For the most part, though, Delbanco sees the true college as threatened in many ways. In research universities, passionate and effective undergraduate teaching offers no prestige, no profit, and no prospect of permanence. A governing scientific ideal, which emphasizes the ongoing transformation of all fields of knowledge, relegates the transmission of knowledge to at best a secondary status. Humanists, whose subjects do not show progress—Charles Mee, who adapts such plays as The Bacchae, is a fine tragedian, but you mustn’t confuse him with Euripides—are marginalized in academic life unless they adopt a kind of parody of the scientific method, and begin tabulating all the forms of plot used in Victorian novels as if they were a literary counterpart to the human genome.
Saddest of all, the serious courses on the bases of the Western tradition that Delbanco sees as best adapted to opening minds and building characters are rarely required. And even at Columbia and Chicago, where students have to take them, they are mostly taught by younger faculty and graduate students who can be assigned to them, along with a few true believers from the older faculty. Most younger professors look forward to their release from this sort of required generalist teaching, for which they have neither the training nor the taste.
--Anthony Grafton, NYRB.
~
To live wisely and agreeably and well.
--Keynes.
A university education will never consider any of those qualities except if it makes the claim that 'to live well' is the same thing, or at least dependent on, the ability to live well-and that ability itself does not boil down to anything more than the possession of money and wealth.
Capital's final frontier is not space but the inner space that is the human being.
It is, of course, important not to overplay this: in comparison with the dehumanization that occurs in every day physical work the university is still a place of privilege. But it is important nevertheless to point out the ways in which capital transforms mindsets and practices in different walks of life.
in many cases it's already too late. By the time students get to university they already think there's only one game in town and they've learnt-quickly and cynically- that what counts is the bottom dollar, the stamp on their degrees, the ability to network, to fake their way through life with a tremendous sense of entitlement and disdain for complexity or ambiguity.
Those that carry on will, you feel, more often than not come away with a false sense of superiority, spurting all that nonsense about the "life of the mind", thinking to themselves: there's another, possibly "higher", game to be played here.
Saddest of all, the serious courses on the bases of the Western tradition that Delbanco sees as best adapted to opening minds and building characters are rarely required. And even at Columbia and Chicago, where students have to take them, they are mostly taught by younger faculty and graduate students who can be assigned to them, along with a few true believers from the older faculty. Most younger professors look forward to their release from this sort of required generalist teaching, for which they have neither the training nor the taste.
--Anthony Grafton, NYRB.
~
To live wisely and agreeably and well.
--Keynes.
A university education will never consider any of those qualities except if it makes the claim that 'to live well' is the same thing, or at least dependent on, the ability to live well-and that ability itself does not boil down to anything more than the possession of money and wealth.
Capital's final frontier is not space but the inner space that is the human being.
It is, of course, important not to overplay this: in comparison with the dehumanization that occurs in every day physical work the university is still a place of privilege. But it is important nevertheless to point out the ways in which capital transforms mindsets and practices in different walks of life.
in many cases it's already too late. By the time students get to university they already think there's only one game in town and they've learnt-quickly and cynically- that what counts is the bottom dollar, the stamp on their degrees, the ability to network, to fake their way through life with a tremendous sense of entitlement and disdain for complexity or ambiguity.
Those that carry on will, you feel, more often than not come away with a false sense of superiority, spurting all that nonsense about the "life of the mind", thinking to themselves: there's another, possibly "higher", game to be played here.
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