“What educational neighborhoods will retain their value if the bubble bursts? 1. Community colleges. That’s already quite clear even before the bubble pops: many of them offer an attractive mix of value, quality and accessibility.”

I have heard this theory again and again, but the reality is that many community colleges — not just the one where I work — are suffering right now. A decrease in both state and local funding is one major problem. In addition, many of us are noticing decreasing enrollment and closures of career programs. Who wants to train to be a teacher, for example, when teachers are losing their jobs? Never mind jobs in fire or police forces. Also look at the various cuts to Perkins funding currently being debated in Congress.

Nope, we’re not doing all that well either.

I would say that “best practices” generalism and synthesis has those attributes. That it may not be typical of generalism is a different point. But frankly I don’t think that “best practices” disciplinary specialization is necessarily typical of disciplinary specialization in the wild, either.

I think what you describe as my implicit model is one part of what I have in mind. But another part is being broadly aware of the totality of knowledge production within the academy, and then of other knowledge-producing or expert practices outside of it. Not in the sense that you can yourself produce legitimate work in more than a very small range of that big picture, but that you have a good emic understanding of how different disciplines operate, the kinds of work they privilege, and the reasoning behind that privileging. Sometimes that ‘big-picture’ understanding is so that you understand for your own work where there are useful fragments or abstractions available in another disciplinary tradition, and sometimes it’s so that you can serve as a navigator for students and audiences, helping them to know where to go in order to engage a particular problem in a particular fashion. For example, a historian can take an interest in the problem of consciousness as a specialist. A generalist who starts with some grounding in history, as I do, might at some point ask whether there is a very different disciplinary tradition that is available for use to approach that problem from another angle, or might instead simply demarcate as a point of principle where the analysis of the question of consciousness has “left the building” and must be dealt with through some other specialized vocabulary that the generalist can’t easily access.

Are there some kinds of teaching that generalism doesn’t address or is useless within? I guess some kinds of technical skill-based teaching, sure. But even there, I think a generalist sensibility might help any teacher to evaluate claims of pedagogical efficacy–a generalist is going to be able to look differently at perennial debates about immersive techniques vs. drilling, about the nature or character of fluency and translation, and so on.

Not sure that the Swarthmores of the world will be fine no matter what. But as you saw in the first part of this entry, I agree with your view about which institutions are going to be in immediate crisis if the pool of potential college students and their families come to a radically new conclusion about the value of higher education.

1) When you say “Generalism itself has best practices, etc.” – do you mean the kind of (modest in its claims, respectful of specialist work) generalism that you identify as the best? Because I’m not sure that, descriptively, that is really characteristic of actually existing generalism in the wild.

Also (and this is really inchoate), I have this nagging feeling that the model you’re thinking of is basically one of a sort of discursive content-oriented, can-be-expressed-in-essays, sort of knowledge – which is in fact typical of what and how history departments teach. But there are other sorts of college teaching (in my case, elementary language instruction) which will always be excluded from such a model. If so, is it really broader?

(I am however *really* sorry that your colleagues have been giving you a hard time about this.)

2) The Swarthmores of this world will be fine no matter what. It’s institutions further down the pecking order that may be in trouble. In this category, I would expect that the first to go would be regional SLACs without a clear and distinct identity, and so on up the ladder of vulnerability.

Big-Tent Problems

Evaluation Across the Disciplines

What Color is Your Leaden Weight?

Show Me the Money

Brains in Maine

Liberal Arts Poster Children (On the Mythbusters as the ideal liberal arts generalists.)

Welcoming New Arrivals to the Sekrit Clubhouse.

There’s more, but that’s a pretty good start. 🙂

Any chance you could link to a few pieces? I’m a sporadic reader, so I probably missed them, but I’m not remembering any posts like that.

(I’m particularly interested in anything which fleshes out this claim: “Generalism itself has best practices, it has rigor and structure, it has its own kinds of depth, and as a result, can be taught.” But whatever you think are your best posts on the topic would be great.)

SF

As I said, I think the issue is serious enough on its own terms that you don’t need the bubble (or another) metaphor.

The first is that the debt loads that students are incurring now seem increasingly unsustainable in relationship to expected earnings and in relationship to widening income inequity in the US, and that if a moment comes where demand for higher education achieves elasticity of a sort under that pressure, I think it’s likely to be the kind of elasticity where the rubber band breaks and shoots across the room and hits someone in the eye. (Metaphors, I got a zillion of ’em.) In that context, there really could be a pretty sharp shakeout in higher education.

Second has to do with our internal markets within our institutions, and I suppose this is my more urgent concern. If faculty, especially humanists, choose to turtle up in response to anxieties about movements of students within curricula and insist on exclusive, deep disciplinarity, I think they really do run a serious risk of devaluing their own work in a manner that will be hard to undo. Now is not the time to stop taking the liberal arts idea seriously, and taking it seriously means finding a place for generalism and synthesis in the curriculum and in inquiry.

Part of the reason that the muddy metaphor irks me is that I don’t think you need to assert an asset bubble to talk about those dynamics. Being squeezed is a much broader phenomenon than just the asset-bubble crash, and it fits very neatly within institutional life — no tulips required. For example, I’d be very curious to see what happened to turf issues inside Brown during and after the transition to the no-distribution-requirements policy. And there are plenty of examples when people fight — or don’t fight or lose and have to figure out what to do after — the ending of certain requirements for internal institutional reasons. I’m facing a version of that inside my college, and I have seen *both* the standard territorial response and also a view that if there is to be an internal marketplace, by gosh we can attract students through our sheer brilliance and interesting course titles/descriptions. After all, several hundred years after the tulip bubble, you can still find a tulip market. It’s just not superheated. And sometimes, especially in April or early May, you can even find them blooming in southeast Pennsylvania.