United States have grown accustomed to the crass anti-intellectualism of some of their critics outside the academy. It is alarming and embarrassing to hear the same rhetoric within the ranks of my own institution. Mr. Taylor’s absurd and dangerous proposals to abolish departments and tenure would risk trading serious — and sometimes, yes, specialized and unpopular — scholarship for fashionable but intellectually shallow and incoherent commodities. (Letter to the editor, The New York Times)
Erin O’Connor, research fellow, American Council of Trustees and Alumni: What’s great about this op-ed … is that Taylor is going public with this stuff. He won’t make any friends by doing it, and there will be dismissive squawking from the usual quarters. …
I know it’s hard for the folks who have tenure — or who hope to have tenure — to wrap their minds around the utterly vestigial character of an institution that has outlasted whatever limited purpose it might once have served to protect academic freedom in a different era, under different circumstances. But the time has really come for the people who are invested in tenure to conduct the thought experiment proposed by Taylor and others. If they can do that, they will have a fighting chance of preserving academic freedom and self-governance by other means — and potentially of being part of a long overdue revitalization of the academy. If they don’t, they will continue to be a shrinking, defensive, increasingly indefensible group with diminishing claims to authority, respect, autonomy, and, yes, academic freedom. (Critical Mass)
Christopher M. Kelty, associate professor, University of California at Los Angeles Center for Society and Genetics: I really want to agree with Taylor. I just took a very good job in exactly the kind of entity Taylor is suggesting we develop to replace departments and transform academia (the Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA), and I think it is the bees’ knees. I absolutely agree that we should have more such centers, focused on timely problems, bringing experts together from multiple disciplines. But we can’t do it overnight: that “from multiple disciplines” part? It kind of needs to continue for a while for these centers to make sense. What’s more, the only way the center I’m part of could have recruited me or anyone else it employs was by constituting itself as a department, with that same stability and autonomy that current departments have. (Savage Minds)
Timothy Burke, professor of history, Swarthmore College: The useful functions of departments, especially at small institutions, are easily distributed to larger administrative units or completely decentralized to individual faculty. Mostly they’re just barriers, both to teaching and to generative conversation. (Easily Distracted)
Anthony Grafton, professor of history, Princeton University: We do need more and more effective ways to find each other across department boundaries, as faculty and students. … But I also believe, from experience, that collaboration works best when the collaborators have strong bases in disciplines to work from, and that universities need to provide meeting places for people who are already oriented in a body of knowledge and practice, not programs on Water. (comment, Easily Distracted)
SOURCES CITED IN THIS COLUMN
Brainstorm, The Chronicle Review online
Critical Mass
comment, Easily Distracted
The New Republic online
Letter to the editor, The New York Times
Savage Minds
Copyright © 2009 by The Chronicle of Higher Education |