Wednesday, April 2, 2008
If you want to be astonished, take a look at the President's Webpage at today's video of his "reengineering undergraduate education" speech, this by someone who may never have taught an undergraduate class. You can see terms like "mass customization" and "extreme student centeredness" and "education incubator" much of which will take place in a "new entity." All this will involve a "common experience" involving course "modules" and "algorithms" that will redesign the Arts and Sciences curriculum. It is total educational change by decree and will start today. It is well worth watching and shows how little we have been told.
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A colleague sent department faculty this letter to the editor which appeared in the March 13, 2008 issue of Nature. I think you’ll find it describes the situation at UT fairly well.
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How academic corporatism can lead to dictatorship
SIR — Michael Crow’s Book Review of Daniel Greenberg’s Science for Sale (Nature 449, 405; 2007) calls for a response because it reflects a worsening philosophical divide in US academia between those who regard universities as analogous to corporations and think they should be run that way (mostly career administrators) and those who see universities as primarily intellectual enterprises governed by academic core values(mostly line faculty). Asserting that the university is an idea — not an ideal or an ideology — Crow, who is president of Arizona State University, plays down or ignores most of the dangerous consequences of campus capitalism.
Faculty members would generally hold that universities represent ideals as well as ideas. These are manifest in a value system that is among the first casualties of academic corporatism. Derived from political corporatism, academic corporatism is an administrative strategy that is antithetical to the spirit that academics hold dear —including openness, transparency, collegiality, meritocracy, rule-governed procedures, balanced curriculum, a level playing field for probationary faculty and participation by faculty in governance.
Like its political counterpart, academic corporatism often results in dictatorships, with ideas originating only from the top and nothing going the other way. Academic assemblies, unions and senates are eviscerated, neutralized or eliminated altogether. Faculty members are disenfranchised. There is a chilling effect on free speech and the notion of an open marketplace for ideas.
This can wreak havoc with a university’s curriculum, jeopardize its intellectual and educational missions and compromise its future. As former Harvard president Derek Bok said: “The end to which this process could lead is not a pleasant prospect to behold.”
G. A. Clark
Department of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change,
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, USA
NATURE|Vol 452|13 March 2008|p. 151
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