Gen and I are both "faculty brats" who benefited from growing up in and around dynamic college towns and we both attended the sorts of universities who many, including the authors whose books this article is reviewing, have begun to decry as simply not worth the price tag. We were also both generalists, taking various courses in the social sciences but also dappling into more random realms (ahhh yes, "The Big Bang and Beyond"), who avoided a clear pre-professional academic curriculum and completed hefty research thesis which led to us both having library breakdowns around 3 am. Come to think of it, basically our only major college persona differences were that I attracted the boys like honey, spent a year in France, and cheered for a winning athletic team, and poor Gen could never score dates to his formals, spent 4 years ripping on all things French, and never saw the Tigers win a game.
Anyhow, we've talked at length about the benefits and shortcomings of those experiences, particularly now that we have the perspectives from being a few years out (Most notably, Gen now dreams of visiting Paris, kisses people in greeting, and says "Sacre bleu!" whenever he's excited), and are aware of what a major role financial assistance played for both of us. We're also both fascinated by these trends against intellectualism, against a perceived "elitism," and separately, towards corporatism, present in the US psyche - trends which this author evokes strongly in critiquing the position that some have taken of blaming universities' failings on tenured faculty and in calling for an end to the classic liberal arts education.
I found this to be a really strong piece and agree wholeheartedly with much of the author's general take.
Excerpt (although many other points in rest of article):
"To me, the university is a precious and fragile institution, one that lives with crisis—since education, like psychoanalysis, is an “impossible profession”—but at its best thrives on it. It has endured through many transformations of ideology and purpose, but at its best remained faithful to a vision of disinterested pursuit and transmission of knowledge. Research and teaching have always cohabited: anyone who teaches a subject well wants to know more about it, and when she knows more, to impart that knowledge. Universities when true to themselves have always been places that harbor recondite subjects of little immediate utility—places where you can study hieroglyphics and Coptic as well as string theory and the habits of lemmings—places half in and half out of the world. No country needs that more than the US, where the pragmatic has always dominated.
I am not so much impressed by the faults and failings of the university—they are real enough, but largely the product of frightening trends toward inequality in American society that the universities can combat only to a limited degree. It’s more the survival of the university that amazes and concerns me. It’s one of the best things we’ve got, and at times—as when reading these books—it almost seems to me better than what we deserve. I will succumb here to a temptation (expecting that I’ll be ridiculed by Hacker and Dreifus) of quoting Henry James, at the moment his character Nick Dormer, in The Tragic Muse, who has sacrificed a career in politics to pursue a vocation as a painter, stands before a set of great portraits in London’s National Gallery:
As he stood before them the perfection of their survival often struck him as the supreme eloquence, the virtue that included all others, thanks to the language of art, the richest and most universal. Empires and systems and conquests had rolled over the globe and every kind of greatness had risen and passed away, but the beauty of the great pictures had known nothing of death or change, and the tragic centuries had only sweetened their freshness.
Universities are not so isolated from the tragic past, but they still make a claim to speak with eloquence across the centuries. They often fail, they need reform and course correction, but they are not, at their best, merely venal and self-serving. They deserve better critics than they have got at present."
Finally, what does it say about my education that I am in my mid twenties and love this:
(Jette sent it to us with the subject line: "oh hey gen and nadia at the pool." sigh. got jokes J.)
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