Comments on: Lines, Grids, Legibility: A Follow-Up on Summers

By: CMD

CMD — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 15:36:32 +0000

I work for a for-profit “corporate” university. Note, I say work rather than teach, although the latter is the nominal role. Therein, I suppose, lies one of the first problems with a corporate, for-profit institution of higher learning. On a purely anecdotal level, none except the youngest and most idealistic among our faculty cohort actually believe that he or she is a faculty member, or more, a professor. No, we’re employees, workers, and the corporation treats us as such at every opportunity. So what’s the point? The point is that as an employee, one eventually comes to a moment at which an economic ratio becomes the guiding principle behind much of the extra-classroom tasks teaching requires. To state it crudely, one begins to employ a “you get what you pay for” mentality when it comes to taking any extra steps beyond the minimum for students or for a class as whole. And if, as in the for profit university world, one is paid low level wages as a contract employee with no benefits, what they are paying for is very little; or more accurately, as little as one must put forth to ensure positive course evaluations, which in the for-profit education world is the ultimate condition of continued emplyment. This isn’t hard to do. I feel the further “corporatization” of the non-profit educational world will result in a similar ethos, if it hasn’t already.

By: bbenzon

bbenzon — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 01:33:50 +0000

“. . . presence.”

Yep, you need that because it inspires the students. Presence is hard to come by. I suspect West has it.

And you know, the Platonic legacy of Western thought is going to make us suspect presence, even in academics.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 20:54:05 +0000

Yes. You absolutely need lectures, but they need to done in a highly skilled manner. There needs to be something about a lecture that is quintessentially personal and performative and requires presence. If it’s just someone reading slides or droning on, then it accomplishes nothing a textbook or online course couldn’t deliver equally well. And yes, we need to look at the architecture of information and cooperation in academic institutions.

By: bbenzon

bbenzon — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 18:39:45 +0000

Re SAGES, in principle, I have no problems with faculty taught seminars for freshmen and sophmores. But I don’t think we should scrap lecture courses. Rather, we need to staff them with really good lecturers who speak well and make full use of media — pictures, film clips. And these star lecturers should probably be senior faculty with broad knowledge. The kind of broad knowledge you get by having spent a dozen years in a teaching regime where a significant chunk of your teaching time took place in another department. Then you can start the freshman out with broad integrative views. One or of those courses per semester for the first two years and you’ve got something.

Junior faculty shouldn’t teach these courses because they don’t have the breadth. They’ve got to publish in their specialties and get their careers moving. So let them do that.

But how do you set up incentives for senior faculty to do this? The current rewards system makes this kind of scheme impossible. Every once in awhile you have a senior guy — like Steven Pinker — who’s good at this and likes to do it. We need more like that.

By: bbenzon

bbenzon — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 18:28:36 +0000

My gut is to say that Posner doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Doesn’t mean I think Harvard did the right thing; they didn’t. The question is whether or not there is a right thing that’s doable by anyone whomsoever. Maybe the system’s busted. But that’s more than I want to chew on.

Colleges and universities are strange beasts. And it’s the peculiar and delicate role of faculty that makes them so. If you “break” (I’m thinking of breaking a horse as my metaphor) faculty to the corporate employee mold, you’ll kill them as researchers and probably as teachers as well. (Trainers may function well as corporate employees, but that’s different from what’s required of the best undergraduate teaching.) But it may also be the case that faculty have lost a sense of how to be both in the context of what is still a 19th century institutional pattern.

I like your cross-teaching idea.

You might want to look at Arthur Stinchcombe’s *Information and Organizations.* Stinchcombe is a smart sociologist arguing that institutions have the form they do because of the need to reduce uncertainty in their operating environment. Different organizational styles suit different information flows. So, in one chapter he re-examines classical work on GM. In another chapter he looks at companies that drill for oil in the North Sea. And he devotes a chapter to universities, which, in his analysis (as I remember it from 3 or 4 years ago), are diven by the need to maximize their reputations, which in turn stand on the reputatations of their faculties. Faculty reputations are mostly driven by narrowly disciplinary considerations.

Except for those in the public intellectual business. And so we’re back at Harvard and Cornel West. And so forth. Don’t think Stinchcombe discusses public intellectuals at all.

By: A. G.

A. G. — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 03:18:46 +0000

It is intriguing that Posner’s reaction to Summers calls for greater centralization of power in the presidency (as if that would ever happen at any place even remotely like Harvard). This seems knee jerk to me, and comparisons to a corporate model unhelpful. As you pointed out in another posting about Summers, the modern research university cum institutes cum professional schools is simply much more complex an enterprise. What is needed, though difficult to accomplish is the permeability and yeastiness of what you call interoperability, whereupon faculty might go down the path, perhaps even willingly, to a broader vision of their institution and its role.