The protestors in Zuccotti Park, Freedom Plaza, and anarchist tent cities across the country are mad as hell about student loans — going so far as to demand loan forgiveness for low-earning college grads and circulating a “Pledge of Refusal,” vowing to stop making payments on their debt.
The agitators’ demand that their creditors take a bath shows how blind they are to the reasons their higher-education credentials are worth so little. Professors and wannabe academics have flocked to the protest sites, welcomed with open arms by the poor, downtrodden BAs-turned-baristas and out of work MFAs at the movement’s core. Yet no one bears more responsibility for the dashed hopes and dreams of these overeducated, underemployed youths than America’s professorial class.
Higher education has become mostly disconnected from labor markets — and the realities of household budgets — in recent decades. Tuition (in constant dollars) has more than doubled since the 1980s, as universities have transformed themselves into all-inclusive resort communities; learning is a distant priority after sports, parties, and the rest of campus life. When students do finally hit the books (for a mere dozen hours a week, according to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book Academically Adrift), they study such disciplines as the performing arts, creative writing, and a myriad of “studies” majors exploring narrow questions of ethnic, racial, and sexual identity.
A beleaguered professor might protest that she is merely doing her job, that students themselves generate the demand for the unchallenging degree programs offered at most institutions nowadays. This ignores the responsibility of university faculties and administrators for two related and troubling trends.
First, the higher-education establishment has embraced the goal of “college for all” with alacrity. After all, it’s in the self-interest of everyone except the students who are being shoved into college unprepared and the parents footing a portion of the growing bill: For professors it means bigger department budgets, new buildings, more jobs. Uncle Sam finances this binge spending with subsidized loans, and no one asks how students will get a job at the end to pay them back. Never mind that majorities of students in many other developed nations are obtaining technical skills in rigorous vocational-education programs at this stage of their lives, at a fraction of the cost. Faculty members are too busy forming their students in the liberal arts to care.
Which brings us to the second disturbing trend in higher ed: the cheapening of “liberal arts” to mean “any subject of study divorced from considerations of practicality or good taste.” The liberal arts were once about studying how to live, informed by literary, philosophical, and historical accounts of how others conducted their lives. Students took a coherent set of core courses and immersed themselves in the Western canon. The academics of today instead offer programs catering to teenage sloth and narcissism, giving kids and their helicopter parents whatever they want for a buck, regardless of quality or rigor, reluctant to miss out on the student-loan-driven bubble now inflating. Anything for the freedom to conduct trivial research, play activist on the side, and enjoy the waning prestige of tenure-track life.
The Occupy Wall Street protestors are right to be angry about the failed promise of higher education. Colleges and universities have fallen down on the job of developing the human capital we need to improve our economy and civic life.
The villain is not the lenders who played an incidental role in providing capital to creative writing majors, however. It’s the tenured bozos who gave them Derrida and finger painting in their formative undergraduate years instead of Plato and Aristotle (or a good course in computer-aided drafting). The Zuccotti Park crew should drop their beef with the banks and demand change from academia instead.
— Chris Tessone is the director of finance at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a leading education policy think tank. He blogs at Flypaper.
I didn't know English had a generic "she." Guess I really did get hosed by my alma mater. Keep fighting the good fight against all that wasteful academic PC nonsense, Chris.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeah, this article... I don't even know where to start. It's one generalization after another, with a hefty amount of shaming areas of study that the author - for whatever reason - believes to be fruitless. I'm so glad someone else commented on the "she."
Considering the role that universities played in the advancement of feminism, civil rights, political dissent, etc.... it's pretty horrifying to see people like this dismiss certain studies as overly narrow and worthless. Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_ lacks relevance in a society facing overcrowded prisons and the torture question twists in the wind? In a world that has a pill for every sad or anxious thought, _Madness and Civilization_ has nothing to say? _The Order of Things_ addresses fundamental problems of epistemology and has influenced numerous modern fields (even a handful of lucrative ones).
I am not up on my Derrida, so I'll let you slide on that one. You've picked some odd examples if you were trying to point out shoddy college courses or areas of study though. It sounds like you want a narrower curriculum, one favoring particular intellectual heavyweights and eschewing critical theory. But in some areas of the humanities, theory is unavoidable - the key is to know it is there and to use it like a lens. It's a way of seeing, not the object itself.
As I said earlier, there's way too much to properly discuss, and I suspect the author is more interested in pontificating than actually discussing this topic. I mean... this bit especially is bilous: "The academics of today instead offer programs catering to teenage sloth and narcissism, giving kids and their helicopter parents whatever they want for a buck, regardless of quality or rigor... Anything for the freedom to conduct trivial research, play activist on the side, and enjoy the waning prestige of tenure-track life."
