Hello. I’m a fan of PBC, and I usually either agree with the postings or enjoy the back-and-forth going on. But for at least the second time, a PBC blogger has given a hat tip to Yorktown University or, in this case, its founder. This is unfortunate, because Yorktown exhibits a glaring shortcoming in some such enterprises: a lack of adequate support resources. Specifically, I looked under “Libraries” on Yorktown’s website, and unless I missed something, what they provide in the way of library resources is not merely inadequate, but scandalous.

The Yorktown “library” apparently consists of a few dozen links to free Internet resources. In my professional opinion as a library webmaster and collection-development librarian, this would flunk as an elementary-school library, to say nothing of a resource for graduate students. For serious research in most academic disciplines, there is simply no substitute for professionally compiled indexes and abstracts, professional and academic journals, books, and other traditional library resources, whether print or online. These things cost money — lots of it. I suspect that Yorktown is either cutting corners due to a lack of financial resources, or is run by philistines. Since its students either need to use a real library (i.e. use resources paid for by — ahem — tuition and taxpayer funding at brick-and-mortar colleges), or get a degree without much serious outside reading and research, Yorktown is therefore free-riding off higher-cost, older institutions, or peddling questionable degrees, or some combination of both.

I believe that distance ed and other non-traditional methods of study have a lot to offer, but they need to be intellectually serious; there’s enough intellectual flim-flam at traditional institutions. It’s a shame that its academic conservatism notwithstanding, Yorktown seems to offer such a dubious product.

Anonymous