Academic

NEW YORK TIMES: The End Of Tenure? Plus, some higher education bubble thoughts from Roger Kimbal?

By Glenn Reynolds

NEW YORK TIMES: The End Of Tenure?

Plus, some higher education bubble thoughts from Roger Kimball.

The Australian philosopher David Stove, commenting on the Faculty of Arts at Sydney University, formulated a diagnosis that applies to the teaching of the humanities of most Western universities: It is, Stove wrote, a ?disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly-leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in cattle.?

There are incipient signs that a Great Recoiling from this intellectual disaster is beginning to form. It will be greatly aided by the economic disaster in which the institutional life of universities is embedded. ?Why,? hard-working parents will ask themselves, ?does it cost more than $50,000 a year to send Johnny to college.? Leave aside the question of what it is that Johnny is and isn?t learning in those ivy-covered walls. Why does his four-year furlough from the real world cost so much? One reason, of course, is that Johnny, assuming his parents are paying full freight, is paying not only for his own tuition: he is also helping to foot the bill for Ahmed, Juan, and Harriet down the hall. Colleges routinely boast about their generous financial aid packages, how they provide assistance for some large percentage of students, etc. What they don?t mention is the fact that parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others. How do you suppose Johnny?s parents feel about that?

Not so happy now that they’re figuring things out. Plus, is this an analogy to the mortgage bubble?

Lasell College has agreed to pay students $191,000 to resolve complaints from the Massachusetts attorney general that the college improperly encouraged students to borrow funds from a lender that was giving the institution’s aid officials free trips, The Boston Globe reported. There were less expensive loans available at the time, and the college never revealed to students that its officials had ties to the lender they were sent to.

Happy Labor Day!

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on September 06, 2010 (boomark / email).