I keep reading this over and over and over again, each time with less respect for the guy who gets paid to write drivel like this. Yeah, those liberal arts professors - they just have it made, don't they! Would you like to do a bit of research on courseloads and average salaries in the liberal arts vs. the sciences (where the private dollar holds sway precisely so that corporations are allowed use the university as a carrot patch, e.g., unpaid internships and the like). And who gets to decide whether someone's research is trivial? You? The "market"?
The university is not and should not be a corporation. There are reasons - very good ones, in fact - that it does not function as a business. Have you thought about that?
Ah, I don't know why I'm bothering.
By the way, out-of-work is an attributive adjectival phrase and needs to be hyphenated.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt still has not dawned on them that however unseemly they find the free market and consumerism, their pursuits are utterly dependent upon capitalism's excess. It's not a coincidence that all these snotty, barely employed artistes and anti-establishment types gravitate to economically-vibrant cities. Whether you're talking about a bored rich guy who finances art films or documentaries, a rich guy who invests in a restaurant and hires a talented chef, rich people who buy and support art or a non-profit funded by rich folks, the common denominator in most of the pursuits which they fancy is the loose change of people with wealth.
I mean, really, nobody needs the 1% more than do the Occupy Wall Street misanthropes. And while I have no doubt that a great many of them already have this deluded mindset when they enter college, their insular and entitled professors have neither the will nor the worldliness to disabuse them of their juvenile sentiments.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhile I basically agree with this essay (and in particular the critique of "college for all"), I fail to see how knowledge of Plato and Aristotle makes one significantly more employable than immersion in Foucault and Derrida. Sure, the former are geniuses while the latter are charlatans, but generally speaking, if you spend loads of money on a degree in the social sciences or humanities, you are gambling dangerously with your future.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePlato and Aristotle teach us about the nature of Man and his condition. Foucault and Derrida teach us cynicism and despair. One set of teachings is much more useful than the other.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou know that and I know that, but I'm not sure how many employers know that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThat's right, it's the liberal arts that are responsible for the academically adrift phenomenon. Just one problem - if you look at Arum and Roksa's data, you find that students in the liberal arts perform quite well, just behind the students in the sciences, and far ahead of students in "practical" majors such as business. (Did you know, Chris, how badly business majors perform on the GMAT? You could look it up. Not that looking at evidence is your strong suit).
But hey, mere evidence has never kept NR or Phi Beta Cons from slander.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"if you look at Arum and Roksa's data, you find that students in the liberal arts perform quite well, just behind the students in the sciences, and far ahead of students in "practical" majors such as business."
What the hell is that supposed to mean?
Also, you really should learn the difference between libel and slander.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, don't be so hard on the poor dears in the "humanities". They must keep selling or they to will be out of a job when the suckers, I mean, students move to more useful studies. It's like Amway, you start selling and recruit a crew beneath you that you earn off of. But wait, the importance of an academic is in their research not their teaching. Really?
Turns out, John Adams' statement:
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.
Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780
Is the formula for the death of the American dream. For if granddaddy and daddy didn't amass enough principal for the grandkid to live off the interest, then the grandkid isn't going to be living as well as his/her forefathers who pursued useful fields.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnother way to look at Adam's statement is that he studied war and politics in order to win independence from England and establish a new country. He wanted his sons to study subjects necessary for the new country to succeed, giving their children the luxury to study the arts. While the arts can make life better, you have to concentrate on getting the essentials right first.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI have to say, I am very disappointed in conservatives' animosity towards the liberal arts.
How is today's generation ever going to understand and defend the dignity of the human person, virtue ethics, or religion if they do not understand Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Paschal, and Kierkegaard? How are they going to be able to offer informed criticisms of modern culture if they do not understand the faults of Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche?
By seeing education only as a means to an end, we doom our society to more of what the modern secularist culture has already resulted in: abortion, embryonic stem cell research, artificial contraception, same-sex 'marriage', socialism, communism, etc.
The liberal arts, those studies which are an end in and of themselves, allow us to become more fully human.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf you read the article, you'll note that the author's complaint is based in part on a redefinition of "liberal arts," a definition which often ignores or purposely excludes the bastions of Western Civilization. " Studies" has never heard of Plato.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes, the author did briefly mention the importance of the Western Canon and the liberal arts of old, but I think his definition is a little off.
His criticism of "any subject of study divorced from considerations of practicality" is a criticism of liberal arts itself, especially the liberal arts that have been the foundation of Western education for centuries.
Liberal arts are, by most classical definitions, those studies which are ends in and of themselves. That is, they are not practical, or servile, arts, because they are free from (not subservient to) a practical end. Accounting, for example, is generally a practical/servile art. Philosophy, mathematics, chemistry, theology, and linguistics, to name a few, are liberal arts.
These liberal arts are, by definition, useless (their final cause is not a practical end), but nevertheless they are the studies that make us more fully human.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAmen!
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse