"...the financialization model of higher education in America (like its monstrous healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and for-profit prisons), is obviously stupid, unproductive, and clearly designed and championed by incompetent and rapacious morons."
Thank you for this cogent analysis of some of the more puzzling aspects of the past sixty-odd years. Now my question is: can we do anything about this? How do those of us who actually care about the world (as opposed to caring only about money, security, and volatile forms of stability) build a better society? Or is that merely a ludicrous dream?
Yes, when the author repeatedly makes a call to the service of truth and "universal humanity", what does that mean on a practical level?
I mean that sincerely and I really do want to know the next steps. Otherwise we will be like the elite clerk Pontius Pilate saying, "what is truth?" and washing his hands. :-(
Exactly. There must be a way, though doubtless it will not be an easy path. We are living the consequences of moronic rapaciousness on an hourly basis, now.
Shades of Thomas Sowell...informative, personal, passionate, and exquisitely written...firmly establishes TMR as a philosophically diverse forum...well done...thank you!
This is a well written essay and I agree with much of it. However, there is a key historical error in it that I think is important to note, the post war transformation of the American Academe *did not* create a “People’s University” born of democratization; it was actually the opposite. The transformation during the decades after 1945 rode on Cold War procurement, centralization of resource control -- both public and private -- in-general and then federal research contracting, national accreditation cartels, professional licensure, and other mechanisms that instituted nationwide Academic hierarchies and centralized agenda-setting and pulled institutions out of local civic control.
The pre WW2 Academic landscape was plural and deliberately lower case "d" democratic in structure, municipal colleges, normal schools, denominational colleges, independent technical institutes, industrial labs, locally controlled polytechnics, locally controlled Classics institutions, even varied high-school/academy pipelines, and more, each funded and governed by towns, states, trades, churches, and more. What emerged during the decades after 1945 was a unitary, standardized system whose access gains were real (but that was going to happen anyways, they hijacked an expansion of the Old Academe to destroy it and create the current Academe) but subordinated to a consolidated national mandarinate. Your (eloquently written) review itself captures the pitch, it recast the university to “train bureaucrats” who harmonize with hegemonic institutions, which is the sort of mode that consummates centralization rather than corrects it.
Where where I would really disagree with Westbrook and agree with the essay is in Westbrook's recommending that surplus humanities PhDs do “para-ethnography” for central banks, sovereign wealth funds, corporations; that wont humanize the administrative state, its a deeply centralized apparatus that serves to advance powerful special interest groups and it denies almost all humans access to its decision making processes; so it cant be humanized.
I made no such recommendation for PhDs, I was commenting on Westbrook’s recommendation - which I (quite clearly, I thought) disagreed with. The term ‘paraethnography’ is his.
I did say something in the manner of…the attempt to recreate something, which in itself is irreproducible and of its time, for a specific purpose which to some extent detracts from its timeliness and the singularity of its vision etc
Really enjoyed this, particularly the anecdote about the general.
Yes, that was illuminating. And painful.
"...the financialization model of higher education in America (like its monstrous healthcare system, pharmaceutical industry, and for-profit prisons), is obviously stupid, unproductive, and clearly designed and championed by incompetent and rapacious morons."
Alas, this puts it too kindly.
Agreed, it’s not stupid. It’s a scam.
Thank you for this cogent analysis of some of the more puzzling aspects of the past sixty-odd years. Now my question is: can we do anything about this? How do those of us who actually care about the world (as opposed to caring only about money, security, and volatile forms of stability) build a better society? Or is that merely a ludicrous dream?
Yes, when the author repeatedly makes a call to the service of truth and "universal humanity", what does that mean on a practical level?
I mean that sincerely and I really do want to know the next steps. Otherwise we will be like the elite clerk Pontius Pilate saying, "what is truth?" and washing his hands. :-(
Exactly. There must be a way, though doubtless it will not be an easy path. We are living the consequences of moronic rapaciousness on an hourly basis, now.
Shades of Thomas Sowell...informative, personal, passionate, and exquisitely written...firmly establishes TMR as a philosophically diverse forum...well done...thank you!
Thank you for reminding me why I'm out. And why I need to finish my sodding campus novel. Babylon, absolutely Babylon.
This is a well written essay and I agree with much of it. However, there is a key historical error in it that I think is important to note, the post war transformation of the American Academe *did not* create a “People’s University” born of democratization; it was actually the opposite. The transformation during the decades after 1945 rode on Cold War procurement, centralization of resource control -- both public and private -- in-general and then federal research contracting, national accreditation cartels, professional licensure, and other mechanisms that instituted nationwide Academic hierarchies and centralized agenda-setting and pulled institutions out of local civic control.
The pre WW2 Academic landscape was plural and deliberately lower case "d" democratic in structure, municipal colleges, normal schools, denominational colleges, independent technical institutes, industrial labs, locally controlled polytechnics, locally controlled Classics institutions, even varied high-school/academy pipelines, and more, each funded and governed by towns, states, trades, churches, and more. What emerged during the decades after 1945 was a unitary, standardized system whose access gains were real (but that was going to happen anyways, they hijacked an expansion of the Old Academe to destroy it and create the current Academe) but subordinated to a consolidated national mandarinate. Your (eloquently written) review itself captures the pitch, it recast the university to “train bureaucrats” who harmonize with hegemonic institutions, which is the sort of mode that consummates centralization rather than corrects it.
Where where I would really disagree with Westbrook and agree with the essay is in Westbrook's recommending that surplus humanities PhDs do “para-ethnography” for central banks, sovereign wealth funds, corporations; that wont humanize the administrative state, its a deeply centralized apparatus that serves to advance powerful special interest groups and it denies almost all humans access to its decision making processes; so it cant be humanized.
I made no such recommendation for PhDs, I was commenting on Westbrook’s recommendation - which I (quite clearly, I thought) disagreed with. The term ‘paraethnography’ is his.
My bad! I meant to write "where I would disagree with *Westbrook* and agree with the essay"; I write too quickly here sometimes :). I'll edit it
Mr Dematagoda, I enjoy reading your work.
With respect, you might consider re-reading Borges' Menard.
I did say something in the manner of…the attempt to recreate something, which in itself is irreproducible and of its time, for a specific purpose which to some extent detracts from its timeliness and the singularity of its vision etc