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 |  Subject: Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University  Thu Jan 08, 2015 3:22 am | |
| A provocative expose of the decaying moral and intellectual state of American colleges and universities links problems in higher education to university faculties, trustees, and administrations, and explains how to enhance quality education.
After 35 years in academia, Anderson (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution) gives a cri de coeur about what's gone so dreadfully wrong with the American university: Academic intellectuals, he says, have ``betrayed their profession'' and, within the halls of academe, ``integrity is dead.'' Strong charges, but Anderson does nothing if not back them up with facts, figures, and plenty of common-sense observation. Part of the problem is simply in quality-control: Between 1960 and 1975, the number of those attending college ``almost tripled, an increase of some 8 million students,'' and in the rapid hiring of faculty to teach these hoards of new students, ``there has been a slow but significant decline in the average quality of academic intellectuals.'' Add to this what Anderson calls ``hubris'' (the ``unchecked intellectual arrogance'' that leads academics to believe themselves above the rules that govern other people); and add to that the transformation of universities from what were ``rather small, quiet, dignified institutions of rarefied scholarly pursuits and the teaching of a select few'' into huge and ``sophisticated megabusiness machines''--and the stage is set for deterioration and trouble. Like bound apprentices of medieval times, graduate students ``teach'' (Anderson calls it ``children teaching children'') so that professors can produce still more research for their own institutional gain--most of it ``inconsequential and trifling''--while real education lags. Academics, says Anderson, ``begin by lying to others, and end up lying to themselves.'' Empty research, padded budgets, poor teaching, tenure-protected faculty who claim academic impartiality but in fact judge politically, corporate-style image management-- all of this, overseen by boards of trustees who know little about education, makes for ``a recipe for disaster, a witch's brew of incompetence, timidity, and neglect.'' There may be bones to pick here, but few will be unimpressed by a veteran insider's faithful-oppositionist view of the intellectual shambles our universities seem to have become.
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Some of Allan Bloom's concerns (in The Closing of the American Mind) are updated by Martin Anderson's Impostors in the Temple: American Intellectuals are Destroying Our Universities and Cheating Our Students of Their Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, c. 1992). Anderson is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and served as an adviser to both presidents Nixon and Reagan.
One of Anderson's contentions is that two groups of intellectuals exist in America, but they rarely interact. One the one hand there are "academic intellectuals," unanimously "liberal" on most issues, protected by tenure and accountable to virtually no one. Their only constituency is fellow professors, who largely share their worldview. For example, at the University of Colorado, less than 7% of the professors in the College of Arts and Sciences are Republicans; no Republicans have been hired in the past decade, and the English department, with 57 professors, has no Republican at all! So much for the vaunted "pluralism" of today's university!
On the other hand are "professional intellectuals," working in various media, government agencies, private think tanks, etc., far more equitably balanced between liberal and conservative. Primarily, Anderson argues, academicians should teach. In fact, they don't! Ernest Boyer's 1990 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching report, "Scholarship Reconsidered," indicts professors for failing to profess, failing to give students what they should get, scholarly instruction. Teaching, counseling, grading papers all take time. Time invested in such is time wasted for academic intellectuals tracking tenure via "scholarly" publications--virtually none of which are read, even by others "scholars" in the same discipline.Read more
http://www.amazon.com/Impostors-Temple-Decline-American-University/dp/0671709151/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 |
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