Inside Higher Ed reports today on a session at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association dealing with the ways that the “ideology and analytical tools of business” are destroying the humanities and, as a result, education as a whole.
Here is a taste:
Some expressed the belief that a business-driven mindset in the academy is also reflected in the purpose that higher education is thought to serve. It is no longer a place for students to be challenged, broadened, or taught how to think rigorously — a place for the cultivation of knowledge for its own sake. The university has become a training institute for corporations and a means to get a good job, said Zahavi. Nowhere is this more evident than in the description of students as customers, many noted.
But some on the panels and in their respective audiences pointed out that this division between academics and administrators is too simple. Administrators are not simply bean-counters looking to feather their nests at the expense of academics, as some panelists suggested. They cope with a different set of pressures, such as how to maintain an academic program amid rounds of budget cuts.
“We don’t wake up every day thinking, ‘How are we going to stick it to the humanities?’ ” Todd A. Diacon, deputy chancellor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said from the audience of the session on the job market. “We have to face a very different reality.” Like many other panelists and audience members, Diacon also noted that the “either/or” construct of academics and administrators ignores certain realities. Many administrators and others who are trying to measure productivity and maximize efficiency in higher education are — like Diacon, a historian who has published books on early 20th century Brazil — trained scholars. “The enemy is us,” he said.
Others noted that the real enemy was a larger question about the economic viability of higher education. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, who teaches American and urban history at Loyola University Chicago and led the department during a college effort to quantify faculty productivity, described an “elephant in the room”: the underlying economic model for undergraduate education in many institutions, which recognizes faculty members for their research and rewards them as they move up the ladder by giving them less and less contact with students. “How long can we sustain this economic model?” Gilfoyle asked.
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